what economists can't see: the invidious effects of methodological individualism

We all begin as welfare recipients.

Worse, we begin as stereotypical welfare recipients. We first cause pain to our primary donor, Mom, then we get out there in the world and proceed to make impossible demands, stay up late at night and cause others to stay up late, never work, get addicted first to milk and then often to sugary substances. And all the while we complain complain complain.

Of course, this is a modern phenomenon. It used to be that many of us would get out there and start working when we were four. And of course it used to be that our death rate was in the 60 percent.

My point is that economists are generally so blind to the real material conditions of everyday life that they are quite comfortable treating generations as independent variables. Thus, we are supposed  to think that the young have interests opposed to the old, and so on. The production of these pseudo social categories is an invidious effect of the economist's disease - methodological individualism. Of course, once you have your pseudo social categories, you can mount your pseudo social movement, which explainst the perpetual libertarian thirty something push to cut social security because it hurts "young people." The people who do this kind of thing, on closer examination, are almost always products of terrific family benificence. They never give a worried thought about what to do with the parents when they get old, since the parents have already bought the cruise ship tickets and the time share in Costa Rico.

In reality, the economic lives of the young and the old are inextricably mixed in these things called families.

Without seeing families as anything other than individual agents puzzlingly tied together through long term contracts that the smart young person will renegotiate after consultation with an accountant, you'll never understand economic life in, well, the real world. Almost all Gary Becker like schemas, which map cost to benefit as though we were all University of Chicago ants, are thus bound to fail. 

A recent column by Paul Krugman cited a Pew Poll about financial security:

We learn, for example, that 3 in 10 nonelderly Americans said they had no retirement savings or pension, and that the same fraction reported going without some kind of medical care in the past year because they couldn’t afford it. Almost a quarter reported that they or a family member had experienced financial hardship in the past year.

And something that even startled me: 47 percent said that they would not have the resources to meet an unexpected expense of $400 — $400! They would have to sell something or borrow to meet that need, if they could meet it at all.

Where do you think that 47 percent goes to when they need to cover that expense? The local bank? No, the gap is covered by parents, grandparents, siblings or children for the most part. Although American family structure is notoriously weakly linked, I believe the trend is to stronger links, for various obvious reasons: the immensely cheaper logistics of keeping connected, the stagnation in upward social mobility, the erosion of the WASP model of family, which leans heavily on do it yourself. The frontier is dead – you can jam it up Davy Crockett’s ass, because it is done. Facebook is only the latest in the series of avatars that killed it and killed it. So we don’t have large groups of people disappearing to homestead in some desert and writing the family one or two letters a year.

I would guess that interfamily shifts in money are what has kept Americans afloat in the age of the Great Slump. But economists can’t even begin to see this until they start seeing something more than human pixels accruing capital.  

Christopher Taylor is so clever in the London Review of Books

eternal english time

Tom McCarthy’s new novel is subject to one of those damnings with finicky praise in this week's London review of Books. The reviewer, Christopher Taylor, has great fun with McCarthy’s pronounced leanings towards Continental Theory. 

Of course, Taylor  doesn’t want to be taken for a complete philistine, so he won't be dragged into one of those funny controversies with the sneaky sophists from Europe. Rather, he has cleverly decided that Continental Theory is a fashion, and, to boot, a fashion of the 90s. Apparently, he runs with this motif under the delusion that he is saying something utterly original.

I think I can, with justice, call this the “English disease.” It consists of positing two temporal regimes. One regime is that of fashionable ideas. Being fashionable is of their essence. Thus, their entire worth lies in their novelty, which is a tricky temporality, socially speaking. Who wants yesterday's papers? The other temporal regime is implicit. This is the regime of common sense, of “realism” in literature, of liberal values, etc. These regimes are attached, usually, to two geo-political entities. The fashionable one is European, the common sense one is English.

The game, when it has some sophistication, allows for the fascination of the fashionable. Those cool names! Foucault, Derrida, Lacan. Instead of say Ryle, or Williams, or Searle. So, as a temptation, it is understandable that English youth might fall for it. Youth is, after all, in the modern era, the age group most associated with fashion. But just as youth grows up, so too does fashion fade. Fading, what we find is not another fashion, but instead that the mature temporal regime, that of English common sense, It has been there all along, patiently endowing value and genuineness. Common sense is never fashionable, though o so often true!

This division and the strategy I’ve sketched has existed at least since the French revolution. The English romantics, carrying Kantian ideas (and worse) from Germany to England, and revolutionary ideas (which is where the worst takes on a face and fangs) from France, were of course caught up in fashion. When Coleridge, a great copier of ideas from Schlegel and company, shook off any sympathy with the equalizers in France, he took up the idea of fashion versus the English eternal in Biographia Literaria. However, Coleridge’s geneology is a bit eccentric, especially for a Unitarian. For him, leveling philosophcal ideas of a democratic kind (cue appropriate shudders) first emerged in the English civil war, then died down, and then somehow, in that furtive, creeping way of plagues, was transmitted to France, where “the same principles, dressed in the ostentatious garb of fashionable philosophy, once more rose triumphant and effected the French revolution.” I imagine Christopher Taylor would look askance at that claim, since of course with its ostentatious garb – the garb of a pimp, a hooker, a DJ – fashionable ideas are doomed to die and be transformed into advertising for various corporations.
It would take more time – fashionable time – than I have at the moment to trace the outbreak of the “fashionable philosophy” epithet as it is variously hurled at English painters going impressionistic or English novelists infecting themselves with French ideas and some Irish ones too all along the road to good old literary realism, long may it wave, and common sense values. Taylor adds a bit of snarkiness to the package, but it is a very magisterial snarkiness, a don’s snarkiness – there’s no touch of foreigner or Oscar Wilde about it. It is good in its way. On the other hand, it does make me sigh. It is so so eighties, don’t you know.

My poem for today. I'll call it melancholia meets the hounds of spring

This hand crabbed from the key dulled letter

Sits, paleolithic, on the obsolete absolute page

Its grip reduced to a spastic C

Illustrating some text on graphology

Section graphomania, dangers of. Notebooks

Hanself and gretel back to the storied youth

And up to the man long in the tooth

If teeth there are so wrought by seasons

Of unheeded sugar, the slave produce stored

In poisoned plenty – is it not in this plenty I lived?

And how my happiness grieved

To see its imperial thunder mocked and tin

Reduced to a mere tinkle in the heart.

But what of it, weeper? Is it proved

That the grave’s your major stockholder at fifty?

As though out of stiff fingers no nifty

Thought could throw off smothering bone

And you have to face alone, alone. 

Paul Seabright and the contemporary mystification of competition

Competition is an all-explainer word - and as such, a contemporary myth. One throws it about as if we knew all about it. And we throw it about as if, knowing all about it, we know all about the world. We don't. The less we know, the more we throw it about - which is the way with myths. The more we know, the less inclined we are to throw it about without at least introducing a little explanatory curtain music.

In theTLS last week, Paul Seabright, in a review of Melvin Konner's Women after All,  threw it about to make a semi-claim about the social dimension of human sexual evolution. Here are the two grafs that concern me.

“Konner has two distinct stories to tell, and the one that occupies most of his pages is well told: it concerns what we now know about how biology shapes the difference between males and females, in many non-human species as well as in our own. It is no longer tenable (and has not been for some time) to think that biology determines only the anatomy of male–female differences while culture determines all the differences in behaviour. Human behaviour is massively variable and responsive to cultural influences, and virtually all observed types of behavioural trait have been found in at least some men and in at least some women. But there are still some traits, good and bad, that are more characteristic of men than of women, and vice versa.

Some such differences in traits (such as the greater male predisposition to violence) are present across most or all cultures, even when the magnitude of the difference is responsive to particular environmental and cultural circumstances. Some (such as a greater male preference for competitive environments and a tendency to perform better under the stimulus of competition) appear to hold in some contexts but not in others, yet are rarely found in reverse. For some, too, we know a little about the correlation of the trait with some physiological characteristics, such as testosterone levels. For others (such as the greater tendency of women’s scores on various tests of competence to be affected by what is called “stereotype threat” – a sensitivity of performance to cues about what is considered normal or expected for their gender), we still have frankly no idea.”

I’m interested in the meaning of the sentence in the second graf, of course. It seems so hedged that it ends up in a clause that makes the entire thing obscure. “Some (such as a greater male preference for competitive environments and a tendency to perform better under the stimulus of competition) appear to hold in some contexts but not in others, yet are rarely found in reverse.”

 What, exactly, does this mean? Certainly in natural history, competition within a species between males would mostly reference reproduction. Males compete to mate with females to produce more ‘vehicles’, as Dawson would have it, to carry their genes. Compete, here, seems to be consonant with competition within an idealized capitalist system. As we know, Darwin actualy took his competition model partly from Linnaeus, whose metaphor of the economy of nature referred not to the market, but to the court – to, specifically, competition for positions. There were places, awarded by the sovereign, that courtiers competed for. If you like, natural selection is at the crossroads between the Linnaen competition for place of the pre-capitalist system, and the Smithean competition for market share of the capitalist system.

This in itself should point to the fact that the greater propensity of males to create and flourish under the “stimulus of competition” is, on the surface, a contemporary truism, but when unpacked as a statement about human natural history, seems to beg the question of what is meant by competition and how it is a stimulus at all. Does flourish here mean that males devise competitive systems in order to mate with more females? And if this is so, why does it seem to be the case that the competitions end up having much more to do with positioning in the socius for most of the history that we know (which has rarely involved the love matches we now assume as the norm) than with biological reproduction?

Seabright could be saying, I suppose, that the competitive stimulus is perverted from its original framework.

Even here, though, it is not clear to me how this story of  competition – which is, remember, a functional relationship  - is supposed to work when applied generally to human societies and male and female difference. The phrase makes the individualist methodological assumption, but doesn’t press it too much, because once it is pressed it becomes pretty ridiculous. At least since the dawn of agriculture, most human beings have lived in families or clans and been ruled by these families or clans, at least as far as reproduction is concerned. These clans might compete under the image of the limited good – to use a phrase I am fond of – but I am not sure why women aren’t as much a part of this competition as men, or why they are supposed not to flourish under it. Nor why the relation between men and women isn’t competitive as well, in these circumstances – why does Seabright tacitly suppose gender leagues?

Sociobiologists have an unfortunate tendency to use any random ethological observation to make their points – but as the seventies song said, I don’t like spiders and snakes and that ain’t what it takes to love me. Humans are primates, primates are social animals, and we should go for our pertinent ethological data there, if anywhere. But just confining ourselves to human societies for the moment, I don’t see a big argument here for a., the idea that competitive systems are all fundamentally varieties of some primitive competitive relationship, or b, that the kind of competitions we find in the last fifty years, say, in business tell us anything about the natural history of human beings. 

Seabright sticks with his league play idea even as he shows that the complications of it make it fundamentally unrealistic, and in doing so, alludes (like the economist he is) to some tossed off bit of crackerbarrel wisdom by a wealthy fuck:

This in turn leads to a different kind of competition among males for access to these females than that among females for access to the males. Males are usually more persistent in their endeavours, and females more selective in response to male persistence. Males are usually more interested in the quantity of mating opportunities and females more interested in their quality. Each sex depends for its fitness on the ability to overcome the bottleneck created by the availability of the other, but the bottlenecks are different, and only exceptionally should we expect to see similar mating strategies evolve in the two sexes of any species.

These points are well known to biologists, but one of the fundamental insights of sexual selection (one congenial, of course, to Freudian psychoanalysis) is just how many apparently diverse behavioural traits are in effect mating strategies, directly or indirectly. This is no less true in our own species than in others, and that awareness creates endless opportunities for both science and speculation. One of the entrepreneurs quoted by Konner puts it bluntly: “Fundamentally, what drives most human behavior is basically foreplay”. The remark is revealing, though, less for what it says than for what it leaves out, namely afterplay. Human beings are a species whose social life is shaped uniquely in the animal kingdom by the massive investments we make in raising children. So much of our behaviour is about coping with the consequences of mating rather than just about making mating more likely to happen. It is probably a characteristically male trait to forget that.”

The last sentence would have been incomprehensible in the 18^th century, for instance, when the reproductive investment was the center of the family in many, many ways. It is a characteristically 2000s trait among the glib krewe of tell all-ers to forget that.

competing as a royal screwing

The ideological work of the capitalist system is seen at its most successful in creating the character mask of the competitor for the laborer. In our time, the workers work against each other not only in terms of the price they put, or can put, on their work, but also in as much as they must partake of the treadmill of skilling and de-skilling, which has advanced beyond what it was in the first industrial era - much as Marx predicted. The capitalist system seeks the maximum level of interchangeability among all the members of what I’d broadly call the working class – that is, the class who do not own the means of production. Thus, as members of that class strive to attain a higher price for their skills – investing in education and training – the organizations that hire them strive to devalue those skills by breaking down the peculiarities inherent in their routines. That is, the system strives to make them purely quantifiable. Consequently, we see such things as this: in the white collar world – say, of academia – the ‘uniqueness’ of the academic skill set is continually confronted (and the academic anguished by) the quantitative protocols by which the organization not only judges it, but by which it shapes an interchangeable work force. This is true everywhere there is R and D – the single inventor is replaced with the laboratory worker, the engineer is continually forced to market his labor inside the organization, etc. In the eighties, it became faddish – and still is – to speak of the worker’s “owning” their projects. Now, of course, the workers know that the projects are owned by the company. But the false ownership relation does its ideological work by turning the workers into small entrepreneurs, engaged in rivalry one with the other, or in temporary alliances. In this way, the workers never face the organization as an associated whole. To call the project workers the ‘owners’ of the project is an interesting instance of what Althusser meant by interpellation – that the first ideological act is the identification implicit in greeting, so to speak. 

Famines and Slumps: Galiani versus Smith, or a rehearsal for the Keynesians versus Chicago part one

It struck me as a bit of a revelation, yesterday, that a now obscure debate about trade legislation in 18^th century France resonates in economic thinking to this day, as the sides that were drawn in that debate took a form that was inherited by political economists who, over the last two hundred and fifty years,   have variously called themselves by different names: liberal or conservative, radical or orthodox, saltwater or freshwater, etc. They are even now arguing about the meaning of the business cycle - which has a much more insistent position in economic thinking, now, than famine. Yet it was famine that first prefigured the division, within the circle of enlightenment thinkers, between what one might call, anachronistically, the pragmatists, and those that represent the economic mainstream, from Smith to Robert Lucas.  Until Keynes, the pragmatists had no central, doctrinal figure – but in the eighteenth century they did have Ferdinando Galiani, whose Dialogue on the commerce of grain conceals one of the wittiest texts of the 18^th century beneath a title only an accountant could love.

The Dialogue came out in 1770.A little background, maestro, before we proceed with the explication de texte razzmatazz

In the 1760s – and here the go to texts are Stephen Kaplan’s series of books about bread and politics in 18^th century France, including Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV and the foreward to his edition of Galiani’s Le Bagarre – the physiocrats temporarily triumphed in their struggle to de-regulate agriculture, both in France and in Tuscany – both regions, as it happens, well known to Galiani. The traditional triumphalist history concedes, at this point, that instead of what was supposed to happen in theory –the increase in competition and efficiency, and the lowering of prices for grain – there followed a number of famines. By the end of the 1760s, the circle of philosophes around the encyclopedists were divided between the orthodox adherants of the free trade doctrine and dissenters, including Diderot. It was in 1770 that Galiani, who was previously seen as an advanced economist of the free trade type, published his dialogue. All hell broke loose.

Karl Gunnar Persson summarizes the physiocrat theory well: “ only free gran trade can achieve price stability. Local price stability required exports in tiems of abundant harvests, moderating the decline in prices. In lean years imports would make price increases less violent than if a region had to rely exclusively on its own supplies. Free entry to the grain trade was vital because with many merchants excess profits in the grain trade would not prevail: they would be arbitraged away by competing merchants.” (4)

One senses, here, the invention of a device that would be used over and over in the next two centuries. One was the important place given to the natural equilibrium of the unimpeded market. It would adapt to changed circumstances so as to bring about the most efficient outcome, unlike outcomes produced by regulation. The second is the place of competition. Competition would insure that the price system corresponded to that promised by the free market. This competition, it was assumed, would never devolve into monopoly. If it did, the price distortions would lure into the market space other competitors.

The physiocrats of course had other theories that are rejected today by mainstream economics – most notably, the idea that all wealth is based on agriculture. But this we will leave to one side.

Next, lets take our hero – Abbé Galiani. Ferdinando Galiani was a prodigy, writing letters like a dean when he was seventeen, lecturing when he was eighteen. Born in 1728, Galiani came from a distinguished and educated family. He wrote his treatise on money at the age of twenty; Schumpeter, among others, has remarked on its ingeniousness, both by the hypothesis of a subjective theory of value –  which is of course the way station to the marginalist revolution in the 19^th century – and for his remarks on general equilibrium.

By the time he came to write the dialogues on the grain trade, Galiani had had a lot of subsequent experience as both a writer and an adminstrator. He had, in the latter role, experienced the brunt of famine in Tuscany. It is usual to call Galiani a sceptic, which is a polite way of saying that it is hard to place him in some whiggish history of economics. I think that scepticism is rooted in two things, intellectually: one is the spirit of Vico, who seemed to have influenced all Napolitan thinkers. I’m thinking especially of Vico’s famous strike against Cartesian philosophy, On the Study methods of our time, with its rebuke of the geometrical method in philosophy. The other influence, which I may simply be making up, is Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury was a Napolitan thinker by adoption, one might say, since he retired and died there.  Galiani was not an anti-Lockian, like Shaftesbury, whose animus was born of his personal connection; but  about reasoning I think Galiani was of the same mind as Shaftesbury in moving the cursor of definition from the individual to the social: it was a product of sociability rather than introspection. It was the product of dialogue and the conditions that made dialogue possible.

Now one of our persona is in place. Our other persona – for I am making this a two person essay, radically foreshortening the whole thing – is a man who needs no introduction, as he has been in your office, kitchen, bedroom and dreams whether you know it or not: Adam Smith.

I will hold back on the background with Smith. Since he is the more known of our figures, I will merely allude to the fact that the Scotland in which Smith lived and worked was, like the Kingdom of Naples, a primarily agricultural place. Scotland, in 1695, emulated the English by encouraging the export of grain in order to bring in national income. It was a very short lived sport of a policy:  “In Summer, 1695, they were very busie in giving rewards for having their Corn carried abroad, and a few months after, as impatiently employed in buying it back again.” (Karen Cullen, 31) In fact, over the next five years, the harvests in Scotland were so bad that the people experienced scarcity and famine, only returning to the norm in 1700. As demand increased, so did prices: “In the two years from 1695, prices increased as much as 110 percent… In 1697, prices moderated a little, but in 1698 and 1699 they rose to new heights. Though precise figures do not exist, large numbers of the population died from starvation and disease. The dearth had serious consequences for rural incomes; many tenants faled to porduce a surplus.” (Richard Saville, 39)

The argument I am going to make is that the formal couple of regulation or deregulation and famine have a conceptual similarity to other forms of regulation or deregulation of cyclical economic processes. And it is this conceptual similarity that makes the debate between Galiani and Smith an interesting precursor of the contemporary debates between slightly heterodox Keynesian approaches to the economy and orthodox ones.

the parable of methods

In a letter to Sophie Valland, Diderot gave an account of an argument concerning method between his friend Grimm and M. Le Roy. Grimm hated method, or at least talk about method – either you knew how to arrange things through the force of things, or you do not. Le Roy took the opposite opinion. Just then the secretary of the ambassador of Naples in France – Ferdinando Galiani – spoke up:

“My friends, I am reminded of a fable: listen. It will be, perhaps, long, but it won’t bore you.
One day, in the midst of the forest, there arose a dispute concernng song between the nightingale and the cuckoo. Each vaunted his talent. “what bird, said the cuckoo, has a song as easy, as simple, as natural and also as measured as me?|”
- What bird, said the nightingale, has one that is sweeter, more varied, more lively and more light and more touching than mine?
- The cuckoo:  I say little, but what I say has weight, and order, and is thus memorable.
- The nightingale: I love to talk: but I am always new, and I am never tiring. I enchant the forests. The cuckoo saddens them. He is so attached to the lessons of his mother that he would not dare chance a tone that he hasn’t got from her. Myself, I don’t recognize a master. I play with the rules. It is when I infringe on them that I’m admired most. What comparison can there be between his fastidious method and my happy inspirations!

The cuckoo sought to interrupt the nightingale several times. But the nightingale sang on and didn’t listen: it is a little their characteristic fault. Ours, carried away by his ideas, followed them with rapidity, without caring about the responses of his rival.

However, after  the exchange of replies and counterreplies, they agreed to give the judgment of their dispute up to a third animal.
But where to find a third equally instructed and impartial who could judge them? It is difficult to find a good judge. The went in search of one everywhere.
They were crossing a meadow when they perceived an ass with the most grave and solemn aspect. Since the beginning of assdom, none had ever sported such long ears. “ah, said the cuckoo, in seeing them,”we are really fortunate that our dispute is an affair of  ears: here’s our perfect judge. God created him for us especially!”
The ass was eating grass. He hardly imagined that one day he’d be called upon to judge music. But Providence amuses itself with all kinds of things. Our two birds abased themselves before him, complimented him on his gravity and judgment, and exposed to him the subject of their dispute, after which they humbly begged him to listen to them and decide.

But the ass, hardly turning his heavy head and not missing a blade of grass, made them a sign with his ears that he was hungry and that today was not his day to assume the judge’s seat. The birds insisted: the ass continued to graze. In so doing, his appetite eased. There was some trees planted along the path through the meadow. “oh well, “ he told them, go there. I surrender to your wish: you will sing, I will digest, I will listen to you, and then I will tell you my opinion.

The birds went like a shot and perched themselves. The ass followed them with the air and step of a judge made of cement walking through the halls of the palace of justice. Finally he arrived and said: “begin, the court will hear you.” He was of course the sole court.

The cuckoo said: My lord, my argument is such that you cannot miss a word. Grasp the character of my song and, above all, observe the artifice and the method.” Then, breathing deeply and flapping his wings to emphasize the beat, he sang: coocoo coocoo coocoo coooocooo coocoo. And after having combined this in all possible ways, he fell silent.

The nightingale without a preambule deployed his voice, threw himself into the boldest of modulations, followed the newest tunes, and the ones that were the most rare. His cadences were such that they verged on the breathless; now one heard the sounds fall and murmur from the bottom of his throat like the ripples of a stream which loses itself among the pebbles, now the voice went higher, swellled little by little, filled the entirety of the air and remained there as though suspended. It was successively tender, light, brilliant, pathetic and painted whatever character it took on. But his song was not made for everybody.

Carred away by his enthusiasm, he kept singing; but the ass, who had already yawned many times, stopped him and said. I don’t doubt that everything that you sang there is very beautiful, but I don’t understand it. It appeared to me to be bizarre, tangled, and incoherent. You are perhaps more expert than your rival, but he is more methodical than you – and I, I am for method!

Such is the parable of methods.

Gehlen on alienation, Marx, and instituted freedom

In 1952 the conservative sociologist (and literally, I should note, a former Nazi one of whose students, Fritz Arlt, was a key functionary in the destruction of Poland’s Jews) Arnold Gehlen published a famous paper entitled “Over the birth of freedom from alienation.” The paper had two goals. One was to establish the essentially idealistic geneology of Marx’s notion of alienation. Gehlen traces it back to Fichte’s notion that the I in actualizing and externalizing itself experiences some essential loss of control. That feeling of loss and the desire to reestablish total control of the ego’s activity is compared, by Gehlen, to the French revolutionary terrorist program to establish total control in order to have total freedom – except, as Gehlen amusingly puts it, Fichte was just storming the Bastille of his own head. The idealistic assumption about the total I, here, is then traced through its appearance in Schelling and Hegel up through Marx and, to an extent, Freud.

As Gehlen says, Fichte’s insight was a genuine idea – and genuine ideas are rare in philosophy. Instead of claiming that Fichte is simply wrong about the “I” and its self-activity, Gehlen claims that alienation, as it develops in German idealist philosophy, describes a genuine phenomenon. That phenomenon concerns a two-fold sense of the world: on the one hand, the feeling that “man” or some creator has constructed the world, and on the other hand, the feeling that the creator is in the power of the created. This feeling, of course, slips from man the collective to oneself as the individual, a part of a partial collective. This powerful explanatory schema was employed, according to Gehlen, by the next generation of left Hegelians, like Feuerbach, to explain and demystify religious belief. God, it turns out, is a perfect symbol of the alienation process at work: man creates God, and then reverses the relationship so that it is God, in myth, who creates man. That historical and intellectual reversal is, perhaps, the central property of myth. Myth in this enlightment sense is that which both perceives the power relationships implicated in the real and reverses them. Thus, myth cannot be dispelled simply by claiming that myth is a lie – an illusion is not a lie. It is a genuine phenomenon out in the world. Here Gehlen is content to point to how illusion is laid on the table and understood, freeing us from it. Myself, I think he could have gone further: it must be dissipated not by analysis, but by the movement of the angle of one’s vision. Analysis might convince one that what one is seeing is an illusion, but only that practical movement can dissipate the illusion.

But Gehlen isn’t just investigating the idealistic background of Marx’s comments in The German Ideology. He is also interested in Fichte’s idea on account of his own idea – that the human being characterized by a fundamental lack, which is at the nucleus of her or his consciousness. Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology might argue with the details of Fichte’s sense of the I, but not with the general structure. Fichte, according to Gehlen, characterized the lack of control to which the I is condemned as the realm of bondage, of unfreedom. Here’s the rub, for Gehlen: in fact, the dream of total control, of the identity, say, of product and intention, is not the highest degree of freedom, but instead an erroneous reading of what freedom is all about. As Gehlen puts it, in a rhetorical flourish that would gain the approval of any Cold War liberal anti-communist: “Whosever enthusiastically realizes the feeling of freedom and the great determnation of man, whosever wishes to live out this titanic relief into which this feeling streams, whoever in this thought feels his heart beating more strongly, will, by an enigmatic destiny, find himself becoming the pacesetter of the Guillotine.”

Of course, Gehlen’s words are harder to read if we put them against the background of the pacesetters of the concentration camp, like his former student Arlt, whose thesis comparing “Israelite” women and Icelandic women – to the advantage of the former – was passed right on through by his thesis advisor. But looking aside from this: Gehlen’s notion is that the moment of alienation is not a moment in which freedom is lost, but is, rather, when it becomes a practical reality. Freedom is never direct: Humans can to themselves and their kind only maintain enduringly an indirect relationship, they must take a detour, alienate themselves, find themselves, and for this purpose we have institutions. These are the clearly human produced forms, as Marx saw correctly, in which the spiritual, an even in its greatest riches and pathos an undulating material, is realized, is interlaced in the flow of things and is thereby able to endure.”

This perspective, which welcomes alienation, bears the distinct flavor the capitalist consensus of the time – when, of course, the mention of alienation could not be avoided. It lives on when alienation is no longer a word to conjure with – has been almost unanimously junked by both the rational choice right and the rational choice left.

However, I am suspicious of this junking, its motives and its function. I'll return to this another time.

the no alternative years

Labour  failed in the most basic ways. They had four years to develop a counternarrative, but instead developed a counter-excuse: "we were so austerian, as austerian as you!" Basically, if you can't capitalize on the reserve of good feeling for government agencies like National Health and the reserve of bad feelings for privatized agencies, like the train system (ooops, that dittoed under Blair), then you should not play ball.

There are good defeats and bad defeats. A good defeat is one that lays the ideological groundwork for the future. A bad defeat is one that leaves behind a wreckage of opportunism and users. The Labour defeat (why actually are they still called Labour?) is of the second variety. It was hard to care when, as was obvious months ago, they had succeeded in turning certain victory into defeat. Running on a blairite message of nudgery and sticking to austerity against a tory party that was also running on a blairite message, they lost lost lost. And then, too, there was the repulsive - to my mind - Milliband, who has the look and feel of an upper class jerk.

So why didn’t Labour hammer austerity? Well, you have to talk about why the Great Slump happened if you are truly going to hammer austerity. And that means you have to talk about the City - which were and are great friends of the Blairites. There is a stupid analytic habit of thinking of elections as separate events from the rest of the political flow. They aren't. By choosing to softpedal the problems caused by the City, Labour backed itself into a corner long ago. Plus, of course, they have to bear the burden of the insane and wicked foreign policy of the Blair years. Given these burdens, one had to mark Labour down as the underdog from the beginning. The excuse that it was mean old Murdochian media that put them down won't work - Labour's victories have traditionally come against the establishment press – the one exception being Blair, and we know the sacrifices that Blair’s endorsement imposed. To face that media attack requires being nurturing of a structure that can withstand it and attack back - organized labour – to create a counternarrative. Blair (whose victories were a disaster for Labour) carefully cut the tie to labour. While Ed Balls retreat on austerity was bad in the campaign, it was the symptom of a wholesale disintegration of the old labour structure. 
A good case in point is transportation. Have you ever ridden on a London bus or a british train? They are awful and much, much more expensive than theircounterparts on the continent.

But the thatcherism that Blair adopted and passed on to his successors disallows any discussion of the issue of privatisation - which was accomplished, in the UK, after the Thatcher government thoroughly trashed the service and maintenance of the nationalized train system. A simple populist program that would call for comparable pricing to the norm in the EU would actually have put money in the pockets of the wage class. But it would have offended the city, and the blairites, and so it can't even be spoken. Instead, the pledge was a process one of handing power over buses back to regional authorities and blah blah blah. It was typical of the thrd way style: a lot of boring process talk to get around offending the moneyed. 

I think this election is a premonitory of the next pseudo-left wipeout, in France. The PS has set itself up for one of those defeats it will be hard to survive. Unfortunately, we will have a rightwing Europe to contend with in the next decade. Unfortunately, too, it won’t look much different than if we had a pseudo-left Europe to contend with in the next decade. No alternative, once a slogan, is now a cancer.

enough mass death, please

Excellent article about what is happening in Yemen.

It is part of the comedy of our time that the assembly in France is voting in measures to strip the citiizens of their privacy in the name of protecting them against "terrorism", when their foreign policy is directed towards flooding the Middle East with arms and helping the Saudis destroy countries like Yemen, thus creating the perfect conditions for terrorism. It is as if the government were promoting a strict quarantine of its citizens on the one hand while funding a petri dish firesale of toxins on the other hand.

When Ukraine split into two pieces, the former president fled to Russia, and Putin's Russia supplied the rebels in the East, there was universal condemnation from the bien pensants. There was even a comic conference of the usual pro war wankers, the BHL types, in Kyev. When Yemen split into several pieces, the former president fled to Saudi Arabia, a totalitarian country, and SA bombed the shit out of Yemen to restore him, without a whimper from the bien pensant crowd. The US jumped into the fray on behalf of those friends of democracy, the House of Saud, and have had a great time assisting with the dronage. Hmm, meanwhile, the outrage from the thumbsuckers at the New Yorker or the NYRB - the crowd that includes George Packer and Ben Judah, who froth every time Putin winks are busy doing other things - honing their TED talks, no doubt.
But I'm a wee little pee, not a Gargantua of liberal interventionist virtue. And I'm raising my wee little pea voice to say: stop bombing the shit out of Yemen! Immediate aid for the people, who are on the verge of an Ethiopian style famine!

I have long given up hope that the Western states are anything but the pawn of their plutocrats. But perhaps on this issue, the good side can win. Enough of mass death, please.

desperate characters

I am reading Paula Fox’s novel, Desperate Characters, and I’m grudgingly forking over the admiration. The grudging comes not because of anything having to do with Fox, but because of the backstory that the novel was “re-discovered” and republished due to Jonathan Franzen, who wrote an essay – always a venue for a Franzen ego-trip – about how good it was and that it was better than Updike or Bellow. Well, it is pretty obvious, given Franzen’s sexism, that he was using Fox as a proxy to say that he was better than Updike or Bellow – see, even a girl is better than those big boy writers!

I am reminded of Bellow – less of Updike – by the formal structure and scene of Fox’s novel. It is like Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet in that the novel takes the urban decay of NYC in the late sixties as its pervading scene.  The adventure is in the street, while all the stage setting takes place in various lengthily described rooms, where the party, the lunch, or the wait for a doctor takes place. Such staginess is, perhaps, endemic to life in the metropolis, which unfolds, for the prosperous, in a milieu of interior decorating and chatter. There is an ineradicable theatricality about such scenes, and Fox is extremely good at making it into novelistic. One should also note how of the times this is  – once you have established a standard of furnishing, the garishness and shoddiness of public space becomes all the more oppressive and threatening, all the more indicative of some catastrophic slip in the moral economy. J.K. Galbraith had already pointed out in the Affluent Society, which was written in the fifties, that underinvestment and undervaluing of public space was a creeping disaster in America. It was as though evidence of adequate funding would be taken by the middle class as an affront, since it would visibly use their tax dollars.  

Fox’s brilliant idea is to set her central couple, Otto and Sophie Bentwood, in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. That mongrel of a word, gentrifying, hadn't yet started running around in the  vocabulary of the sixties,  but all the same we recognize the attributes, the the contact zone that, once established, allows Fox to play off public squalor and private order to the effect of undermining both the security and the virtues of the latter. Although Fox is evidently on the liberal side as a person, as we can see from one of her authorial interjections about a George Wallace for President poster, still, the pathology of the downward tending exceeds the perception of our well to do protagonists by enough of a margin that one feels more than a whiff of the Moynihan Report. The poorer residents do things like piss out the window, throw garbage on their front lawn, and kneel, drunk and vomiting, on the sidewalk. Even doing more normal things, like borrowing 11 dollars for a train fare to see a dying parent, they do it with a sort of pathological panache.

The volume on this kind of things is, of course, turned up in Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Bellow is too good a novelist to be confined to his intentions, I should say. However much he intends Sammler to be a sort of moral center, Sammler’s sexism doesn’t really convince the reader that this is the morally centered way to see the world – the women he directs it upon are just too concretely realized, Bellow’s own opinions be damned. They are dreamed too well to follow the will of the dreamer. High art, y’all.

Fox is not aiming for the panoramic effect in Desperate characters; none of the characters “speak” for her, nor, in spite of the numerous references to urban decay, is there a lot of larger cultural pointmaking. There is a subtext of references to French literature – Sophie being a native speaker – with the chief names being Racine, Balzac and Zola. Like Balzac, Fox has no Flaubertian neurosis about inserting herself as an author in the text. This makes the text more complex. At one point, Otto, who we have seen as cranky and given to yelling at Sophie or grumbling at her at least, is in bed with his wife, when Fox ESPs his heart:  “He loved Sophie – he thought about her, the kind of woman she was – and she was so tangled in his life that the time head sensed she wanted to go away from him had brought him more suffereing than he had conceived it possible for him to feel.”

A lesser author might have tried to wedge this news announcement about Otto’s deepest feelings into the story indirectly. Fox simply cuts to the chase. And it is all the bolder in that this announcement directly proceeds Otto’s marital rape of his wife, which ends, after he orgasms, with his thought: “He’d got her that time.”

Not, I should say, that Sophe recognizes Otto’s act as rape, either. The couple are a curious blend of insightful and blind.

This is to say: I’m glad I ignored Franzen’s recommendation and read the novel anyway.

Baltimore

It seems to jerk a certain chain with the right whenever it is discovered that the cop who kills or maims the black person is black too. The point made is that this is, then, a priori not a racist act.

There is a larger point here, a truth that is in real conflict with the conservative vision of America – for surely it is not only a racist act. The militarization of the police, and their elbow room to do illegal acts and acts of brutality, is not simply racist. It is also the effect of the way in which domestic affairs in America, since the Nixon era, have been framed in military terms – for instance, the War on Crime. It is also the effect of class. The overwhelming number of victims of police brutality are in the bottom of the income and wealth brackets. And the African-American population has long been on the bottom of the pole, statistically, with regard to wealth and income. It is a fact that nobody cares about in the United States that the Great Recession struck black households harder than anybody else. Pew Research had this to say in 2014:

“The wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households in 2013, compared with eight times the wealth in 2010, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Likewise, the wealth of white households is now more than 10 times the wealth of Hispanic households, compared with nine times the wealth in 2010.

The current gap between blacks and whites has reached its highest point since 1989, when whites had 17 times the wealth of black households. The current white-to-Hispanic wealth ratio has reached a level not seen since 2001.”

1989 – twenty years of painful progress wiped out. Do we want to talk about this every day? No,  we don’t want to talk about this every day.  We will not talk about this on a boat, we will not talk about this with a goat, we will not talk about this on the tv news and we sure as hell won’t talk about this in the halls of Congress.

Clearing out the underbrush, then, we still have the fact that three of the cops charged in Freddie Gray’s death are black.

Here, I think we should turn to the indispensible Charlotte Linde and her ethnographic study of an insurance company. In explaining how the insurance company tells a story about itself, Linde made the point that the persistance of the company depends upon “drafting” people into that story: this she called  “narrative induction.”

 The title of her article is:  “The acquisition of a speaker by a story: how history becomes memory and identity.”

Narrative induction properly locates story as part of a process of initiation (which, being a “native” thing, or occult, failed to qualify for the verbal place held by identify with). Linde, in this paper, is obviously moving from her concern with stories people tell about themselves – the point of which is to say something significant about the self, and not the world – to stories people tell about the world. Those stories often are about experiences not one’s own. They are non-participant narratives.

Linde divides the NPN process– as she calls it – into three bits: how a person comes to take on someone else’s story; how a person comes to tell their own story in a way shaped by the stories of others; and how that story is heard by others as an instance of a normative pattern.

This is all about how the police work. Police departments lean on their members to become police, to identify as police, to see their enemies as the police define their enemies, to define their friends as the police define their friend. As Linde points out, most of the work on this kind of thing has been done in religious studies. Specifically, the study of metanoia, conversion stories. But there’s metanoia and then there’s metanoia. There’s St. Paul on the way to Damascas, and there’s Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, on the way to the relative wealth of a Toyota Car Dealership, owned by his father-in-law. That’s why Linde, not having access to St. Paul, opted to study the trainees of a major American insurance company in the Midwest. Linde is interested in class issues. In particular, stories of occupational choice. In her Life Stories book, she presented some evidence that professionals present their occupational choice stories in terms of some vocation or calling, while working class speakers present it, more often, in terms of accident or need for money. Philosophy professors rarely will say, for instance, well, I needed a steady paycheck, looked at the job security of tenure, loved the idea of travel and vacation time, so I went into philosophy. They will give a story rooted in their view of themselves as emotional/cognitive critters.

Police work, in America, has often served as a transitional profession, over generations, from working class to white collar. Since police unions successfully raised the benefits and pay of police forces in the eighties in cities around the country, the benefits are sometimes comparable to that of a middle manager. However, it is very much the case that, like philosophy professors, many a cop will say that they always wanted to be a cop – not that, all things considered, driving a truck paid less than being a policeman. There’s a strong vocational charisma, here.  Blue doesn’t erase black and white, but the kind of white that the police represent – that formed the police consciousness, so to speak – is a legacy that the integration of police departments has not negated – merely modified.

The right has never recognized racism as a structure – in the same way that it has refused to recognize class as a structure. Alas, the latter has now become mainstream: as the countervailing power of labor unions  has dwindled, there is little sense, even among supposedly lefty academics, of class or for class. There’s been a large blindness about the class based imaginary that makes it hard to understand class conflict when it rears back and punches you in the face. In Freddy Gray’s case, you have a trifecta of racism, class conflict, and the militarizaton – or should I call it the death squadization? – of the cops.  

goddamn it: we exist!

There are sounds that torture our animal souls beyond endurance, as is discovered by children the first time they scratch a blackboard. The car alarm, untended, in the city night makes the surrounding apartment dwellers dream of firearms and blasting not only the car, but the owner. Then there is the classic crying and screaming of the baby or toddler on the plane flight. It is an amazing fact of natural history that the lungs and vocal chords, otherwise so undeveloped, could raise such mature decibels of sound, and for so long! I once shared a trans-atlantic flight with a two year old girl, six or seven row back, who was evidently sick, in some kind of pain, and able to scream ceaselessly for about two hours. Her parents couldn’t calm her. I would put that girl, at that moment, up against the lead singer of Metallica for sheer volume any time. Yet, being a parent myself, I had no appreciation for the guy in back of us who kept suggesting that she should be stuffed in the bathroom – I dreamed of stuffing him in the bathroom, dousing his head in that weird aluminum vortex of a Boeing toilet, flushing him into the ocean.  

However, our animal nature’s are as keenly attuned – or at least I find mine is, and I don’t think this is special with me – with a perhaps evolutionarily attuned sense for another variety of sound, one that gives us a rare and complex pleasure…

A story: every week day, around 5:10 p.m., I walk the three blocks to the Y pre-school where we keep Adam.  I always leave in a bit of a disgruntled state, since I suddenly realize, around 4:30, that I have a ton of things to do that I now don’t have time to do. But as I approach the school, I always have this moment – not the best moment of the day, not every day, but always in my top five – which comes about simply because I stroll past the wall of the outside playground that abuts the sidewalk. I can always hear inside that wall the sounds of the children, who  I know are strewn about the slides, the plastic car, the plastic castle, the swings, the area in front of the small basketball hoop, and in circles around the teachers, and who are chirupping, screaming, talking, shrieking with joy (their running in the wobble of the voice), laughing and weeping over some crisis. The whole din always seems to touch some spring within me: I feel an affective state we do not have a noun for. It is something like hope without an object.

Kant, of course, is the great without-an-object man. For Kant, beauty was disinterested. Art of any type is fundamentally purposive but without a purpose, a use. We have lost our way if we are thinking of what use we can put beauty too – how we can photoshop it, for instance, to sell a product. We have lost our way to what the aesthetic is about. Well, we can dicker with Kant here – in fact, all of our culture dickers with Kant here – but the feeling of hope I am describing is something like this purposiveness without a purpose. I hope, but I don’t hope for the future. There’s no moral conclusion to my hope, like  hope that we will all someday hold hands and sing. It is a feeling of great expectation without thinking that anything much is going to happen. I know that I’ll pick up Adam, get his stuff, the empties from lunch, go to the store with him, go home. The end, as Adam says, turning the last page of a picture book. These things do overlap, perhaps, my feeling – if I Venn diagramed it out, there’d be the minor expectation of the routine with Adam overlapping the hope without an object, surely.

But that unoverlapped part, it seems to me that the hope is just this: that we exist.

Goddamn it. We exist.

competition three

Sorry, I am under the gun on other projects. Writing this in fragments

If I take a turn and throw a dart at a dartboard and then someone else takes a turn and throws a dart at the dartboard, we don’t say that the darts competed – we say that the players competed. Competition, here, is rooted in games played by humans – its old, situated meaning. It is not projected onto nature, or that part of nature which is constituted by an artifact of  a plastc stick  with a metal point at one end and little fins on the other end. Nor would we say that the dartboard competed with the darts.

Yet competition, as we all know, has long overflowed the agone. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the game has long been recognized as a prototype for other, “serious” kinds of social activity.

We automatically associate competition in nature with Darwinian evolution. That model of competition, as Marx saw, owes a lot to the classical economists. Marx meant this as a criticism of the whole theory of Darwinism, as though a model taken from a temporary form of social practice was inherently falsifying when applied to natural science.  Engels, more sympathetic to Darwin, tried the same trick by applying dialectical materialism to natural history, although without really delivering himself of some serious, systematic book. Marx of course forgot his own huge debt to the  classical economists as wel, which showed, at the very least, that a systematic reference is not an act of allegiance or an unconscious surrender to ideology. In any case, Marx’s notion has been taken up by intellectual historians to the point where it has become a truism – as Stephen Jay Gould put it, “Darwin grafted Adam Smith onto nature”. However, as Trevor Pearce has tried to show, the idea of competition in nature between “species” is backgrounded by more than the Scots philosophers. He points out that the idea of competition relies on the larger notion implied in Darwin’s famous phrase in the  Origins: “all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature.”  It is within this framework that we speak of the “competition” of, say, the quagga mussel  which has “invaded” the Great Lakes econsystem and outcompeted another invasive, the tiger mussel.  

Pearce, while acknowledging the influence of Malthus on Darwin, claims that not enough is made of the influence of other natural philosophers, and in particular, Linnaeus. When Linnaeus wrote of the oeconomy of nature, he did not have in mind incipient capitalism. He had in mind a notion that was connected to the great chain of being and the metaphor of the household – and ultimately, of the court. 

monsters

The sleep of reason isn’t the only thing that gives birth to monsters. Language does, too.

Last week, Adam and I were walking to the store when we passed by a big office building on Wiltshire. The building presented a big window to the street, through which one could see a very empty atrium. I’ve passed by this building hundreds of times without thinking much about it. Adam posed his standard question to me – what’s that, Daddy? I said it was an office building. He seemed a little disturbed that it looked empty, so I assured him that somebody worked there. He repeated my words. It amused me that he said somebody like it was somebody’s name.

The next day he mentioned somebody again, telling me that somebody is in his office. We were walking home. I said that somebody is in the car and somebody is in the house we passed too. Daddy. Funny daddy.

Little did I know that somebody seemed ominous to Adam. And his multiplication was a bit terrifying. Gradually,  I understood, but not before somebody had assumed terrible proportions. Now when it gets dark, Adam talks about somebody being in his office. This morning, as we walked out the door and went to the left – our standard route to Adam’s school – Adam broke into a run, and kept looking backwards.  I caught up with him, gave him the standard adult rap about don’t ever do that, and he told me that he’d seen somebody.

Somebody haunts us. So, actually, does Mr. Nobody, from the Goodnight Moon book. These monsters come straight out of our language, which has dreamt them up. I’m going to have to figure out how to ratchet down the fear of somebody.

the island of laputa - competition 2

It is said that Chryssipus the Stoic held that there were, for all problems, true solutions. But he also held that at times, we can’t see them – and those times called for a morally disciplined silence. It is in this spirit he approached the paradox of the heap – the sorites. The paradox is as follows: if we construct a heap from seeds, say, we can, by adding seeds successively, reach a point where we might say that we have a heap, and identify that with the number of seeds we have used – say, 200. And yet, when we subtract one seed, we are disinclined to say that we no longer have a heap. Given that fact, we might play the game by claiming that we haven’t reached a heap no matter how many seeds we use in order to avoid identifying the heap with a certain number of seeds – but then, paradoxically, we will never achieve a heap. In fact, we don’t really seem to be able to quantify a thing like a heap; neither do we want to say that the heap is a quality when clearly it can be analyzed into its separate parts. To borrow a term from contemporary logic,  there is no “heapmaker” – so how can there be a heap? Chryssipus, according to Sextus Empiricus, recommended that “when the Sorites is being propounded one should, while the argument is proceeding, stop and suspend judgement to avoid falling into absurdity.”  Analytic philosophers, such as Mario Magnucci, who wrote a seminal paper on the stoic response to the sorites, have attempted to incorporate Chryssipus’s response into standard Western logic. To me, the stoic response is closer to the notion of Mu in Rinzai Zen. The famous Mu Koan goes like this: a disciple of Zhaozhou, a Chinese zen master, asked him if a dog has the Buddha nature. Zhaouzhou answered Wu – Mu in Japanese – which means no, empty, vacant, and – it is said – applies in different ways to the question: that there is no dog, that there is no Buddha nature, that the dog does not have Buddha nature, and so on. In other words, the answer is meant to break the mental habit of thinking that the way of assembly – where distinct parts are put together – and the way of disassembly, where distinct parts are separated, are grounded in the real. Indetermination is neither a fact of the real nor not a fact of the real.

Too often, disputes among historians about the rise or decline of some historical property fail to acknowledge that rise and fall are sorites. Hence, arguments become very vicious about what the risemakers or the fall-makers are, and when they occur. Accepting that historical narratives have a sorites paradox at their center helps us clarify the half-fictitious natur e of the business. Even if one doesn’t stop and fall silent, like Chryssipus, one has to accept the possibility that finally, withdrawal is the correct response.

Which is an elaborate detour on the way to approaching the vexed question of the “rise of capitalism” in Western Europe, which basically means England and France, in the eighteenth century.  Of course,Great Britain and France were mainly agricultural –as was the US until 1900. But the question is not just about the rise of industrialism, but the monetarization of agriculture and the emergence of a market system – and the emergence of a “spirit” of capitalism.

That spirit has been poked and probed since, well, the eighteenth century itself. One aspect of it seems to me to be a little less sore from the prodding: the re-evaluation of competition.

 In James Steaurt’s  Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767), there’s an interesting footnote that briefly outlines a counterfactual history stemming from the hypothesis that the Fall neveer took place.

“Hence I conclude, that had the fall never taken place,the pursuits of man would have been totally different from

what they are at present. Mayl be allowed to suppose, that in such a happy state, he might  have been endowed with a faculty of transmitting his most complex ideas with the same  perspicuity  with which we now transmit those relating to geometry, numbers, colors, &c. From this I infer, there would have been no difference of sentiment, no dispute, no competition between man and man. The progress in acquiring  useful knowledge, the pleasure of communicating discoveries , would alone have provided a fond of happiness, as  inexhaustible as knowledge itself.”

The joke in making paradise into  the Isle of Laputa was no longer funny fifty years after Swift to the moral philosophers of the Scottish school – nor, in fact,  to the whole tribe of improving theoreticians who Burke attacks in the Reflections.

More on this later.

  

an analysis of competition for amateurs

There is a story told about the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott. He was talking to a meeting of clergy. One of them asked him how they should decide whether someone who comes to them for counseling should be sent to a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. Winnicott memorably said: “If a person comes and talks to you and, listening to him, you feel he is boring you, then he is sick, and needs psychiatric treatment. But if he sustains your interest, no matter how grave his distress or conflict, then you can help him alright.”

I think Winnicott’s criteria for separating sick and problematic characters can be extended to what the essayist’s “expertise” is. If, as an essayist, you are dealing with a topic that is boring you, probably it needs to be sent to a specialist. But if it is problematic and fascinating, then you can deal with it.

Lately, the topic that I have been itching to write a mini-essay on is “competition”. Competition is one of the colorless words of our time. To be colorless is to be over-understood – so understood that one loses touch with what, exactly, the sense of the concept is.

For instance: the other day I was reading, in the New York Times, a story about “terror birds” – massive birds that lived tens of millions of years ago and that, when laying down and dying, as a favor to paleontologists of the future, left gorgeously articulated fossil remains. As in any story about a now extinct species, the coda has to involve how they became extinct.  In this case, as the story had emphasized how the terror birds prayed on the incipient mammalia, all rodent like beasts, at the time, we had a vague stake in their existence and disappearance.

The fossil adds to the diversity of terror birds and raises new questions as to why they went extinct two and a half million years ago.

Since the species varied in size and weight, terror birds maynot have died out because of an inability to compete with placental mammals, assome researchers have suggested, Dr. Degrange said.

Dr. Degrange has my respect for rejecting the colorless explanation that would have satisfied the NYT mindset, which is all about competition being good for everything, the very vehicle of progress.

That sentence did make me think that it might be nice to see how competition crept into the worlds of natural history and moral philosophy (economics division). I am going to write a bit more about this.

Spitting out the Bittner taste in my mouth

During his lifetime, Gunter Grass opposed the Vietnam war, the emplacement of Cruise Missiles on German soil, the two Gulf Wars and the triumphalist mood after the fall of the Wall. Naturally, this is the type of character that the NYT editorial board collectively takes dumps upon. Now that he is dead and the obituaries pour in, it is a wonderful time for “contrarianism”, so they publish an incredibly boobish op ed piece by a German they’ve been favoring lately with deadtree space, a cat named Jochen Bittner,  an editor for Die Zeit who was last seen in the NYT pontificating like Charles Krauthammer that the West has to seize the Moral Leadership of blah blah blah.
So he’s the NYT gunman on the spot. Here’s a couple of unintentionally hilarious grafs about his Grass problem:

"I was able to pinpoint my frustration only when I met Mr. Grass in person. A couple of months ago he came from his home in Lübeck, on the Baltic coast, to visit my newspaper’s office in nearby Hamburg. The conference room was packed: Everyone — editors, assistants, interns — all crowded in to see this living legend. Although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with mixed emotions about the man, the atmosphere was one of near complete adoration. It was the kind of secular worship that I expect no younger author will ever experience, even if he or she wins a Nobel.
Your generation has had it pretty easy, I wanted to blurt out. You grew big in times when strong ideology and determined judgment counted more than the hard work of examining what is actually going on around us. The way you saw the world counted more than the way it actually was. And there was always a lot of self in your righteousness….
...
I wanted to say all of this, in front of my enraptured colleagues. But I didn’t dare.”

So, we have Bittner, deciding that he represents his generation in Germany (although I’m pretty confident most of his generation has never heard of him) touting the old conservative rap about the “left wingers” but not daring to even speak up before his colleagues.
Luckily, though, he has a lot of that dissident courage in retrospect. So, the man who couldn’t disturb a confab with a famous author is more than willing to use the confession of that famous author that when he was 17, he was conscripted into the Waffen SS to say na na boo boo– and that is supposed to pop Grass’s moral bubble.
So what is the contrast here? It is a contrast of confessions, of Grass's and Bittner's. It is a contrast of unconsciousnesses. Are we supposed to think Bittner, under a regime that would put you in a concentration camp for writing anti-nazi grafitti in a bathroom, would have calmly told the Nazis to fuck off when they came for his counterfactual teen self in 1944? Well, of course he would. Like Mighty Mouse, he would give them the old one two and they'd fall back astonished. Then he'd leap over a few recently bombed buildings.

. Grass was a thoroughly Nazified teen, no doubt, and to my mind, this is one of the sources of his authenticity – he could see, unlike a rightwing critic like Joachim Fest that what was attractive about Naziism was also what was wrong with it - the whole ideology of strength, of toughness, of leadership, decisionmaking, contempt for relativism, absolute faith in what the established power thinks is right or wrong.. Fest  of course began the rant about Grass’s hypocrisy that is echoed in the Bittner piece, even though Fest himself had volunteered for the Wehrmacht, which he claimed was not responsible for any atrocities against Jews - at best, a delusive belief. At the time of Grass's confession, much was made about his  condemnation of Reagan's visit to Waffen S.S. graves. Pat Buchanan, for instance, had his word about it. The weaselish echo wends its way into Bittner's prose.

Bittner does represent one part of his generation – the upper class twits. When Fest wrote his bio of Hitler in 1973, what he was imagining was how nice it would have been if the Weimar leftists had been swept out with a little less anti-semitism - that is, if only Hitler had been Pinochet! It has long been a popular position among the twit set. Bittner is an opportunist of the first water, and I imagine a counterfactual 40 year old Bittner in 1944 he would have elbowed his way into some Deutsche think tank using the same networking methods he's so successfully employed in Merkel's Germany.   He’s a big product of the neo-con network,  EU section, with his positions with the German Marshall fund and his special relationship to Merkel’s Foreign Affairs office.  His embedness has been the subject of some fun in Germany, getting prominent play on the satirical show, Die Anstalt, which published his and his editoreit (Joffe)’s links with various think tank groups - and in Joffe's case, lobbyists. Of course, these two are prominent supporters of the American foreign policy line vis a vis Ukraine.   Bittner and Joffe sued, and lost the case – although the court gave two points to Bittner for one line in the broadcast. Anstalt seems to have been inspired by the wonderful French documentary, Les Nouveaux chiens de garde, which chopped up the purveyors of conventional wisdom in the media and showed their connection to various plutocrats and corporations.

Although the NYT considers itself an avenging God when it comes to those terrible left wing intellectuals in Europe, the Bittner piece seems to me to redound to Grass’s credit. If he repulsed such repulsive critters as Bittner, he must have been doing something right.

the interview experience

Robert Musil opens his interview-profile of the essayist Alfred Polgar with a joke:

One day I said to myself that the interview is the artform of our time. Because the mega-capitalistic beauty of the interview is tha the interviewee does the whole mentla labor, and gets nothing for it, while the interviewer does actually nothing, but pockets the honorarium.

The joke contains an important truth. Interviews are definitely built around a peculiar economic arrangement. Most of the time, we read the interview for the interviewee, not the interviewer, who is nevertheless given the byline (as Musil was for the Berlin paper for which he interviewed Polgar) and the fee. Mostly, the attraction is the better known interviewee – Musil was less known, in 1922, than Polgar, who was as well known in his day as, say, Roger Ebert is in ours.

The joke does not contain the whole truth however. Musil walks it back a bit in the next paragraph:

Other than this it is charming that one may, in an interview, ask a person questions in a manner that would otherwise be offensive. One must naturally get out of the moronic “how do you like our city” and “did you sleep well on the trip” . One must terrify the interviewee, shake him up; for one must successfully put questions, in the name of cultural duty, for answers that of his own free will he would never surrender.”

This is the whole matter of the interviewers art. Or no: I say this having done more interviews in my freelancing days than I can count, from the high – for instance, William T.Vollman – to the low, as for instance some mid level clerk in charge of the erotic comics section at the local comix store. I had no previous training when I was thrown into this work; I very quickly learned that what you read is not eactly what the interviewee said.

But more of that in a moment…

Just as Musil suggests, moronic questions are only good for softening the victim up. Or at least that is how it should be. In fact, as any faithful reader of the NYT Magazine knows, the moronic level is often the alpha and omega of the interview. For instance, there is the old standby, where do you work? This question is always being thrown at writers, for reasons that puzzle me. Would we ask an accountant where they account?  Yet, it is an inexpungable bug in the system of which interviews form a part. The place a writer writes has some strange attraction, it has become a tourist destination of the mind, yet I don’t know what the there is there. What does the question even mean, given that it is a rare writer whose head doesn’t suddenly fill, on the most unexpected occasions, with solutions to plot problems, phrases, rhymes, and the whole business.

However, while Musil says some excellent things about interviewng in this essay – I must get back to a few of them at some other time – he doesn’t say, no interviewer ever says, that there is a gap between transcript and copy. Transcript isn’t copy. After the interview is done and the tape recorder is turned off or the writing peters out in your notebook, where your unintelligible scribble has been lunging through the pages like a troop of drunken monkeys, you have to then take it all home, or to your office, or whereever, and make sense of it.

Sense. Oh.

Americans in particular are not raised in the kind of conversational milieu that made interviews, that 18^th century invention, possible. There’s a certain inabilty to form obiter dicta spontaneously as the ocassion arises. In the 18^th and 19^th century, all these figures, these Goethes and Samuel Johnsons, cultivated the pronunciamento like little dictators. It was as if a part of their brain snapped on and they could give a speech. This cerebral state hardly exists in the general population. Instead, there is a constant segue between half starts, riffs that deadend, rap that becomes air time, and the like. And – one hopes – in the midst of this, one will encounter some beautiful conclusive sentence, the kind that the publishers love, because their ;publication designers (whose firm belief is that nobody reads any more) can use it as a ribbon in bold, large type scrolling across a dense, three or four column page. Unfortunately, most of these glorous sentences wilt into mere platitudes once they are awarded big font size.

I love American speech; it is the glory of the country. It just doesn’t conform to the old strictures of the interview.

Thus, the relationship of the transcript to the interviewer becomes something like the relationship between a DJ and a stack of tunes. The DJ has to find, among the disparate sounds and songs, some common threads, as well as abrupt changes. He has to create a consistent soundscape.

Similarly, the interviewer has to recontext the context. Usually, for nstance, that beautiful sentence is nested in among a bunch of banalities. It needs to be lifted out. Other sentences need to be pared back, supplied with the verb that was dropped in the moment, pruned of the repetitions. The question answer format has to be straightened out too, as many interviewees tend to give the most satisfactory answer to question 1 when answering question 3.

In a way, Musil is right. The end product is the kind of  simulacra mega-capitalism thrives on. The interviewee, in my experience, is often delighted with one’s work.

Here’s an exercise: watch a tv talk show interview of Youtube, and try to take notes on the Q. and A. Then turn it off, read the notes and see if they make sense. Then make them make sense. Then watch the interview again.

Voila: the interview experience.