literacy: shall we eat the book?

"Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel.
So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.
And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.
And he said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them."


Louis Maggiolo was a French schoolmaster who headed an inquiry, in the 1870s, into the history of schooling and literacy in France. Literacy is a hard item to mold into a statistic: what is it? How do you prove you have it? Maggiolo ended up using the signature as an index of literacy. From the statistical point of view, then, one seeks out documents that have been signed. Testaments. Births. Deaths. And especially marriages. In this inquiry, less attention is paid to an equally interesting sociological fact: the increase in the occasions for signing. Maggiolo plotted the rise of literacy in France using 1686 as a base, when the laws concerning marriage were changed to require that the spouses either sign or have someone sign for them the official marriage documents. Maggiolo did not ask himself why, suddenly, the state needed this process. When Maggiolo’s work was, to an extent, rediscovered in the 1970s by Annales historians – Vovelle, Furet and Ozouf, etc. – it was used to make some broad generalizations about the rise of literate culture. Furet and Ozouf, neo-liberal historians who were in revolt against Marxist historiography, used Maggiolo’s work to claim that the Revolution was a great step backwards in the rise of literacy, and that, further, it was not state schools which cultivated literacy, but …. Well, here they become vague as to just how people learn to read and write. Vovelle used the Maggiolo ‘line’ – dividing the more literate Northern France from the less literate Southern – to explore Southern lagging. The signatures have been used, as well, to picture the gender differences in literacy. As one would expect, men become literate first before women – with the difference in the ratio of literate men to women being larger in the country than the city.

Beneath the statistics, however, one finds a number of ethnographic ambiguities. Signatures, after all, as all agree, aren’t really a sign of literacy. In fact, as Lawrence Stone pointed out in 1969, our contemporary conception of writing and reading as being a unified skill set does not reflect the state of education in the pre-modern and early modern era. There were many woman who read but could not write. There were many men who had learned to write a few things – who had learned a writing routine – but could neither write beyond it, nor read.

The controversies over the ethnography of literacy that took place in the 70s seemed to have little effect on the historiography of literacy, even as historiography was, supposedly, awakening to the ordinary life of the people. That controversy involved the opposition of two theses: on the one hand, a thesis going back to Plato and revived by Jack Goody, which was that writing is a technology that creates vast social changes – for instance, by creating tools to enforce a hierarchical order – versus a pragmatic school that claimed that writing has no predictable cultural effect – rather, as it is embedded in different situations, it produces different changes, or none at all. Maurice Bloch wrote a study of a particular writing system in Madagascar that made this point: Astrology and Writing in Madagascar, which he reprinted in How we think they think – a beautifully Austinian title for a book.

The writing system Bloch explores is derived from the Arabic traders who once had posts along the Madagascar coast. These traders were driven from the island in a long campaign by the Portugese in the 16th century, but their cultural legacy survived, at least in terms of Islam and an Arabic writing system that was jimmied into Malagasay, the language of the Antairnoro and Antambahaoka groups who lived on the Southeastern part of the Island. Oddly, the writing system remained there, instead of in the North, where the Arabic trading posts had been.

However, Bloch’s description of the use and spread of this writing system makes it clear that – from his viewpoint – writing did not mark a sociological rupture with orality. If it is a technique, as Goody claims, it is not a technique that creates a whole new social order.

Bloch, it seems to me, is actually modifying, not annihilating Goody’s point. For one thing, literacy – as we have pointed out – is a multiple skill set. For another thing, like all techniques, it is a set of affordances. To say that it is a technology really is to say that it provides opportunities for this or that kind of technical practice. Bloch points out that the Antairnoro Islamic community was not centered around the Qu’ran. In fact, it was not a religion of the book, but a religion in which writing flows into charms, spells and forecasts.

“The Qur'an is replaced by a series of sacred manuscripts called Sorabe, or "great writings". This is a series of books kept and copied by the scribe aristocracy of the Antaimoro and Antambahaoka.
These books have often been described (Julien 1929 and 1933; Deschamps and Manes 1959). Some are old, although their precise date is uncertain; others are more recent. There are two kinds of works. First are contemporary chronicles and historical works dealing with the mythical origins of "Arabic" peoples of the south-east. It is these Sorabe which have been studied most often (eg, Ferrand 1891; Julien 1929 and 1933). Second, and equally common, are works on the related subjects of medicine, geomancy, divination
and asrtrology. These latter are of particular significance here because these sciences are what gave the possessors of writing such prestige in all pre-colonial Madagascar.”

One notices that Bloch uses the word “book” rather imprecisely. What makes these things physically books? What makes a book a book? For instance, Western books are surrounded with taboos concerning their reproduction that have grown up since the early modern era. Those taboos do not suppose that the reproduction changes the meaning – on the contrary, they suppose that the meaning is held in the copy, which makes it a product that is both reproducible and subject to an extension of the laws of property having to do with goods in which the use value adheres to the uniqueness of the good. Is the same set of properties attributed to the material of the book, or does the meaning change in being copied?

Goody’s thesis, I think, can be modified to accommodate different senses of how writing operates – and in fact he modified it to accommodate what he called “restricted literacy’, in which a certain class or sex is given control of the reading/writing technique.

However, besides books there are other forms of writing and reading. Bloch grants them a major role in the formation of the Imerina kingdom in Madagascar:

There is sufficient evidence to say that before the coming of the British missionaries and the introduction of European script, a certain amount of the business of government was carried out in writing in Arabic script, either by administrators who were themselves literate, or by the ones who used Antaimoro scribes. These scribes had the dual roles of diviner-astrologers and secretaries. The importance of these Antaimoros should not be ignored in understanding how the Merina were able to hold together and administer a kingdom considerably larger than the British Isles."

Yet Bloch’s essay turns away from this point to argue against Goody, for in the end the basic cognitive tools of the Merina were, he argues, unchanged in the transition from orality to literacy – or, rather, orality and literacy were intertwined so that it is a mistake to categorically separate out one from the other. Bloch’s argument rests on a notion of seriousness: how serious is a belief? What is the index of its seriousness? He claims that the beliefs that would have been derived from writing as a technique – for instance, an organization and ordering of spatial and cosmological norms represented in writing – are, in ordinary life, felt otherwise. In fact, the astrology that was organized via a writing system is so modified in its application to everyday life by oral sources that, in essence, it has not changed the order of ordinary life. Or as Bloch sums it up in another essay in his book: “I show how the introduction of literacy into Madagascar has merely meant that a new and better tool became available, but that it was used to do the same things as oratory and other specialized language uses had done before.” [152]

And yet, is this what Bloch really showed?

Marriage

Sorry for being so dilatory about posting. I'm getting married, people. Over the next two weeks, I will be pretty hit and miss here. But maybe I'll just put up song links!

Analysing vulgarisation: when a fact is a clue

When Fontenelle wrote the Dialogues on the plurality of worlds, he was working in the libertine tradition of Cyrano de Bergerac and in the heretic tradition of Bruno.

By his own account, he was bringing the new philosophy down from the level of abstraction (and mathematics) in which it was couched, in order to make it understandable for those, for instance, adored novels such as the Princess de Cleves.

And on the account of historians who study the early enlightenment, Fontenelle was a ‘vulgarizer’ or ‘popularizer’ – terms which have been applied to him at least since Emma Marie Sioli’s book on Fontenelle in 1910. In order to answer the question of motive and audience, historians often have recourse to a sort of warmed over classical economics explanation – it is the consumer that did it. That is, there was a ‘demand’ for books on natural philosophy. Sometimes this is expanded into the idea that there was, somehow, more leisure for reading. Or it is mixed with the idea that this consumer class of readers was female. The latter actually does suggest something a bit more sociologically complex, since it links the demand story to education. Women were excluded from academies and colleges of the type that were open to males of a certain class. But they were not illiterate. And so, if we take the demand story a step further, we could link it to the way knowledge was manufactured, and where it was manufactured.
In other words, we can step out of the magic wand model, in which demand is waved in the air, and things simply appear, into another world in which demand is mediated through the division of labor, and division of labor is mediated by organizational settings.

When La Bruyère makes his cutting remark about Fontenelle’s appeal to the “bourgeoisie’ and the ‘provincials’, his idea is that the bel-esprit vulgarization is a matter of cheapening cultural goods, and distributing them among people who don’t know any better. Although one might turn the tables on this characterization – for even as La Bruyère wrote in the confidence that he knew the eternal place of the Ville and the Court, the centralizing politics of Louis XIV and Colbert were producing changes that would quickly undermine the place of those two eternities – his assumption is used even now in defining popularization.

In Marie-Francoise Mortureux’s essay on the formal linguistic properties of ‘vulgarization’ – which the French prefer to popularization – she quotes a definition proposed by Jacobi and Shninn: ‘… to consider the results of research, the objects of knowledge produced by science and to identify the strategies of actors in view of assuring their diffusion among peers and outside the circle of specialists.”

Mortureux makes a sharp eyed assessment of the implications of this definition, among which is the fact that “the evaluation of its effects does not give us any institutional procedure (contrary to teaching beginning classes, and even continual [educational] formation).”

In Gadda’s mystery, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, his police detective, Francesco Ingravallo, thinks, privately, that the usual police procedure of matching an effect to a cause is, in fact, a misunderstanding of our causal cosmos:

“He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed.”

I belong to the Ingravallian sect myself, and take it that in examining the unforeseen catastrophes that dot the weather system of history, one has to look for points of depression or attraction in which multiple causes are involved. In understanding the production of knowledge outside of the institutionalization of its assessment – in other words, being ‘well informed’ – we have to look at a more complex picture then is given to us by the idea of the ‘rise’ of such and such a class and the ‘demand’ for such and such a commodity. This is my rule of thumb in studying the formation of character under capitalism. We have to be on watch, then, for changes in unexpected regions, of which we have only, in retrospect, blurry pictures taken by, as it were, our satellites, our witnesses, our writers, our surveyors working on quite opposite premises for purposes of their own. We have to understand the fact as a clue – and thus always half imaginary.

– Using this method, surely, surely, on those starry nights in that parc belonging to the country estate in Normandy where Fontenelle teases and instructs and is gently rebuffed by his ravishing hostess, the blonde marquise de G***., what is happening, unbeknownst to both players, is the development of one of those depressions in the weather system of the ancien regime.

division of labor and the writer

In describing the ‘workshop’ of the bel-esprit, La Bruyère is, unconsciously, positioning the writer, the quintessentializing writer, within the factory system. It is a rather fascinating coincidence that a decade after Fontenelle is satirized for being a mere producer, with a p.r. advance man and a bag of rhetorical tricks, we have accounts, for the first time, of how skilled labor – for instance, in the making of ships or watches – can be distributed among workmen so as to make the ships and watches more precise and the output speedier. In the light of that development, La Bruyère’s Characters already looks retrospectively obsolete. Or rather, it looks like an ideological investment in the obsolete: in a classical steady state political economy and order, founded ultimately on preserving Nemesis as the limit of growth.

Addison and Steele were exactly the kind of atelier writers that La Bruyère was warning against. They were very consciously writing for the ‘bourgeoisie’, or the commercial class; they were both involved in Whiggish commercial schemes; and they included, in the Spectator, certain remarks in defense of free trade and commerce that were the exact negation of the ideal monarchical order which underlies La Bruyère’s idea of both the writer and of the plurality of characters.

In this respect, I would like to read the remarks about the character of the bel esprit against Number 232 of the Spectator, which appeared on November 26, 1711. It is still a scholarly puzzle as to who exactly wrote this number – although nobody disputes that the ideas behind it belonged to Richard Steele’s friend, Henry Martyn, one of the obscure who issued a pamphlet defending the East India trade in terms that would have done Adam Smith proud. In other words, one of those figures who always seem to precede more important figures, as though a different sun ruled the sphere of intelligence, where shadows precede substance.

Henry Martyn made plainer the connection between free trade and the increased productivity that comes from well ordered manufacture – or what Smith was to call division of labour – in his pamphlet on the East Indian trade, but it is likely that many more people, even at the time, read his argument – if not his genuine writing of it – in the Spectator. That the signature of an essay about the dispersion of worker responsibility in the assembling of a product is, even now, in dispute is one of those mysterious communications between logical levels that Derrida loved so much. The text is attributed to a fictional character – Sir Andrew Freeport – who combines the leisure of the nobility in his weekend rural retreat with the commerce of the City, as a merchant. The essay gives voice to Freeport after a scene in which his unnamed companion and Freeport are ‘assaulted’ by beggars as they are going from the city to the country,and buy them off with alms. It is the state of the poor that quickly brings us to the state of the nation:

“But of all Men living, we Merchants, who live by Buying and Selling, ought never to encourage Beggars. The Goods which we export are indeed the Product of the lands, but much the greatest Part of their Value is the Labour of the People: but how much of these People's Labour shall we export whilst we hire them to sit still? The very Alms they receive from us, are the Wages of Idleness. I have often thought that no Man should be permitted to take Relief from the Parish, or to ask it in the Street, till he has first purchased as much as possible of his own Livelihood by the Labour of his own Hands; and then the Publick ought only to be taxed to make good the Deficiency. If this Rule was strictly observed, we should see every where such a Multitude of new Labourers, as would in all probability reduce the Prices of all our Manufactures. It is the very Life of Merchandise to buy cheap and sell dear. The Merchant ought to make his Outset as cheap as possible, that he may find the greater Profit upon his Returns; and nothing will enable him to do this like the Reduction of the Price of Labour upon all our Manufactures.”
Andrew Freeport evidently sees things in terms of a system. The system – capitalism – will accomplish things that are accounted as miracles under the old system: giving the unemployed employment; raising wages while diminishing the cost of labor; and encouraging world trade as a means of exploiting the even cheaper labor available elsewhere to make the nation prosperous. His companion shows some astonishment at these propositions, but Freeport has read his William Petty:

“It may seem, says he, a Paradox, that the Price of Labour should be reduced without an Abatement of Wages, or that Wages can be abated without any Inconvenience to the Labourer, and yet nothing is more certain than that both those Things may happen. The Wages of the Labourers make the greatest Part of the Price of every Thing that is useful; and if in Proportion with the Wages the Prices of all other Things should be abated, every Labourer with less Wages would be still able to purchase as many Necessaries of Life; where then would be the Inconvenience? But the Price of Labour may be reduced by the Addition of more Hands to a Manufacture, and yet the Wages of Persons remain as high as ever. The admirable Sir William Petty2 has given Examples of this in some of his Writings: One of them, as I remember, is that of a Watch, which I shall endeavour to explain so as shall suit my present Purpose. It is certain that a single Watch could not be made so cheap in Proportion by one only Man, as a hundred Watches by a hundred; for as there is vast Variety in the Work, no one Person could equally suit himself to all the Parts of it; the Manufacture would be tedious, and at last but clumsily performed: But if an hundred Watches were to be made by a hundred Men, the Cases may be assigned to one, the Dials to another, the Wheels to another, the Springs to another, and every other Part to a proper Artist; as there would be no need of perplexing any one Person with too much Variety, every one would be able to perform his single Part with greater Skill and Expedition; and the hundred Watches would be finished in one fourth Part of the Time of the first one, and every one of them at one fourth Part of the Cost, tho' the Wages of every Man were equal. The Reduction of the Price of the Manufacture would increase the Demand of it, all the same Hands would be still employed and as well paid. The same Rule will hold in the Clothing, the Shipping, and all the other Trades whatsoever. And thus an Addition of Hands to our Manufactures will only reduce the Price of them; the Labourer will still have as much Wages, and will consequently be enabled to purchase more Conveniencies of Life; so that every Interest in the Nation would receive a Benefit from the Increase of our Working People.”

The watchmaker and the shipbuilder and, indeed, implicitly the writer all fall under this beneficent rule. Technology, which one thinks of as a matter of individual invention, is here given a structure. Although it may seem odd to think of the bel-esprit in correspondence to this vision of the ultimate meta-technology, in fact it is historically accurate.

The origin of the new, the origin of the writer

In the preface to his Characters, La Bruyère advises the reader to always keep his title in mind when reading the work. The title (Les Caracteres ou les moeurs de ce siècle) is, as it were, a monitory ghost that haunts every line of the text.

What can we say about that ghost? Firstly, that we are not dealing with character, but with characters. The plural is significant. As we have seen in tracing the etymology and use of character in rhetoric, there is a divergence between character as a stamp on the psyche and the character mask, or the proliferation of many characters. The former is the ground of moral seriousness, and a perpetual reference for the orator or politician; the latter is the ground of farce, and a continual reference for the satirist or dramatist. Secondly, there is that substituting ‘or’. The or here does not give us a disjunction so much as a renaming. La Bruyère’s characters, between them, embody the ‘manners’ of ‘this century’. That distinctive ‘this” roots the book entirely in its time. And yet, it contains no conjectural history. This is not a project like Voltaire’s essay on the Moeurs et les esprits des nations, or Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois. The century, a diachronic reference, is, in fact, made into a synchronic entity, a sort of horizontal stage upon which the characters appear. At the same time, it has another connotation characteristic of moralizing satire – this century is always a fallen time, in comparison to some other time. La Bruyère was one of the partisans of the ancients in the quarrel between the moderns and the ancients, and the silent partner to which ‘this’ century is compared is antiquity, or – most probably – the ideal time of Rome.

And so the title, that monitory spirit, is a framing, within which, firstly, a number of characters are assembled and their traits enumerated, and secondly, within which a historico-mythic claim is made.

That claim is made on behalf of the whole project. La Bruyère, in his preface, consciously locates himself with relation to the moralist tradition. “These are not, besides, maxims that I wanted to write: they are like the laws of morality; and I admit that I don’t have enough authority, enough genius, to play [faire] the legislator.”

But if La Bruyère calls attention himself to his violation of the maxim form, he still sees what he is doing within the general pattern of the orator or public man. That is, he sees his writing, and in fact all true writing, as an attempt to instruct and correct: “The orator and the writer can’t defeat the joy that they have in being applauded; but they ought to blush at themselves if they have only sought, by their discourses or by the writing, to be praised: in addition to the fact that the most sure and the least equivocal is the change of manners and the reformation of those who read or listen to them.” [2 – my translations]

La Bruyère is blindly groping towards the function of the writer, here. It is a tatonnement which goes on to the present day. The writer or orator has a function different from the poet or the philosopher, but what is it? It is here that the Theophrastian tradition of the character seems to come in handy, for it mixes the delight in description with the principle of correction – based on the idea that the writer who holds up a mirror to vice reveals it to the infected person, who can then reform him or herself. It is a peculiarity of La Bruyère’s static mind set to see vice, or the obsessions which mark and distinguish character, as a set that is established in antiquity, and can be applied to this century. But beneath La Bruyère’s sense of the legitimacy conferred by antiquity, there is a strong sense of the contemporaneity of what he is describing. A good example is precisely the character of the writer. In a famous passage in the chapter on Society and conversation, La Bruyère presents a furious attack on the emancipated writer, the modern. Under the name Cydias, he portrays, it is generally agreed, Fontenelle. The energy of the dislike for this kind of writer will not be lost on those, in the eighteenth century, who again and again attack the philosophe. Even at this stage of the early ‘enlightenment’, one sees the motifs of the counter-enlightenment gather.

Cydias is a “bel esprit’ by profession. “He has a sign, a workshop, commissioned works, companions who work under him: he can give you the stanzas he promised you in less than a month… Prose, verse, what do you want? He succeeds equally in either one. Ask him for letters of consolation, or to send to someone absent, he’ll undertake the task. You can take them already completed, enter his shop, you have your choice. He has a friend who has no other task on earth than to promise him at a long date before to a certain world, and to present him in the salons as a rare man with exquisite conversational talents. … Cydias, after clearing his throat, rolls up his sleeves, extends his hand and opens his fingers and gravely pours out his quintessentialized thoughts and his sophistical arguments. … for be it in speaking or in writing, he has in view neither the true nor the false, neither the reasonable nor the ridiculous; his sole goal is to avoid presenting himself in the sense of others, and to be of somebody else’s opinion.”

In other words, the modern writer, or bel esprit, is a manufactures and prides himself on being always new. To novelty, everything is sacrificed. Such is Cydias’ – and Fontenelle’s – modernity. To sum up: “In a word he is a composite of the pedant and the precious, made for being admired by the bourgoisie and in the provinces, in whom, nevertheless, one can discover nothing of greatness save for his great opinion of himself.”

instinctive manicheanism

One is always having to remind oneself, in trying to do intellectual history, that the enunciative situation of a writer, from whence flow the texts one is continually pursuing, analyzing, using as evidence, is no mere scene dressing which easily melts in the background as we get down to the nitty gritty. It is nitty gritty all the way through. The enunciative situation is a nexus of institutionalized and non-institutionalized spaces that one forgets at one’s peril.

But even if we do try to be good historical materialists, there awaits the peril inhering in assuming a few Manichean categories to explain it all: public/private, or state sphere/private sphere, etc. I want to introduce categories as character, adventure, the total social fact, the encircling institution, the circulation agent, the writer as clerk, to snatch the real – or perhaps I should say, the everyday - from out of our instinctive Manicheanism.

dogs all the way down

Who let the dogs out?

Reading this post from Andrew Gelman, I was reminded of certain of Chamfort’s anecdotes about ancien regime society in France. For instance, this one:

“Do you know why, M. said to me, one has more integrity in France in one’s youth and just up to thirty years than past that age? It is because, after that age with us, one is undeceived – for with us one must be the hammer or the anvil; one sees clearly that the vices under which the nation trembles are irremediable. Up to then, one resembled a dog which defends the dinner of its master from the other dogs; after that age, one is like that same dog, who takes his part with the others.”

This has the stamp of the cynicism characteristic of the end of the regime. But at the end of our regime, the old democracies, giving way rapidly to plutocracies of the vilest type, one has to amend the fable, for the guard dogs in the American republic, incredibly enough, simply switch from defending the master to defending the pack of dog thieves. Their reward is to think that they are somehow, by being dogs, like the dog thieves.

Of course, they are encouraged in this belief by a rather rotten, financial unstable, but still necessary print propaganda machine. Time Magazine, through thick and thin, has assured us that the pack of dogs are the finest fellows in the world, all sprung from log cabins and making their millions by the sweat of their brows. Thus, as Gelman quotes a story in Time assuring us credulous outsider dogs who hold the mag in our earnest little paws that the top layer is made up of smarties and the most industrious:

“[Sam] Lessin is the poster boy for today's Times story on Facebook "talent acquisitions." Facebook spent several million dollars to buy Lessin's drop.io, only to shut it down and put Lessin to work on internal projects. To the Times, Lessin is an example of how "the best talent" fetches tons of money these days. "Engineers are worth half a million to one million," a Facebook executive told the paper.”

Gelman provides this gentle little corrective:

We'll let you in on a few things the Times left out: Lessin is not an engineer, but a Harvard social studies major and a former Bain consultant. His file-sharing startup drop.io was an also-ran competitor to the much more popular Dropbox, and was funded by a chum from Lessin's very rich childhood. Lessin's wealthy investment banker dad provided Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg crucial access to venture capitalists in Facebook's early days. And Lessin had made a habit of wining and dining with Facebook executives for years before he finally scored a deal, including at a famous party he threw at his father's vacation home in Cyprus with girlfriend and Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro. (Lessin is well connected in media, too.) . .
It is almost Horatio Alger time in Bush-Obama America – you too can rise from the bottom if you only manage to get the keys to your dad’s vacation home in Cyprus!
However, as in ancien regime France, where Chamfort felt the undercurrents and eventually transformed himself from a disabused observer of the nobility to a very fine revolutionary writer proposing their at least collective decapitation, in ancien regime America one feels that the currents underneath are gathering against the plutocratic orgy at the top. There was a remarkable Gallup poll released a couple of weeks ago and touted by the right that showed that only 47 percent of the American people supported heavy taxation of the rich to produce an unspecified ‘redistribution’ of the wealth. I was astonished – almost half the country would support the most radical measure I can think of. Specify that ‘redistribution’ – say, instead, heavy taxes for ‘deficit reduction’ – and the numbers go way up. Pew shows that more than 40 percent of the Republicans support that. In spite of the money poured into position management (the news networks, the think tanks, the media in general), the screws are shaking loose of the machine.
Such moments are unpredictable. In 2008, the electorate thought that they were voting for change from one or the other candidate. Instead, they were voting for the continuity of Bush’s policies, with a little Romneycare thrown in for good measure – a policy that is in many ways less helpful than Bush’s much more expensive pill bill. A Republican treasury secretary and a Republican Defense secretary have been the pillars of our ‘bi-partisan’ policy. A Republican Fed chief can look back with satisfaction on a policy of loaning over 6 trillion dollars to the wealthiest Americans at 0.025 percent interest (a fact I enjoy pondering so much that I would like to include it in everything I write to the day I die) and leveraging a stock boom and a commodity futures greedorama. Which act was disguised behind TARP, so that comparatively few Americans realize how TARP was dwarfed by the free money policy. And those who do realize it are assured, in infinitely patronizing tones, that the Fed and the Obama administration only took the painful course of making the rich much, much richer because it was good for all of us – otherwise, it is laissez faire all the way!
The dogs, with their Cyprus summer homes and their Harvard pedigrees, will fight for the gigantic scraps of an economy that is still a world historical wonder for a while, while the middle class squabbles because some among them, after working twenty to forty years as public employees, actually get the pensions they were promised twenty to forty years ago. Unfair! It is squabbling dogs all the way down. But I’m thinking some of the dogs are suspecting there is no master at the table, and that the top dogs are, well, weaker than they look. Oh, let that moment come!

morning reflections on Gwinnett County

There are cities that are written into life – I was just living in one of the most extraordinary of them, Paris. Natalia Ginzburg once remarked that Turin and Pavese were one – that walking in the city that always smelled of soot and train stations was, in a sense, walking in Pavese’s state of mind.



In Atlanta, they are celebrating the 75th year of Gone with the Wind, but it is impossible to think of Margaret Mitchell when strolling through downtown Atlanta – although it is a different story perhaps with Buckhead, with its fad for white columns. In Gwinnett County, where I write this, there is no organizing principle. Forget a novelist or poet – this expanse of land lacks even a defining mapmaker. Housing developments, shopping centers and roads that name themselves after already existing roads and under false premises wander impudently into necks of the cut down woods are the norm, here. So are churches. Chaos, it turns out, is imminently Christian. Gwinnett County is the kind of place that counters the “Jimmy Carter” bestowed as an honorific on this or that piece of Georgia roadway (for the logical reason that Carter is Georgia’s one and only president) with a Ronald Reagan Highway, which then generates a plethora of Presidential shopping centers. To write Gwinnett county, the poet requires a large magic marker, and a tank full of gas in his Cherokee.



There is something odd about all this, or so I am thinking this morning. When the New World was new to the old World settler, that settler brought not only his pair of eyes but his names and promptly set to work – first with his “New”, then with the names he thought he heard coming out of the mouths of the people who were already here. But it is difficult to learn a man’s language as you are shoving him forward with blows from a blunderbuss, so the Indian words were hit or miss, a very distant approximation of the songlines that once ran in the wilderness. Gwinnett, that odd looking word, came not from some Welsh savage but from Button Gwinnett, Georgia’s signer of the Declaration. According to his biographer, William Montgomery, Button Gwinnett’s name was a fake. Button was probably Bolton, and we have simply misread his signature. As for Gwinnett, his assiduous researches – at least in 1913 – turned up no Gwinnett in England. Interestingly, it turned up a character named Gwinnett, who figures in a text by Richard Steele. As for where he hailed from – it was certainly not the territory I can see out my window. As Montgomery found, Button Gwinnett’s property is as shaky as his name – did he first appear in Charleston as a merchant in the 1770s? Or was it Savannah? Did he own property on St. Catherine’s island? The man came out of the mist. The man came out of the Transatlantic mangle, he came out of pirates and imposters, he came out of the Age of Reason and was the second signer of the Declaration of Independence, but with his ridiculous paucity of credentials, he would never have been issued a license by the Georgia Department of Drivers Services in Gwinnett County, and his signature would surely never have graced a single legal document in our age of infinitely backed up legal documents. The lady at the counter in Lawrenceville would have told him, firmly, that he had to go over his checklist and find at least a paystub. And to top it all off, Gwinnett found a way to die of a gunshot wound in the Revolution without firing a shot at the British – he died in a duel with another Georgia politcian.



I find this lost soul, by one of the iron laws of cartographic poetry, the perfectly appropriate symbol of this county.

From the files of the autocracy: the philosopher behind the curtain

We have an account of La Bruyère from a contemporary enemy named Vigneul-Marville. V-M took the term “characters” as an apposite plural for La Bruyère’s, who he portrays as having several. The transition from singular to plural, here, is the transition from the morally sound (or the comically obsessed) to the imposter – for it is at this point that the incision of character, its stamp on the body or the psyche, is, as it were, lifted off the counter, and becomes a mask. There is something contagious about the character mask – for instance, even as Vigneul-Marville wrote acidly about La Bruyère’s, he was writing under a pseudonym – his real name was Noël Argonne. In his Melanges, Vigneul-Marville compares La Bruyère to a succession of the great characters of the classical age – to Don Quixote, Socrates, and the Misanthrope. Each is considered from the comic point of view – that is, each is considered an imposture, a usurpation of tone. However, even among these attacks we come upon an anecdote in the Melange that has a certain clarifying Daoist simplicity, one that gives us a clue about La Bruyère and the way that the clerks have always betrayed the Great Tradition of which they are the ornament and reference – for surely La Bruyère must count among the clerks of literature who form a secret Daoist strain in the West. The features of this oppositional, skeptical character form in the absolutist bureaucracies, and of course suffer a great change within the bureaucracies of capitalist circulation, but the knowing listener can hear a distinct note – the kind of pitch struck by Josephine, the Singer of the Mouse Folk – even back in 1680.

This is Vigneul-Marville’s anecdote. At one point in his life, La Bruyère lived in a cramped apartment facing the Ile St. Louis, on the left bank. , as an evidence for, indeed, the manners of the century.
“Nothing is prettier than this character [that of the philosopher], but it must be admitted that without the interposition of an antichamber or cabinet, it was pretty easy to introduce oneself to M. de la Bruyere, before he had an apartment at the Hotel de …. There was only one door to open, and a room close to the sky, separated into two parts by a light curtain. The wind, always a good servant to Philosophers, which ran before of those who entered and returned with the movement of the door, delicately lifted the curtain and let one see the Philosopher, the laughing visage well content to have occasion to distill the elixer of his meditations in the minds and heart of his unexpected guest.”

For Vigneul-Marville, this is the scene of a mock oracle: the lifted curtain, the laughing visage of the philosopher, the gawking admirer. And of course he was writing in the era when, as Fontenelle had explained, the oracles were dead.

But it is a mistake to cut that anecdote out and impose it on the blank counter of our narrative as though it had a face value. For the man behind the curtain was more than the imposter of his enemy’s venom. He was, for instance, a functionary. The son of a Parisian bourgeois, La Bruyère, by education, was destined for the law. Apparently, however, he preferred not to. Instead, inheriting a tidy sum from a deceased bachelor uncle, he purchased into the corrupt system that had developed under Colbert, buying, for 18,000 francs, the sinecure of ‘trésorier de France au bureau des finances de Caen.” This was one of the rotten posts that the Rouen merchant Boisguilbert, in one of the earliest treatises in political economics to distinguish use and exchange value, railed against as a system of robbery. The post was another of the endless rentseeking positions through which money was siphoned from the merchants, peasant and middle landholders to the French court. The treasurer was a sort of money-lender [J. Marchand] who loaned out money at interest to his subordinates, who then sponged the money from the productive class and transferred it up the line, taking out their cut. This was a position that allowed plenty of leisure time to the functionary who had no vocational sense of his function – and La Bruyère had even less sense than most: he made one trip to Caen and then retired to Paris forever, getting his remit in the mail from the Normand bureaucrats who seemed to have objected at first to this obvious malfeasance, and then accepted it to the point that they were surprised, when La Bruyère finally sold the post to somebody else, to have to encounter a real human being who actually moved to Caen in the course of their tax business. (Magne, 1913)

the will to powerlessness - a note

A number of forms of knowing crystallize around the notion of character in the early modern era. It is no exaggeration to say that character is at the base of the era’s human ‘sciences’ – Van Delft has called the moraliste discourse ‘the anthropology of the classic age’, and character was at the center of that discourse – but as the human sciences were not institutionalized as such, character traversed what we now separate, as for instance romance and political economy. Thomas Mann, in Magic Mountain, writes with regard to his character, Hans Castorp:

Man lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, also that of his epoch and his contemporaries, and even if he may observe the general and impersonal basis of his existence as unconditionally given and self-evident, and be very distant from the idea of criticizing it, as in reality the good Hans Castorp was, yet it is truly possible, that he feels his moral comfort vaguely impaired by its lack.” [My translation, p.58] In fact, Hans Castorp is inheriting the burden of the orator as he was characterized in Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, which was written at some point before 100 A.D. Quintilian experienced in his own life the downfall of the first lineage of emperors – James Murphy, one of his commentators, claims he returned from Spain to Rome just in time to see the bloody transactions that put an end to the Julian emperors and started the new line, from Vespasien. He flattered Domitian, who instituted a cruel secret police state. And yet, he dreamed in his book of oratory of the civic man: “We are to form, then, the perfect orator, who cannot exist unless as a good man, and we require in him, therefore, not only consummate ability in speaking, but every excellence of mind. 10. For I cannot admit that the principles of moral and honorable conduct are, as some have thought, to be left to the philosophers; since the man who can duly sustain his character as a citizen, who is qualified for the management of public and private affairs, and who can govern communities by his counsels, settle them by means of laws, and improve them by judicial enactments, can certainly be nothing else but an orator. 11. Although I acknowledge, therefore, that I shall adopt some precepts which are contained in the writings of the philosophers, yet I shall maintain, with justice and truth, that they belong to my subject and have a peculiar relation to the art of oratory.” [Watson translation] The orator is, indeed, the contemporary – it is as a contemporary that he absorbs the traditions and moves onto the upper management jobs that run the state.

Yet, the contemporary in Quintilian’s day as well as Hans Castorp’s had to practice the critique of society from a rather precarious position. Already, in the Institutes, the critique is ossified. On the one hand, one forms a man whose opinions should count in the way society is run, and, on the other hand, society is being run on a system that will not stop to consult the good man. His will to power is continually undermined by his will to powerlessness – his tactic of never quite confronting the man, of which an extensive record is left in Western literature and philosophy, even beyond Nietzsche “Great Politics”,(perhaps the most ironic expression in modernity of the will to powerlessness).

La Bruyere's field research - a cautionary note

Van Delft is, I think, right to speak of the moraliste tradition as a sort of classical anthropology. I’m going to use this and other suggestions about Van Delft, but I’d like to note that, as is so often the case with historians of literature, one feels a lack of the feeling for the institutional location of such things as “anthropology” or ‘natural philosophy.” We are used to looking at the texts of the past and thinking that here we have an ‘epistemological field,” or a ‘tradition”, without thinking of the fact that it is a modern institutional characteristic to have combined such ‘research programs’ and education in locatable institutions. La Bruyere, acting as the historiographer of Louis XIV, engaged in one sort of research h activity, and as the writer of the Characters, engaged in another. In the latter, there was a sense – one feels it in the introduction to the characters – that the time for making maxims is passing. And yet of course there is no social science methodology readily available – outside of astrology, and the university courses that lead to the creation of the “civic man”.

But we should try to remember certain facts about education in the 17th century. For one thing, it was not an encircling institution – the government, for one thing, did not control it – rather, it was mostly a matter of the church – and for another thing, it was not connected with the vast capillary system that fell into place during the latter part of the 19th century in France and England, and that has always distinguished the United States as an enlightenment state – the states from the beginning took responsibility for education. For instance, in 1792, in Paris, a city with a population of 600,000 people, there were only 163 “regent” doctors, doctors who had gone through a full course of training, in the city. (Coury, 136) When La Bruyere went to school, he went ‘naturally”, as his biographer Etienne Allaire puts it, to a religious school, because ‘there was no other.” And just as naturally, he attached himself to a noble house – first, the Condé. Intellectual historians have a habit of speaking of, say, the rise of a ‘culture of sociability” by quoting people like La Bruyere or Addison or Lessing without pausing to ask how we are to analyse their claims – without even thinking about the kind of ‘field research’ they did. Partly this is because the very notion of ‘field research’ simply didn’t exist. In speaking of his book, La Bruyere gropes towards the authority that resides in the claims of the moraliste, but he never, of course, even considers statistics as applied to populations and the like – it wasn’t just that the sciences were not there, even the concept of populations wasn’t there. The forms weren’t there. Instead, the forms came out of a humanistic schooling that was prescribed for any educated person – doctors were trained in rhetoric as an essential element in their professional makeup. The remnants of this vast, blasted system lie across the landscape of academia today, for – as is my contention throughout – there is not and never will be a total ‘modernisation’ or a society of ‘rational’ institutions.

(I need to develop this more in The Tears of Homo Economicus)

the roots of ethology revised

Between 1840 and 1900, the character of economic man, or homo economicus, was formulated not so much as a sociological type observed empirically, but rather as a theoretical necessity arrived at deductively. In the model of the market economy as a sort of variant of the electromagnetic field of Maxwell’s, there was need for some molecule upon which market forces could work, and economic man was elected for the task. But, admittedly, this molecule had a backstory, one that was smoothed out no doubt to make him the infinitely rational calculator of myth, and yet still one that imposed a certain historic weight. John Stuart Mill, in the System of Logic (1843), suggested that there should be, at the center of the social sciences, one that was devoted to character itself – ethology. In the twentieth century, ethology was hijacked to describe the study of animal behavior, while the science that Mill suggested died in its cradle. Its object, too, has lead a marginal existence in sociology and economics – far better to speak of the self, the subject, the agent, the actor, than of character. Economists evoke the latter mainly when they turn away from the day’s business and turn to the slightly sickly rhetoric of uplift to raise morale among the newspaper readers and businessmen.

In picking up on character as my thematic to lead me through the transformations wrought by capitalism (or the Great Transformation, or modernization – names that attach to the great sweep that has lead to the artificial paradise we know in the developed economies today, with their great chemical alterations of the environment, their predominantly non-agricultural populations, their electricity, their eight hour a day lifestyle rhythms – a historical epoch that could be said to have been founded by the industrial revolution, or the trans-Atlantic revolutions, or the scientific revolution, and that I think took its start when Magellan made the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1519), I am making use of a category that bears a slightly dented aura. Even in the humanities, where characters still populate novels and films, the study of the unity and peculiarity of character is démodé. My impression is that character has little standing in the social sciences as well. And yet character more than self, subject, agent, personality, actor, traverses much more naturally the three spheres of human existence – the sphere of waking life, the sphere of dreams, and the sphere of third life – of media.

Character was the general study of the moralistes of the 17th and 18th century. When Marx uses the term “character mask” in Capital I, he is pressing on a trope that had a long circulation in moralist literature. La Bruyere wrote, in his Characters: “The difference between a man who puts on an alien character and who he is in the privacy of himself is that of a mask to a face.” [1692, 461] This contrast between an aspect that is not fixed, that can be put on, and that adheres to another, fixed aspect without mimicking it in every detail is a very old trope, suggested by the theater of masks.

A. Körte (1929) traces the word character back to the Greek verb for inscribing and wounding. The verb took on two technical meanings – inscribing in stone or wood, and the second was for the impressing of coins. It was nominalized first to designate the instrument that stamped the coin, and then for the stamp upon the coin. Thus, by a nice etymological coincidence, we find that the transformation of the meaning of character, in the ancient world, already brings us to the subject of money and standardization.

Körte points to the relative paucity of the word in the texts we have up until Aristotle. However, even then the metaphor was working that would link the stamp on the coin to the stamp on the soul. Although, Körte points out, the intermediate link is the stamp of the body:

“The image of the stamp, of the impress, was applied rather early to people, but not to the designation of their spiritual impress, the ineradicable individual type, as we mostly use the word ‘character’ today. It went rather with the bodily appearance, as in Herodutus in the scene of the recognition of the young Cyrus by Astyages: “While the boy thus spoke, there came upon Astyages a sense of recognition of him and the lineaments of his face [karaktes tou prosoepon] seemed to him to resemble his own, and his answer appeared to be somewhat over free for his station, while the time of the laying forth seemed to agree with the age of the boy.”

According to Körte, the final step towards the psychological meaning of character was taken by Aristotle, who liked the idea of using the idea of a wrought appearance – the lineament that is inscribed in a material – to speak of the stamp of habits upon the soul.

James Diggle, in his edition of Theophrastus, claims that the work should be translated as something like Behavioral Types or Distinctive Marks of Character. The metaphor, still working on a flat surface, was a drawing, or the portrait. But the drawing was of a general type – generated from Aristotle’s vices, as well as the vices of other moralists of antiquity. It was immediately seen that these characters had something comic about them, and they were transferred to the comedies of the stage. The comic was, perhaps, a stiffness in the stamp – an obsessiveness which rubs against reality, and which makes the character vulnerable to the stratagems of those he encounters.

At the same time, certain of the moralists took seriously the virtues of character. “The Stoic Posidonius (fr. 176 Edelstein-Kidd ap. Sen. Ep. 95.65–7) proclaims the utility of ethologia, his term for charakterismos: to display a model of virtue is to invite its imitation.” [Diggle, 11] The chain of meanings that lead us from the instrument that scratches on a surface to the surface that invites emulation is a trope that is taken up in Roman culture, especially by the stoics, and again in the early modern era.

At this point, the question of the relation between the mask and character takes a certain turn – and it is one we know well. It is a turn that resembles all the beginnings of a split, a branching off of the natural, a doubling – all the conjectural histories that, taking off from Rousseau in his two great essays on the social contract and inequality, saw the doubling as something suddenly sprung on the human animal… who was of course a Greek. The Greek, back in the days when the world was whole, would don the mask and become the mask, be possessed by it just as the devotee of vaudau would be possessed by a deity. French classicist Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, in an essay, A Scandal in Athens: doing the comos without a mask, presents this viewpoint well. Her point of departure is an Demosthenes’s accusation that his the brother in law of his enemy, Eschines, went through the comos, the nocturnal procession or charivari, with dancing, singing and apparently indecent pantomime and the like, in honor of Dionysos. In the essay, Frontisi-Ducroux uses this accusation to understand the use of the mask in classic Athenian culture:

What is the import of this infraction? The question returns us to our interrogation concerning the significance of the mask, in Dionysian rituals, of course, but also generally in the practices and representations of the Greeks. Thus the values which permit us to disengage the term prosopon and its uses does not absolutely go towards the sense of incognito. Recall that the Greek language only possesses a single term to designate mask and visage, and that the two notions, far from opposing one another as in our cultures, are apprehended similarly in terms of faces, since the prosopon is “what is offered to the gaze”. The visage is what each one presents of itself to the eyes of others, and which, in a culture of exteriority, coincides with its authentic being. Thus the prosopon will designate the personage, then the grammatical person, before being applied, in the Christian epoch to the psychological and moral person. In such a context, in order to remain incognito, it is necessary to hide one’s visage, as Ulysses did in Alcinoos’s palace, during the song of Demodocus. But to put on a mask refers to putting on a new personality, which temporarily abolishes the first, which no longer matters. The prosopon that the actor dons is not a mask, in the sense that we understand it, but a new visage which presents its wearer to the eyes of others with other traits, under another aspect and a new identity.”

Frontisi-Ducroux’s difficulty in finding the words to express the person is part of the history she is telling – “personage:, “person”, “personality,” and “identity” are all words devised under the semantic regime of doubleness, of the artificial man. The natural man, of course, does not know his naturalness, and the moment he does know it, that naturalness slips into the retrospective view, never to be inhabited again. This is a variant of the story of the Other, codified in the 18th and 19th century grapple with ’man’ as an object of study and the subject of history. And it is thus – if we accept this story – that the mask and the character, which may seem like a natural couple, are somewhat at odds. To return to our history of metaphors, if the stamp on the coin is to work as the mark of authenticity, it cannot be lifted off – although in actuality coins can be pounded back into blank counters and restamped. But the mask can be lifted off and put on – it is the nature of the mask. It is also in the nature of the convention of masking that the mask represents another face than that borne by the masker. Still, the possibility of the mask hovers over the chain linking the character on the coin to the character stamped on the psyche. And so the mask does couple with the character in one tradition, which leads to the comic character, and eventually the cynical one – the man whose character in public is a strategic mask, an incognito through which he proceeds secretly to his ends. Whereas, in another tradition, the character is that which remains under the mask, that which is the very cast of the moral self.

an excrement in potentia

I’ve been thinking about the fact that two English philosophers – Shaftesbury and John Stuart Mill – were subjected, when young, to the educational regime of two other English philosophers: John Locke and James Mill.

As far as I can tell, John Stuart Mill paid little attention to Shaftesbury. He certainly didn’t know of Shaftesbury’s strange notebooks, the Philosophical Regimen, as they were called by their first editor, Benjamin Rand, although Shaftesbury called them the Askemata, or Exercises. I'v e previously written about this, and thought I'd reproduce the following:

Ginzburg did not include Shaftesbury in his brilliant essay on the geneology of Estrangement as a literary device, in which he traces, link by link, the connection between the Stoic practices recorded by Marcus Aurelius and the formalist notion of “making strange”, that formula which was so important to Victor Shklovsky. However, Ginzburg’s explanation of the Stoic method – a method that is neither dialectical nor introspective nor, quite, logical - can easily be applied to Shaftesbury's Philosophical Regimen:

“Epictetus, the philosopher-slave whose ideas profoundly influenced Marcus Aurelius, maintained that this striking out or rearsure of imaginary representations was a necessary step in the quest for an exact perception of things. This is how Marcus Aurelius describes the successive stages:

“Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse that is drawing you like a puppet. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour.”

Each of these injunctions required the adoption of a specific moral technique aimed at acquiring mastery over the passions...”

Shaftesbury’s method and madness converge on an operating table in which the writer is both surgeon and patient. One notices that the direction of the Stoic move – of wiping away impressions – is the opposite of the direction of the Lockean idea – which builds outwards from a presumed tabula rasa. For Shaftesbury, the Lockean notion that in our minds we build the world anew (an implication that finds its political expression in Tom Paine) can’t possibly be true. The world is the more certain fact, and its impingement upon the mind comes in the form of impressions that are distorting – rather than the sole hermeneutical resource with which we make our uncertain way through the world. In the PR, Shaftesbury’s exercises literally apply Marcus Aurelius’s suggestions, and reference the idea of viewing things “as from a height.” The aftershocks of the clash between Locke's experience (which, for Shaftesbury, is a false kind of innocence) and the Stoic dissection of experience can be felt in the question marks that swarm all over Shaftesbury’s text. They seem like so many jabs into the simulacra of the philosopher patient, the wax doll upon which he intends to operate in order to effect a ritual cleansing. Here’s a passage from the notes on “Deity”. It comes just after a passage comparing the Deists and the Epicureans – “Atoms and void. A plain negative to the Deity, fair and honest. To Deism, still no pretence. So the sceptic....
“From whence then this other pretence? Who are these Deists? How assume the name? By what title or pretence? The world, the world? say what? how? A modified lump? matter? motion? – What is all this? Substance what? Who knows? why these evasions? subterfuges with words? definitions of things never to be defined? structures or no foundations? Come to what is plain. Be plain. For the idea itself is plain; the question plain; and such as everyone has invariably some answer to which it is decisive. Mind? or not mind? If mind, a providence, the idea perfect: a God. If not mind, what in the place? For whatever it be, it cannot without absurdity be called God or Deity; nor the opinion without absurdity be called Deism.” (38-39)

While we recognize both Marcus Aurelius's exercise and the grammatical echoes of the great Carolinean preachers - Donne, Taylor - the effect of this continually interrupted movement, this play of thought that tears at itself, over pages, is of a sort of self-cutting. One can’t help but wonder whether the voices at play, here, don’t include Locke's voice from the nursery. A voice which we know from Locke's work on education, which was confessedly based on his experience teaching the Shaftesbury children. This is Locke:
“Familiarity of discourse, if it can become a father to his son, may much more be condescended to by a tutor to his pupil. All their time together should not be spent in reading of lectures, and magisterially dictating to him what he is to observe and follow. Hearing him in his turn, and using him to reason about what is propos’d, will make the rules go down the easier and sink the deeper, and will give him a liking to study and instruction: And he will then begin to value knowledge, when he sees that it enables him to discourse, and he finds the pleasure and credit of bearing a part in the conversation, and of having his reasons sometimes approv’d and hearken’d to; particularly in morality, prudence, and breeding, cases should be put to him, and his judgment ask’d. This opens the understanding better than maxims, how well soever explain’d, and settles the rules better in the memory for practice. This way lets things into the mind which stick there, and retain their evidence with them; whereas words at best are faint representations, being not so much as the true shadows of things, and are much sooner forgotten. He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos’d, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor’s lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.”


Wit and false colours. Which, of course, are just what is defended in Shaftesbury's Sensus Communis. One might wonder how one gets from the severities of the stoic operating table to the epigrams of the drawing room - this has puzzled Shaftesbury's commentators, at least. The key is to follow not the thread of that truth which is discovered by a process of corresponding idea to object, according to the narrow procedures of proof, but to take a broader, more social sense of proof into account. Wit is a trial. A trial is a different thing than the amassing of proofs, which is the sort of activity done by the police or prosecutor before a trial. Trials are about guilt and innocence, which is the context in which truth gains its social footing. Thus, trials are dramas about character and circumstances. Trials are part of the world as theater. And the world is a place of infinite and not so converging impressions. Here is the gap, the little peephole, into souls, and for souls, truth alone is not enough. Truth won't give us seriousness. Which is why we need other methods more appropriate to our theatrical world. Which is why we need wit. The test of opinion is in the struggle between the serious and the absurd. This is a point to which Shaftesbury returns time and again in defending wit as the kind of thing that is consistent with common sense: ridicule drives an opinion to the point at which it becomes ridiculous, or extravagant. It drives it outside the bounds of common sense. It makes it a scapegoat. It expels it.

Yet Shaftesbury is careful not to confuse absurdity with falsity. An opinion doesn’t have to be untrue to be absurd. In the infinitesimal separation, there lodges an infinite meaning, because it presents another dimension of reason, one in which the terms concern the serious and the absurd. It is in that dimension that LI sees the glimmer of what Durkheim called the sacred. The spirits at work in the festival of mockery are the spirits of the sacred and the profane, and the shock of mocking opinion, especially one’s own, is derived from the sense of profanation, of de-consecration.

The trial of opinion by wit is parallel to the trial of the mind by the body, as this is laid out in the Philosophical Regimen. “Nature has joined thee to such a body, such as it is. The supreme mind would have it that this should be the trial and exercis of inferior minds. It has given thee thine; not just at hand, or as when they say into one’s mouth; not just in the way so as to be stumbled on by good luck; not so easily either, but so as thou mayst reach it; so as within thy power, within command. See! Here are the incumbrances. This is the condition, the bargain, terms. Is the prize worth contending for? or what will become of me if I do not contend? How if the stream carries me down? how if wholly plunged in this gulf? What will be my condition then? what, when given up to body, when all body, and not a motion, not a thought, not one generous consideration or sentiment besides?” That gulf, as Shaftesbury points out at the beginning of the section on the body, is one composed of shit. The body is an excrement in potentia

“And as from the parts of the body, so also abstract it from the whole body itself, an excrement in seed, already half being, half putrefaction, half corruption. Thus be persuaded of this: that I (the real I) am not a certain figure, nor mass, nor hair, nor nails, nor flesh, nor limbs, nor body; but mind, thought, intellect, reason; what remains but that I should say to this body and all the pompous funeral, nuptial, festival (or whatever other) rites attending it, “This is body. These are the body only. The body gives life to them, exalts them, gives them their vigour, force, power and very being.”

The trial of the mind proposed here will follow a body’s logic, which is the logic of juxtapositions. Throughout the Regimen, the thought of the simultaneous and the all – that gaze down from the height – operates to create a world wide absurdity, a feeling of disgust, of a crowd of potential excrement increasing at every moment:

“Consider the number of animals that live and draw their breath, and to whom belongs that which we call life, for which we are so much concerned; beasts, insects, the swarm of mankind sticking to this earth, the number of males and females in copulation, the number of females in delivery, and the number of both sexes in this one and the same instant expiring and at their last gasp’ the shrieks, cries, voices of pleasure, shoutings, groans nd the mixed noise of all of these together. Think of the number of those tht died before thou wert or since; how many of those that came into the world at the same time and since; and of those now alive, what alteration. Consider the faces of those of thye acquaintance as thou sawest them some years since; how changed since then! how macerated and decayed! All is corruption and rottenness; nothing at a stay, but continued changes; and changes renew the face of the world.” (257)

And as always, Shaftesbury’s move is to put these notions in a scene, sketched rapidly.

Life is as those that live it. What are those? What are we? Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati. Tolerable carrion; fit to be let live. Honest poor rascals not so bad as when they say “scarce worth the hanging.” Life-worthy persons, if a bare liveable life. But say, what are we? What do we make of ourselves? How esteem ourselves? Warm flesh, with feelings, aches, and appetites. The puppet – play of fancies. O the solemn, the grave, the ponderous business. – Complex ideas, dreams, hobby-horses, houses of cards, steeples and cupolas. – The serious play of life. – Shows, spectacles, rites, formalities, processions; children playing at bugbears, frighting one another through masks. The heard, priests, cryer. The trump of fame; the squeaking trumpet and cat-call; the gowns! habits! robes! How underneath? How in the nightcaps, between the curtains and sleeps? How anon in the family with wife, servants, children, o where even none of these must see? Private pleasures, other privacies? the closet and bed-chamber, parlours, dining-rooms, dressing-rooms, and other rooms. In sickness, the lazy hours, in wines, in lecher? taking in, letting out- O the august assembly; each of you, such as you are apart!” (258-259)

The wit of Sensus Communis and the reductions and division of the Philosophical Regimen are attempts not only to find a place for profanation, but – in as much as absurdity is a proxy for the profane – to come back to the serious as a form of the sacred.

Doormen of genius

The great wheel of circulation is altogether different from the goods which are circulated by means of it. The revenue of the society consists altogether in those goods, and not in the wheel which circulates them. – Adam Smith

How can we reconcile what Simmel says about the lengthening of the means – the lengthening of the instrumental interval – to ends in capitalism with our experience of what Marx pointed out again and again – that capitalism becomes a global second nature that conceals the system of production under the great wheel of circulation? For, starting from Marx’s perception, we notice that everything seems speeded up, and not slowed down, in capitalism. For Shylock and Bassanio, a bet on cargo would take months to come to some end – but for a Jerome Kerviel, hundreds of millions of dollars can be bet and lost or won on bundles of financial instruments in the course of a day merely by using a cursor. The sugar I put in my coffee today came Saint Louis, a company that refines and distributes sugar derived from beets cultivated in Europe, while the coffee came from Peru. Both were purchased at the Monoprix down the street. The logistical network by which both products could be refined, packaged, trucked to stores and finally end up consumed on my table is only intermittently visible to anyone – it is visible in the truck that unloads the packages and the store clerks who stock it – it is visible to the rural proles who harvest the beans, picturesquely dressed in colorful and characteristic clothing and smiling (according to the image on the package) (although in reality probably wearing tee shirts that say Harvard or Hard Rock Café or something similar and blue jeans, part of the vast dump of tee shirts throughout the undeveloped economies), and visible as digits displayed on a screen to accountants at the company and stock market traders. All of which means that as Simmel’s teleological series are lengthening, they are also producing the appearance of temporal shortening – they are faster. The faster they are, the more they are lengthened – this is one of the paradoxes of capitalism.

It is a paradox that, as well, impinges on the novelistic representation of the Great Transformation. Lukacs, in the Theory of the Novel, speaks a little mysteriously of the various regimes of “distance” between the hero and the meaning of life in the epic, the tragedy, and the novel. This distance is, I think, an expression of the teleological chains that Simmel saw on the surface of life in a fully monetized society. For the epic and the tragic hero, the quest is to understand the sense of life in the face of fate – the world here consists of large, or one might say, royal contingencies. But for the novelistic hero, fate doesn’t have the same totalizing meaning – it has, instead, a dispersing meaning.

“For life, gravity means: the absense of any present sense, the indissoluble enclosure in senseless causal connections, the withering in fruitless nearness to earth and farness from heaven, the having to endure in not being able to liberate oneself from the irons of simple brutal materiality from that which for the best immanent forces of life is the continual goal of overcoming: expressed with the value concept of form – triviality.”

Baudelaire said that Balzac’s novels are distinguished from the usual novel of moeurs by the fact that Balzac’s delight in the massive triviality of material circumstances transforms them into signs and symbols of genius: “All his personages are endowed with a vital ardor by which he is himself animated. All his fictions are as profoundly colored as dreams. From the summit of the aristocracy to the plebes at the bottom, all the actors of his Comedy are more eager for life, more active and clever in struggle, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In brief, each, with Balzac, even the doormen, have genius.”

Baudelaire is a very surefooted critic. Wilde obviously copies Baudelaire here in his famous essay on the Decay of Lying, and Wilde was as cunning as a jewel thief when it came to copping the shiny bits of his predecessors. But though I am sure that Baudelaire is correct about the excess in Balzac, I am not sure that this excess did not flow back into life – or rather, I am not sure that Balzac was not simply being prophetic. Proust thought so – thought that the aristocracy absorbed Balzac’s aristocrats into the norms of their own behavior. The transmission, here, was obviously through a literacy and taste that one might not suppose in the doormen. But could it be… could it be that the burden of trivia itself imposed a struggle upon them such that the result, under the Great Transformation, in the midst of teleological chains that were both lengthening and shortening – in an Alice in Wonderland world – was that genius became a job requirement of the doormen of Paris, London or New York? In comparison to the Sganarelles and Figaros of the old order, at least.

revelatory preferances

As economists with a psychological bent have discovered, there is a problem with the way economists talk about preferences. Preferences in the neo-classic paradigm, codified by Arrow and Debreu, are invariant and logically sorted by a simple transitivity rule, so that if preference a is preferred to b and b to c, a is preferred to c. There is no test ‘in the wild’ that has ever reproduced this theorem.

However, economists generally dismiss tests in the wild as non-relevant, for, they claim, either the psychological tests that show non-transitivity are due to the special circumstances of the experiment itself, or empirical non-transitivity itself doesn’t count, because models that are transitive approximate the collective reality of markets.

There is, however, another problem with the idea of ‘choice’ as it is used in mainstream economics. It divorces consumption from what Simmel considered one of the hallmarks of modernity: the increase in both the number of links and the complexity of links that leads from means to ends. Simmel considers that money triumphs as an institution in modern society because it forms a perfect means in the midst of the tangle of means and purposes.

For the economist, revealed preferences have a certain dead-endedness – whether one buys a commodity for another end, or for itself alone makes no difference to the economic analysis of the transaction. But it is easy to see that this can’t be true. It isn’t simply that there is a difference between a company buying coal to make steel with – which, though a consumption of coal, leads to another purpose that will have a global effect on the purchase of the coal – but it is also true that satisfaction, or marginal utility, is also effected by the means-end chain.

As Simmel points out, for the individual, there is a divide between the logic of purposes, in which an overall purpose gives meaning and direction to a chain of means, and the emotional and motivational logic of means, in which means as stages in which one must act in a certain way have to be endured or enacted with a purposiveness in their own right that absorbs energy. Indeed, it is a common experience for those who finish a long task, say, writing a book or even simply an article, to feel a letdown at the end of the process, as one is simultaneously freed from exerting one’s energy and attention to the matter at hand and at the same time left with a sort of unguided and unstructured moment. The moment is not a vacation – it is a crowning, a finish, an ending. And yet it doesn’t give one anything to do.

But of course there is more to Simmel’s point than this. Much of the modern life-story is taken up with long-term projects of consumption towards some end. College students, for example, are encouraged from the very beginning to aim at some degree, which is in turn seen as the key to a job. And yet, as the degree is years off, it would be difficult to make a calculation to understand just how much time and energy one should spend on each step. Not that something like this doesn’t happen – a computer science student in an elective English literature class is very often a study in someone who has calculated exactly how little time needs to be spent on a subject that is only a lightly weighted means to his end. Of course, this student intersects with a teacher whose purpose is, in fact, exactly to teach that English literature class. Modern life is full of what we might call purposive jams – like traffic jams, they consist of people who, jostling one another, are going different places but find themselves within the limits of the same narrow situation.

The series of means is also susceptible to another contingency: polysemy. For as the steps, the means, to these longer ends are situations, they also have a multitude of affordances. The student might, by some miracle, fall in love with English literature, which would change his purposes entirely. This is a reality that doesn’t fall under revealed preferences, but quite the reverse – the preference itself is revelatory.

The adventure of modern life begins with revelatory preferences.

Freedom and money

And everywhere we go people be like damn where you from, where you from
I'm from moneyland
So give me some money, man


In the last post in this series, I wrote about Caillois’s sense of the morphology of the game. Whether it is the triangle of baseball, the rectangle of the football field, or the strew of different bits of plastic models under the Christmas tree, play ultimately forms a circle about itself, much like God – that archetype of the circle in which the center is nowhere and everywhere.

As I also pointed out, one of the grounds of play, in Caillois’ schema – the freedom of choosing to play – seems to have a deep connection to one of the grounds of modern capitalism in Marx’s view – free labor. The player’s choice to obey certain rules – whether scripted or spontaneous – and the laborer’s choice to sell a certain product for money – one’s ‘time – both give us moments of relative freedom, the bounds of which are determined in the system in operation.

Georg Simmel was also attracted to social ‘morphology’ – to hubs and linkages, to circles and the social meaning of encirclement. One catches a glimpse of the idea of the ‘encircling’ institution in the Philosophy of Money. There, Simmel presses on the parallelism of three social factors in modernity: law, money, and education, the latter of which bears the guises of science, culture, and ‘intelligence’. The parallelism begins with the ‘leveling’ logic to which they are all subject. Thagt is, they operate on the principal of equalization. The law ideally views all those subject to it as equal; all commodities are equally buyable by money, even if by different amounts; and the content of intelligence is defined as such by being equally true for all who gain access to it. In modernity, then, the legitimation of hierarchy is derived from quantity rather than quality, to put it in vulgar Hegelian terms.

But this quantitative aspect is deceptive – behind the piles of money or the IQ test, there lurk social mechanisms that are certainly qualitative, disciplinary, and positional in more than quantitative terms. I have been pondering this equality in terms of the idea of the encircling institution. In the premodern landscape, the police, schools, and money were, of course, present, but they were not omnipresent. They did not have an enclosing nature. All three, however, developed in tandem with each other within the modern state, especially after the French Revolution. By this I mean that they ‘touched’ everyone. Where before – as one can see by reading, for instance, Mazzoni’s The Betrothed – great patches of Italy had literally no law enforcement at all, which was as true for England, Scotland, Massachussetts and Russia, etc. In addition, these kingdoms, city states and colonies were mainly rural, with economies that could be and was run with little reference to money as such. And, finally, there was no school system set up did not service the population as a whole of the European states (except for Holland) until the early nineteenth century. Then, in the U.S., in Prussia, and later than that in France and England, literacy, the greatest of all impositions on the Little Tradition by the Great Tradition, became theoretically mandatory. And even then, it is surprising, when one looks at the statistics, how few people were processed through higher education. A scientist in France in 1888 could well have met all the specialists in his field, or at least all those with diplomas: there was relatively few.

What is important to remember is that all three encircling institutions were put in place on a national scale by the end of the nineteenth century. One of the morphological mistakes of orthodox Marxism is to consider this a matter not of circles, but of a vertical constructs – hence, the famed structure/superstructure idea. Marx himself used this image not as a permanent heuristic but as a heuristic at hand to get to the notion of class. It is, however, certainly not indispensable, and a firmer sense of the circulation of commodities erodes that image.

I began this post with a reference to freedom. Heine, as I pointed out weeks and weeks ago, usefully analyzes freedom in terms of privacy, equality, and utopia (and here I am simplifying his simplification). Simmel takes a materialist approach to freedom that helps us understand the coupling of freedom and encirclement. Like everything Simmel writes in The Philosophy of Money, the insight tends to get buried in a very confusing style of topical presentation – a style that yearns to be aphoristic and that takes on its systematic duties as almost a punishment, which is then meted out to the reader. Myself, I understand how one can beat one’s wings against the cage of the dullest prose: but in life there is rhapsody, and there is taking out the garbage, and one should try, when possible, not to confuse the two.

In my next post, I think, or the next at least in this series, we will discuss freedom and money

Some rambling notes on entanglement

In 1991, an anthropologist, Nicholas Thomas, wrote a book entitled “Entangled Objects” in which he proposed that other dimensions of commodity exchange exist outside of what is usually analyzed in terms of production and circulation. That is, objects are entangled with other objects and situations to a degree that confounded both the theory of revealed preference and the Marxist analysis of surplus value, the latter of which held production and circulation too far apart, the former of which had forgotten production and overlapping markets altogether. 

 The idea of entanglement was taken up by two different economic sociologists, Daniel Miller and Michel Callon, who have clashed about just what it means. Callon, who is better known, is one of the architects of Actor Network Theory, has made field studies of fishermen and stock brokers to study markets and producers. His theory of markets, based in this research, accords a great role to what he calls the performativity of economics models – that is, economists model transactions according to theories of rational choice and then real markets are molded to adhere to the model. It is a sort of para-Dorian Gray effect, with the wickedness of the economist showing up in the way market participates in a particular market identify themselves. Miller has developed what he calls a virtual theory of markets – by which he means that transactions that are framed as exchanges in a market are so framed by the abstractions of economics, which paints a virtual picture of economic reality and works to make the latter conform to the former. 

Miller, unlike Callon, does not give the market framing any ontological privilege. Thus, he resists the whole idea that the market describes anything more than a locale in which commodities are exchanged.

 For both thinkers, the way objects are entangled in production and the symbolic realm make the neo-classical claim about the exchange of commodities unrealistic. Both writers are engaged in what Mill called ethology; unlike Mill, however, both Miller and Callon think that there is an experimental dimension to economic theory, which is enacted or performed in real transfers of objects.

The polemic between Miller and Callon has crystallized around an example, introduced by Miller - a transaction that does not, as it happens, involve the cowry shells beloved by economic anthrologists: the buying of a Renault automobile. 

 That it is a Renault instead of a Honda or a Ford is a sign that this is, among other things, a transatlantic debate. The French car gives us a vaguely French buyer – in Miller’s example, a woman named Sophie, who accrues a profile that would make her ideal for an Oprah interview: “So let us imagine the case of Sophie buying a Renault. What are the factors that determine Sophie’s selection of this car and the price she is prepared to pay for it? Sophie is recently divorced and, while she has kept possession of the family house, her ex-husband kept the car. Her income is now much restricted so the Renault will be a small one. This is an important decision for her, one of the most signicant purchases she has made for a while. For one thing she is suddenly redefining her image as an individual as against being a ‘partner’ in a relationship. So the aesthetics and the image of the car are important as a decision about her outward appearance, and many of her friends are very stylish. She is quite proud of that element of nationalism that leads her towards buying a French car, with a confidence bolstered by recent victories in football. So she is clear that she wants a Renault as opposed to say a Fiat or Toyota. Also the car is becoming ever more important to her since her two children are growing to an age where much of her parenting consists of chauffeuring them around to friends and activities, so the car must function well to facilitate her daily responsibilities (Maxwell 2001). Also she has realized that car journeys are actually the main time when she listens to loud music so the sound system in the car is perhaps more important than the hi-fi. in her home (Bull 2001). Sophie is also (to an admittedly rather mild degree) a bit of an environmentalist so that some of the ‘costs’ of the car, which are normally regarded as externalities, are internal to her equation. She wants an efficient engine principally to save her own petrol costs but also she is happy that this is for the sake of the earth as well as for the sake of her budget.” [“Turning Callon Right side up” ] 

 I will overlook the oddly sappy terms in which Sophie’s character is described, although they have the glaze of self-help psychology – Sophie is, as E.M. Forster might put it, a thin character, and she is all the thinner for being “confident”, or ‘happy for the sake of the earth’, that her car has good gas mileage,etc. Oddly, Miller, who has done ethnographic fieldwork, seems uninterested in saying exactly what the ‘earth’ means to Sophie. However, aside from Sophie’s cartoonishness, Miller’s portrait is distinguished by a lack of noticing both the material situation in which his purchaser makes her purchase – where does Sophie live, anyway? – and a blind spot so large as to be puzzling: Sophie is not ‘purchasing’ a car, if she is a normal car buyer – she is taking out a loan. That new cars are big ticket items for most drivers, and that they are entangled, at both ends of the market transaction (that is, the ends designated by the seller and the buyer) is, one would think, one of the primary entanglements of this transaction. It is one of the reasons that the disentanglement is so doubted by Miller and so easily imagined by Callon: 

"As noted elsewhere, the object of the transaction may be a service, irrespective of how ‘immaterial’ it may seem. For example in Sophie’s case the sale may include a leasing contract or after-sales services. But since all that is specified and qualified, salespersons and buyers are quits once the transaction has been completed. In other words... the disentanglement of the car from the seller’s complicated and heterogeneous world is accomplished. And this is because the goods are detached and reattached that the two agencies become quits: the two processes are strongly intertwined. In other words it is quite impossible to separate the two issues of the embeddedness and of the alienation of (commercial) goods.” 

 Callon’s borrowing of the term agencement from Deleuze is one way to grasp the fact that choice or consumption is only one dimension of the economy – production is the other. Marx and the classical economists knew this well; the neo-classicals have erected an entire science on forgetting it. Yet Callon, too, envisions a checkbook and the alienation of property, as though Sophie were buying a steak. The checkbook brings into this transaction a bank; it should also bring into this transaction the seller’s terms, which will certainly include an interest rate. Callon mentions the lender's terms, but doesn't seem to understand that alienation here is a highly conditioned term. Sophie operates, as we all do, in a world in which purchase is not a matter of being endowed with a supply of funds equal to one’s desire for goods, but rather in a world in which one’s continuing supply of income makes one suitable for funds flowing from other parties – banks, credit card companies, the automaker’s own lending unit – which in turn leads to secondary transactions – the bundling of loans into larger financial products that can be sold amongst parties in such derivative markets – and so on. At the time Callon published his refutation of Miller, in 2005, there was something like 300 trillion dollars of derivates contracts being traded “out there” . The entanglement of supposedly separate markets impinged, virtually, on every big ticket transaction. If Sophie were living in Dublin and buying a Range Rover, in 2011 the taxes she paid would be going to pay off bad bets made by bad Irish banks who had plunged into the credit markets that, at some point, serviced the big ticket purchases of people like Sophie – as well as the small credit card purchases. This makes it all the more interesting that economists model a market – rather than the tangle of markets that actually exist – and insist on a highly unrealistic notion of the individual revealing preferences in these simple to disentangle, recognizable markets, when of course they are operating in ways they are not sure of in markets that they cannot overview to make purchases that they ‘prefer’ due to the existential structures in which they are embedded. To trust, then, that they reveal a preference, here, is like understanding the Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg by assuming that a number of soldiers from a number of Southern states had decided, on their own, that it was a good time to take a stroll across a Pennsylvania meadow. 

The notion of entanglement helps us see how circulation and production in capitalism have, over the nineteenth and twentieth century, shaped certain ‘ideal types’: producers, middle persons, clerks and lawyers and doctors,  consumers, etc.  One of the characteristics of those types is that they have learned to navigate the hyperconnectivity of capitalism. But they have not learned, even on the level of economics, to understand it. Take someone who is supposedly much more sophisticated than Sophie: Larry Summers. I was struck by one of Summer’s responses in the brief interview with him in the NYT Sunday magazine. You have been cast as the heavy in documentaries like “Inside Job” and on “Frontline” for sowing the seeds of the economic crisis during the Clinton administration. You were against regulating derivatives and in support of repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which significantly relaxed how banks do business. Did they miss the mark by casting you in this light? 

"Oh, these are much more complicated issues than those kinds of movies can suggest. Canada, for example, is generally pointed to as a major regulatory success. But it’s got universal banking that goes considerably beyond the Glass-Steagall reforms that happened in the United States. The major accidents in the United States — Bear Stearns, Lehman, Fannie and Freddie — had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall. Did we 10 years ago foresee everything that happened with respect to derivatives? Absolutely not." 

Summer’s is right that these are complicated issues. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand their complication. The question that is posed, here, is: is there an entanglement between deregulating banks and allowing them to expand their services in all directions so that any crisis they experience will be violently transmitted through the economy and deregulating mortgage markets and derivatives so that they will be free to make riskier investments? And behind this, the larger question: why even have banks if the capital they mobilize is invested, incestuously, in a pyramid of bets about the capital they mobilize? Does this create a perverse incentive to keep the financial services sector from investing in longer range projects – thus creating a huge barrier to long term Research and Development by making it an unattractive investment? 

 Summers, of course, might have some inkling of these things. But he really can’t connect two things that are modularly separated by his models. Over here we have the separation between investment banks and commercial banks, and over here we have a market in financial instruments that, on the consumer end, deregulates the process of mortgage lending, and, on the other end, creates unregulated opportunities for derivatives of ‘real’ financial instruments to be traded back and forth for profit, but no real social gain. Every economist gets trained, through modeling, to bracket and separate factors that the economist knows, in reality, are interrelated. This is done, firstly, in order to build and make models work. But somewhere along the way, they begin to think that these separations and divisions actually reflect reality. Hence, their policymaking is always done on the principle that the economy is a modular system, without any thought about the fact that it is also a highly interconnected system. Summers simply can’t think through the proposition that he was the architect of a malign coupling – big banks, stinking financial instruments – and thus reverts to the logic of analogy beloved by those pushing bad policy. Analogy pushing has evidently moved on from the glory days, in which our occupation of Iraq was just like occupying Germany after WWII. It is now an excuse for turning a blind eye to the essential and massive dysfunction of financial markets. And this, in turn, manufactures a bigger blind eye, in which our supposedly ‘neo-liberal’ government, virtuously shunning central planning and ‘industrial policy’, actually operates a very intense industrial policy that is centered on promoting financial services.  

I wrote the bulk of this in 2012. And in this year, 2021, we still don't see entanglement taken very seriously, even as we live in its virtues and vices. This is where a training in Marx is a virtue, and an ignorance of Marx is a vice - for Marx, at least, had a systematic view of capitalism, while the orthodox political economist has only a mythical monster called a market. And so we go into our world-changing future with this primitive intellectual tool, which is scary.