Johnson again, or getting near what I set out to say, but not saying it

For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.

There’s a famous story about the first time William Hogarth met Samuel Johnson. It happened when Hogarth was visiting Samuel Richardson:

“While he [Hogarth]  was talking, he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an idiot whom his relations had put under the care of Mr Richardson, as a very good man. To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forwards to where he and Mr Richardson were sitting, and … displayed such a power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this idiot had been at the moment inspired."

”

Hogarth’s testimony to the strangeness of Johnson’s presence, even to the extreme of thinking, at first impression, that he was a congenital idiot, is not idiosyncratic.  Famously, Johnson ate behind a screen at his friend Mrs. Thrale’s house, due to the fact that he was a notoriously sloppy eater. This was not due to some viciousness of his upbringing, but to some deep malfunction of his physiology. Johnson seems to have been afflicted with something ‘daemonic”, which has been variously diagnosed as Tourette’s syndrome, or epilepsy, or whatever it is that scrofula was – since scrofula was the diagnosis of his age. He was a man of tics, a man who could never totally trust his own gestures. For this reason  I like to thinki of him in terms of the daemon: and this is all the more appropriate in that he could only have lived in the eighteenth century, with its interpenetration of Enlightenment sensualism and Mesmeric mystery. It was an age has  features that only come out when looked at through the daemon. It was in a rented room in a house in Johnson’s London that Swedenburg, a man Johnson never met, I think, also met his daemon, or his angels, who threw him bodily around the place – and a working class artist, William Blake, met his there too. Curious how Johnson certainly seems on the other end of the spectrum from Blake, and yet it is easy to imagine Johnson having the kind of tolerance for Blake that he had for Christopher Smart.

Johnson’s prose is famously mannered – like Gibbon, Johnson never met a contrast that he didn’t want to set in prose marble. However, his conversation, as recoreded by Boswell and others, was a more darting affair. And yet, his acquaintances recognized his voice in the Rambler. Those wonderfully balanced sets, which seem so attached to pen and paper rather than tongue and gesture, were , apparently, rooted in the latter – it is as though the “Sir” which Boswell’s Johnson so copiously initials his responses and speeches, that term of address  in which respect and attack are mingled , seems to dance, unsounded, over those paragraphs that Hazlitt, later, would find all too balanced, and all too indiscriminating as between occasions for high style and occasions for low notice:

“We can no more distinguish the most familiar objects in his descriptions of them, than we can a well known face under a huge  painted mask. The structure of sentences, which was his own invention, and which has been generally imitated since his time, is a species of rhyming in prose, where one clause answers to another in measure and quantity, like the tagging of syllables at the end of a verse. The close of a period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense  is balanced with the sound; eacch sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza.”

Yet Hazlitt is, like everybody else, enchanted by Boswell’s Johnson, and makes a distinction between the writer and the speaker. The latter spoke as though he had cast off fear, while the former wrote as if any errant sound would plunge him into the abyss.

Yet we have the testimony of his friends that The Rambler did sound like Johnson. His voice was in it. Perhaps Hazlitt was showing his own dread of the grotesque when he compared the writing to a huge painted mask – exaggeration, the wild growth of some  familiar thing, is one of the tropes of the gothic, and of horror. And though Hazlitt is trying to show that the famously juggled style is, in the end, as boring as a metronome, his comparisons betray perhaps another more sweeping and painful anxiety, in which the problem is not that the prose is forgetable, but that it sets up an irritating vibration in the head, which is catching – one’s own voice can be infected by this sound.

Authority is the sign of the daemonic in traditional society. In Matthew, Jesus is said to speak with exousia – authority – while Paul uses the word in a curious way when he writes that the headcovering of women in the temple is there exousia – their authority to preach. Authority is evidently power, but not any kind of power. To know that of which one speaks is a kind of power, the kind granted to any classroom lecturer whose prepared his or her notes. That is the power of the scribe. Cultic authority is something of which one can be sensible – it can prickle the hair on the back of your neck – without one knowing entirely what is in back of it. Socrates’ daemon was wholly negative – it closed down avenues of thought and discourse.This is not necessarily because they were unethical or illogical.  In Plutarch’s dialogue about the daemon, the participants arrive at no clear notion of what it was – whether it was a sense for omens or whether it was a voice. Surely, however, Socrates felt it was an authority.

This, to my mind, binds together the talk in Boswell’s Johnson with the great essays.  Contra Hazlitt, the Tatler and Spectator of Addison and Steele, which he admired so much, have become merely dim references to fill out a tale about the coming of public opinion in early modern Europe – a terrible fate, that, to be a dog’s dinner for Habermas.  But Johnson’s essays grow more enigmatic. He does have a bulldog’s way of shakng a bone – and the bones he preferred were the standard tropes of the moraliste – self love, hypocrisy, vanity, folly, etc. But he had a strong sense that the drama that the moraliste made out of sentiments and vices was a puppet show, and that the real broke down the puppets sooner or later, as one sounded the depths about what one knew to be true of oneself and others, which means sounding the depths of what one doesn’t know about oneself and others. Where does this irrepresible ignorance, this internal illusion, come from?  It is Johnson’s constant theme; and a theme, if obsessed over with enough genius, becomes a form of authority, though it resolves itself in the indeterminacy of an enigma. God is a problem whose resolution is another problem, Novalis once wrote: and such problems all are lit with something divine, or daemonic.

This is the kind of thing that Johnson knows best. It is why he is the master of procrastination, that moment when knowledge confronts its essential helplessness before the fact that it transforms nothing, that it dissolves into a ghost if it isn’t the pawn of desire. He turns these moments into existential acts – acts of the highest futility.

“To act is far easier than to suffer; yet we everyday see the progress of life retarded by the vis inertia, the mere repugnance to motion, and find multitudes repining at the want of that which nothing but idleness hinders them from enjoying. The case of Tantalus, in the region of poetick punishment, was fomewhat to be pitied, because the fruits that hung about him retired from his hand ; but what tenderness can be claimed by those who, though perhaps they suffer the pains of Tantalus, will never lift their hands for their own relief ?”

  

samuel johnson, marcel mauss, and an old crone

Circumstances alter

definitions. Of course, not only circumstances impinge on the career of a definition; nor is it always clear where a circumstance ends and another begins. But – for instance –to argue about Samuel Johnson’s political beliefs in the idiom of our own era’s political terms is surely to risk obscuring what Johnson thought,  even if it does satisfy some desire to create a totemic line of thinkers neatly coming down to us. Which, talk about your enormous condescension!

Thus, though Johnson was obviously on the “right” during his time, and was even suspected of being a crypto Stuart supporter, his conservativism is obviously not ours. This comes out in his defense of hierarchy, or the “enormous pyramid of subordination”, as he darkly put it, in Rambler 145, clearly written in a spirit to counter the gathering ideology of utilitarianism that has since made every man his own alienator and reduces any person who thinks to quiet moments of despair. Johnson strikes a note that is surprisingly similar to a theme sounded in Marcel Mauss’s  Essai sur le don about exchange in “archaic” societies, where the gift and the spirit of power define the highest level of existence, while utility – and all questions pertaining to the useful – are put on a second, lower level.

“It is allowed that vocations and employmnets of least dignty are of the most apparent use; that the meanest artisan or manufacturer contributes more to the accommodation of life, than the profound scholar and argumentative theorist; and that the publick would suffer less present inconvenience from the banishment of philosophers than from the extinction of any common trade.” The terms with with Johnson begins clearly turn on an opposition between dignity and use, philosophy and trade, and the social hierarchy that backs this placing of upper and lower.

The Johnson that we know from Boswell is an established figure – but we know that the Johnson who, in his younger days, sometimes rambled at night for want of a place to sleep, was far from established. It takes a while for the reader to see that the sometimes elephantine prose of Johnson, his massiveness, is shot through with an undeniable whiff of the street. This essay, which could have taken off in a sort of rococo defense of the best and the brightest, instead encounters the street in the form of complaint against a society that doesn’t honor those who do the most to make it work – those who, as Adam Smith put it later (even as he was shifting the terms by which this society explained itself), did ‘productive labor.’ A complex phrase that haunted the political economy of the nineteenth century and was submerged in the twentieth, where it now exists as a kind of economic populism, a railing ghost. On the streets of London in the eghteenth century – as, indeed, on the streets of Santa Monica in 2015 – one finds both archaic forms of thinking and utopian criticism of the monsters of rationalisation that keep the majority down.

“Some have been so forcibly struck with this observation, that they have, in the first warmth of their discovery, thought it reasonable to alter the common distribution of dignity, and venturedd to condemn  mankind of universal ingratitude. For justice exacts, that those by whom we are most benefited should be most honored. And what labour can be more useful than that which procures to families and communties those necessaries which supply the wants of nature, or those conveniencies by which ease, security, and elegance are conferred?”

This idea is as alive today, on the street, as it was then. Who has not, when young at least, had conversations in which dream societies were proposed that would pay the garbageman more than the CEO? Indeed, I am not so far from that opinion myself. However, Johnson’s putting of the case already gives us a vision of what makes it unconfortable: the notion of elegance and the conveniences of life – of consumption. For the notion that the producer rates a higher dignity than the consumer – which, at its root, displaces the honor of the creator to its human prototypes – isn’t an a priori or universal truth. It does contain enough prejudicial force, however, that even in the vastly changed circumstances of capitalsm, the manager, the symbol pusher, still grasp for the role of producer, and throw the rest into the status of parasites – of, to use the immortal words of the private equity mogul, Romney himself, taker. Circumstances adjust definitions, but definitions store, like an archve, earlier circumstances.

Last week, I was drinking coffee at a Coffee Bean on Santa Monica Boulevard when I was approached by a beggar. This woman would have delighted Yeats. Her fingers were no longer filthy – they were lacquered with old filth, they had a sort of patina. She asked for a dollar, offered me a cig, sat down and began to sigh that she was bored. I’m sixty two, she said, and if I ever get rich, I’ll never be bored again. If you are poor, what do you got? Last night she didn’t have television,nor anybody to talk to, and she was bored. Which, she said, was a not unusual condition. I asked her whether she really thought that the rich were not ever bored, and she said that of course they weren’t. They could go out to movies every night! They could put a tv in every room, which she would do, if she was rich.

Now, this image of the rich is different, and yet not different, from the image of the rich as “producers”. After all, to go too far down the road that the rich produce is to embed the rich in a social function, having social benefits. It is hard to sidestep this, even if one presses the key of freedom over and over again – the current way of blocking the path to a discussion of ultimate social ends.

Johnson, more than me, would have recognized in the old woman’s talk something of what he thought, pragmatically, about dignity and ease. He has a wonderful way of moving from granting the workers – in his time, the agricultural worker – their place to putting that place in terms of the universe of higher values, the values of the sage and hero: [the workers] who, after all the consessions which truth may extort in favour of their occupation, must be content to fill up the lowest class of the commonwealth, to form the base of the pyramid of subordination, and lie buried in obscurity themselves, while they support all that is splendid, conspicuous, or exalted.”  

This is burial indeed. There is something gothic about thes phrases, as if Johnson were speaking of a zombie proletariat, an undead, a host of shadows busy supporting all that is splendid by doing all that is obscure.  Another whiff of the street: clearly, this distribution of places is profane. What is spendid, conspicuous or exalted is still of this world.

So far the street reaches. But Johnson’s Toryism has a reply prepared, contrasting intellectual labour to manual labour, to the disadvantage, both socially, in terms of remuneration, and morally, in terms of dignity, of the latter.

There is a twist, though. If dignity has any meaning, it can’t decay into mere contempt for the manual labor that supports us – us, the intellectual laborers:

Yet the refusal of statues and panegyricks to those who only employ their hands and feet in the service of mankind may be easily justified, I am far from intending to incite the petulance of pride, to justify the superciliousness of grandeur, or to intercept any part o that tenderness and benevolence which by the privilege of their common nature one man may claim from another.”

Ah, but now the café where I am writing this is getting crowded, and I want to go on for a few pages more. Maybe I will for tomorrow.

being there -NOT

I’ve always been fascinated by lacuna. Existence, it’s a word, we use it pretty easily, even when we ornament it, like a Christmas tree, with various symbolic ornaments. But it always seems there – the being there of Heideggerian lore. Alas, this thereness, when looked at levelly, seems a bit too thick, a bit too simple. It leaves out of account the vacancy which we bear on our journey through life.
For instance, tell you what I'm talking about: a couple of days ago, Adam wanted to see Adam. He wanted to see the Adam pics on my computer. There are, of course, many. Hundreds? At least a hundred. From birth until now, the now being precisely two and five months. As we went through them, again – for we have done this before – I notice, as I also noticed before, a small wedgelike sensation of strangeness, of losing my total grasp on this small face and body, the one before the speech  I can understand, the one before the two and five month year old who says Daddy, I racing, and promptly flurries for a bit down the sidewalk in his blue and yellow crocs.  Yes, this was Adam – my sentiment reaches out to this small infant whose hair at one time was not so flaxen, whose laugh was not the developed chirrup it is now, and whose crying was more primordial – cries that seemed to come directly from the beginning of all things, the big bang, the whelp universe before it hit its stride and started to get fat.  Sense, sensemaking has crept into Adam’s cries.
Myself, I have pondered the fact that my growth, my physical growth, is something I know and yet can’t feel . I can’t get back inside being, say, four feet high. Going back, returning in my mind, in the meld of imagination and memory, I am outside those four feet. And of course this is so – I don’t quite feel my height even now. But from my present height, the world spreads out. I sit on this stool in a coffee house and look at the screen and at the passerbys through the window at my given height, which is the point from which up is up and down is down. Adam, on the other hand, has much more up, in human terms, and much less down. I did too when I was his age. I can’t recover that. It isn’t there. My being is not there, even though my existence surely was there, and surely, in the sense that all moments have their own eternity, still is there.
Heidegger modifies the notion of Dasein with the notion of thrownness, just so you won’t get too comfortable with there, just so you won’t move in and plug in the tv, the airconditioner and the refrigerator and watch your favorite shows. In this sense, the there does have the essential property of recession – it perpetually recedes from the here. So perhaps in the end I should give MH some points. Adam is already fascinated with what he was once, even though I feel that – in a way – he points to the old Adam, the baby Adam, for my sake. He’s more interested, as he tells me, with Adam in park – show me Adam in park, daddy, meaning the Adam of last week who I briefly phone videoed shooting baskets.
I wonder if, like his old man, he will grow a bit morose about the lacunae, the failure of imaginative power, the failure to be there enough?

why it doesn't matter

The fashion for titling books and articles with the aggressive phrase “why it matters” – why sinatra matters, why the middle ages matter, empathy: why it matters, and so on – has begu to itch the retina of my conscience – it is giving me spiritual hay fever.  “Why it matters” is, one would think, the unsaid and the hoped for of any research, any project, which of course must engage the researcher, writer, artist or maker on some desperate level. Whether it engages the reader or spectator is, I think, another matter entirely, and that comes down to both form and content. When I entitle a piece “why it matters”, I am making a rude, bogus, or desperate claim of pre-emptive victory. It is a bullying maneuver, trying to put the reader in a corner. But it is also a ridiculous maneuver, as the reader is unlikely to be convinced by a title alone, and either thinks a thing matters or doesn’t. It is never a good sign to begin with a puff for yourself, because that usually ends badly, in boredom and disinterest. Even Nietzsche’s Ecce homo, surely the most triumphant or triumphing title in literature, plays against his incorrigible tendency to parody, to doubling, to setting his Zarathustras in the midst of cranks, exhibitionists and gargoyles.

My first response to these why it matters titles is: fuck you. To get me to watch what you are doing, don’t poke me in the eye first.

conspiracy theories

I love reading conspiracy books. I love conspiracy theories.
And I also rather love the pained choking sound made by the demystifiers of conspiracy theories. It is in their rhetoric that one can find all the things that characterize our 21st century capitalist society: the identification of seriousness with credentials, the logical inconsistencies that accompany examining social phenomena with an abridged set that excludes members that should be included, and the higher rationality of the technocrat that mystifies the processes of narration.. All of these features are on gorgeous display in the Aeon article about conspiracy theories written by a philosopher (who else?), Quassim Cassam. We already know where Cassam is going when he begins his article by exhibiting a loony: 

“Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job. The aircraft impacts and resulting fires couldn’t have caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse. The only viable explanation, he maintains, is that government agents planted explosives in advance. He realises, of course, that the government blames Al-Qaeda for 9/11 but his predictable response is pure Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

Notice the flow of that paragraph. Notice how Oliver is a conspiracy theorist, but the government – it is a judge. What is elided here is what the government, or the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, offered as its explanation for 9/11 – a conspiracy theory. That is, a theory about a conspiracy that made an event happen. What is elided, as well, or put under the sign of smugness, is expertise. What did the committee do? It hired people who spent much of their time going to websites, for instance, of jihadists. They consulted “experts” on Al Qaeda. They rarely, it should be noted, interviewed anybody from Al qaeda. Nor did they interview, as far as I know, anybody from the Saudi government. And when they interviewed certain persons, as for instance the President, they gave those persons enormous leeway in their testimony. Finally, the government report was redacted and censored.

This is how you form a theory about conspiracy. There is no other viable theory about 9/11. 19 persons didn’t spontaneously hijack four planes.

All theories about 9/11 are conspiracy theories.

However, the conspiracy theory debunker never begins from the construction of “authorized” conspiracies. In a sense, ideology in Marx’s image – the inversion of the world – is exactly what they are engaged in.

When we see such inversions, what we should expect is a certain class aggression. The construct of Oliver, who will then be battered left and right in Cassam’s essay, is the construct of an “amateur”.

The war between the academic and the amateur, especially as academia filled the spaces of expertise after WWII, is fierce and unrelenting. An amateur is part time, for one thing – he works in his “spare time”. The researcher, by contrast,, is ideally full time. Anybody who has contact with academic research can tell you that this is a pretty distorted picture – administration, teaching, managing grad students, all of these take away from research time proper. The researcher understands credentialing. Cassam’s goal in his article is to say that conspiracy theorizing arises from a character flaw in the theorizer. And to credential his theory, he opposes it to another credentialed theory, which is that conspiracy theories mistakenly find patterns in random events.

“A different objection to character-based explanations is that it’s just not true that people have questionable beliefs because they are stupid or gullible. In How We Know What Isn’t So (1991), the US social psychologist Thomas Gilovich argues that many such beliefs have ‘purely cognitive origins’, by which he means that they are caused by imperfections in our capacities to process information and draw conclusions. Yet the example he gives of a cognitive explanation takes us right back to character explanations. His example is the ‘hot hand’ in basketball. The idea is that when a player makes a couple of shots he is more likely to make subsequent shots. Success breeds success.

Gilovich used detailed statistical analysis to demonstrate that the hot hand doesn’t exist – performance on a given shot is independent of performance on previous shots. The question is, why do so many basketball coaches, players and fans believe in it anyway? Gilovich’s cognitive explanation is that belief in the hot hand is due to our faulty intuitions about chance sequences; as a species, we’re bad at recognising what genuinely random sequences look like.
And yet when Gilovich sent his results to a bunch of basketball coaches, what happened next is extremely revealing. One responded: ‘Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I couldn’t care less.’ This seems like a perfect illustration of intellectual vices in operation.”

Actually, as a recent statistical study that impressed Gilovich shows, the basketball coaches seemed to be on to something. In 2014, Andrew Bocskocsky, John Ezekowitz, and Carolyn Stein presented a paper, The Hot Hand: A New Approach to an Old “Fallacy” that targetted an assumption in Gilovich and Tversky’s classic paper:

“Each player has an ensemble of shots that vary in difficulty (depending, for example, on the distance from the basket and on defensive pressure), and each shot is randomly selected from this ensemble”

Bocskocsky et al. reasoned that if basketball players did believe in the hot hand, there would be a skewing in the ensemble of shots – they would make the shots more difficult for the person with the so called hot hand. Thus, there would be a pattern – a pattern “caused” by belief in a pattern – among the players. Basketball coaches knew this, although of course they don’t speak in statistical terms – or at least they used not to, before data analysis became an essential part of the basketball toolkit. So they used “a novel dataset of over 83,000 shots from the 2012-2013 National Basketball Association (NBA) season, combined with optical tracking data of both the players and the ball.” And they did find a hot hand effect: “Our estimates of the Hot Hand effect range from 1.2 to 2.4 percentage points in increased likelihood of making a shot.”

Now, why would B, et. al., have started this research? Perhaps because the people who played basketball, rather than studied it statistically, were sure that the statisticians were wrong. In other words, the amateurs were right to question “who is this guy?”

Cassam’s paper is part of a recent rightward turn in ethics towards “moral facts” and “character” – a turn that is executed by operating in that inverted ideological way, and viewing conspiracy not as a social construct, but as a culpable piece of rebellion against official narratives – even as those official narratives themselves encompass conspiracy theories.

Which brings us back to the government ‘s function in Cassam's first paragraph. The government 'blames'. This, too, elides a very important fact. The most important screwball conspiracy theory about 9/11 was not Oliver’s, but Dick Cheney’s, and it was that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and that officers from Iraq had met with Mohammed Atta. Dick Cheney happened to be vice president.

In other words, the “government” in Cassam’s presentation - that deus ex machina - is as much a fiction as “Oliver” –  since in reality the government has multiple aspects. The government, for instance, includes the House Committee on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy that concluded in 1976 that Oswald did not act alone – or, in other words, that there was a conspiracy.

Here we have two aspects of the government that disagree, since the Warren Commission, the previous official government response, was to blame Oswald alone. This became the official narrative. All others, then, became relatively loony.  As we know, when some part of the government acts naughty and doesn’t agree with an official narrative that has been agreed to by the experts, we ignore it. This principle - that only authorized conspiracies, which cease to be conspiracy theories, are allowed - was shown by the way the  NYT, Washington Post and LA Times all felt comfortable with dissing the character of “conspiracy theorist”  Gary Webb, who reported that the CIA knowingly collaborated with drug dealers in the Contra war - the recent subject of the movie "Kill the Messenger". The journalists who attacked him were very open about the fact that  Webb didn’t give enough space to the  CIA response to the accusation – that it was false – even though, theoretically, the journalists would all probably pretend that the role of the press is not to accept the word of government agencies at face value. But in this case,  given that "drugs" at the time Webb was writing were being used to create a massive flow of persons into penitentiaries, the government agency just couldn't have done what Webb said. It would question more than the integrity of the CIA, it would also question the meme that drugs - especially cocaine - were the evilest evil ever known. Given these interlinked elements, the conclusion had to be that we must believe the CIA. As one defender of the agency in the press put it, extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof - a perfect nonsequitor. There is no such thing as extraordinary proof.  What Webb was actually doing was following up on the Kerry commission report that the CIA had used people who used the CIA to smuggle drugs. But this part of the narrative was buried by the press. We didn't need to be hearing this.

However, not to end on a sour note, the wonderful thing about conspiracy books is not the truth of the conspiracies they uncover – I’ll admit it, most of them are whacky – but the way in which, by using degrees of separation to slice into our everyday history, they uncover the extraordinary weirdness of the everyday. Anybody who reads about the New Orleans of Oswald’s day, as uncovered by Jim Garrison, has to be impressed by the totally oddball character of it: the hairless pedophile part spy airline pilot, or the private detectives shaking down strip clubs, or the daily work of Mafiosi guys – this is what I love. It is a rather beautiful narrative method, because it destabilizes the social weighting we accord to major and minor players – instead, the bit parts have a tendency to swallow the story. The necessity that there be bit parts in any narrative produces an unconscious effect on the spectator of making it seem like there are bit parts in the world. But bit parts are only in stories about the world, and those stories can be radically shifted. This is what the amateur knows, and the expert forgets.

On Robert Durst and Us

I had to watch HBO’s The Jinx, on Robert Durst.
I couldn’t help myself. 
But I was more impressed with the fourth episode, with the clips of the filming of Durst's murder trial in Galveston, than the famous sixth episode with the cadaver letter. Somehow, I don’t think that letter, or Durst’s ramblings, are going to send him to prison, frankly.
After all, his confession that he killed his neighbor, cut up his body, put the torso in a suitcase and the rest in garbage bags, and threw them into Galveston bay didn’t move the jury to a lot more than a yawn. They declared him another aggrieved Texas householder, defending himself as best he could from the ever overlooked Morris Black. Not guilty.
It is rare that you see footage that so roundly confirms one’s impression that the American judicial system is a joke and an outrage. If Amnesty international didn’t depend so much on American good will, the US would rank with Iran and Saudi Arabia as a human rights offender. The overflowing prison, that White response to the Civil Rights movement – the wholesale buying of legislatures to change laws unfavorable to corporations – and most of all, a judicial system that continues the feudal custom of allotting one’s legal defense according to one’s ability to pay for it, as though nobody had ever heard of democracy, much less equality – are all part of why the U.S., in my lifetime, has become, at least politically, a piece of crap. 
What do you get when you can afford any defense? In the OJ Simpson case, you had a defense that was, at least, matched by a District Attorney’s office that was not run completely by morons. But the Galveston trial was a remarkable display of an excellent defense lawyer’s ability to adapt to the atomsphere of intelligence in a courtroom. They ran circles around a prosecution that apparently had laid out its plan for its case long before the trial started, and zombie-walked through that plan. An alert D.A. would have enjoyed the defense plan – which began by explaining Durst’s motives for hiding in Galveston, and thus threw a huge prize in the prosecution’s lap, since here was the motive for the death of Morris Black. Although the clips from the trial were by no means exhaustive, its is obvious that the prosecution was not even listening. Why should they? After all, in our utterly corrupt system, what you have is first, some realization of a violent impulse, which is investigated by a police force more focused on extracting fines from poor people so that the department can purchase ever shinier military ware than on petty crimes like murder, and tossed to district attornies who have grown fat on pleas, punishing those who do go to trial. Its not dystopia, its everyday American life. 
Even the show did not stop to find a single person who might have known Morris Black when he was alive. The show never told us what he did – although in his interview, Durst casually let drop that he carved Black’s body up with his own tools – nor did they seek out a single distant family member. Apparently the prosecution thought that carving someone up would suffice. The judge, meanwhile, allowed the defense to instruct the jury in the finer points of law as it saw fit, making a mockery of homicide law. Of course, the judge knew that these were sharks, these lawyers, and probably figured they knew more than she did.
It was, all in all, a porthole into the way justice is doled out in this country. What was it that Solzhenitsyn says in the Gulag? He entitles the chapter on the waves of prisoners that passed through the camps “the history of our sewage disposal system”. 
That is about right.

a philosophical suicide pact: on relativism

One of the myths of our time is that the average college freshman takes into the classroom a belief in moral and cultural relativism. I have my doubts. I don’t doubt that a college freshman might be given to saying things like, that is only your opinion, or, well, that’s my opinion, given the unfamiliar stimulus of a first year philosophy class. But outside of that stimulus, I don’t see much evidence for either form of relativism. On the contrary, there is a lot of evidence for a naïve faith in the rightness of the established order on up through and including such absurdities as grading. As far as romantic reveries in which the subject is placed on a parity with the objective world, this seems contraindicated by  the strong increase in busness majors and the clamor from both parents and students for a secure job after graduation.

The myth bugs me on several levels, one of which is the assumption that relativism is a sophomoric sophism that dissolves in the light of the overwhelming proofs for universal truths and values. The latter are represented, of course, by the teacher, so infinitely more sophisticated in philosophical argument than the childish, unconscous  echo of Protagoras.

The place to start wth those phrases is not to juxtapose them to glorious universal truths, but to question the idea that the conjunction of “my” and “opinion” has any sense, outside of the semantic possibility that allows possessives to modify nouns. There are, after all, few self-generated opinions among the sane. It is a rare existence that stops itself long enough to question the opinions of others that it has absorbed all its life, much less finding better ones. And those rare existences mostly shift to opinions that have also had their long career in the belief community. Although I am an opiniotated person, I can’t really say that I have a lot of my opinions proper, any more than I can say that there is part of the atmosphere consisting of my air.

In fact, doubt about the capacity to invent opinions – rather than embroider pre-given beliefs – is I think one of the important, humbling stages of self knowledge.

Then there is the irritating smugness by which relativism is usually dismissed from the city. The argument goes that if you don’t have objective, universal values, you have no footing to condemn Auschwitz. That’s a pretty preposterous argument, and it is founded on a very contemporary view of relativism in which respect for other beliefs is the universal rule. But why I should be relativistic about the stars and the trees, and take my hat off for the respect rule is usually not analyzed. In fact, one of the motives in my case for relativism is the realization that Dachau was not built by moral or cultural relativists, but for them – for putting them away and destroying them. The Nazis were all about universal truths, and ruthlessly punished those who they felt violated the natural order of values. To think that relativism, with its endemic questioning of any absolute, was a Nazi doctrine is preposterous.

What the Nazis did, of course, was to pursue methods that were in exception to the moral rules they ardently believed in. In this, unfortunately, they were not very original. In the United States, from 1945 until the present, the population has accepted and resourced the making of a terrific force of nuclear missiles aimed at inflicting millons of civilian casualties. That doesn’t mean that Americans have adopted flexible relativistic norms – rather, it means that, like in all belief systems that build a great superstructure of moral and cultural universals,  the foundations are riddled with ingenious exceptions and emergency situations.

I used to call myself a relativist, but in fact the more I have looked at this issue, the more I think it is one of those philosophical death pacts, those double binds, in which both sides are fucked up. It is hard to see how a relativism can get off the ground without formal rules for recognizing belief systems – rules, in other words, that are norms. And of course, as a relativist can easily point out, in every society that claims to adhere to universal norms, one can expect a lively sub-system of exceptions. In those societies that have philosophy, the subsection called ethics is usually involved in both proclaiming universal values and justifyng the everyday exceptions to them that make life possible.

This kind of enjambment makes me think that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way the relativist issue is discussed in philosophy. It makes me think that it is a sucker’s game.   

The ownership society - they own,and you gotta ship out.

Here's what the ownership society - the neoliberal dream from Bush to Bush, from Clinton to Obama, looks like: the ripoff society! Eduard Porter's column is as fine as it can be within the limits of the idiot episteme we suffer under, where all that exists exists to profit the oligarchs:

"A research paper by Mr. Bogle published in Financial Analysts Journal makes the case. Actively managed mutual funds, in which many workers invest their retirement savings, are enormously costly.

First, there is the expense ratio — about 1.12 percent of assets for the average large capitalization blend fund. Then there are transaction costs and distribution costs. Active funds also pay a penalty for keeping a share of their assets in low-yielding cash. Altogether, costs add up to 2.27 percent per year, Mr. Bogle estimates.

By contrast, a passive index fund, like Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund, costs merely 0.06 percent a year in all.

Of course, Mr. Bogle has a horse in the race. He founded the Vanguard Group. He invented the first index fund for the public. His case is powerful, nonetheless.

Assuming an annual market return of 7 percent, he says, a 30-year-old worker who made $30,000 a year and received a 3 percent annual raise could retire at age 70 with $927,000 in the pot by saving 10 percent of her wages every year in a passive index fund. (Such a nest egg, at the standard withdrawal rate of 4 percent, would generate an inflation-adjusted $37,000 a year more or less indefinitely.) If she put it in a typical actively managed fund, she would end up with only $561,000."

Porter, alas, doesn't recommend the right change. Tax 401ks which are simply tax avoidance schemes for the upper and set up low tax passive index accounts through a postal bank - which the US had at one time, since in the 40s and 50s the government still did a few things for people instead of plutocrats. This won't happen, of course - after all, the advantage of doing this would accrue to the bottom 90 percent rather than the top 10 percent, and the White Republic that has its boot on the American people - executive, legislative, and judicial - wouldn't stand for that. But, of course, the screwed up retirement scene is the direct result of the government de-regulating and encouraging the huge rip off that fed wall street. Surprise!

david autor and the new defense of the 1 percent: don't do the math! look over here at this shiny neo-liberal platitude!

It took a while for the research of economist David Autor to reach the rightwing mimosphere, but it is there now. Autor's claim has become gospel for the rightwing set: As David Brooks puts it, If we could magically confiscate and redistribute the above-average income gains that have gone to the top 1 percent since 1979, that would produce $7,000 more per household per year for the bottom 99 percent." This is said to mislead, so that you think, oh, 7,000 isn't much. But if you do the math, that means every household in american would be making 315,000 dollars more per year. 
I think this is close to my estimate. To quote the EPI institute: "The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20.1-to-1 in 1965 and 29.0-to-1 in 1978, grew to 122.6-to-1 in 1995, peaked at 383.4-to-1 in 2000, and was 272.9-to-1 in 2012, far higher than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s."

So, imagine that CEOs were making the same salary in 2012 and the compensation ratio was 29.0. Average CEO compensation was $14.1 million in 2012. Thus, the average worker would be making 486 thousand dollars.

We are fucked.
Brooks of course goes on to compare real money earned with a fake premium on college education, "But if we could close the gap so that high-school-educated people had the skills of college-educated people, that would increase household income by $28,000 per year." Of course, Brooks doesn't repeat the idea that every year since 1979, the bottom 99 percent would be earning 28,000 more per year.

Now, it is possible that Brooks, who has no head for math, is misquoting Autor. But if he is correct, than Autor is a bigger putz than he appears, since obviously an increase of 28,000 over 45 years is much less than an increase of 316,000. Autor's work is in the domain of justifyng the wealthy and red herringism. Don't think about that one percent! But he accidentally seems to have confirmed just what we know.
We are so fucked.

Russia's Chalabi

I just read the gingerly New Yorker portrait of the old Yeltsin era crook and current fashionable Russian "dissident", Khodorkovskii. David Remnick loves Khodorkovskii, and so does the NYRB. He is their Chalabi. Of course, we have to overlook the blemishes in the past - which Joffe, his New Yorker Boswell, sketched with perhaps some trepidation (American liberals like not to dwell too much on the past of  their rich freedom fighters - a fraud here, an act of violence there, who cares?). I suppose the equation here is that since Putin is Hitler and the Devil, his opposition must be Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn rolled into one.  The problem, of course, is that the cleansing operation by which a Chalabi becomes a Charles De Gaulle and a Khodorkovskii becomes a "dissident" in a new Gulag (I do admire this - that the writers of a country, the US, that has the largest and one of the cruelest prison systems on the planet can calmly talk about the New Gulag) - the problem is that when you implant them back in their native country, the natives, puzzlingly, aren't enthusiastic. It took years for American journalists, always expecting a popular revolution in Iraq in Chalabi's favor, to get their heads around the fact that Iraqis thought he was a crook. When he received less than one percent of the vote in Iraq's 2007 presidential election, it was sort of funny, given that the vast majority of news stories about that election in the NYT and the Post had been about Chalabi. It was like some European paper betting on Dennis Kucinech being elected president in 2004. Khodorkovskii's reputation is being kept alive by the American press, with the same disregard for reality. Of course, Americans have never had a very firm grasp on the reality of any place outside of the strange American republic.  Even, it turns out, the highfliers at the New York Review of Books - who are definitely not the highfliers who used to be there. It is a funny thing - American intellectuals are more provincial, now, during the age of "globalisation", than they used to be before this vaunted time. Provincial n the sense that they could take facts and imagine how they were perceived in another society or culture. All that is dead, now, and replaced by howlers about human rights or new gulags.

opening - an objection

Among the chief ornaments of the romance of philosophy is the high place accorded to the open, or to openness. Open the understanding or the mind or the eye, openness as a state of being – these are all on the plus side of the ledger. Heidegger, of course, is the great poet of openness in this tradition, charging openness with a numinous relationship to being that you can take or leave – but he is only building on a vast previous structure.

Closing, perhaps as a consequence, is never given high marks by philosophers. Closing one’s eyes or one’s understanding is, automatically, a bad thing. Even in building an argument, to come to a conclusion – a close – is often transformed, in the text, into opening up.  After the Absolute spirit has tied itself in knots and done more tricks than Houdini, he at last is in a good place at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. You would think that the absolute spirit would be able to close up shop and go fishing. But no!  He has to open up once again and go, in recollection, though the whole muddle again. No closing for it!

Such are the lessons of the masters. But Adam, ever the dissenter, disagrees.

A couple of months ago, he was with the orthodoxy. Back in those primitive days, he would often strain towards the door knob, or at best, hang from it, crying for the door to be opened.  This happened most often when Mama or Papa had made their exit. Sometimes, though, it was the principle of the thing.

In the last month, however, he has a, learned the word door knob, and b, figured out how to turn one. Having set himself up to join the grand tradition of opening, he, instead, has begun to close doors meticulously.

Of course, one of the things about being out in the open is that you can be seen. This is fun and spiritual if you want to be seen. If, however, you want to hide, closing is your friend.

However, closing seems to have more than a ludic value for my wee little pea. He seems to recognize, in a closed door, a symbol of a larger order. Thus, when settling in to bed and grudgingly accepting the turning off of the lights, he delays the onset of sleep by pointing to the door and demanding it be closed. The thing about this is that he often has already closed it. It is as if Adam recognizes further degrees of closure. There is the closure that you use to hide with in a game, but there might be other types. One is, perhaps, that opening invites people to leave a room. It introduces a certain selfish individuality among one’s courtiers, who might be inclined to go through the open door and go into another room and start watching Peppa Pig or Goodnight Gorilla on the computer – such unimaginable riches!

Now, from the romantic philosophical view, closing here might be a symbol of involuntary servitude. But from another point of view, say that of a two and a quarter year old, it might be a sign of solidarity. It is, definitely, something with a dimension beyond the mere physical closing, just as opening has its more numinous dimension. One of the irritating things about opening in the tradition is that it is often treated as a natural property. The open is the natural situation. But one could well argue that, for living things, opening is unnatural. Skin, tegument, eyelids, doors, drawers, pots, urns, bags, all the paraphernalia of closing shrewdly measure the heroism of opening against the cleverness of closing.

I am not saying that Adam doesn’t appreciate opening. In fact, once he has closed the door on me, he will open it himself, eventually, if I don’t make a sound or an approach to do so. And he points out, every day, how much he wants an outdoor basketball court. (He likes to say I want lately. After seeing a story about a little girl who wanted the moon, he also wants the moon, which he imagines would be a very big basketball.  I want the moon daddy. Cursed little girl!). So in the technical sense, he likes the open – the undomesticated, or at least the domesticated only to the degree that it has resulted in a basketball court and a park with a slide.

To wrap up this rap: Any child’s history of philosophy would have to cast a more skeptical eye on opening as a given and a good.    

photogenic and the twentieth century

Photogenic drawing was the phrase used  by Talbot Fox, among others, to describe the photographic method: chemically treating a sheet of paper so that the light falling on an object made an impression of that object on the paper.  Fox and Daguerre were contemporaries, and daguerrotype soon overtook photogenic drawing as the preferred term, to be overtaken in turn by photography. The word, from the Greek for product of light, was not forgotten, but came to be employed in technical contexts – for instance, in discussing light producting organisms like fireflies; but then it took a strange turn in its philological life history.

The first references to the new meaning of photogenic come from French cinema culture. Already, in 1921, in Cinea, Jean Epstein is connectng photogenie to a particular impression of a thing or a person on the screen:

“The cinema itself is movement, so much that even its natures mortes, telephones, factories, revolvers,  revive and pulsate. It isn’t a question of worrying about making them live: let it happen and it gives life.

But it is a particular life, a life of ideas, a life of sentiments. Note: everything that is witness of an exclusive thought: habit, tiredness, animality, distraction, plays with a marvelous photogeneity. The cinema is mystical. It attaches a uniquely important value to everything which represents, exteriorly, the signs of intelligence.”

It is probably the French use of the term which floated back to the US. In the twenties, as we all know, a new American literature was being written by expats in Paris. What is less remembered is that numerous American news bureaus sited themselves in Paris, and there was a strong trans-Atlantic flow of journalists. The earliest US source that I can find is a story from the Washington Post, dated April 23, 1922, entitled Parisian News and Views, from a special correspondant. The item recounts the movie mania sweeping France, and makes the usual coy with the American image of France as the home of dashing male lovers, who have all the lines:

“So much is this true that if Don Juan lived today the spiritual Clement Vautel is sure his classic lovemaking would be transfored into such simple words as: “you are so photogenic. Would you like for me to present you to one of my friends – who is a moving picture director?”

Photogenic operates in that paragraph as an exoticism, an introduced species, something with an accent. At about the same time, the word appears in New York Times stories with quote marks around it. God bless the New York Times for having had, since forever, a stick up its ass about formal and informal English. One can go back in the archive and find words that are currently accepted as standard, like ‘leak’ for a leak of information, and trace their gradual loss of the branding quote marks in NYT stories. The appearance of the word in a cluster of newspaper stories of this time shows that photogenic was taking off, that it filled a need. Like the starling, another introduced species, it found the environment in the US conducive to massive growth.

By the 1920s, the film industry had been around for around 30 years. As Ty Burr points out in his recent book on stardom, Gods Like Us, film stars and the star system had not been around that long. The first photoplays didn’t name the people who appeared – acted? – in them. As audiences for these things grew larger, the studios began to receive massive amounts of mail asking for names. Burr picks one actor as the first star: Florence Lawrence. It is evident that Burr doesn’t quite get Lawrence:

“Her very few surviving films reveal a stat uesque woman, attractive in the preferred Gibson Girl mode of the day, with a prominent nose, broad face, serene expression. Her acting is histrionic with out being over bearingly so, yet there’s little that makes her jump off the screen the way a movie star is supposed to.” 

“Jumping off the screen” is in the semantic neighborhood of Epstein’s terms in 1921 – reviving, coming to life, resurrection.  Epstein’s examples – the objects of ordinary life – temper, of course, the hijacking of photogenic as an attribute of stardom.  But the special correspondent to the Washington Post already caught the erotic charge, the personalization of the photogenic.

Surely we are encountering, here, one of the tripwires of modernity. Edgar Morin wrote, long ago, that the art that presents an image of reality injects that image into reality. What photogenic injected into reality was a new organization of appearances.  One should, I think, see the photogenic against another term - “aura” – which is also emerging, although in philosophical culture, with Bela Belazs in Visible Man and, most famously, in Walter Benjamin essay on Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

my problem with reductionism

I’ve never quite understood the reductionst program in the philosophy of science.

I’ve edited beaucoup papers and dissertations logically proving that, happily, the mental is a level wholly reducible to the molecular, or that the vital is reducible to the laws of physics without a remainder, and I’m the editor – I don’t interpose myself in the flow of argument and shout halt! These papers grudgingly reference the problems in the field, the fact that bridging principles seem to break down and that we still have no account that would explain the higher level phenomena completely, but in the end we can, on principle, correlate every mental and vital even to an underlying physical one, and that is all we need.

This is what they say. I begin to lose the thread with the word “underlying:.

Underlying. Higher and lower levels. In the arguments themselves these words are used with a, it seems to me, blissful unconsciousness. Because I still don’t know what level means, here.

It would seem that after we have done our tricks, we can abolish the level talk –and yet we can’t. The level itself, what it is, where it comes from, is the great stubborn residual here. Is it a fiction? I’ve not read a defense of the idea that the level is a fiction, and that underlying is simply a bow to rhetoric. Rather, it seems that we consider the level both a convenient conceptual device and a self-explanatory rhetorical conventionl. But it seems to me that the whole argument rests on there being a level that can be reduced.

If it is a rhetorical convention, it seems to me that it has sprung not from quasi-science or pre-science, but from the way the mind is. And if it is more than a convention – if it is sort of a natural fiction, like a mirage – then our story of reduction is certainly not finished if it can’t account for the mirage.

It is a puzzle, to me.

the tourist's world of contemporary liberalism

Tourist guides never advise tourists to go to working factories. Tourist guides avoid, as well, pointing out the wonders and spectacle of doctors’ and insurance offices, tire and brake repair places, janitorial supply warehouses, and loading docks. In other words, the world, seen through a tour book, is a world in which the sphere of production is shut out, and the sphere of circulation is severely abridged. The people who do work in the tourist’s country, who prepare food and bring it to the tourists table, who check the tourist into the hotel and change the sheets on the bed, who sell t shirts on the beach or post cards at the museum shop, are indeed working hard, to please the tourist. But the massive mechanism behind these people is simply assumed by the tourist. The tourist isn’t there to see it. If in fact the tourist comes into contact with this world – say in a car wreck, or because the tourist becomes ill – this is not part of the vacation. It is the part one subtracts from the vacation.

What, then, are we to make of this tourist world? A couple of things. Except for shows dealing with cops and criminals, it is a fair picture of the world television shows. Television used to show the blue collar world, but mainly that world has dried up, Nielson-wise. The other thing is that it is a fairly good take on the world of the contemporary liberal.  Up through the eighties, the old fashioned liberal – reporter, judge, politician, academic – used to have some very serious political connection with the working class. But as the unions diminished both as a moral force and a physical presence, those connection became nominal. The world of production and circulation is out there, but if you map the outrages and causes of the liberal onto it, you will find very large gaps, incredible gaps relative to what liberalism used to be. For instance, in my lifetime, there have been two extended periods of decline in black household wealth – during the Reagan years, and since 2007. The decline since 2007 is unbelievable: according to Pew Research, while median white household net worth is at 141,900 dollars, for black households, it is 11,000 dollars. In 1983, the figures were 100,000 dollars and  10,000 dollars.

In tourist America, however, this just hasn’t happened. In the sixties, liberals from RFK to the writers at The New Republic would have been all over this. But, in our post-deluge world, it is a tourist unfriendly fact. Tourist unfriendly facts only get to emerge as facts if they become excitingly voyeuristic – if we can stick a crime in there someplace. Who was the black actor who said that 90 percent of the time his job offers were to play criminals?

I think the effort to make this a tourist world is seriously chipping at the moment. But I fear that the liberal literati are not seeing it.  

confessions of a gnostic

The gospel version was: “in the beginning was the word.” That is a very attractive idea for the intellectual, the creature of formulas, chalkboards, debates, science, and all that stuff. The word gets a big advantage, heritage-wise, and can lord it over the rest of creation.

However, as we know, the Gospel of John touches on gnostic heresy. It is the most philosophical of the gospels. In Genesis, the star turn is taken by the creation of the heavens and the earth – not by the instrument God uses. Whereas there is a variant within gnostic belief (gnostic gathering together the mixed cosmic schemes of the first to third century A.D.) that I have some sympathy with. This variant took a dim view of the heavens and the earth. In a sense, in this view,  “in the beginning was the mistake.” The mistake was, precisely, to begin. And the reason that mistake was made was the subject of the colorful mythologies that we can extract from obscure texts by Origen and Iraneaus, who were always slagging Gnostic groups with delightful descriptions. For those with the kind of pre-disposition for it – those Blakeans among us – the heresies listed in Iraneaus or Origen are objects of revery. What if we lived in a culture where we believed that the seven heavens were guarded by seven totemic beasts?

(1) Michael the lion-like, (2) Suriel the bull-like, (3) Raphael

the serpent-like, (4) Gabriel the eagle-like, (5) Thautabaoth the bearlike,

(6) Erathaoth the dog-like, and (7) Thartharaoth (Celsus: Thaphabaoth) or Onoel the donkey-like. – Tuomas Rasimus, 18.

Onoel the Donkey-like is an entity I wouldn’t mind praying to. Donkeys are the most spiritual of animals. They have long been the philosophers friend. Giordano Bruni was especially fond of his donkey, and wrote a sort of spoof, an ass fest. Would that there were more of these.

It is no longer the case that the gnostics are simply obscure bogeymen of obscure theologians.  We know more, now, than we’ve known in 1500 years about them, or about the scattered heresies that have been categorized as Gnostic, due to the Nag Hammadi Library and other manuscript discoveries.

That almost all the heresies the early church fathers discuss are now called gnostic shows a very interesting interchange between the two terms, as though any deviation from Christian orthodoxy must become gnostic. Heresy is derived not from the Greek word for error, but from the word for choice: haireo. A heresy is perseverance in choice - which opposes it to perseverence in faith.  It has long been the reigning idea among heavy thinking conservatives that liberalism, and indeed, modernity itself, is a form of heresy - or gnosticism. Eric Voegelin  was the most famous proponent of this idea, and it allowed him to label both Marx and Nietzsche and the modernist everyman as gnostic. You can tell a gnostic, to make Voegelin sound a bit like J.Edgar Hoover on Communism, by the way he cuts off questions. Voegelin has a peculiar notion of what cutting off questions means. Because Voegelin wants to say that there is, at the foundation of society, a transcendence that he gets all mushy about in the usual philosophical way (At the opening of the soul—that is the metaphor Berg son uses to de scribe the event—the order of being be comes visible even to its ground and origin in the beyond, in the Platonic epekeina, in which the soul participates as it suffers and achieves its opening), he is making a claim. But it is made in the weird way that we get there from the  possibility  opened up by questioning whether man is just a part of nature, whether, that is, the social order does reflect something transcendent. Possibility is magically transmuted into a claim by way of the question: interrogation becomes assertion, and assertion becomes opening. Well, two can play at that game, and one wonders why we couldn’t open up the possibility that this isn’t so by questioning whether transcendence makes sense, opening up the possibilty of a world in which transcendence doesn't make sense. In Voegelin’s view, I guess, you can go up the staircase but not down it.

Voegelin might nevertheless be right that there is somethng distinctly gnostic about modernity. Voegelin’s notion is that the very notion of alienation is the clue that the gnostic hunter should be looking for, since for the gnostics, matter is the primal sin, and man is forced to live as matter and among matter like a prisoner.

But given the alchemy of questioning, this prison, for the modern gnostic, must be  a form of self-deception that does not actually ultimately fool the self, which has the power to question and can, as aforesaid, open itself wide.

Voegelin then draws up a model of self-deception or intellectual swindling in three moments:

“On the surface lies the deception it self. It could be self-deception; and very often it is, when the speculation of a creative thinker has cultur­ally degenerated and become the dogma of a mass move ment. But when the phenom non is apprehended at its point of origin, as in Marx or Nietzsche, deeper than the deception itself will be found the awareness of it. The thinker does not lose control of himself: the libido domi­nandi turns on its own work and wishes to master the deception as well. This gnostic turning back on itself corresponds spiritually, as we have said, to the philosophic conversion, the pe­riagoge in the Platonic sense. However, the gnostic movement of the spirit does not lead to the erotic open ing of the soul, but rather to the deepest reach of  persistence in the deception, where revolt against God is revealed to be its motive and purpose.”

There is definitely something to this, if we grant that deception is involved, here, rather than deflation of the grander claims of Platonism or Christianity – or any order footed, supposedly, in the transcendent. But I think that at a deeper level, it is this notion that the beginning was an irrevocable mistake with which we have to deal that makes up the real gnostic insight, and the base of gnostic reflection, and for this reason  I think we have to ultimately reject the idea that the majordomos of modern thought are gnostic.. Voegelin's rather heavy handed attempt to turn orthodoxy into paradox and heresy into orthodoxy is a common move on the right - Chesterton did a similar thing. In as much as heresy goes back to the notion of choice, however, I think the paradox can't be sustained, and the opening of the soul will always result in a credo, rather than the vigorous life of questioning. The latter is what the modern gnostic is, actually, much more about than his opponent, who will call the omni-questioner, the true gnostic, a nihilist.

he do the police in several voices - Kristen Ross's police conception of history

Kristin Ross, in her excellent book, May 68 and its afterlives, begins with a meditation on what she calls the police conception of history, riffing off Jacques ranciere. She begins in this way because she has noted a strong tendency in the 1990s to dismiss 1968 as a failed revolution. Nothing happened, is the refrain.

Nothing happened.” In a recent text, Jacques Ranciere uses that phrase—only in the present tense: “Nothing is happening”—to represent the functioning of what, broadly speaking,he calls “the police.”

“Police intervention in public space is less about interpellating demonstrators

than it is about dispersing them. The police are not the law that

interpellates the individual (the “hey, you there” of Louis Althusser)

unless we confuse the law with religious subjection. The police are

above all a certitude about what is there, or rather, about what is not

there: “Move along, there’s nothing to see.” The police say there is

nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done but to keep moving,

circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the

space of circulation. Politics consists in transforming that space of circulation

into the space of the manifestation of a subject: be it the people,

workers, citizens. It consists in refiguring that space, what there is to do there, what there is to see, or to name. It is a dispute about the division

of what is perceptible to the senses.”

I’ve been giving this some thought in relation to the coverage about the Greek “crisis”. Friday’s agreement was immediately greeted by an overwhelming chorus of nothing happened in the press. The Greeks, poor dumb bastards, tried to turn the agreement in something that would end their economic depression – although no, it is never phrased that way. Would try to welsh on their debt – that is the preferred meaning. Since Europe has gotten bored with unemployment figures not seen since the end of World War II, it isn’t an issue.

Still, the rush to say, nothing happened, seems exactly the kind of thing Ranciere is talking about. Indeed, something did happen – the Greeks were able to hammer down the primary surplus required by the Germans – or, to do pretend talk, by the Troika. This is, as far as  can see, the first time one of the collapsed periphery nations – Ireland, Portugal, Spain – came away with a concession. One would think that there was something to see, there.

But, as if Wolfgang Schauble’s Id were dictating all the stories – from Bloomberg to the Guardian, from Le Monde to Liberation – the story was essentially that the Greeks failed, and that there was nothing to see.

The police fate awaiting mass movements has now become routinized in public response. If there is nothing to see, if the police win every time, then the fight beccomes futile, or becomes a spectacle. It is one of the unconscious vices of the critical school, of negative dialectics, that it can assist the police endeavor, or make it seem like, at most, the important thing is to resist.

Maybe the important thing, however, is to win. Maybe a negativity disconnected from any sense of victory quickly becomes a myth-machine.

Maybe – I am claiming that this is possible, not that this is always and everywhere what is happening.

Something is happening, however. Don’t move on. Watch. At the very least, watch.

the scar

“Then” is the shape of time, or at least of time for birds, beasts, and bacteria, and for all the other monuments of DNA as well. In the world of nuclear particles, ‘then’ is a wicket through which one can pass one way and then another and both simultaneously, or so the equations tell us.

“Then” is also, by a heavy coincidence, a logical function. Here it does not give us a temporal, but a seemingly atemporal sequence. Such is the magic of words, however, that we are always tempted to take the atemporal world of the variables of logic and confound it with the temporal world in which we find ourselves. We are always tempted to see logic in history, to see the temporal as the pattern of the temporal.

Yet is logic so blind to temporality? Do we require some second order of reasoning to reconcile the one to the other?

That is, perhaps, the task that falls to dialectic. It is a shady task – Kant for instance placed dialectic in the slum of philosophy, where the hucksters, grifters and sophists ply their wares.

Dialectic is not the royal road to truth, on this view, but is the path of pins – to borrow a trope from that most philosophic of tales, Little Red Riding Hood.

If we want to come to grips with substitution, the dark power of our time, we must begin with these imperfectly aligned domains. A certain kind of philosophy takes it for granted that the task is to align them perfectly. Another approach is to take their imperfect alignment as a great philosophical fact – perhaps the great philosophical fact, and draw the consequences. The consequences, according to this school, lay everywhere around us. Like the fallen body of the giant in Finnegan’s wake, the parts form our parts, and we can go endlessly through the semiosphere, from newspaper stories to the towering summas of culture, and continually feel this imperfect alignment, this intellectual scar.

I’m inclined to the second view.

Economics as science (sigh) again

Economists, as a rule, are highly defensive about being "scientists". By this, they don't mean that they are part of the general social sciences set - a subset of sociology, in fact. No, they mean that they are like physics.
They aren't at all like physics, of course, starting at the ground level. While physicists can start with atoms because atoms are entirely defined by mass and motion, economics has no equivalent. Individuals are not simply defined by mass and motion. Economists have attempted to define them as the atoms of economics, but the arguments for this range from poor to unbelievable. This is even conceded, and got over by pretending that the motion of the individual is wholly defined by the desire to get more. 
Since the very meaning of getting more is not really definable without the system of values defining more, there's really no atomic level to work up from. 
But economists still somehow consider that, since they do hard mathematical work, they must be scientists. And since, at a certain point as undergraduates, they read Friedman's methodological paper about prediction, that science is defined by predicting things. 
So, lately, we've had a round of economists bitching that non-experts are pitching into macro-economics. It started with Scott Sumner here, went to Noah Smith there, and now I'm going to talk about it.

I get tired of the idea that science is entirely defined by the ability to predict things, which is like defining a car as the ability to go 70 miles per hour. Many other things than cars possess this ability, from hurricanes to peregrine falcons. But it is into the prediction hole that the whole incredibly badly formed debate around economics turns. Did economists predict the 2008 downturn or not? and then we are off to the races. 
But I'll bite on this for at least a second and ask what I think are more pertinent questions. 
-- what economist in the seventies or eighties predicted that the medium American wage would effectively stagnate for the next thirty or more years? 
-Which predicted that household debt would begin to equal household wealth for the medium household? 
-Who predicted that, even with the advent of IRAs, mutual funds, and 401ks, the shape of the ownership of all financial instruments would essentially remain the same in 2014 as it was in 1979? 
- Who predicted that the last American trade surplus would be in 1976?
My questions are all invidious. They are all about trends. The prediction biz, as defined by economists, is a pretty narrow thing about particular events. The local downfall, the inflation figure for the next quarter. But it is long term  long term trends, which are the meat and drink of the prediction biz of the natural sciences. The prediction of the course of a single atom isn't in it. The trend, going back billions of years, is. 
What seems evident to me is that economics, as a branch of sociology, can produce ideal models of various economies (not just capitalist ones) and capture broad trends within them. But it isn't very good, even so, at predicting long term trends at any middle distance - and as for up close, no way. Marx's prediction of the inevitable fall of the rate of profit, founded on classical economics, is a good instance of the use of trends - the ideal model of capitalism he constructed would seem to require it. One can see how the physical limitations inhering on labor time would even make it, at some point, true. But it has turned out to be only a factor, and a reversible one, in capitalist business cycles. Or perhaps I should say, a factor with varying weight.