pencils

Doing research on early twentieth century newspapers, I came across a feuilleton in the Figaro from one of the most famous fin de siecle reporters, Jules Huret. Huret is known today by a few specialists for the fact that he practically invented the scenography of the interview with the artist (Royer, 1986); his subjects included Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Sarah Bernhardt, Giusseppi Verdi, and Kipling, among others – a veritable who’s who of the fin de siecle’s bright lights. In 1909, he made one of his innumerable reporting trips, this time to Germany, and wrote a series about the place for his newspaper.

What attracted my attention was his visit to the pencil factory.

Huret was obviously keen to share with his French audience his impression of the transformation of the German economy from one of small ateliers to large industrial complexes. Getting to Nuremburg, he discovered that the town contained 23 pencil factories. He decided to visit the most famous of them: Johan Faber’s.

“The Faber factory counts 1,000 workers. Almost everything is made, naturally, by machine. Under a vast hangar crowned by six lightning rods, a mountain of cedar logs are left to dry, as big around as one hundred year old oak, entire linden trees, and Swedish birch; and piles of small planks which are distributed on cutting blocks. An exquisitely balsamic odor emanates from the cedar wood. One breathes, everywhere, the perfume of the sawdust. All the buildings are covered with red ash. Nothing other than the powder of cedar, the house receives in its atelier nearly 15,000 kilograms each year. This dust is resold to the makers of etheric oils, to perfumers who exploit it for the mixtures of various perfumes. Under the hangar, the cedar reserve alone amounts to 2 million.

Powerful American saws work on the enormous coniferous trunks. Sometimes, dramatic surprises happen to the workers; great snakes are discovered in the crevices of the trees where they have taken refuge and sleep; scorpions and rare insects are daily taken from the tropical forests.

The cedar is a wood which grows quickly and is quite humid. This is why is it easy to work with. Those of Ceylon and Australia, too hard, are worthless for pencils.  Here, they prefer the ones from California. It has been tried to transplant them to Germany, but they don’t develop and turn out too hard.

How pretty a new pencil is, red and glistening! When I was small, I took a sensual pleasure in touching them, in sniffing them, in sharpening them, in biting and chewing on them. Today, still, the idea that I could someday run short of pencils vaguely discomforts me, and I always have some in reserve. And here they are by the thousands, or what am I saying, by the millions! One makes 15,000 packets daily, here, which is 2 million, 160,000. My joy is great and I am tranquilised.

I never asked myself how they make pencils. This is how: flat small planks of dry or tender wood pass under shaping machines that, in one blow, round them up on one side like chocolate bars and on the other drill out a series of small gullies, six per plank, so that two of those planks juxtaposed, after one has inserted in the gully a small stick of lead mixed with a strong glue, makes six pencils which are then separated by the help of another machine. It then remains only to polish them, to color them, varnish them, and stamp them with the brand name of the factory. All this is done by very specialized machines, save for the gilding of the stamp, which demands female hands. The pure gold which serves for the stamps mounts to about 40,000 francs per year, without counting the copper and aluminum which serves for the inferior quality.

I saw there all kinds of pencils and pens imaginable. They even make special pencils for surgeons, who draw on the skin, and others that can write on glass and even on metal.

Certain pencils are so hard that they hardly erode at all, They are worth 50 to 60 centimes. There are 15 degrees of hardness. The softest are destined for Russia, which only uses these.”

Indeed, Huret’s description took me to Russia, and to one Russian in particular: Vladimir Nabokov. In what I’d call Nabokov’s most beautiful book, Speak Memory, he gives a special notice to a Faber Pencil in the very first chapter. This one came from Treuman’s, a shop which is described all at once on page in a telescoping parenthesis of passerby’s prose:  “(writing implements, bronze baubles, playing cards)”. The Pencil is, originally, part of a fever dream – and if the society from which the dollop of the dream descends is meant to remind us of  Nabokov’s ultra-rich childhood home, worthy of mention in a Figaro article and, indeed, competitive with Proust’s childhood, the fever of that dream points us in the direction of Nabokov’s antithesis, his Dr. Moriarity – Dostoevsky – whose characters tend to come down with fevers so often that his collected works could be considered something like an epidemic.  Sick, dreaming of his mother, Nabokov – an infant in this chapter - sees her in a waking dream pick up a wrapped package from Treuman’s, sees her footman carrying the package (“which looked to me like a pencil”), is astonished that “she did not carry so small an object herself”, and then sees her in person, entering his room:

“In her arms she held a big parcel. It had been, in my vision, greatly reduced in size—perhaps, because I subliminally corrected what logic warned me might still be the dreaded remnants of delirium’s dilating world. Now the object proved to be a giant polygonal Faber pencil, four feet long and correspondingly thick. It had been hanging as a showpiece in the shop’s window, and she presumed I had coveted it, as I coveted all things that were not quite purchasable. The shopman had been obliged to ring up an agent, a “Doctor” Libner (as if the transaction possessed indeed some pathological import). For an awful moment, I wondered whether the point was made of real graphite. It was. And some years later I satisfied myself, by drilling a hole in the side, that the lead went right through the whole length—a perfect case of art for art’s sake on the part of Faber and Dr. Libner since the pencil was far too big for use and, indeed, was not meant to be used.” 

The pencil, which inverses the proportions of sickness and health (shrunk in the hallucination to normal size, and enlarged in reality to an hallucinatory extent) is as much the symbol of Russian art as the cracked servant’s looking glass into which Buck Mulligan was gazing around the time the pencil was purchased was, per Stephen Daedus, the symbol of Irish art. In fact, it was an era, this turn of the century, in search of symbols of art. Just as Huret is fascinated by something ultra about the making of the pencil –something that brought the artisan’s craft ethos to the factory, something so satisfactory about the fit of the lead to the pencil, those small, grooved gutters, that sawdust that coats the factory walls, that odor of cedar – so, too, Nabokov is pleased by that touch of the unnecessary – the pencil in the giant display pencil – which is a case of art for art’s sake sprung from industry.

And what is that art? It is not the art of fevers, but of specificity. In Nabokov’s lecture on Dostoevsky, he approaches Notes from the Underground (a ‘stupid” translation of the title, N. preferred notes from a mousehole), by noting that the mouseman’s book is composed entirely of soliloquies in front of a phantom audience (which is a form, incidentally, pinched for Lolita). And he writes, with evident disapproval:

Throughout this part the mouseman, the narrator, keeps turning to an audience of persons who seem to be amateur philosophers, newspaper readers, and what he calls normal people. These ghostly gentlemen are supposed to be jeering at him, while he is supposed to thwart their mockery and denunciations by the

shifts, the doubling back, and various other tricks of his supposedly remarkable intellect. This imaginary audience helps to keep the ball of his hysterical inquiry rolling, an inquiry into the state of his own crumbling soul. It will be noticed that  references are made to topical events of the day in the middle of the 1860s. The topicality, however, is vague and has no structural power. Tolstoy uses newspapers too—but he does this with marvelous art when, for example, in the beginning off Anna Karenin he not only characterizes Oblonski by the kind of information Oblonski likes to follow in the morning paper but also fixes with delightful historical or pseudo-historical precision a certain point in space and time. In Dostoevski we have generalities substituted for specific traits.”

The last sentence is supposed to come down with crushing force on poor Dostoevsky, much as a the rubber of the eraser attached to American pencils comes down on the false word or phrase and rubs it away, transforming sense- or nonsense –into a pile of dirty pink crumbs.

Pencils are not only writing instruments, they are the writing instruments of childhood. Huret’s description of sniffing and chewing on pencils must have reminded his readers – as it reminded me – of the tooth gashes one would leave in the pencil that one played with as the teacher talked in the front of class, little secret crescents – or the crescents left in the wood by pressing one’s fingernail into it. Nabokov’s big pencil is both in continuity with the childhood culture of the pencil and, well, bigger – although drilling into the pencil is, after all, the ultimate child’s gesture, even if Nabokov struck art at the end of his drilling.

Finally, reading Huret’s account today, one thinks, as well, of the tremendous maw of human desire into which so many trees have disappeared. And the dust, the perfume that enchanted Huret – is the same dust that, breathed in by those workers, day and night, doomed a percentage of them to silicosis – a fact that Ludwig Hirt, a German doctor, had already documented in the 1870s. Huret finishes his up his tour of the pencil factories by going to a graphite factory and watching the pencil leads being manufactured. He exits, covered in black soot. It doesn’t occur to him that the soot he was covered in penetrates into the lungs – but it does. And this is where Nabokov’s view of the pencil swerves to avoid a reality – about both art and pencils. Fredson Bowers, in his introduction to Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Writers, remarks that Nabokov could not abide “social criticism”: “In the classroom lectures the social element in Turgenev is deplored, that in Dostoevsky  is ridiculed, but Gorki’s works are savaged.”  But this critical stance leads to an incorrigibly childish canon of good taste – as though the poems were written by magic scepters, rather than implements made by human beings, and exacting a price-  in energy, in grace, in time and trouble, in mortality – which enters art by the front door. The opponent of art is not social criticism; the opponent of art is denial. Stripping denial of its power is what separates art from mere sublimation.  The pencil is, indeed,  childhood’s thing, but it is a thing that is wrenched, at amazing sacrifice, from out of the raucous adult world.

Barthesian adagio: reading and looking

 

--- Georges Dambier

 

Among academics, it has now become common to use the term “read” when speaking of pictures.

How did "to read" become the go-to term wheneven the scholar approaches the picture (drawing, painting, photo, film, etc.) ? I imagine part of the answer was the great busting of the White Mythology that happened in the sixties and seventies. The White Mythology put, on one side, cultures with writing, against cultures without writing. This opposition, however, seemed oddly oblivious to the wholly different writing systems we know about and the evidence – from pictographs to tattoos – that the line was always blurry everywhere; and that it was politically charged with all the acids of colonialism, sexism, racism, and other of the devil's helpers. At the same time, the busters of the White Mythology were busting ‘presence’. In the domain of visual culture, this meant junking the idea that one sees a picture in one glance. Just as the printed page might not, itself, move, but is constructed with the idea that the eye ‘moves’ over it, so, too, the picture encodes a mobility that the eye follows, if it sees anything at all. And in that relationship of the immobile that is coded for mobility to a mobility – the act of reading – that is hooked up to an immobility – the reader, whose ideal reading posture is immobile – we get the idea that visual culture is meant to be read. Doctors read x rays, moviegoers read the expressions on actors’ faces, and we all read pictures. Although one could ask, here, whether the busting up of presence is not reinstating an old Aristotelian idea of motion and time that reintroduces presence on another level. But I'm too old to ask that question.

The upshot is, I’m happy with all this, up to a point. But I also like to listen to the ordinary angel of language, and that angel persists in speaking of “looking”: I looked at a picture, I watched a movie. This is what makes me think that more is going on, here, than the afteraffects of the busting of the White Mythology – which is otherwise unbruised in our geopolitics and economics, in our newspapers and Sunday supplements. In other words, when “looking” is systematically displaced by “reading”, I suspect that some nuance, some ‘difference’, has become roadkill.

What is that difference? The ordinary angel of language has an ally, here, in Roland Barthes. Barthes was one of the great busters of the White Mythology, but he was also an escape artist – he spent the first part of his career, on his own account, devising beautiful semiological tricks and interpretive traps, and the second part escaping from them. The m.o. of the second career of Barthes was the discovery of desire. Or, perhaps, the discovery of perversion. In On Reading (1976), Barthes claims that the moment of pertinence, the moment in which a domain of knowledge is organized according to certain purposive principles (which are not veridical, but implicative – that is, they organize the field according to a structuring relevance), is lacking when we come to the discipline of reading. Reading is im-pertinent – it operates in a structure as the structure's perversion, following a subtle, masochistic routine.

And this puts its finger on what I suspect is being run over in the substitution of reading for looking, for this use of reading is anything but impertinent. It is identifying and registering. It represses its im-pertinence – it represses the voyeurism of the look, and the masochist in the structure. It lacks the final courage of its own surrenders, and in this way is easily recuperated by the White Mythology – which is the grandest of all recuperators in history, Mr. Three Card Monte florishing Hegel's Logic.

I’ll end this by quoting Barthes from this essay, which has been slightly misrepresented, in Richard Howard’s translation, by substituting “non-pertinence” for Barthes’s im-pertinence. I like Howard, but a translator should not step on the jokes of his subject, if he can help it.

“This difficulty in finding a pertinence, from which to found a coherent Analysis of reading, we can think that we are responsible for it, by our lack of genius. But we can also suppose that im-pertinence is in some way congenital to reading: something statutorily comes to confuse the objects and the levels of reading, and in this way puts in check not only all research on a pertinence in the Analysis of reading, but even, perhaps, of the very concept of pertinence (for the same adventure seems currently to be happening to linguistics and narratology). This something, I believe I can name it (in a manner that is otherwise rather banal): it is Desire. It is because every reading is penetrated with Desire (or Disgust) that Anagnosology [a general theory of reading, from the Greek, anagnôsco – R.] is difficult, perhaps impossible – and in any case may just accomplish itself there where we least expect it, or at least there were we don’t exactly expect it: by a (recent) tradition, we expect it on the side of structure; and we are no doubt partly right: every reading occurs in the interior of a structure (be it a multiple or open one), and not in the supposedly free space of a supposed spontaneity: there is no “natural”, “savage” reading: reading does not exceed the structure; it submits to it: it has need of it, it respects it; but it perverts it. Reading will be the gesture of a body (for, understand well, one reads with one’s body) that in the same movement poses and perverts its order: an interior supplement of perversion.”

Newspapers 2

In he classical liberal view of the press, the most important thing, which gobbled up all the attention, was the relationship with the government. The heroic struggle was to escape government censorship of various forms - from outright banning to the state's booted strategy of assessing various taxes - for each copy, or for advertisement - to the newspapers. What the state was doing to suppress freedom of the press was, as well, an impediment to freedom of trade. The classical liberal could thus take up two favorite causes when, abstractly, defending the newspapers Benjamin Constant’s essay (1819), The liberty of the ancients compared with the moderns is an important intellectual link in a chain that goes back through the enlightenment to the British revolutions of the middle of the 17th century; and it made the classical liberal case in the early nineteenth century in ways that were certainly echoed on the Continent, at least. The very title points us back to the battle of the books, the effort by Perrault and Fontenelle to forge another notion of history than that humanistic one which put the scholar in perpetual servitude to the classics. The moderns had long won, but the battle was worth rehearsing (and not simply by Constant - it is rehearsed endlessly in the history of European philosophy) because the stake, this time, was not taste or technology - not progress - but a change in the mode of political experience that acknowledged the end of the old order. Constant does not so much trace an accumulation of knowledge or taste, but instead traces the systematic substitutions that ensue when the ancient idea of liberty is inverted in the modern idea of freedom. Constant presents two determinants of the ancient idea of liberty: one was an ethos of glory that found in war the expression of the highest virtues; the other was a very public view of private life, in which the way one behaved in one’s domestic space was subject, always, to public censure. The moderns have substituted (Constant hopefully claims) commerce for war, while erecting walls to block the transparency of the private life to the public gaze. The ancient city state was, in fact, small enough that the private life spilled out into the public forum; that the private citizen could very well collaborate in government, whose operations were not on a grand scale, and consisted mainly of finding outlets, compensations, for the animal spirits of its citizens (hence, war against an external foe draws away energy from internal feuds); and that was economically semi-autonomous.  These conditions do not apply to the great modern powers

It results, from what I have just explained, that we can no longer enjoy the liberty of the ancients, which was composed of active and constant participation in collective power. Our own liberty must be composed of the peaceful enjoyment of private independence. The part that each took in national sovereignty in antiquity was not, as in our day, an abstract suppositon. The will of each had a real influence; the exercise of that power was a lively and repeated pleasure. In consequence, the ancients were disposed to make many sacrifices for the conservation of their political rights and their part in the administration of the state. Each felt with pride all that their sufferage meant, finding in that consciousness of one’s personal importance an ample recompense. This recompense no longer exists for us today. Lost in the multitude, the individual almost never perceives the influence that he exercizes. Never is his will imprinted on the collective, nothing evidences to his own eyes his cooperation. The exercise of political rights thus offers us no more than a portion of the enjoyment that the ancients found in it, and at the same time the progress of civilization, the commercial tendencies of the epoch, the communication of peoples among themselves, have multiplied and varied infinitely the means to private happiness.”
In this image, commerce – in classical liberal fashion – is enfolded in the private sphere, which thrusts it outside the household and re-deploys the vocabulary of liberty. The happiness of the individual is enjoyed privately, though necessarily earned through public action. Like commerce, the press exists in the mid-terrain between the household and the state, and participates, as well, in the universal mechanism of compensation – by alternately feeding the delusion of private participation in public administration and by encouraging the feeling that individual power is an anachronism, superceded by the multitude. The industrial experience of the multitude, the assembly line, the treadmill of goods, has its correlate in the newspapers columnar structure, its infinite and dispiriting diversity. 

Pluto-porn

It is generally agreed that we live in mean and seedy times: the age of the artificial woody, the entertainment-security complex, and a political system that has vanished in a mist of legalized bribery and impression management. Cast a glance at the Forbes hundred top billionaire and trillionaire losers and try to imagine the fun if some world government seized all their money and burnt it – yes, it would relieve the world of a little pain, but it would do surprisingly little good. The system incorrigibly generates these kind of autistic dinosaurs.

So – in lieu of the bonfire of their vanities – at least we can, occasionally, peak at their email. This week, as DSK – that’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn to you Americans – gets officially clamped for pimping, his emails got sorted out in the press. Now, this is  a press composed of people who, two years ago, were his BFFs (whatever that means. It is one of those internet acronyms that has the sort of upshifting, Valley kinda ring to it, which is why I’m using it,  but of BFF in general I’m strictly still WTF?) In other words, the compliant, knowitall press that Segolene so accurately denounced for their sexism, their middle of the roadism, and their toadyism – the new chiens du garde like the old chiens du garde, and someone’s in the kitchen with Dina – have officially turned on the master. 

Which gets us to the vocabulary of the emails. Since America is transfixed, at the moment, with the joys of its newest retro craze, lynching – making a big comeback in Florida, I hear – the emails of DSK have not, so far, made it through the grate.  The NYT story about his arrest was disappointingly dreary with filler, no mention made of the “material”.

Here’s the first paragraph of the story in Le Monde:

Il les appelle des "filles", des "copines", des "petites". Parfois même Dominique Strauss-Kahn use du mot "matériel", comme dans ce texto, un mois de juillet : "Veux-tu (peux-tu) venir découvrir une magnifique boîte coquine à Madrid avec moi (et du matériel) le 4 juillet ?" Une autre fois, il utilise une périphrase, celles qu'on "aura dans ses bagages". Et évoque même, un jour, un mystérieux "cadeau" offert au peintre Titouan Lamazou.

[He calls them the girls, the girlfriends, the little things. Sometimes, even, Dominique Strauss-Kahn uses the word “material”, as in this text, in july: Do you want (can you) come to find a magnificent, cute club in Madrid with me (and material) on July 4? Another time, he utilized a periphrase, those that one “had in one’s bagages” And even evokes, on day, a mysterious “gift” offered to the painter, Titouan Lamazou.]

Material – now, that is a word to jump on. For DSK was an economist, and moved in a pluto-world where humanity had been reduced to two classes: one of “human capital”, the other of ‘innovators’ – aka, rich old fucks. Long gone are de Sade’s libertines, whose every ejaculaton was aura-ed with blasphemy. The orgy, now, is papered in business inspirational prose – just as business inspirational prose is papered in the kabuki language of porn. The girlfriends were probably as conversant as DSK’s buddies in the wow moment.  It is a virtuous circle of the vicious, all converging on a magnifique boîte coquine.

One can forgive the rich much – and besides, one has no choice.

But not their tackiness. At least one has been busted – a small victory for humanity.    

A defense of crank economics

Economics is the art of pretending that the dots are unconnectable. Although in God's own time, we will see that they form the image of a balance - equilibrium being the divinity's one and only aim. Crank economics – of which I am a proud purveyor on this here site – is the art of claiming that the dots are so infinitely connectable that you have to be blind, heartless or bribed not to see it.

So, today’s item about the plutocrats was cut bleeding fromthe national body politic and served up bloody:

 

"In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.
Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent."
To round out the crime in another way: “The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income.”
Now, of course, we are to believe, on the best authority, that this kind of thing has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with, oh, free trade, or the talent premium, or IQ, or whatever story your favorite press or think tank brownnoser thinks best. 
What we are not going to be told is this:
This is the outcome you get when you loan 16 trillion dollars to the financial sector, in which the wealthiest of the wealthy have concentrated their fortunes, at one percent or less, while the ninety nine percent have to content themselves with paying off their ARM mortgages, credit cards, and student loans at interest rates of between 5 to 10 percent. Back of the envelop estimates for the point spread between the interest on that amount of money that the Fed (with the cooperation of the treasury) lent to the financial sector, and by implication the top 1 percent, and what it would have cost coming from the private sector comes to something like 600 billion dollars. A nice little gift for the wealthy. And that gift keeps on giving, for the leverage it gives makes it all but certain that the wealthy will increase their share of the national income using all the greasy tools at their disposal.
Add to the comedy of the political economic debate the fact that it has been staged, in our public consciousness, as if there were only two rings to the three ring circus. In the one right stands the libertarian liquidationist, a moral stooge for the plutocrats whose rhetoric they welcome (if only we hadn’t been rescued by the government!) while they gobble down government largesse. The other ring is the plutocrat Keynesians, who insist on easy money as well as lunch money for the lower 99 percent – unemployment benefits, for instance. No peep about, say, perhaps the state loaning money at that nice one percent to the 99 percent, using the easy to create vehicle of a state financial institution, a sort of state superbank, into which the people could also park their retirement money. Even tax free. For a more sure rate than they would get from the kites and carrion eaters on Wall Street.
That kind of idea is way off limits, because our rulers insist on a tworing circus only. I urge you, my few readers, to embrace crank economics before Pluto-economics embraces and crushes you, and sucks your marrow.

Newspapers - from lento to presto

“Such a book, such a problem has no hurry: on this question we are both friends of lento, myself as well as my book.” So wrote Nietzsche in the preface to Dawn.

Lento, of course, is the opposite of the speed at which, supposedly, both Fama and the mass media moves. In fact, Nietzsche was dead when his books – especially Thus spoke Zarathustra – began to move at a much faster speed. A sort of legend claims that 150,000 copies of Zarathustra were produced for a special field edition in World War I, thus introducing a generation of German soldiers to Nietzsche as a German thinker next to Goethe and Luther – Goethe’s Faust and Luther’s Bible being the other books put out by this soldier’s press. A Nietzsche scholar, Richard Krummel, has recently suggested that this legend was based on some misunderstood remarks in certain memoirs of the war.

Nietzsche, of course, took Fama’s course and  spoke, in his books, in many voices and tempos. He spoke in presto as well, showing a marked preference for images of lightning strokes and dynamite, and for “arrows” – aphorisms that were launched at great speed. Lento is definitely related to Nietzsche’s fascination with “great events”, events that unfold over thousands of years – as he supposed the uprising of slave morality had unfolded. However, there is a sense in which presto and  lento are not, in fact, opposites, but express two aspects of that characteristic of modernity – the simultaneity impressed upon modern societies by mass media. The mass medias may have interpreted themselves from the beginning in terms of acceleration. And yet they have also interpreted themselves from the beginning in the rhetoric of what Marx called the “middle class prophets” – those who prophesize that the world market and global capitalism are the end of history. “The observation that free competition=the last form of the development of the forces of production and thus of human freedom means nothing more than that the domination of the middle class is the end of world history – clearly a pleasant thought for the parvenus of the day before yesterday.” [Grundrisse]

It is hard, maybe impossible, to date a tempo. But one can make an at least symbolic case that modernist presto began on November 29, 1814, when the Times of London installed a Koenig press, which harnessed steam power to the old manually driven iron printing press and could print 1,100 one sided sheets per hour. John Walter unveiled the press with typical capitalist panache by firing his crew of manual pressman, telling them that “if they were peaceable, their wages should be continued until similar employment should be procured.” (The North American miscellany, 1851).

The faster machines made the newspaper, like the railroad, one of the avatars of the industrial experience. Being able to produce more newspapers meant extending the circle of newspaper sales; it meant changing the ‘turnover’ time of the newspaper, which could not only come out daily, but could compete over different segments of the day – as morning, afternoon and evening papers appeared. And the change in turnover time meant that news would have to be produced. The new would now be on the assembly line.

England, of course, had the most advanced industrial system in 1814. Other sections of the world lagged behind. Pierre Sorlin, in an essay arguing that the “public” is a mirage, (1992)  pointed out that Gogol, in the letters that he wrote around the time Dead Souls was published, in 1842, estimated that he would sell 4,000 copies. “ To the 2,500 captive buyers, which represented the usual clientele of every new book and which, frequenting literary circles, was more or less in relation to himself, he hoped to see functionaries join perhaps landowners who would be fascinated by the audacity of the subject. Conscious of the field of possible prospects in the same way as other writers in his entourage, Gogol aimed at the narrow circle whose reflexes he knew well. .. It is instructive that he made a prognostic error: it took four years to exhaust the first printing of 2,400 copies.”

cars

I was obviously born generations too early. I lost my interest in cars somewhere after my father bought a Ford LTD. In high school, I had many arguments with my poor parents about getting a driver's license - I didn't want one. And failed my first driver's licence test. But then I was forced to go to driver school, so I surrendered, and on the next test, I correctly identified what the stop sign was for, and all the rest of it. After that, I had a friendly enough relationship with an old Galaxy 500,  one motorcycle, and a Chevette. The Chevette took me to Santa Fe, and then gave up the ghost. It was replaced by the most disastrous purchase I ever made, a AMC matador. That AMC was long bankrupt and that the used car dealer who sold it to me was practically wearing a sign around his neck saying "crook" did not deter me from buying this folly. However, its engine block soon cracked and that did it between me and cars. Since 1993, I've not owned a car and haven't really felt the loss. In fact, in Austin, I began to feel that you could see more of what was going on when you rode a bike - I mean, you had a sort of x ray vision of the ersatz wealth that was going into pathetically big vehicles and all the accoutrements of the out of whack credit economy. I had ecstatic visions of imperial overthrow everytime a SUV blasted its horn at me and wooshed past, spilling insults from the driver's window. I knew exactly how Jeremiah must have felt meeting the up and coming Baal businessmen on the way back from athe Fellowship Dinner and Infant Sacrifice night, hogging the chariot path into Judea.

the kind of JOBS bill that only a crook or a legislator could love

In Paducah, the beauty parlor operator and the kitcat café owner are besides themselves. In Louisville, they talk about it on sidewalk corners and at bus stops. In Lexington, the subject of horse races has been dropped, and it is the theme of knitting circles and barroom conversations.

I’m talking, of course, of the ardent desire of millions of Kentuckians to see IPO law changed to remove regulation, transparency, and accounting standards that impede the simple pleasure of rentseeking and fraud.

The man with his hand on the pulse of Kentucky is Kentucky senator Mitch Mcconnell. Many doubt that Paduchians, for instance, are more fascinated by the possibility that the less than one percent of ‘small” businesses – the American governing class loves the word “small” as much as Starbucks loves the word “tall”, and applies it to all things bright and beautiful – who actually do have an IPO than they are by the fact that, for instance, a prominent Middle School principle was recently arrested for rape and unlawful imprisonment. But those doubters were corrected yesterday by Mitch, who is quoted in the NYT:

“Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, urged members of both parties to approve the bill as it was to avoid further delays. “This bill is exactly the kind of thing Americans have been asking for — greater freedom and flexibility. And that’s one of the reasons it’s had such overwhelming bipartisan support,” Mr. McConnell said.”

And what is that flexibility and freedom about, when we look under the hood? As Simon Johnson and Bill Black have pointed out, a bill that damages transparency and accounting requirements will in all likelihood be very good – for bucket shops and Wall Street investment banks that like to bet against their clients. It will be very bad for “small” businesses. Yves Smithquotes John Coates on the issue: 

“While the various proposals being considered have been characterized as promoting jobs and economic growth by reducing regulatory burdens and costs, it is better to understand them as changing, in similar ways, the balance that existing securities laws and regulations have struck between the transaction costs of raising capital, on the one hand, and the combined costs of fraud risk and asymmetric and unverifiable information, on the other hand.”

What Mr. McConnell is really saying, I think, is: there’s a sucker born every minute. We live in a nation of suckers. And are represented by a circus of suckees. For the thing that American lobbyists have been asking – and the thing that is so sweet to the legislators, who have toiled long and arduously to reach the summit that puts all the cornucopia of legal bribery within their bipartisan reach – is for a jobs bill that will employ more and more unscrupulous stock salesmen in bucket shop operations. And that is just what they are getting.

Once again with the Nagelian voter

The East coast political pundit is a reliable product. Every four years, when the presidential candidates do their greyhound around the track thing, their is sure to be a section in the stands where they moan and gibber for moderates. This year is no different. The punditocracy is viewing the GOP race through moist eyes, because obviously with such extremism, it is the end of the GOP and all things bright and beautiful. This is the tenor of Ryan Liazza’s recent piece in the New Yorker, which surfs the poli sci lit for explanations of how extremists capture parties. In the case of the GOP, the extremists that lead the GOP to that massive 2010 defeat in Congress seem to be in control… or, er, wasn’t that a massive GOP victory?

A good pundit, however, has a tough hide, and can ignore counter-evidence if it gets in the way of the narrative. Joan Didion uses the nice phrase, the  “self-created and self-referring” class, for the administrators of public opinion who take it upon themselves to treat politics much the way Phil Spector treated Beatles songs on the Let it Be album: taking out the unprofessional bits and adding the expected continuity. That continuity is what Didion called the “narrative”: 

“When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life. “I didn’t realize you were a political junkie,” Marty Kaplan, the former Washington Post reporter and Mondale speechwriter who is now married to Susan Estrich, the manager of the Dukakis campaign, said when I mentioned that I planned to write about the campaign; the assumption here, that the narrative should be not just written only by its own specialists but also legible only to its own specialists.”

The insularity continues to be ever more insular, quickly absorbing the insurgent energies of the political blogger scene of the early 2000s as those bloggers self-identified as “political junkies” and happily cycled the process. Those of us within the rez, upon whose head the process is merrily played, with all its wars, its plutocracy, its merciless jails, are supposed to be good sports: the horrendous people who emerge like fabulous locusts to darken the airwaves on election years  (often as a step to what they really want – the excellent lobbying job) are there to administer to the great need they presume we still possess to pretend to be connected, by all the democratic ties, to what they are going to do to us anyway. The quickest route to courage, for the pundit class, is to propose something “unpopular” that will damage the lives of most of the 99 percent in some way, but that will deal with one or another politically created crisis: the debt crisis (caused by chronic undertaxing of the wealthy, and the neo-liberal penchant to find ever more ways to shuffle money from the wage class into securities funds that will ultimately fail to fund retirement, healthcare or education, but will make the rentseeking class wealthy); the foreign policy crisis (caused by the huge gravitational pulls of the Pentagon and the defense industry that lead America by the nose from one act of aggression to another); and the war crisis (ditto).

Myself, I long to be the raven from Poe’s poem, perching on the head of east coast pundits and cawing, nevermore, and gently shitting down the back of their necks.

Liazza’s piece did make me think about my own little contribution to poli sci: using Thomas Nagel’s model, in what is it like to be a bat, to ask the question: what is it like to be a voter?  

The presumption of the pundit class is that the ‘process’ is most aptly run by those with an intelligent grasp of the issues. The issues, of course, are created by those with the intelligent grasp of them, so there is something nice, solid and incestuous about the whole thing.

However, I don’t think election based democracy is about those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, at least if that grasp is defined in terms of having informed opinions about policy. In my opinion, a philosophical defense of democracy has to begin with a better description of how voting functions in a democracy in the first place. What kind of feed back is voting? This is where Thomas Nagel’s essay, What is it like to be a bat? Proves to be handy.

Now of course Nagel’s essay doesn’t seem like it is about politics at all. It is about the narrow set of questions that are posed by the cog sci school to frame the problem of consciousness. And, famously, Nagel suggests that these questions do not pose the central problem of consciousness at all : “…the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”

’What it is like’ questions grab hold of subjectivity, rather than deductive activity:

“We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.3 I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.”

The defense of the participation of the people in the government has traditionally been couched in terms of their education and their information about the policy issues. The Kantian dictum about enlightenment -- that it is the people treated as adults, or grown into their adulthood -- is often taken to be about the people educated, who are then ready to take up, in a Lockian manner, the reins of governance.  Relieved of their superstitions by some suitable immersion in the bath of facts, they can go out and find representation. However, to me the "adulthood" does not stand for a list of facts known. It stands for a complicated system of controls on behavior, for the capacity for a range of emotions, for imagination, for empathy, etc., etc. In the same way, defining the voters participation in the government in terms of checking things off the list of things known is much like defining the consciousness solely in terms of deductive or inductive mechanisms. Or, at a stretch, in terms of intentionality.

The picture I am against is like this: your educated voter looks up candidate x’s view on the issue of lowering or raising tariffs on the import of bananas, and looks up candidate y’s view of same, and – deciding which view accords with his own intelligent view of banana importation – votes accordingly. Votes, in fact, can be reduced to a digital function: for/not for.

I think this is a bare and distorted view of what voting is about, and how it functions in a democracy. The voter, on this account, merely confirms or disconfirms views represented by x and y. On this basis, we think, democracy has no real strength that would explain not only its survival, but also its survival in competition with its rivals of all sorts. It would simply be a system with a lag in the decision making process, called an election, as opposed to say tyranny, where the lags are unpredictable, and correspond to the mental life of the ruler. Since it is unlikely that any voter has the amount of knowledge to make a competent judgment about not only the banana import issue, but, say, subsidies to the ethanol industry and car safety standards and the proper foreign policy to assume towards Gabon, if election based democracies depended on a set of voters with competent listable knowledge alone, I wouldn't give it much chance of survival.

The question of success, here, is often obscured by the rhetoric of morality. Democracies are supposed to possess some moral superiority. I have my doubts about this. Any time a political system becomes dominant, you find intellectuals busy justifying the system as morally superior. So far, the most long lasting governmental arrangement known to man involved the ruler marrying his sister and being acclaimed, at some point or another, a god, before his dead body was embalmed and interred under a certain tonnage of rock. In my opinion, this doesn’t sound like the height of morality, although it makes for very impressive postcards. I think that the success of democracy, given the success of other governmental arrangements in the past, probably does not have to do with its moral status, and probably has more to do with structural qualities it possesses.

This is the reason I don't think voting is well described by the Lockean model. I don’t think voters are like that. I prefer the Nagel voter. The Nagel voter votes, of course, in the for/against mode. But the Nagel voter votes from what it is like to be him or her. This is why the motives of the Nagel voter aren't simply confirming or disconfirming, and why the appeal to him or her is going to be about the emotions around the issues, or the issues as passions. And why the idea that is sometimes bruited about by liberal commentators about injecting ideas into a race and the scandal of not doing so is wrong – not wrong morally, but wrong organizationally. When, for instance, the Swift boat veterans threw mud at Kerry, it was a perfectly legitimate ploy, and has precedents going all the way back to our first presidential elections – mud is part of the process. It is a good part of the process. The swiftboating of Kerry revealed something crucial about Kerry – not that he was a coward under fire on the battlefield, but that he’d become a coward long after that fire was over in denying what made him different from any other grunt: the courage he had to organize to end the war. This, the whole reason he was in politics, disappeared almost entirely from his bio, along with the pics with Jane Fonda and other hippies. This was a huge character flaw that was not unrelated to his huge political flaw – his belief in the “process.” It was a belief that betrayed his Nagelian knowledge that what it was like to fight in Vietnam was a horror show that the process started and was unwilling to stop. Or even stop and repent.   This isn't to say the better man was elected. The man who was elected was George Bush, who is perhaps the epitome of the non-better man, the worse man of all. It is to say that politics is about electing politicians, not better men, and the system's success is peculiarly linked to what makes politicians successful.

Of course, polls are not sensitive to these things: polls ask questions about itemized issues, in a pre-digested sentiential form. There are, of course, millions of Lockean voters out there, and they are variously scandalized by the lack of intellectual content in American political campaigns. And LI has sympathy for that indignation. In fact, my indignation is easily aroused about what I see as gross stupidity on the part of politicians. I dislike their lies, their riches, their easy way with the plutocrats, the stuntedness of their life experiences, and their power to fuck up and fuck me up personally. Just as I don’t want to throw deduction out as the enemy of consciousness, we don't want to entirely junk the image of the well informed voter. But eventually, the voting input is about what it is like to be an Irish ex-cop in New York city, or what it is like to be a embittered ex writer and insane blogger from Austin, Texas, etc., etc.

I will round this off with three paragraphs from Nagel’s essay that give us a sense of how the Lockean defense of democracy differs from a Nagel-like defense of it. The Lockean, remember, is one who, like the reductionist, believes the way to understand the functioning of a government is to find the elementary parts and their combinations. And who thus is comfortable with administering the “narrative’ and the “process”, loves “grand bargains” and “moderation”, and views the dissidence, anger and riotousness that has pushed forward, time and time again, radical ideas that, once adopted, become the conservative furniture of everyday life – as something unusual and that happens, best scenario, in a foreign country, telegenically with young people waving flags at the end of it. For the Lockean, the last sentence of the third paragraph in this quote contains an idea too shocking not to be wrong, since it seems to make it impossible to perfectly combine rationality and government. And, after all, if government is simply decision-making – with its past being a series of decisions made, and its future a series of decisions to be made - then the Lockean has to be right. But if what Nagel is calling experience is not a decision – if it is a style, a set of attitudes, unpredictable variations among language games – and if experience is what democracy depends on, then the pundit view of the administered election, the process, the narrative, and all of that stuff, should be flushed down the toilet, as it ignores or oppresses the expertiential core of democracy:

“In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat? But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes which were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?10

... This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have the phenomenal point of view.

Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things. Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.”

kill chain nation

In this week’s London Review of Books, by a happy juxtaposition, there is a review, by Thomas Powers, of two books on Joseph Heller, and a review, by Andrew Cockburn, of Obama’s drone wars.

That America spent 2.59 trillion dollars on the military over the last five years, and that the Obama administration, which has long signaled its desire to get tough and cut America’s entitlements (medicare, social security, etc.), proposes that we spend 2.725 trillion dollars on the military over the next five years, exactly defines the place of liberalism in American politics – as a zero. The zero is a crucial number. Perhaps the most crucial number. The zero promises that anything can be quantified, including nothing at all. Similarly, that post-Vietnam liberalism has exerted exactly zero degree of power over American foreign and domestic policy, yet hold the system together by providing a convenient domestic enemy, whose peacemongering and welfare-for-all attitudes can be triumphed over again and again by progressive pundits and policymakers who live “in the real world.” The liberals are the dummies in the elaborate American “kill chain” – a felicitous phrase uttered by the hero of Cockburn’s piece, one former Lieutenant General, David Deptula (who, in a glorious swoosh of the revolving door, is now the chief executive of MAV 6, a “provider of enhanced situational understanding of battlefields”.) MAV 6, we are told, is proud to have recently landed a contract with the Pentagon (for a paltry initial 211 million dollars) to develop “Blue Devil Block 2”, a 350 foot long unmanned aircraft – because if liberty stands for anything, it stands for offshoring the kill chain to unmanned and highly expensive drones. Those drones, in turn, have proven themselves to be very successful machines – although not on the battlefield. In the warzone, the drones are crap, and all the stats show they actually worsen hostility situations, raise the rate of guerilla attacks, and in general create counter-productive havoc. No, the zone in which these drones have proven, without doubt, to be the world’s best weapon is in D.C., where selling drone projects to the Federal piggy bank has raised housing prices (as well as the price of a decent private school) for thousands of employees of the war system, who profit from every scheme swallowed by the Obama Pentagon. This is a kill chain to die for!… As so many human products do in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and other exotic places.

Cockburn’s journalistic trick of tying the Bush-Obama klepto-krieg to the irresistible rise of David Deptula is, perhaps, a bit unfair, but it is good fun. Deptula is always in the background, it seems, when money is shifting to one defense industry vehicle or another, automatizing the hell out of the battlefield. And this, for those who know their Catch – 22, throws us back on one of the prophetic figures in that book: Milo Minderbinder. Milo is the man in Yossarian’s unit who sees the war as what it is – a market interspersed by firefights – and relentlessly privatizes the unit’s supplies, trading them in an increasingly bizarre bizarre for other commodities. The bombing in Catch-22 – irrational and relentless – is the binary partner to Milo’s all too rational quest for profit. The two sides converge in what Tom Powers calls Catch-22’s central scene – the death of Snowden. Snowden, who is the flattest of flat characters – we just know that he is young, perhaps a teenager, and that he is a tailgunner – is hit by flak when Yossarian’s plane is on a bombing mission. Yossarian proceeds back through the fuselage to patch him up. He finds that Snowden has a large wound on his thigh, the size of a football. Snowden is conscious and keeps telling Yossarian he is cold. So Yossarian opens the first aid kit: “The twelve syrettes of morphine had been stolen from the case and replaced by a cleanly lettered note that said: ‘What’s good for M. and M. enterprises is good for the country. Milo Minderbinder.”

As it turns out, Snowden wouldn’t have been helped anyway. In a scene that is probably being correlated in Afghanistan even as I type this, deep in the comfort of the war on terror cocoon, Yossarian finds that repairing the leg wound hasn’t helped: “Yossarian bent forward to peer and saw a strangely colored stain seeping through the coveralls just above the armhole of Snowden’s  flak jacket. Yossarian felt his heart stop, then pound so violently he found it difficult to breathe. Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yosarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden’s flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out.”

            And the beat goes on. Kill chains – every link is lovingly handcrafted by the men you can trust! Be a realistic, and remember - dronification is a small price to pay for the liberty we all enjoy so much.

Murdoch and the security entertainment complex

I’m amused by this article on Murdoch's cowtowing to Maggie Thatcher in order to get his greasy paws on the Times.

I'm amused, that is, that the current scandals in England are going back so far.

The major things afoot in the gimcrack world of the Great Moderation, constructed out of “free” trade (a curious beast, which was hatched when the standard elite policy of lowering taxes on businessmen suddenly generated metaphysical wings), the worldwide exchange of democracy for mucho security against the high improbability of terrorist mugging, and the other trade of all things on heaven and earth (including the future composition of the atmosphere) for a little comfort in the present overshadow the comical Murdoch scandals. Still, the timing shows that God, or Nemesis, really is the greatest stand up comedian.  What better con-fuckup than this one, involving the heavily bribed police, celebrities, and the lizard like fourth estate?

During the twentieth century, the penetration of the media into the private sphere was seen by a few illuminés in world historic terms – I’m pointing at you,  Joseph Goebbels and J. Edgar Hoover. 

During the great period of the capitalist transformation in the nineteenth century, the police forces were reformed and re-distributed, and attracted reforms in turn: such as the enumeration of houses in cities, which, in France, was first adopted as a military measure in garrison towns, and then, under Fouche, Napoleon’s minister of security, began to be imposed on Paris (and reached other cities later – in the 1840s, Lyon still did not have a strong address system). Wherever Napoleon’s armies went, police were sure to follow – and as Napoleon’s armies pulled back and Napoleon was defeated, the police – at least as a structure – stayed. In England, the creation of a modern police force followed in the 1820s. The bourgeoisie, of course, loved their police – but the masses still loved their legendary robbers, and still fought the police daily in the street, where police work was largely directed towards disciplining the mass of drunks, whiners, perverts, whores, and anarchists that constituted the class laborieuse et dangereuse.

The rise of the police force not only as the quotidian tool of social repression, but as a form of entertainment that allowed us all to enjoy social repression, may have been prehended in the nineteenth century, but its existence is one of the striking features of the twentieth century. The folkloric rival of the Sheriff of Nottingham hasn’t had a chance. Social repression comes with the contract, of course. If you aren’t going to have revolution and whatever comes next – every example of which, in the twentieth century, created monster police – then the contract of capital in its neo-liberal phase (Section 4., line 10a) specifies that you will have entertainment police, a police force that oscillates between radio show (and then tv show) and the SWAT team. A police force that seizes the attention of those whose own livelihoods radically decrease in entertainment value the more life is wholly oriented towards them.  Ultimately, police are just extremely inefficient regulators – regulators of the last resort – and the paradox is that, in a culture in which regulation has become a bad word and the regulator treated as a menace to all the good things that would flow if we just let the capitalist genius of the entrepreneur flourish, the most inefficient regulators have been given carte blanche not only by the governing elite (who has a contempt for the police that emerges every time the police union negotiates salaries), but by the middle class that identifies with them. And even if they don’t identify with them, they cannot get enough entertainment value from them. In the security-entertainment complex, this comes to the same thing.

The security-entertainment complex doesn’t, of course, just run through tv. As prison replaced apartheid in the U.S., the last redoubt against the Sheriff of Sherwood Forest became hip-hop, which absorbed the  flyting and bragging songs of traditional culture in a kind of parody of resistance – a parody because it was a resistance connected to no political force whatsoever, for the political force had been vacuumed up neatly by the security-entertainment complex. Within the vacuum, the counter-force that emerges knows itself through the entertainment that leads it on a merry eternal return of the same, from money to prison and back, endlessly.

It is funny to watch the tabloids and the police in the UK bump into each other, as one of the tools of the glorious Bush-Blair-Berlusconi era comes as undone as the former two’s hopeless war on terrorism. Not that the war won’t continue to roll on – and not that anti-democratic cretinization, now in its baroque stage, won’t also continue to roll on. Popular demand, you know. The slogan under which the democracies, where the massive self-destructive machine is switched to on, is still as pertinent as when James Chance and the Contortions first posed it in the Reagan era: “Take out all the garbage that's in your brain ... Why don't you try being stupid instead of smart?”       

Rumor 1

Rumor

If in one direction, pheme/kleos moves towards the universal knowledge vested within the people – towards common sense – in another direction, it moves towards rumor, the “angel of ruin”, the fama of Virgil’s Aeneid, the beast perched on the gates of the city:   “Furth she quicklye gallons, with wingflight swallolyke hastning,/A foule fog pack paunch: what feathers plumye she heareth,/so manye squint eyeballs shee keeps (a relation uncoth)/So manye tongues clapper, with her ears and lip labor eevened./ In the dead of nighttime to the skyes shee flickereth, howling/Through the earth shade skipping, her sight from slumber amooving./Whilst the sun is shying the baggage close lodgeth in housroofs,/or tops of turrets, with feare towns loftye she frighteth,/As readye forged fittons, as true tales vayneley toe twattle.” [101, Translation by Richard Stanyhurst, ed. 1895 by Edward Arber, p.101] Such an image could as well be applied to the kind of “rumor panics” in Borneo in 1979, as reported by anthropologist Richard Allan Drake. In the longhouse of the village of Sungai Mulae, he was told that the government was building a bridge nearby, and that of course, they would send out kidnappers to snatch somebody and sacrifice them to the bridge. The village was, ostensibly, Christianized, yet rumors like these “flew” about often; in fact, Drake establishes that the form of this rumor was recurrent in Borneo. It was recorded on the North coast of Borneo as early as 1910; it was recorded in Sandong River region in 1949; and in 1981, it was recorded in the Meratus mountains. In fact, if we extend our search from Borneo to other regions of the world, we find that, for instance, in pre-Revolutionary France, there were rumors about the kidnapping of children and women by the government of King Louis XV; and there was the persistent rumor in Czarist Russia of Jews kidnapping Christian children to use their blood.

Although the circumstances and meanings of these rumors are different, their reappearence puts them in the category of “Tauchgerüchte”, diver rumors – they dive up and they dive down – that was so named by L.A. Bysow, a Russian sociologist who wrote a seminal analysis of rumors that appeared in the twenties, and then disappears from sociological literature. Like many one article authors, Bysow’s position in the construction of the sociology of rumor suffers, itself, from odd distortions – for instance, he is often quoted as D.A. Brysow (for instance, by Curtis Macdougall in his book, Understanding Public Opinion (1952). Bysow borrows the late nineteenth century notion of contagion to model rumors according to an epidemiology, thus continuing a very old analogy between logos and seed. The invisible microbe that replaced the miasma model fit comfortably with the word as organic – and indeed, the word is the product of an organism. In fact, the analogy between sickness and rumor is encoded even in Virgil’s image, for this monstrous bird of ill or true fame conveys the word from mouth to ear in the city bears a visible likeness to the winged demons who shoot the arrows of sickness in the city. Both sickness and rumor “fly”. And both are mass phenomena, often leading to panic. And, in a quiet division between true fame and false, rumors have, over time, been associated exclusively with distortion. The rumor is often treated by the sociologist as though, by definition, it must be false. As often happens, the sociologist is simply following the cop, here – for the justification of using police action against rumor is precisely that it falsifies, as though there were some connection between hegemonic power and the truth

Rumor is the illegitimate sibling – at least mythopoetically – of public opinion. Drake connects rumor in Borneo is connected to the dominance of the “oral” in Borneo society. The logic of evidence here feeds on itself – unlike the written, which requires a process of mediation that engages the body as scriptor, the medium as the object inscribed, and the eye as reader, rumor, like the word itself, springs directly from the tongue and flies to the ear. Bysow speaks of its chain-like characteristic – depending on face to face communication, it creates a public of a sort out of haptic space – the kind of public that Gabriel Tarde, writing in the late nineteenth century, classified as essentially the primitive form of the public: the crowd.

In the early modern period in France, as Arlette Farge shows in Dire et Mal Dire, the word on the street was as much a vehicle of news as any official chronicle. Indeed, news was subdivided between the official histories, the private journals, and the gazetins of the police – police reports composed from the reports of the mouchards, the spies, that the police planted in the population. Louis XV enjoyed having these gazetins read to him. The relation of those in power to those underneath is mediated by a concern, on the part of both parties, with what is thought by the other – a concern in which the police can act as brokers. In World War II, there devolved upon some sub-officers the duty of filling out rumor reports – for officers and the upper management of the security apparatus were obsessed with the damage rumor could do. It was during the war that Allport and Postman studied rumors through a series of experiments, in which an image, seen by some subject, was then described by that subject to someone who couldn’t see the image. Then a chain of accounts is produced as the second person tells a third person (who also can’t see the image) about it, and so on. The sadistic element in the experiment (for psychology experiments almost always contain some element that displays the gratuituous power of the experimenter) is that these accounts are made in front of an audience that can see the slide on the screen, while those describing the image have to keep their backs turned to the screen.

Notice two things about Allport and Postman’s experiments. The first is the idea, which forms the whole basis of the experiment, that the story communicated by the rumor is – in contradiction to that reported by, say, the experimenter – essentially distorted. The distortion here is given to us in the frame of the report – although we who read the report cannot ourselves examine the slides, we are told, without any shadow of a doubt, what they depict by the researchers. In fact, of course, these descriptions often carry with them descriptors that are not “contained” in the images. In an experiment made in Britain following Allport’s line after the war, for instance, we are told that one slide is of “students throwing eggs” – which depends for its truth value on, among other things, describing the thrower as a student. But can true and false fama be so easily separated? Does distortion really mean untruth? Whose protocols are in play, here?

The second thing to notice about the Allport/Postman experiments is that they impose an identity on the group of subjects by giving them certain functions, in opposition to another group. Allport and Postman were not concerned with the function of rumor in maintaining the group so much as they were concerned with the transmission of rumor, which meant studying how a distortion generates a story pattern. A distortion like mistaking L.A. Bysow’s name, on the other hand, does not generate a story, although it occurs in the literature of rumor. Indeed, it would be petty to pick at it. However, we are again led to question the provenance of these assumptions. The atmosphere in which Allport and Postman worked reflected the war. As identity was imposed on the mass of draftees and volunteers in forces around the world as a topdown matter, the powers in place in armies and government bureaucracies became obsessed with information control – and thus, with fighting rumors. 

It is worth asking, then, whether rumors can be, among other things, attempts to wrest away that identity power by those upon whom it has been imposed. It is one of the surprises of literature it is shown such respect by the powers that be that they are continually trying to police rumor, or in other words, stories, narratives. The history of the policing of rumor shows a surprising sensitivity by those in power to the view of the ordinary outcasts and non-entities over whom they rule.

The mouchards of the Ancien Regime lead us, etymologically – that science that tracks the rumor of sound and sense behind the current word – to a sort of totemic animal who presides over the contagious rumor: the fly. According to an etymological dictionary of 1856 (Noel, Carpentier), the word mouchard “is not an old one in our language, [it] … derives from the word mouche [housefly], flies going out to search their food everywhere, changing places in the wink of an eye; and what appears to confirm this opinion is that one said and one says still moucher for spy, mouche for a spy. “It is useless, says M. Ch. Nodier, to search there (in the name of the father of Mouchy) this etymology, which presents itself naturally in musca, which had the same figurative acceptation in Latin, as one can see often in Plautus and in Petronius.” [374]

However, there is another story about the word in question here – for the housefly is not, according to Greenburg and Kunich, at the root of musca. Musca derives from the Sanskrit, mukshika, which describes something more like a gnat – the eye fly, musca sorbens, which feeds on secretions of the eye. The fly is shown in lists kept in Mesopotamia, and the gods are compared to flies when they gather around a sacrifice, or fly through the streets. In Lucian’s Praise of the Fly, the connection between the fly and gossip is made part of an origin story:

“Legend tells how Myia (the fly's ancient name) was once10 a maiden, exceeding fair, but over-given to talk and chatter and song, Selene's rival for the love of Endymion. When the young man slept, she was for ever waking him with her gossip and tunes and merriment, till he lost patience, and Selene in wrath turned her to what she now is. And therefore it is that she still, in memory of Endymion, grudges all sleepers their rest, and most of all the young and tender. Her very bite and blood-thirst tell not of savagery, but of love and human kindness; she is but enjoying mankind as she may, and sipping beauty.”
In Steve Connor’s Fly, there is a wealth of associations culled from literature and life – the life, for instance, that is recorded in the trials of witches - between the fly and devils. The fly as a familiar possesses a number of qualities – its metamorphosis from the worm, its feeding on excrement, its omnipresence as a camp follower of human habitations, its quickness, its flight, its prominent eyes, its buzz – that go into the notion of Fama as well. Oddly, Connor doesn’t touch on the subject of the spy as fly, perhaps because the spy in English is free from the fly’s taint that finds expression in  French. 
Rumor, the reporters of rumor, and the makers of rumor are three faces of the myth of what sociologist Shibutani calls “improvised news”. Shibutani proposed a quantitative model in which a certain demand for information is not met by “official channels”. Rumor, in this view, is a kind of overflow of the demand for news. Thus, Shibutani does not identify rumor with distortion, but instead, with an enduring will to truth – in as much as the demand for news is taken as a will to truth. But is it? Is the news about portraying the world? And does this realistic view of the  news work any better than realism in any of the arts?
The social time of rumor is, ideally, simultaneous.  Rumors connect those who spread them, and create among those who are “in the know“ a sense of the ‘latest’. Because rumors are primarily oral, however, their simultaneity is limited. Observers are surprised by it – surprised by how fast rumors spread. Partly this is because rumors fall on the side of the pre-industrial and the oral. In the early modern period and enlightenment, rumor coexisted with print as the literate coexisted with the illiterate, and as the ideology of progress coexisted with the dying gasps of the image of the limited good – the ideology of Nemesis, of the wheel of fortune. But this period, we can see, looking back, is premonitory of the industrial experience even if it is separate from it. One might say that symbolically, from the moment that Fontenelle noted the ingenuity of Paris’ artisans and Defoe noted the accounting methods of English traders, literature filled with intersignes and prophecies of the industrial future. The great novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century – Balzac, Stendhal, Dickens, Gogol, etc., are all unconsciously prophetic, for in the monumental spasms of negative capability they absorbed, in the experiences they diversely lived, the intersignes lying about, cast up to the surface of society by the great capitalist transformation at work underneath.

The T.E.

Shamefully, I’ve been in Paris now almost two years and I hadn’t paid my full respects to the Tour Eiffel. So A. and I went with our friend Miruna and her two children by metro to the Trocadero, and there I finally looked the thing in the eyes.

It is still surprising:  to be confronted with it in all of its gigantic intricacy, like experiencing some gloriously detailed and incomprehensible dream. The thing that strikes one most is its evident, its monstrous, its impossible uselessness. Nineteenth century architecture, whether of the railroad station or the factory, inclined towards wrapping massive ornament around some central utility – for use was the codeword of the century. Utilitarianism leveled the very planet to the question of use and exchange value, and conceived of human society globally as a vast cluster of users. We – living in the age of petrochemicals and entertainment – have followed in those footsteps, and simply added a horror movie dimension. But if one of those railroad stations or factories got up and kicked a jig, it would provoke the same kind of astonishment that the T.E. provokes – all that engineering, that crosshatching of intentionality writ large and in metal, those well laid stresses and balances, the netting, the internal busywork, to produce a thing like no other. Underneath the familiarity of it, the hundreds of millions of reproductions, there is still the fact that it adds itself to our vocabulary of things as itself alone – not as another skyscraper, or pyramid, or obelisk.

Donald Norman, in the Design of Everyday things, claims that the average person in America has a vocabulary of around 30,000 ‘readily descriminable objects’. He takes the end-user’s perception of the object to be determined by three design categories – affordances, mappings and constraints. Scissors, for example, present us with holes attached to blades, and the holes ‘call out to’ our fingers – they map onto our fingers – while the size and number of them operate as constraints, and the result of the mapping and constraint gives us an affordance – the aspect of use that separates the scissors from the butterknife, say.

The T.E., however, is beautifully alien: there are no holes to slip our fingers through here. We can go up it. We can go down it. And we can make use of it – we can send radio signals from it, we can make it into a tourist destination. But these are uses we cast over it, not uses that its structure calls for. We can domesticate it, but we can’t claim any native right over its heart.

So: down the steps and out of the Trocadero, and out to the Champs Mars, where we met some more friends and had a picnic. Afterwards, I went with the kids, Julien and Constanza, up to the second platform, leaving the adults below. I have the same view of high buildings as Jimmy Stewart has in Vertigo – which made this a bit of an ordeal. The kids clambered, jumped and in general pointed to things far below us, and I told myself that the stairs, guard rails and fences were not going to suddenly give way. The truth is that there is something also a little trippy about acrophobia. It is a hair’s breadth from being stoned. And it certainly helps you understand the menace that the massive steelwork represses. I knew that I would feel like this before I took the first step, but I also wanted to test myself. And I was right proud to be on the second platform. However, I would have to have very strong opiates administered to me before I’d even think of taking the elevator to the top. So, to Julien and Constanza’s disappointment, we did not go any higher.

High enough, though. You know, the gods don’t just demand respect – they desire that little token of fear. I gave it. Thus, the gods and I are even for one day. 

Mangle of inequality redivivus

Over at Economists View, there is a post disputing, to an extent, a new study by Michael Bordo and Christopher Meissner that disputes the idea that inequality caused the crisis. I can't resist reprising my mangle of inequality idea, with a few changes from the way I originally formulated it after my friend S.'s wedding.

As the discussion begins as one about cause, and I am all about conditions, I suppose I ought to say something about cause. Cause is difficult. Cause is an impossible quest. And it is made all the more impossible as economists bring a cumbersome machinery to the problem, which is pledged to a model forged from the idea of the market, of equilibrium, and of some kind of surreptitious base/superstructure idea - that is, one finds out the micro-foundations of macro-economic events, and we all go home then, to watch American Idol. I say nay, though, in bloggy thunder.

Rather, I want us to go back and understand what contemporary inequality in the developed countries, and particularly in the U.S., is about. The place to start, of course, is the seventies. After thirty years, we are starting to recognize the form of the shift that began to occur then. And let me be the harpooner that points out the shape of that beast, the main points of which are 1., the crushing of the bargaining power of labor; 2., the de-manufacturing of America – which was partly connected to the fact that manufacturing workers were the most militant, and partly the inevitable effect of the ability of capital to find other, cheaper regions in which to place factories; and 3, the dissolving of traditional constraints on credit.

These events occurred in response to the most serious crisis in capitalism since 1945. Galbraith’s New Industrial state, the liberal Keynesian economy, had created structures that were supposed to resolve such crises. These included the management of aggregate demand by the state, the moderation of labors’ older, utopian demands for a slice of the power in return for a steadily rising paycheck, and management’s movement away from optimizing profits in exchange for lessened volatility. The Keynesian moment unwound for a number of reasons – labour, with increasingly less interest in the political dimension that originally animated unions, became much more vulnerable; the government management of aggregate demand, combined with the government dependence on War, had finally unleashed inflation; and the ROI of the Fortune 500 corporations was finally causing an investor revolt. However, of the three factors I am listing in the shift to the new, Reagonomic paradigm, one and three seem oddly disjoint. How is it possible to diminish the bargaining power of labor – which results in the stagnation of wages – and at the same time dissolve traditional constraints on consumer and other credit?
Of course, from the neo-classical point of view, that makes a lot of sense. Instead of the government actively managing aggregate demand, the private sector, with a freer credit market, can take over. And in fact, even if wages stagnate, household incomes rise. The house itself as an asset appreciates, for one thing; more investment vehicles are made available to the public, for another thing; and finally, there is the great entry of women into the labor market.

Credit, then, is the keystone. It is from this moment on that the financial services sector, which had been relatively unimportant in the Keynesian regime, returns in force. It is what I would call the mangle of inequality – playing on Andrew Pickering’s term, mangle of practice. Contemporary capitalism in America has to effect a straddle – the economy depends on consumption, and yet, the majority of the consumers engross less and less of the productivity gains accrued by the system. Freeing the financial markets had two effects – one was to re-vamp the consumer’s financial horizon. Instead of worrying about making a wage sufficient to live the good life, the consumer worries about making a wage sufficient to have a good credit history – which is the magical key to the world of cars, plasma screen tvs, houses, and all the rest. The other was to make the consumer a shareholder in the system. For simplicity’s sake, call this the 401k world – that stands at the symbolic center of a system by which the ordinary person was hooked into the market. And the market could, consequently, use vast flows of capital to keep easing credit. A virtuous feedback, so to speak.
It had another, symbolically resonant significance. The triumph of the state in the 20th century was in providing for retirement. The state successfully created, within a capitalist economy, a mass ability to finish one’s life without poverty or utter family dependence. It was the template for the structural goods that the state, in a mixed economy, could provide – when the demands of distributive justice could not be aligned with the price creating market in a good or service. Consequently, social security has earned a special hatred from the right. The American system of encouraging private investment was meant, on the surface, to complement social security, but the ultimate aim was always to replace it.

The mangle of inequality, then, was not – as in Marx’s time – a head to head confrontation between classes. It is a more complex machine, in which class interests are blent so that head to head confrontation is systematically differed. The political triumph of the system is that the blending disenfranchised populism, since it became unclear who would really benefit from populist practice.

Given this context, we should be posing different questions about the housing bubble - not the question, what caused it, but the question, why was it necessary? It is not as if the policymakers consciously intended a housing bubble. But they did consciously intend returning the Clintonian surpluses to the investor class. And when the 2000-2001 recession happened, they consciously intended to find a way to respond to it that did not involve the government "interfering" in the economy. Luckily for the policy makers, by this time the neo-liberal program of guiding money from the wage class into financial assets was nearly complete - whether on the individual level of the 401k or on the aggregate level of pensions - and thus the neo-liberal machine could be played like a slot machine - there was plenty of money, the market in secondary mortgages as well as the housing market (two things which intersect, but which are not the same) could now provide a collective speedball, and everybody was happy. Otherwise, policymakers would have to face unpleasant alternatives to the neo-liberal version of capitalism. As we have seen in the O. era, they simply can't do that. The conceptual set seals off all solutions that might put in question the neo-liberal mindset. Hence, the mangle of inequality is both a cause and an effect of the neo-liberal economic paradigm.