the era of splaining 'splained

The Upshot was supposed to be the NYT’s ‘splainer. Splaining is very popular among the center-liberal crowd who went from their twenties to their thirties in the Bush and Obama years. The center of the ‘splainer universe is Vox, which has decided the gimmick is to present opinion pieces as though they were explanations. It is as if you received a box containing, say, the parts for a tricycle, and were given an instruction sheet that told you why the person who wrote it prefers a red to a blue tricycle. This is why it is ‘splaining. Usually, there will be some grafs thrown in, as though we were big boys now, but grafs are only convincing in a convincing context. For decades, the climate change denialists would use a graf to show that the climate worldwide was actually getting cooler. Easy to do: just take the outlier peak of 1998 and graf everything from that.

And so it is with the Upshot. Every once in a while, the Upshot magisterially surveys the presidential race so far to tell us all what its about. And it always includes grafs like this one:

“The polls get most of the attention, but they’re not the most important part of the early stages of a presidential campaign. The better guide to who’s really winning is known as the “invisible primary,” in which candidates compete for support from their fellow politicians, from party leaders and from donors.”

This is a very press-centric view of how presidential campaigns function. And as it has crashed into the fact that the polls are actually driving, for instance, the invisible primary – why else is Jeb Bush now number 2 on their little chart – it has remained in place, just as a sort of sign that says: peons stay out. Serious ‘splaining going on.

In fact, to say what is and what is not important about a dynamic system is – as explained by even a brief acquaintance with any of the literature – requires not only being able to break it down into its “natural” parts, but the ability to build it up again into the way those parts function with each other. The Upshot people have, in their wisdom, divided one set of facts – the polling of the population of voters – from another set of facts – the inputs from funders and established political figures. And in their account, the latter drives the former.
However, this kind of dynamic has not been the story of the campaign so far. Now, to the ‘splainers, since this is the kind of dynamic that gives them the advantage, knowing the insiders and all, this is very disturbing. So, the way to paper over that disturbance is to pretend it isn’t happening.
An excellent example of ‘splaining in action occurred when Trump basically blasted the war record of John McCain. McCain is a hero to the press corps. Famously, a Times reporter in 2008 compared being around McCain like being able to hang around a football hero in high school. So the attack on McCain, they naturally assumed, would create a great wave of horror that would topple the Trump clown.
Not only did this not happen, but the Trump clown has grown in the popular polls. This has led to the ‘splaining meme of the leak. The leak will sink the Trump “balloon”. This metaphor has been independently discovered by Politico, Vox, the Upshot, and other fine outlets of ‘splaining, and they are all watching for their prediction to come true. Meanwhile, the invisible primary’s number one, Jeb Bush, has been having a campaign much like Humpty Dumpty’s after the unfortunate wall incident. And his response has had that entitled touch which crosses Mitt Romney at his country club worst and Neil Bush explaining Silverado:

“If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then I don’t want anything, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation. I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, be miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that.”
This is the kind of talk that endears Jeb to the ‘splainer heart, since gridlock is a terrible thing. It has prevented, for instance, that Social Security reform that could have tracked us onto privatizing that thing, and lowered social security benefits as well! There’s a graf somewhere that ‘splains how great that would be. Plus, of course, the idea of cool is something you don’t have to analyze among the thirties group: they all love cool unthinkingly, with all their invisible polling heart!
I am wondering, though, whether the cool kids aren’t about to turn on ‘splaining. After a while, it seems a bit, oh, patronizing…

the decoder ring

We name our epochs or ages like we name our pets – to give them a handle. Spot may have spots, and the industrial revolution might, in some places, have indicated an enormous increase in manufacturing. But when we fall to quarreling over the name, we are, perhaps, succumbing to magical thinking. Spot may also rove, like Rover, but she still has spots. She thinks of herself in entirely doglike terms, so it is impossible to say that she gives herself something like a name at all.

There is something, well, vocational about a name – a name is also a calling. Mysteriously, an age seems to conjure into being its symbols, which coalesce around what we call it. This happens even on a trivial level. Thus, the post-war era, in which transistors and computer languages figure so largely that it has been called the information age, gave birth, on the level of children’s toys, to the decoder ring.

The decoder ring evolved in the twentieth century about the same time structuralism as a recognizable school of thought emerged in academia and the popular press. Levi-Strauss’s Les structures elementaires de la parenté appeared in 1949, the heydey of the radio show, Jack Armstrong, which promoted a whistling ring and a decoder pin. In the popular memory, which operates much as Freud theorized that dreams function,  these things have coalesced into the “secret decoder ring”. As far as I can tell, the fabulous object itself did not yet exist, as such.

In fact, what we discover at the origin of the decoder ring is a shift in the binary distributing properties to the boys and the girls. A pin, of course, is coded female. A badge is coded male. But in the thirties, when Shirley Temple and Captain Midnight offered decoder toys, the toddler male was often an in-between thing. I remember pictures of my own father when he was around five, in the thirties. His hair rolls down in a luxurious blonde wave, to his shoulders. He wears – or am I wrong about this? – a rather effeminate Buster Brown outfit. This was not due to some aberration of my grandmother, but rather, expressed an entire conformity with cuteness as defined by the upper middle class of that time. In stories from that era, the boy wearing such things was often the target of the street kid – the son of a worker, the kid signalled by his ain’ts and his dirty knuckles and face.

In the post-war era, the fashion for long haired male toddlers dressed in girl-like clothes waned. Pins became badges. And the badges were often surmounted by violent male emblems, like guns, or atom bombs.

Yet the ring remained. This is of interest. The standard WASP prohibition of most male jewelry did not extent to the ring. True, single men did not often, under this standard, wear rings – that was confined to ethnics, with their pinky rings. But the military established a certain acceptance of rings as the kind of insignia that a man could wear without embarrassment.

I could compare, at some length, this prehistory of the decoder ring with the pre-history of structuralism, which also begins in the era of movies and radio shows – the twenties and thirties, when phenomenology, formalist literary theory, and Sausserian linguistics came together in places like Prague or Moscow (where the people who met to hash these things out, like Jan Mukarovsky or Roman Jacobson, were part of circles).

The secret decoder ring came together in a supreme act of bricolage at some point in the late fifties. It was if not the golden era, at least the silver era of prizes in boxes of foodstuffs (of no nutritional value) for kids. Breakfast cereals used these “premiums” to sell their stuff, and in so doing they sold the cartoon that the ring was usually associated with. Sometimes, though, it was other products that promoted themselves through rings. Thus, the cartoon Jonny Quest, which accurately reflected a racist, imperialist mindset that ran through this stage of the American empire, was associated with a magic ring, which seemed predicated on the old idea, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – the ring had forur distinct components (a magnifying glass, a dial a code a signal flasher and a secret message compartment) that were all distinct components of earlier rings.

The classic decoder ring was, indeed, the ur structuralist text. The ring contains two bands. The inner band has inscribed on it the alphabet and numbers 1 through 9.The outer band has a corresponding sequence of letters and numbes. One has merely to establish a turn for the inner ring: say, one notch, to change the a to a correspondence to a to b. Voila, the code! Elemental structures of kinship, indeed – here was all the exogamy and secret names you could want.  

Perhaps the Jonny Quest ring, with its baroque structure, signaled the coming decline of structuralism. It came out in 1965. A year late, in October, 1966, Johns Hopkins sponsored a conference on the latest wave of European thinking entitle, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structural Controversy" at which, for the first time on these shores, Jacques Derrida presented a paper commonly thought to foreshadow the coming destruction of structuralist hegemony: "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."

The decoder ring, as it were, was broken.

Which is another story.

a day in the life

This weekend we had a late afternoon picnic over at Emerson Reed Park with some friends. The friends had two kids, one five and one seven. We have Adam, now three. The Park is a heterogenous space. There’s a large structure that houses a theater, a typical California house circa 1940 with the Spanish look – whitewashed walls, red tile roof. There are tennis courts, two rows of them, behind large fences with green netting to give the players privacy from the steet, I guess, which go down to Wilshire and up to the right wing of the theater, almost, leaving a little space for a garden and a fountain and some rose bushes in the between area. There is, next to the left wing of the theater, an almost acre area of grass and trees. There is a basketball court, or rather, a large asphalted area that boasts three basketball courts. There is, behind the theater, a sort of garden, with a pathway that leads down to a structure with four bathrooms. Then there’s another house, also Spanish style,  that faces Seventh street. And finally, there is the thing that interests us, a children’s play area, neatly divided into two, which lies next to the basketball court and is separated by a metal fence from it.

These are the features of the park as you would find them on a plat. My description is pathetically 1-D. But the major feature of the park, for the person who first wanders in 3-D into it, is the presence of lounging street people, who are everywhere on the acre of grass and trees, or sitting on the steps of the theater building. Some have shopping carts, some sleeping bags, some nothing. There’s a rule that is spelled out on a sign on the gate to the children’s area – no adult unaccompanied by children allowed. This is very much obeyed.

After one adjusts to the use of the acre, it soon becomes obvious that, like some watering hole in the jungle, the varieties of type all coexist there reasonably well. The basketball court is much used by pickup players, coaches teaching little league basketball, and weekend regulars. The children’s area, which, as I said, is divided, offers a sandy area, swings, a trampoline, a small labyrinth, and a low hanging basketball hoop on its one half, where the children are usually younger, and a more busy jungle gym and slide area, where the children are a bit older. Here there are some picnic tables. Here parents, grandparents and nannies sit. Adam is a traveler in both realms, although sometimes he abandons playing in the sand, swinging on the swing, trying to put the basketball through the low hoop, climbing on the jungle gym, rising and falling on the seesaw, or sliding down the slide, to hang, longingly, on the fence between the children’s area and the adult basketball area and ask, can I play basketball?

He can’t, we explain. He doesn’t like this.

After an hour or so, we all decided to head home. The five year old and Adam decided, though, to charge the seagulls that pick among the lounging streetpeople. So they charged the birds, which skittered off into flights just above the ground, and came perilously close – Adam and his friend - to this or that sleeping body, knowing enough by some instinct to veer off before they actually trod on a limb or ran into a recumbent mass. I thought, as I often do, how insane it is that our contemporary world enfolds a permanent Great Depression within it, which we all see and which we all exclude, not even thinking, from the “we” that is the subject to how we are – watching HBO or wondering whether to put “our” children in the pre-school that costs 24,000 dollars a year.

Mark Bowdon interviews enlisted men! Bystanders applaud. Heroes win!

This paragraph by Mark Bowden, defending his version of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, is the loveliest expression of the pres bubbleI have seen in a long time:

“While Hersh’s story (and Mahler’s) suggests that mine was, in effect, handed to me by administration spokesmen, it was (as the book notes) based on dozens of interviews with those directly involved, including President Obama. One wonders where else the story might come from, since the hunt for bin Laden and the mission to kill him were conducted by government officials, right down to the enlisted men who conducted the raid. Basing a story on those government sources directly involved makes it “official” in some sense, I suppose, but I have never been in the employ of the government, and have carved a fairly extensive career working with complete journalistic independence.”

Yes, one does wonder where a story about an event in fucking Pakistan would come from if not from American officials, including the President. Pakistanis? Oh please. Those guys don’t even speaka the English. They couldn’t possibly know anything about what happened on their soil. No, it was enlisted American men – enlisted – the U.S. Army – heroes! – who filled my ears. Enlisted men, not draftees. Of course, there are no uh draftees, but I thought I ought to mention that they were enlisted. Heroes!

This is how the press works, as a not very subtle propaganda machine.

His list of sources doesn’t include one Pakistani. Not one! Not even an enlisted one! Cause they aren’t heroes, I guess.

“I interviewed J.S.O.C. commander Admiral William McRaven, who helped plan and who oversaw the mission, and members of his staff. Some of the others (without listing their job titles) were Tony Blinken, John Brennan, Benjamin Rhodes, James Clark, Thomas Donilon, Michèle Flournoy, Larry James, Michael Morell, William Ostlund, David Petraeus, Samantha Power, James Poss, Denis McDonough, Nick Rasmussen, Michael Scheuer, Gary Schroen, Kalev Sepp, Michael Sheehan, and Michael Vickers. These sources—and others—worked on the case in various capacities for years and were present and often involved in the key decisions that led to the mission.”

Why, how somebody would look at that list and say that it was an official government version is just beyond me.

Oh, and here is the telling series of grafs from the Mahler piece that Bowden is replying to:

“Eleven days after the raid, an unbylined story appeared on GlobalPost, an American website specializing in foreign reporting. The dateline was Abbottabad; the story was headlined: ‘‘Bin Laden Raid: Neighbors Say Pakistan Knew.’’ A half-dozen people who lived near bin Laden’s compound told the reporter that plainclothes security personnel — ‘‘either Pakistani intelligence or military officers’’ — knocked on their doors a couple of hours before the raid and instructed them to turn the lights off and remain indoors until further notice. Some local people also told the reporter that they were directed not to speak to the media, especially the foreign media.

When I contacted the chief executive of GlobalPost, Philip Balboni, he told me he considered trying to aggressively publicize this narrative when he first posted it. ‘‘[B]ut that would have required resources that we did not possess at the time, and the information against it was so overwhelming that even we had to wonder if our sources were right,’’ he wrote me in an email.

Balboni put me in touch with the reporter, Aamir Latif, a 41-year-old Pakistani journalist. Latif, a former foreign correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, told me that he traveled to Abbottabad the day after bin Laden was killed and reported there for a couple of days. I asked him if he still believed that there was some level of Pakistani awareness of the raid. ‘‘Not awareness,’’ he answered instantly. ‘‘There was coordination and cooperation.’’

Understandably Latif, being Pakistani, wouldn’t know anythng about it. I mean, enlisted Americans! Samantha Power!

It would be totally silly to actually go to Abbottsford and interview the inhabitants. Which is why, thankfully, our American reporters don’t do such things. Imagine there was a fire in say, Chatanooga, and one interviewed Chatanoogans about it… uh, oh, sorry, bad example, since Chatanoogans are Americans, many have enlisted, and all are heroes!

It is so sad that Sy Hersch doesn’t, once, admit how Americans are heroes. He must be violently attacked by all the right people. This will not stand, this act of aggression!

the heteronormative American tone

I have a hunch that the comedy of self-consciousness, in other words, self-consciousnessery, has about exhausted itself. It is the prevailing tone adopted by white male American novelists and writers from about the 90s forward. I’ve been reading 10:04, Ben Lerner’s novel, and finding it both less irritating and less amazing than Leaving the Atocha Station – and this is significant. Lerner’s first novel was to self-consciousnessery what, say, Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans was to metaphysical poetry – it pushes the tone and tic to such an extreme that it undergoes a fatal crisis. Hmm, perhaps my analogy isn’t perfect – to my mind, the self-consciousnessery of LAS produces something interesting, the picaresque rouge as uber-self-conscious American. Perhaps it was the Spanish locale. Perhaps there was a subtle reference to Lazarillo de Tormes or Quevedo.

As David Foster Wallace made clear, self-consciousnessery with its endless fastidiousness and play of retraction and assertion was, in part, a response to a previous generation of asshole writers (Mailer, Updike, Bellow, Roth, etc.). Politically, the self-conscious style was supposed to mark and check the white privilege – heteronormativity, y’all, the great white whale itself, this time as hero. But of course it did no such thing. Updike, perhaps the most assholeish of the previous generation’s writers still set on foot and dealt  in novelistic terms with a host of female and black characters. SC-ery, to my mind, has largely failed to pick up the challenge. Perhaps I can exempt The Corrections from this charge, but otherwise, the story for the women – upper class, college educated, white – largely falls into the same as-it-ever was: women are seen as objects of romance or as failing to be objects of romance. Their interest, in other words, is outside themselves. Esse est percipi, which is one of the great formulas for disempowering the other -  the colonialist principle elevated to a cosmic injunction. Thus, the meaty american story of the last couple of decades is approached only obliquely. That story, of women – mostly upper class and mostly white – experiencing the market place and upward social mobility – escapes the SC-ery trap, which is, perhaps, designed not to trap that historic moment.

As an aside, here, let’s not be heteronormative ourselves about that moment. It is definitely a story of class and race as well. For the vast majority of American women, lean-in feminism is a joke, another management ploy in order to keep labor cheap and disorganized.

Along with 10:04, I’ve been reading a much more obscure book about NYC. Stanley Walker’s Mrs. Astor’s Horse was published in 1935. Walker was just coming off his stint as the news editor of the New York Herald Tribune, a position he held down beginning in 1927. He’d seen the peak of the Jazz Age and its collapse in the Depression. Someday, given the perpetual nostalgia for accounts of New York City low life and glamor, Walker’s book will be reissued. I can just see a NYRB edition, with a preface by Luc Sante. Walker’s tone is keyed to his generation’s wisecracking white male American. It is a language that uses the slang of the ballpark and vaudeville, and that plunges into what the American Mercury, Mencken’s magazine, used to call curiosae Americanae – the eccentric side of American life. Eccentric in the broad sense that includes lynching and the antics of California radio evangelists. It crunches down on electrocutions and adultery among the rich, with the aim of casting an unflattering light on the American booboosie, the eating, drinking, ticket paying esse who loved nothing more than gawking at the spectacles of that which supposedly violated their norms.
Mencken, Winchell, Ring Larnder, and the early New Yorker wits were very good at this. Because it is the kind of writing that presupposes the yawning cretinism of the American middle class, one might be lured into thinking that it is performing a progressive critique. But as the progress of Mencken showed, it wasn’t. It was the kind of satire that does a turn around in the fifth act. Although the businessman is a Babbit, heaven help us if we take the economy out of his hands. Although the ossified WASP is ridiculous as any kind of arbiter, in the end, he is our true bearer of civilization and lets not mess with our current arrangements, lest we get Bolshevism.
Within those limits, though, this enjoyment of the American carnivalesque does give us a point of view from which to see the limits of S.C.-ery, and in particular, the latter’s surprising piety about res publica.
About which more later.  

more on thoreau

I’ve thought some more about the essay on Thoreau that I dissed yesterday. I actually see where Schulz is coming from in her recoil from the idea that Thoreau was a saint, rather than a writer. But Schulz certainly fails to understand Thoreau the writer.

It is a misprison that comes out best, I think, in Schulz’s staging of the gotcha moment. Which is here:

“The book is subtitled “Life in the Woods,” and, from those words onward, Thoreau insists that we read it as the story of a voluntary exile from society, an extended confrontation with wilderness and solitude.

In reality, Walden Pond in 1845 was scarcely more off the grid, relative to contemporaneous society, than Prospect Park is today. The commuter train to Boston ran along its southwest side; in summer the place swarmed with picnickers and swimmers, while in winter it was frequented by ice cutters and skaters. Thoreau could stroll from his cabin to his family home, in Concord, in twenty minutes, about as long as it takes to walk the fifteen blocks from Carnegie Hall to Grand Central Terminal.”

This reading of the book can only be held if we think that Thoreau was thinking of his audience as composed of high school and college students one hundred fifty years hence.

But Thoreau did not think of his audience as composed of people reading Walden in a classroom. His audience was composed of people who knew exactly where Walden was. If, as I think is evident from the text itself, this is the case, then Schulz’s idea that the subtitle tells us that “Thoreau insists that we read it as the story of a voluntary exile from society, an extended confrontation with wilderness and solitude” is simply foolish, a denial of the mass of references and ironies that any literary text brings with it, especially one written in the train of an essayistic tradition of crossing the serious and non-serious – in other words, the romantic tradition of the ludicrous. In American culture, as I pointed out yesterday – following in the footsteps of such pioneers here as Constance Rourke and her book on American humor – the ludicrousness of Dequincy or Lamb or Byron (when he was in the mood) becomes the deadpan. By erecting a vision of Thoreau which makes Walden and all his works the direct, unironic expression of Thoreau’s personality, Schulz gives a perfect classroom reading of Thoreau’s work, one in which the idea that Thoreau was talking about Life in the Woods shows how he was throwing dust in our eyes, and hence was no saint, and hence can be tossed in the dump.

But if you are not sold on the the idea that the text can be read with absolutely no attention to the contexts that make sense of the effects it aims for, then Schulz’s piece reads like less of an attack on Thoreau than on some odd poster of Thoreau, with an inspiring quote caption, hung up in a dorm room. The class room, the dorm room – these are very much reading scenes. And of course any text that is worth killing trees for should lend itself to multiple reading scenes. But what is usefully done in a college classroom, or should be done, is to invigorate the text with its material context. If I read Thoreau mentioning dead drowned children cursorily and turning from them to evoke the landscape and I put this in some universal moral place, eliminating the time and place of the writing, I have one reaction – one tracked by Schulz. But putting the writing in the context of the vast amount of sentimental writing about dead children – Thoreau’s was the era in which the death of Little Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop became an actual cause celebre, as was famously attested by the anecdote about American readers gathering on the docks when ships from England came in, wanting to know more of Dickens’ story – than you might pause and ask what is going on here. Schulz thinks what is going on here is that a misanthrope – Thoreau – is expressing his hatred of humanity, un point c’est tout. But that an author might devise an image of himself as a misanthrope – in fact, a standard practice in the ludicrous thematic throughout romantic literature – never seems to cross her mind.
Writers lie. Hunter Thompson really probably didn’t take all the hallucinogens he claimed to have taken in his self report in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Writers lie, but they hope to illuminate something larger with their lies and sometimes they do.  Fredrich Prokosch, in his memoir, Voices, wrote that “in order to be truthful, one must always lie a little, just as in order to tell a lie, one must tell the truth a little,” The art of adjusting that ratio is the writer’s business.

the wrong question to ask about Thoreau

Kathryn Schulz’s attack on Thoreau is not very convincing. She quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on Thoreau, and basically she simply develops his line of attack. At the bottom, of course, Schultz’s problem is the person, Thoreau. She thinks of him as a fanatic, a narcissist, a this and a that. It is the moralizing approach. Bad Thoreau, wandering like Maldoror along the beach at Cape Cod. And – implicitly – good us, who would weep decorously over the bodies of children who are drowned. Schulz treats this passage as though Thoreau had no idea that weeping decorously over the bodies of children was to be expected – this, in the great era of sentimental literature about same.

What is lost when one gets immersed in the moralizing approach is, well, almost everything. For Schultz, for instance, Thoreau is an absolutely humorless person. Thus, she reads Walden as an absolutely humorless text. In the process, she seems to have ignored completely the long tradition of American deadpan. But to read Thoreau’s account of how a man could drill some holes in a crate by the side of a railroad and live there like a lord is not the result of narcissism or fanaticism – Schulz takes Thoreau’s phrase that he isn’t jesting as obvious, without raising the question of why he would feel he had to offer it - but of the deadpan that informs the work.

Walden has a lot of boring patches, patches in which detail or quotation simply don’t come to life. But mainly, its life comes out of the portrayal of Thoreau at odds with the maxims he throws out, as well as with the side observations he drops along the way. Walden’s nearest relatives are not the naturalist’s books that came after, like Muir, but Buster Keaton’s movies. After all, the book begins with an absurd question that is supposedly being posed by the entire community – how Thoreau lived at Walden. Which is like supposing that the entire community of Santa Monica is wondering how the clochard with the cough that I hear at night is doing camping in the local park. Thoreau well knew that his writing, into which he threw accounts of his life, was not popular. He was not a seller.

And in fact this is where the Economy section in Walden is interesting, and where the – to Schultz – inexplicable popularity of certain of its phrases, for instance, that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, comes from. Schulz doesn’t sound like she has ever had a single day in her life where she didn’t have lunch money, but such was not the case for the Irish immigrants that she begins with, or indeed, for most of the 80 percent in the US at the moment who make below 75 thou a year.

It is here that Thoreau lands a lot of great punches – in as much as a maxim is a line with a punch – related, as it is, to the punchline. When Thoreau writes that the cost of a thing “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it”, he does a lot to explain the central fact of the economy from the point of view of how we experience it – or fail to. It is the stick man of the rational calculator who has forgotten what rationality is that makes the chapter interesting, gives it a dialectical flow.

I understand Schulz’s impulse, here, to counter the image of Saint Thoreau. But in so doing, she unconsciously concedes to the enemy the idea that the importance of Thoreau was whether he was a saint or not. And really, it isnt.

gun control as a foreign policy issue - not that the "adults" care

Democracy is still a great instrument of popular control, which means that it has to be constantly policed and the issues at stake rigorously trivialized by the “serious” people (who have now taken to calling themselves the adults lately – perhaps the unrelenting riducule aimed at the serious people during the 00s on the internet, which has been echoed by Paul Krugman, has been taking effect). Thus the role of the email scandal that surrounds Clinton’s years as secretary of state. It is a zero of a scandal – I mean, in contrast with the scandal that has not arisen because Dick Cheney erased 30,000 of his emails. One of the great unknowns of the Obama years is whether we would be in much better shape, politically, if the Obama Justice department hadn’t taken that massive dose of oxycodine and decided to give a pass to all Bush administration officials and Wall street, occasionally waking up to jail some journalist for publishing unclassified material about this or that random atrocity. In any case, Clinton’s emails are a red herring’s red herring.

However, unless Bernie Sanders brings it up, the press will never ask a question about the real scandal of Clinton’s term of office, which is the unprecedented amount of weaponry sold, under the State Department’s aegis, by the US to forces around the world. Unprecedented except for WWII – one has to go back that far to find comparable numbers for the 160 billion dollars worth of arms the US has sold. It is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb, but more dispersed. The 400,000 people dead so far in the Syrian war? Look at the bullet holes, and you will see a lot of American pride there, eviscerating their flesh. All to stop that evil terrorism! Although, of course, what it does is sow chaos, thus allowing more terrorism, thus allowing more arms sales. A truly virtuous circle.

That is a scandal. That should be a crime. And that is, of coursde, a non-lieu – something that will not come up in the presidential campaign at all. Gun control at home will come up – gun control abroad will only come up as a good thing for our industry. After all, the “adults” know that this is only of interest to fringe groups, probably on the extreme left or something.

After all, what could go wrong with selling bombs to the Saudis?

reflections on a car accident

So I’m walking Adam to school, around 9 a.m. We approach the corner of Lincoln and Arizona. On one side of that corner is a popular pre-school. At this time in the morning, streams of strollers, parents and maids are moving towards it. On Lincoln, a white car decides (or rather the driver decides – but from our position on the sidewalk, the cars are the masters of the street) that he can make the light – which had clearly turned red – if he pumpe the gas. He pumped the gas and promptly collided with an SUV which was turning onto Arizona. It was a big crash.

As is always the case when cars crash, everybody around froze and watched. I imagine everybody around, like me, had a breathless moment, too. Was somebody hurt? Was somebody killed?

It seems that the answer is no. Slowly the pilgrims to the school resumed their walking, and Adam and I resumed ours.

So, what was the purpose of that potential destruction of human life and the mechanical damage that I’d assess, by eye, as well over 5 thousand dollars?

The purpose was to gain a full two minutes. Stopping at the red light, the white car would have had to wait.

There’s an article in this week’s LRB about a movement in philosophy called “effective altruism.” Inspired by Peter Singer, this movement seeks to direct philanthropy to the most effective causes for ameliorating misery. Although it might sound good in this neo-liberal era, where the gains of democratic socialism have been so pushed back that private philanthropy is now considered the only response to the terrible conditions of the “poor” – thus aggrandizing the power of the wealthiest, of course – still, the whole enterprise, if the explanation in the review is accurate, sounds completely null.

Interestingly, one of the way these new “philanthropists” decide what cause to contribute to is by comparing quality of life measurements. If the quality of life of , say, a blind person is objectively measured and shown to be less than a person with AIDS, then you give to causes to cure blindness. The idea that blindness and AIDS might be connected, might in fact be part of a system of public health or its neglect, doesn’t have a place in this philosophy. Each misery is considered in royal isolation.

However, if one were to do this kind of calculus, surely the misery caused by car wreck – 1.24 million deaths worldwide from car wreck were recorded in 2010, not to speak of the injuries – would surely rank up there. Before one contributed to gun control laws or things of this sort, one should, by the efficient altruism theorem, contribute to suppressing the automobile.

Nobody in reality is going to suppress the automobile. The last public intellectual to seriously consider this was George Orwell, who did think that automobiles by law shouldn’t go more than 30 miles per hour.

In an article in Le travail humain, Anticipation visuelle de collisions en situations simulées: effets de l'expérience de la conduit, C. Berthelon et al. coin some truly Delilo-esque terms to speak of the behavioral situation of the driver in a car. One I love is the “optical flow field”.

“Human observers,” according to the article, “perceive the direction of their displacement relative to some such global flow with a precision that is sufficient to control locomotion in an important spectrum of trajectories and environments.”

Indeed. As we all know, human evolution gave us bodies that could move, by our own locomotion, in bursts of speed up to 27.78 miles per hour. That peak speed was greater than the speed of a chariot or of most vessels in the ancient world.  The peak speed of a tireme, for instance, was about 8 knots, or 9 miles per hour. Of course, humans can’t maintain their peak speed, so the chariot and the tireme were useful. But, for the most part of human natural history, legs were the speediest instruments humans possessed. And, as one would expect, that speed keyed our human reaction time. Our natural global optical flow was such that other flows – the flow of a charging bull, or the flow of a river in flood – often confused us. The literature on bear attacks is a good source for our natural human reaction time to threatening phenomenon in the optical flow. It doesn’t bode well for natural human reaction time to threatening phenomena like 4 thousand pounds of metal moving at 60 miles per hour. Freezing and  racing away are both bad things to do in a car.

Our first mass exposure to speeds that far exceeded those attained by our legs occurred on railroad trains. Schivelbusch’s marvelous little book, The Railway Journey, culls accounts of the first passengers on railroads and their vertiginous experience of a very different regime of velocity.

“The average traveling speed of the early railways in England is 20 to 30 miles an hour, which is roughly three times the speed previously achived by stagecoaches. Thus, any given distance is covered in oen third of the customary time: temporally, that distance shrinks to one-third of its former length.”

Shrinkage, then as now, was the way this kind of transportation  velocity was conceived. It is a rhetoric that penetrates Alice in wonderland, where Carroll has great fun with Alice figuring out the game of shrinking and growing as she drinks the potion that diminishes her to ten inches high, so that she can fit through the door she finds to get into a garden, and eats a cake, to make herself get bigger, or if necessary, smaller. This was precisely the game that was being played by geographers at the time in the popular quarterlies. Schivelbusch finds, for instance, this quotation from a British magazine that irresistably suggests Alice.

“For instance, supposing that railroads, even at our present simmering rate of traveling, were to be suddenly established all over england, the whole population of the country would, speaking metaphorically, at once advance en masse, and place their chairs nearer to the fireside of their metropolis by two thirds…”

Magically, though, the objects in the optical flux would remain the same size as ever. In this way, shrinking isn’t really shrinking, even though it is.

The next great leap in shrinking and not shrinking was, of course, the automobile. The passengers didn’t direct the railroad car, they just sat in it. Now they were placed to direct a weighty object going at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour.

Greg Siegel, in a Foucauldian article entitled The Accident Is Uncontainable/The Accident Must Be Contained: High-Speed Cinematography and the Development of Scientific Crash Testing, claims that World War II marks a difference between two administrative responses to car crashes. In the first period, the emphasis was on reducing car accidents to the lowest possible number. In the second period, after WWII – and as the strategy of nuclear war made popular the idea that the attainment of state objectives that might cost millions of lives in a brief period of time – the emphasis shifted to administering the damage –or as Siegel puts it, from Crash avoidance to Crash amelioration. The parallel with war strategy is not arbitrary –the construction of vast highway systems was propelled by the strategy of nuclear war and the imperative to make cities evacuable in record time.

“By the early 1950s, however, the basic terms and tendency of auto-safety discourse had changed dramatically. The emphasis was no longer on the prevention (and progressive elimination) of accidents but, rather, on the reduction of crash injuries and fatalities. This conceptual and discursive shift - from a regime of crash avoidance to one of crash amelioration - was tied to the emergence of a new technoscientific ritual: the automobile-collision experiment. Full-scale "accidents," complete with humanoid dummies as human surrogates, were painstakingly re-created at several industrial and institutional sites across America during the postwar period. Intricate systems of instrumentation, electronic and photographic, were used to facilitate the observation, registration, and analysis of the collisional process in all of its aspects: every motion, every mechanical deformation, every anatomical contortion.”

Those tests were performed at sites that, five years before, had used dummies for another purpose – to explore the effect of incendiary bombing. The US Air force would construct Japanese like houses in order to understand how best to burn them down and how best to make sure their inhabitants would also fry.

This history is in the background of the evolutionary restraints that came into play with my man in the white car this morning, speeding towards a red stop light.

In a sense, what happened was a triumph for the second regime. The collision of the cars did not crush either of them, or cause them to burst into flame, as in the movies. The drivers emerged alive – the passengers were not strewn across the asphalt, bleeding.

However, one has to ask: what is waiting to a humanoid dummy?

For the automobile environment is not only about the individual human being and his or her proprioceptive system, but the interlocking of all those systems on the road, in traffic, and on all the roads that follow the driver, in memory, or that the driver envisions, in the future. What the driver learns, and what is communicated throughout all our technical systems, is that waiting is an almost unbearable negation of the driver’s purpose. Waiting is the enemy.

Waiting, however, is not the enemy. Waiting, I would say, is the hidden foundation of ethics. Not respect – respect derives from waiting.

Which is a position I should defend at some future time.  

file under end of nature

This is a sad fact from an review of a book in the latest LRB: Near the start of the book, "Near the start of the book he gives a list of words that have recently been dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. I’ll reproduce them in full because they represent a fairly hideous symptom of what is going on: ‘acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, willow’. (The new additions to the dictionary mostly concern electronic media.) " I'm sorry, but what genius decided that kids don't need to know the word mistetoe - not to speak of kingfisher and cowslip! First they come for 'dandelion'... I guess the powers that be have already determined that, as there is nothing to be done about global climate change, they will teach the kids the definition of "youtube" as a compensation.

old halloween

In Adam’s class this week, they are working on nursery rhymes – Adam now knows that Humpty Dumpty fell off a wall, although, like the rest of us, he is rather foggy about who put him, or failed to put him, together again. He much prefers, at that point in the tale to go back to the wall – Humpty dumpty fell off a wall, humpty dumpty had a great fall, humpty fell off a WALL, daddy! I’m glad to see that my son already knows that you don’t bury your lede.

However, they are also learning about ghosts. And every day, when I come to pick him up, I see more orange and black in the room.

Yesterday, A. taught him about Jack o lanterns. It was A.’s first Jack o Lantern too, but she did a bang up job.

All of this has made me think about the Halloween mission creep.

When I was a kid (says Grandfather Simpson)… when I was a kid, Halloween was pretty firmly a children’s holiday. You could tell the kids who couldn’t let go when they’d appear, heads taller than the rest of the crowd, begging for treats. Those were the kids whose parents were always being called into conferences with their teachers; those were the kids with the bully problem, either doing it themselves or receiving it.

Time marches on, in big black leather boots, right over my face, in fact. At some point Halloween became a teen and then a college student party day. Les fetes des masques nous manquent – Martin Luther killed carnival, the rat bastard. So it makes sense that something like Halloween would emerge from a culture still ruled by a Protestant elite but increasingly Catholic. This is a good thing.

It also makes sense that the dead time between the end of summer break and Thanksgiving is a long, long time. The day dwindles, and all we do is work – that can’t be right! Halloween has started to fill that space.

What disturbs me, however, is that as the grocery stores start to stock up on Halloween a month before the day happens, and the decorations turn macabre (in a commercially approved way) on October 1^st, something of the holiday spirit goes out of it. It was, commercially speaking, small change –and now commerce has infected it with the usual malign effects. We speak of the “market” in very abstract terms. In fact, small markets like those that used to supply candy and costumes for Halloween did differ in their culture from the large markets that take over the logistics of holiday enjoyment, sexing up the costumes, making the scares an adjunct to the latest slasher series. I’m just grateful they’ve left us the pumpkins.

When the pumpkins are replaced, I will be very sad. It will be something like Jack o IPAD, and their will be Intellectual Property rights. Oh Oh Oh.

Harlequin's politics

"But if we had been asked, who are you for – Kaedin, Kornilov, or the Bolsheviks, Task and I would have chosen the Bolsheviks.  However, in a certain comedy, the harlequin was asked, Do you prefer to be hanged or quartered? He answered, I prefer soup.”

Viktor Shklovsky is a hard writer to get a grip on. More than most writers, his essence is quicksilver – that wrestler’s metaphor is peculiarly inappropriate for a man who so loved the one or two sentence paragraph. Getting a grip on Shklovsky is like wrestingly a necklace.

But one can say certain things. I’m currently reading The Knight’s Move. Skhlovsky begins the book, a seemingly disparate collection of pieces, with a sort of stunning image – that of the knight’s move in chess. There are many reasons for  the “strangeness” of the knight’s L shaped move in the game, Shklovsky writes. But one of them is this – “the knight is not free- it moves in an L shaped manner because it is forbidden to take the straight road.”

And, a typical Shklovsky device, he drops the matter. But since the move entitles the book, and the book is about literature, there is surely a broader implication. I would take that implication to be that all the notions that traditionally refer to the artist’s freedom, or familiarity with chance, the whole dual notion of inspiration, in which the freedom of creation is granted only at the cost of annuling the creator, in as much as inspiration exists outside of and through the creator, are subsumed in the iron law of the strange move. Strangeness, the disjunction, the lateral movement, are not so much spontaneous but rigged. And yet, what is being rigged but a violation of the conventions of the straight road? And even if the movement is rigged, its effects are not. This is where Shklovsky’s image differs from the inspiration traditon, which situates inspiration not only outside the author but outside the work. The work is the product of inspiration, in this way of thinking. For Shklovsky, it is precisely the inverse. Inspiration is a product of the work – that is, the devises in the work are both inspired and inspiring, creating other devices.

In work, however, in which the devices seem to force us all into straight lines – in work that is, for instance, political – the knight must make a harlequin’s leap – that is, prefer that choice that isn’t given.     

tests for great or not so great literature

One of the common reviewer bromides is the phrase, one test for great literature, or one test of a great book, etc., with some x being the test – that it can be read over and over, that it transcends convention, etc., etc.

I’ve come up with a new test.

Here it is. Take any text – an essay, poem, story, novel – and sit down and read it next to a little boy watching a Youtube video of some of his favorite Oswald the Octopus cartoons.

For those pariahs outside the Oswald orbit, Oswald is a sweet tempered Octopus with a dog and a number of friends – a penguin, Henry, and Daisy, a daisy, among them – and Oswald typically has a problem that involves these friends, as for instance he wants to collect something (Henry collects spoons and Daisy leaves). Out of this problem evolves a series of episodes in which niceness triumphs and some life lessons are snuck in. All of this happens in a world where the most complex words are issued by Daisy, and these consist of Yipporapparoonie, or Fanfuntastic. Otherwise, characters do not speak with Shakespearean eloquence. The closest to that is when the twins, two eggs, get on the swing and one of them says I’m going higher, and the other says now I’m going higher, and then the other says Now I’m going higher – you get the gist. Which, I gotta say, Sam Beckett might like.

Reading next to that, I often experience some kind of linguistic transposition between what I am reading and what is occuring in Oswald’s world. The sentences in the book I am reading suddenly seem light, and not too far removed from the twins – or at least Henry. This is especially so with run of the mill mysteries, where the investigator rarely climbs the heights of I’m going higher/now I’m going higher. Swing swing, swing swing, crime explained, criminal caught.

I’d don’t quite know how to grade my results. Some of the transposition might only pick out the innocent text, that is,  innocent in Blake’s sense. Sometimes, however, it cruelly picks out the level of plausibility that the book rests on – the kind of plausibility that is generated among 13 year olds. And that isn’t good – that is, if you are forty or more years older than 13 year olds.

The roots of philosophy

Philosophers are all rather proud of Aristotle’s notion that philosophy begins in “wonder” – it seems such a superior birth, so disinterested, so aristocratically outside the tangle of pleb emotions.

For these reasons, that origin story has, for the most part, been more interpreted than questioned.

It is, of course, hard to get clear on these things, which depend on self-reporting. Stories that one tells about oneself are, prima facie, self-interested.

Myself, my “philosophical” thinking has its roots more in worry than in wonder. Worry about the dark. Worry about abandonment.

This morning I saw, very plainly, that is, as plainly as I have seen the clouds in the sky gather and obscure the sun and foreshadow ran –worry coming over Adam’s face, as we were headed to school.

Adam, for a long time now, has accepted and, even more, enjoyed going to school. So I was a little nonplussed that, when we got there, he neither accepted nor enjoyed his destination, but instead stood at the entrance and said he wanted to go home now.

He didn’t dash out to the playground, as he usually does when the kids are out there, leaving me to stow away his lunch. He didn’t say hi to his teachers.

I could already see, rolling him to the school in his stroller, that something was going on. His face had a set cast, and he inflected his non-response when I asked him what was up. Adam, nearly three, has long mastered the grammar of silence. In this, he’s already adult.

So I left him there, in the playground, unhappily and tearfully screaming. I went home feeling like a monster. But I am sure when I come back this afternoon, he’ll be fine.

Novalis, somewhere, proposed that philosophy was nothing more than nostalgia, homesickness.

I’m on my man Novalis’s team today. Sigh. 

why the left doesn't care about the poor. Why that's a good thing.

In the TLS, Paul Collier has penned a review of some left leaning economics books that contains an exemplary rightwing view of what left wing economics is all about. The key sentence is here:

“In thinking coherently about capitalism, a helpful starting place is to ask yourself: why are poor people poor?”

Brandishing this question, Collier proceeds to find the left wing answer inadequate, and offers his own critique of financialized capitalism.

However, for a left winger, this is certainly not a helpful starting place to plunge into an analysis of capitalism. It hasn’t been a helpful starting place since Karl Marx, in 1842, starting reading the French radicals and discovered the economic and sociological category of “class”. Such is the amnesia that has befallen contemporary liberal and lefty-leaning groups, who’ve inherited all the shit of the Third way movement of the 80s and 90s, that they have forgotten their own history, and might well fight Collier over the best way to ‘help’ the ‘poor’. For the better two thirds of the twentieth century, however, leftists would have laughed at this starting point. These thinkers, activists and politicians knew full well that Marx was right, at least about this point. In fact, they asked a much different question, at least outside of the Soviet bloc. That question went: can a system based on the exploitation of the worker be so modified that the level of exploitation goes down, even as the system becomes global?

From this vantage point, we can derive another question: why are the middle class people middle class? A question tentatively answered by Karl Polanyi when he pointed out that the classical liberal consensus broke down in the twentieth century as the state became a very large actor in the creation of the economy. In the US, with the New Deal and the Great Society; in France, with the dirigiste regime; in the UK, with the welfare system; in Scandinavia, with a combination of strong unions and the socialist parties. During this time, state intervention, which included massive public employment, enlarged the middle class beyond all recognition. What had once been a class mainly of professionals, administrators and other actors in the sphere of distribution (workers who, as Marx put it, performed non-productive labor) was now flooded with new members, not all of whom shared the same middle class values, but all of whom shared the aspiration for a middle class life style.

Who paid for this? Capital. The state, by its regulations, its taxation, and its support of labor’s bargaining power, hoisted the middle class on the neck of the capitalists.

There are many reasons this period did not last. Suffice it to say that the middle class era is ending, with the middle class life style now an uncertain matter, and the financialization of households a new phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon that Marx foresaw, but it is fascinating. Marx did believe that under pure capitalism, the level of exploitation would go up until the worker owned nothing. This hasn’t exactly happened. Rather, the level of exploitation and the level of financialization have worked in tandem to this goal. In 2004, the OECD published a report on the indebtedness of American households, divided by income. Those households that made below 64,000 dollars – in other words, the middle class – owed, at that point, approximately 238 percent more than they earned. St. Paul is right: in this world, we must see as though in a glass, darkly. Thus, the period of the “ownership” society under Bush was the period of peak non-ownership. As the crash showed in 2008 up until now, these figures aren’t abstract. Many millions of middle class people literally own nothing. If you sell their main asset, the house, they will only get what they paid for it or less.

Are these the “poor”? By no means. But the left is concerned with classes – the poor are not a class, but a description that doesn’t place their members in the real, capitalist economy. As Marx discovered in 1842, the poor is not the correct description of the working class. It turns a sociological category into an object of charity. The disappearance of the working class as a category, and the substitution of the term “poor”, is an example of Third way and right wing trolling.

Don’t fall for it.   

the essential problem with american patisserie - a snobbish pov

In one of his most famous poems, Baudelaire writes of the albatros who is captured by sailors and held by a rope on board ship, unable to fly, and so mocked by the crew, now by a poke, now by some sailor imitating his limping walk. For Baudelaire, this is the very image of the poet:

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées

Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

For me, this is the very image of a man stuck in Los Angeles, remembering French boulangeries.

It isn’t that America has any reason to have suck pastries. If you read about the donut, the ur-American pastry, it evidently derives from the same family as the beignet, and all kinds of European fried flour goods. So what happened to it? Somehow, there was a split in the development of pastry, with the Europeans intent on inventing ever lighter, ever more complex pastries, and the Americans intent on creating ever denser, ever mono-sweeter pastries. To want something other at some point would expose the poor decadent American who expressed such deviance to a milieu des huées, and from there it is just a hop skip and a jump to homosexuality and drug taking, as any good Republican knows.

This is not to knock all American cuisine. In Paris, one longs, like a poet, for good coffee – although as numerous articles in the NYT over the last five years have pointed out, Paris has become a hot spot of expatriate baristas, who are slowly weening the french from that simplistic concotion they call expresso (not to mention the horror of Nescafe served as coffee – it happens!). However, I’m old enough to remember (a phrase I seem to increasingly use. Funny, that) when American coffee at its finest was a can of Yuban. Perhaps the greatest contribution of hippy culture to the American scene (besides the Monkeys) was an increased awareness of ingrediants and non-industrial cooking. The completely irritatiing foodies are the result, on the one hand, but on the other, the level of American eating has gone up, at least among the aspirers.

This is why I find the donut a puzzle. The donut shop is omnipresent in American life – hence, the network for distributing a better beignet exists. But where is that beignet? Donut shops, when they respond to what they think is public demand, are concerned to advertise less calorific varieties of donut. I, on the other hand, suspect that donuts are one of those serial foods, like popcorn, so that the calory profile of one donut is not exactly helpful. What is needed, of course, is to attack that serial pattern, to make a donut that is completely satisfying in itself. Patisserie, ladies and gentlemen! I humbly ask this on behalf of all albotrosi  

in defense of the 10 dollar word

When I was thirteen, there was nothing I liked better than to peddle my bike to a library near us, look through a random volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, pluck an obscure word at random – something long and spidery – and try to use it at the dinner table, or in talking to friends, which often required seriously distorting the direction of the conversation in order to find occasion to slip it in. 
I still like the OED, but I no longer go to it to find rare words at random. Still, I appreciate a stunner when I come across one. These words were often begotten by obscure old authors and only surfaced once, in their texts, and were fated to be buried without ceremony in some future dictionary and never know the loving clasp of a live tongue. 
It is this history that makes me bristle a bit when I run into complaints about the arcabe vocabulary of some writer or another, where it is maintained that such vocabulary is stuck up, unnecessary, and show-offy. It seems to me that any writer who isn’t being show-offy has mistaken his or her profession: it is definitely show business all the way down.
That doesn’t mean that I am always for the abstruse. There’s a long quarrel about this in english literature. Thomas Nashe, the elizabethan polemicist, made great fun of his the vocabulary of his enemy, another pamphleteer named Gabriel Harvey. He takes two words Harvey employed – entelechy and adoulce – as the occasion for a nice kicking: “with these two Hermophrodite phrases, being half latin and half English, hast thou puld out the very guts of the inckhorne”. In other words, this isn’t writing, its straining. There’s something to that. It is part of the discipline of showing off that it can’t involve straining, because if it does, one’s pretensions turn against one. So much so that the writer will be accused of being pretentious. And it is no use replying that the taboo on pretension stems from a very reactionary sense of social hierarchy, in which those on top are accorded a naturalness that turns those on the bottom trying to work their way up into either outlaws or buffoons. Because by the time you have gotten that analysis off your chest, your audience will have long turned away and followed other things, usually on their cell phones.

waves and the room - more Woolf

In Prigogine and Stenger’s book, the New Alliance, they claim that chemistry was tremendously boosted by Buffon. There was a period in the 1770s when certain French scientists, like D’Alembert, began to consider the Newtonian system to be faulty, due to various discrepencies they thought they had found, experimentally. Buffon, however, was having none of it, and in refuting the anti-Newtonians on the theoretical level, he suggested that the universality of gravity had not yet been taken up by chemists, who had clung tenaciously to an old fashioned system of “attractions”. The mathematical faults that D’Alembert felt he had found merely pointed to the need for further research under the grand Newtonian umbrella.

“… and if, up to this day, we have regarded the laws of affinity as different from those of gravity, the fault lies in not having well conceived them, grasped them, embrassed this object in all its extension. The figure which, among celestial bodies, hardly does anything by the law of the action of bodies one upon the other, because the distance is so vast, does everything, on the contrary, when the distance is very small or non-existent.”

It is through the research that was pursued under this unifying charter that, in the beginning of the century, brought about the discovery of radioactivity. Buffon’s comparison was almost literally transferred to the atom in Bohr’s theory of 1913, although I doubt Bohr ever read Buffon. It was in this context that the wave became one of science’s reigning symbols. From 1900 until the 1930s, waves were much in the news, and not only due to physics, but due, as well, to technology. The wave was associated with the radio, and the radio promoted a view of the world as a sphere of invisible waves.  In 1919, Victor Tausk’s famous essay, On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in schizophrenia, he points to a recurrent image in schizophrenia, in which patients claim that a kind of devise exists that influences the patient’s and other’s thoughts and feelings. In a footnote on the devise, Tausk notes that “It produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces which the patient’s knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain.” The patient isn’t the only one – as radios came on the market, it was the rare customer whose “knowledge of physics” could explain how they worked. But that they worked by means of waves (rather than, mostly, rays – I think one could probably trace a change from rays to waves, the effect of cultural themes, in the 19^th century)  was something all knew.

I am not quoting Tausk to intentionally pathologize  Virginia Woolf, although I’m afraid that, given our knowledge of her breakdowns, I am a bit. However, Woolf’s own texts are not reticent about what she experienced during periods of mental disorientation, and I don’t think one can discount these experiences in the way she wrote, the themes she elaborated.

Heinrich Hertz, the man who discovered radio waves, spoke, in general terms, of replacing such terms as energy and force in mechanics with his threefold categories of time, space and mass, and deriving his mechanics of “hidden mass” and “hidden movement” from these – much to the dismay of philosophers like Mach. That hiddenness, that invisibility, combines with the notion of waves to create a certain popular mythology. Oliver Lodge, who took Hertz’s theory, popularized it in England, and arguably made the first radio receiver, was as famous, in the 1920s, as a parapsychology researcher. He took the model of the radio very far – in the twenties, he propounded the theory that the eye “is like a revieving instrument for detecting radio waves of an extremely short and definite length. It was the first wireless receiving set employed by man.”   

With authorities like Lodge – authority-eccentrics – using the notion of invisible waves to reinforce a rather pre-scientific world view, I hope I am not pathologizing Woolf by suggesting that both her illness and her peculiar awareness of contemporary fact made waves an irresistable image of the stability-in-instability that she was after. I have not been able to find out when she first bought her own wireless set. But there is a quotation in her diary from 1918 that shows how radio waves, voices, and information come together in a complex. She records a meeting with a high government official, who tells her about the latest developments on the front in France.

“I tried to think it extraordinary but I found it difficult – extraordinary, I mean, to be in touch with one who was in the very center of the very center, sitting in a little room at Downing St. where, as he said, the wireless messages are racing through from all over the world, a million miles a minute. Where you have constantly to settle off hand questions of enormous difficulty and important – where the fate of armies does more or less hang upon what two or three elderly gentlemen decide…”

This crisscrossing of messages, and the sorting of them, is reproduced and suitably transformed in many passages in Jacob’s room where an entire collectivity is taken into account, with the authorial voice wandering among it, and commenting on the enormous difficulty and incompleteness of knowing where to begin, how to penetrate, what it means. This is a collectivity in which Jacob floats. It is to the decisions of two or three elderly gentlemen, who take this collectivity, this Europe, to war, that Jacob is eventually sacrificed.

This, then, are some of the significations of the wave.  The wave is the form taken by what is in motion, whereas the room is a retreat from what is in motion – this, at least, is one of the values their opposition has in Jacob’s room. You can be mounted on a wave, but not for very long. Woolf has a description of Jacob’s attempt to hunt like the gentry which seems, almost,to derive from Muybridge’s famous series of photos. It gives us, or me at least, the kind of wave reference which I think goes all the way through the novel:

A few moments before a horse jumps it slows, sidles, gathers itself

together, goes up like a monster wave, and pitches down on the further

side. Hedges and sky swoop in a semicircle. Then as if your own body ran

into the horse's body and it was your own forelegs grown with his that

sprang, rushing through the air you go, the ground resilient, bodies a

mass of muscles, yet you have command too, upright stillness, eyes

accurately judging. Then the curves cease, changing to downright hammer

strokes, which jar; and you draw up with a jolt; sitting back a little,

sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over pounding arteries, gasping:

"Ah! ho! Hah!" the steam going up from the horses as they jostle

together at the cross-roads, where the signpost is, and the woman in the

apron stands and stares at the doorway. The man raises himself from the

cabbages to stare too.

So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the

hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches, looking over the hedges,

noticing the colours as if new scraped, cursing his luck.”

the fascist heart of Narcos

I’m watching Narcos, first season. Excellent show, but like Homeland, it has a fascist heart. The latter’s heart was all in the war of civilization, aka Muslims equal terrorists. It was never, the West equals massive war dealers and makers killing Muslims and erecting totalitarian states, aka the Saudis and company.There was not even a hint that this was part of the argument. In Narcos, the first show begins with the DEA agent embracing the idea that a criminal investigation is a “war” and gives an approving nod to Pinochet’s death squad action against those terrible ‘dealers’. Then of course there’s the quick flick to America, where the fact that cocaine was increasingly being used in the eighties is taken not as an indication that the particular form of suppression chosen by the state, in particular the formation of the DEA and the extraordinary powers granted it, were a huge mistake, but instead, that the dealers are more evil than we ever thought they were. The DEA, operating as a catalyst to make the smuggling much more violent, then legitimates itself with reference to the violence. And then there’s the money – which is depicted, hilariously, as going from the US to Colombia. This, we are gravely assured, alarmed the good business community of Miami. Miami in the eighties went through an economic boom precisely for the opposite reason. Nobody was investing in Colombia. Like good Latin American capitalists, the dealers invested in the US, and the US banking system and government was complicit all the way. The deregulation of finance and the increasing acceptance of offshore banking just happened, by amazing coincidence, when cocaine’s black money became a major presence in the international system.

About the money, the show is DEA dumb, siting street prices as though they were writ in concrete. The problem for the dealers was that, in spite of the great fiasco of the DEA, they had too much product, so the street price went down.

“Cocaine’s wholesale price fell sharply during the 1980s, rose somewhat in 1990, and then declined fitfully during the rest of the decade. In 1993, the wholesale price dipped below $50 per pure gram, and has never exceeded that level since. The price has fallen every year since 2000, settling at its all-time low in the first half of 2003 ($37.96)” I take this quote from WOLA, which takes it from the American government. Even so, prices and amounts should be viewed with caution. The DEA and police department habitually inflate the price of the drugs they either interdict or claim are on the street. There is really not a reliable index in this area. Estimates are made in the most hazy way, and then, unsceptically, distributed by a press that has long identified with the DEA and the “war on drugs.”

Narcos, unfortunately, is still animated by the spirit of Harry Anslinger, the founder of the Federal antinarcotics bureau and the man who, from the 1920s to the 1960s, did more than anyone else to create the drug mythology. It is painfully stupid to broadcast a series about cocaine that includes crackpot evidence about how rats will prefer cocaine to food or anything else when the audience, and sans doute the people who produced the show, have largely experienced cocaine in their own lives, and know how various responses to it can be. It is and will be the case that cigarettes and alcohol cause more damage than cocaine and heroin put together. The state may well have reasons to suppress the latter two, but those reasons shouldn’t  be allowed to trump reality or fill our prisons. Now, of all times, is not the time  to make the DEA heroic. 

the room and the wave in Woolf - a beginning

The black spot – the pirate’s anticurrency - of the utilitarian mindset, as was seen early on by critics like Hazlitt and Macaulay, was that it led to no larger purpose. Macaulay, attacking James Mill, made some great shots at the utilitarians – “whose attainments just suffice to elevate them from the insignificance of dunces to the dignity of bores” – but attained his larger purpose by arguing with Mill’s narrow definition of the purpose of human action on the grand scale:

“But what are the objects of human desire? Physical pleasure, no doubt, in part. But the mere appetites which we have in common with the animals would be gratified almost as cheaply and easily as those of the animals are gratified, if nothing were given to taste, to ostentation, or to the affections. How small a portion of the income of a gentleman in easy circumstances is laid out merely in giving pleasurable sensations to the body of the possessor! The greater part even of what is spent on his kitchen and his cellar goes, not to titillate his palate, but to keep up his character for hospitality, to save him from the reproach of meanness in housekeeping, and to cement the ties of good neighbourhood. It is clear that a king or an aristocracy may be supplied to satiety with mere corporal pleasures, at an expense which the rudest and poorest community would scarcely feel.”

This anthropological protest against the utilitarian apriori was greatly expanded by Veblen at the end of the 19^th century. It is certainly not a comprehensive critique, but it speaks to a “lowness” in the utilitarian world view that was certainly felt by almost all the Victorian sages.

But those sages also saw that, indeed, the era of the satiety of mere corporal pleasures was on the horizon. From the sugar that sweetened the tea of the poorest laborer in England in the 18^th century to the new department stores that Zola and Dreiser wrote about, a sort of synthesis was being enacted in which the great social purpose was not to satiate desire but to arouse it.

The result, in its critics eyes, was that a utilitarian culture slowly dissolved the belief that there could be any larger purpose, or that desire was anything but a tool to profit.  Simmel, in the Philosophy of Money at the  end of the 19^th century, saw that this was an insistent characteristic of a society in which the social nexus seemed to have been supplanted by the cash nexus: rationality becomes less about reason as a living, dialectical entity – an open spirit of inquiry - and more about the best strategy for making a money, for playing the angle, a strategy to which all creativity is subordinate. Simmel’s sociology may have enormously exaggerated the inroads of rational self-interest: Europe was still a continent that was majority peasant in 1900, and larger purposes, ominously, were everywhere. But there was something inexorable about the social logic that Simmel lays out, something that could be felt, like a chill, on ever street of every city. It was not only among intellectuals that the idea that humans were reduced to their use in a machine that was felt to be an insult to humanity, and a source of suffering. On the other side of Simmel’s money-bound society were the many critiques and utopias, all of which were meant to solve it, or transcend it, or roll it back. It was certainly felt by Mill, in the 1860s, that something had gone wrong with both the social logic of utilitarianism and with happiness itself, as it was currently interpreted. Woolf and the people that she knew all felt that something had gone badly wrong. But the difference between 1850 and 1922 – the difference that Woolf had dated, famously, to 1910, in her essay on Arnold Bennett – was that the failure of the larger purpose was not seen as a bad thing, but rather as a stone that had been lifted from off our breasts. At least in Woolf’s own writing, this becomes an aesthetic principle of loose ends. The word about Woolf is that she is always psychological.  However, one cannot get very far reading Jacob’s Room in this way. In a sense, Jacob’s Room is a rubican novel – once she wrote it, she could not go back. What she does in it is suggest that the novel need not be tied to the fate of the character. Instead, fate could be put to one side, and a certain looseness, a certain concantanation of life paths, can be thrust into the foreground.  

Myself, I am continually thrown back on a persistant binary in Woolf’s writing between the room and the wave. Jacob’s Room, evidently, stakes itself on the room – but it is a book filled with waves. In an early scene in the book, when Jacob is boating with his Cambridge friend Timmy Durrant, the wave is thrust into literature itself – or, rather, literature is thrust into the wave.

“The seat in the boat was positively hot, and the sun warmed his back as he sat naked with a towel in his hand, looking at the Scilly Isles which--confound it! the sail flapped. Shakespeare was knocked overboard. There you could see him floating merrily away, with all his pages ruffling innumerably; and then he went under.”

“… all his pages ruffling innumerably”! This is such an intelligent adverb that I myself go under it, bow to it, sink beneath it. This must be said. But to return to my point,  this is not the only place where the wave becomes the great universal solvent in which all things are dissolved and resolved.

I’ll do more, I hope, with the room and the wave later.