Letter from Paris

Paris has had a dismal winter. My standard of comparison is, admittedly, skewed. Set next to the simulacrum winters of Santa Monica, which perfectly replicates the pattern of long nights and short days but not the temperatures or the potential for snowfall (snowfall on the beach? No way, dude!) – that is, the storybook winters we get in children’s books, all based on the weather in those countries licked by the Gulf Stream at its Northern end, which are the model even in films made in Hollywood (or, really, Culver City), where Santa Claus never wears jogging shorts even if the actor playing Santa does – by such personal orienting points it was hard. By more normal standards, winter was less dismal than mid-range. It isn’t as if we are plunged into the Little Ice Age here in Europe, as in that period in the 17^th century when the Seine regularly iced over at Rouen, and the glaciers crept down those Alpine slopes into Heidi’s bedroom.

Of course, in one model of the disaster we are heading into, Europe will be cut off from the warming brought by the Gulf current and we will be facing something more like a major ice age. But since the current consensus is that our grandchildren can all go extinct as long so long as we can get our tat now, that is something I guess we should not think about. Posterity is def going to be a bitch.

So, with our carbon-fueled nonchalance, we all sortied out into the streets this winter, and kept our mufflers on. Which is always fun – I will probably always stick out as an American in Paris because I cannot achieve that degree of lightness with my echarpe, the ability to wind it around the neck just so, where it is like a perfect nest from which the head emerges. My echarpe always looks like it was wound about my neck by a sloppy hangman. I never claimed to be agile, or good with my hands. And so life has gone on as usual, posing the usual Parisian question, viz., how can all these people afford to be crowding the cafes and restaurants? One passes by the menus posted outside and it seems that the budget for lunch alone would eat a hole into any standard middle class family budget – and yet, here all these people are. Mysteries! Which are of course deepened by the menus posted outside of real estate offices. These menus are always being surveyed by small, shifting groups of people. I cop to being as mesmerized as anyone else. Here’s a bargain, one bedroom, a bathroom with a shower, another half bathroom with toilet, tiny kitchen, small salon, the all wrapped up in 45 m²  for only 600,000 Euros, why it is a steal! The mystery of the price system, the neo-classical economists assure us, is an effect of the market. Which shows the power of superstition among the learned, since the “market” is an amorphous, ill-created explanander, a sort of perpetual motion machine for intellectual wankers.

Myself, I just have my prole awe about it all.

I’ve grown old in the joints, which dream of Florida, so naturally my first inclination when it snows is to watch it coming down from a warm room inside. However, Adam’s is to go out in it and make snowmen, or snowballs. He loves snow. I love the look of it, the pristine white, when it first comes down; and I am properly shocked by the dirtiness of it after a few hours in the streets. I know that dirtiness is an impress of the dirtiness we live in and just don’t see. Just like the cop’s black powder, which sprinkled around reveals fingerprints, snow reveals the fingerprints of our collective pollution. This is the stuff that circulates through our lungs.

It won’t last much longer. The spring avant-garde – Demeter’s spies – sometimes comes out and gives us warm hours. I’ve been walking about in the city, thinking of … well, the place setting for the next novel, which I have started with the vague idea that the settings will be Atlanta Georgia, Paris France, and a few other places. And I have decided that one of my characters must buy an apartment, so I walk down Montorgueil in a happy dream, looking at buildings and trying to peep through opened courtyard doors, imagining living there – or perhaps somewhere else? The thirteen, for instance, near Gobelin? It gives me an interest. Besides which, I have always had an antiquarian interest in how this city came to be – the whole psychogeography spiel. I am not Sebald, nor was meant to be… but these histories are accessible, they still live in the faces of the people in the street.

Things will be harder in Atlanta – a metro area that has an Etch-A-Sketch structure, where pictures are shaken up and out and new ones are added at the touch of a moneyed hand, and who remembers, who remembers?

on sidewalks, cities and corruption

The French philosophes made a cult out of all things English, from Newton (whose science was taught to Voltaire by his lover, the Marquise du Châtelet), Locke, the school of psychology founded by Hartley, and the threefold division of powers as envisioned by Montesquieu. So it is not surprising that D’alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopedie is full of Anglophilia, even in the farther corners. For instance, in the entry entitled Trottoir, or sidewalk (which may have been added when the Encyclopedie was re-edited in 1825), we read this: “The city of London has been the one that most commodiously instituted the use of sidewalks. It owes this advantage to the almost entire reconstruction of the old part of the city that was consumed in the great fire of 1666. All the streets were retraced on a vast plan, all aligned and cut at right angles.”
This of course is a fantasy, a fanta-fact, but it floated before these dreamers who longed to be the Great Fire themselves, purging the old and crooked from the City.
In the meantime, in 1787, the administration of Paris, which was at that time headed up by Baron de Breteuil (the unfortunate who was named prime minister of France by Louis XVI a week before the storming of the Bastille), sent a letter discussing a new street template. In 1783, the administration of Paris had ruled that all streets should be 30 feet wide; but this created dissatisfaction. In new proposal before the city administration was to make all new streets 36 feet wide, with 6 feet on either side being reserved for sidewalks. That would make the vehicular area 24 feet wide. At no point in the discussion that is reproduced in L’etat de Paris en 1789 is there a discussion of what these widths referred to: the width of the standard carriage? The width of two people standing side by side on the sidewalk? This is probably related to the fact that standardization came in after the 18th century, with the rise of factories – at which point the street scheme of centuries was already in place.
The effect of these obscure discussions are with us today. I can walk down Rue Charlot, which is next to our apartment, and see exactly what the Baron de Breteuil was talking about – streets with a with of 36 feet, with two sidewalks taking up twelve of those feet. Of course, the new street provision was amended, ignored, or forgotten in the next hundred years. In all the industrialized countries, the advent of the automobile brought a new and more dangerous element into the mix of pedestrians and riders. But at no point, to my knowledge, did this lead to experiments about what would be the safest mix – how much for instance per lane would lead to minimizing accidents? How about standardizing exits and pass-throughs? And what size is optimum for pedestrian traffic flow on sidewalks?
In Paris, at least, sidewalks are plentiful (much more so than in Los Angeles, for instance), but they are crowded, bumpy, and imperfectly protected from intrusion by motorcyclists and others. The sidewalks are a part of contemporary life that is sort of hidden – while any Paris mook will know about Haussman, that famous cityscape arranger, it is the rarer urbanite who knows about the father of the Parisian sidewalk, le Comte de Chabrol, who was appointed by Napoleon as the administrator of Paris and began wracking up the “dallage” – pouring sidewalks – as part of his remit. George Sand, latter, accused him of corruption for favoring rock from Volvic – quarried, that is, from his own home territory. Pierre Estienne, in a history of Volvic, sums it up as follows:

Thus we understand the program of Chabrol-Volvic, prefect of the Seine from 1812 to 1830, for discovering other outputs for the stone – in this case, a Parisian clientel: it needed his influence, his power, to impose a stone which had neither the robustness nor the clear and war colors of Paris’s subsoil limestone. “it would have been more economic to pave paris with five france lengths of stone than bringing in the Volvic volcanic stone,” notes a skeptical contemporary. What to make of this sad stone which possesses a darkness that accentuates with age, which decays quickly with use, and should not form paving, much less sidewalks? Chabrol required a rare stubbornness in order to have his friends and most likely associates, the Brosson who were in Pont-du-Chateu, bring in the Volvic stone, cut it, deposit it on ships in the Allier that was almost unnavigable, and finally to have it carried on the canal de Briare up to Paris, and with the price of the rejects that one can only imagine, fill orders. In fact, up to 1830, F. Brusson had obtained the monopoly for supplying lava stone for the sidewalks of the capital, thanks to Chabrol’s protectrion; he even had a permanent sales office on the banks of the Saint-Martin canal.”
A city, as Balzac knew, is not just branded with corruption – corruption often literally drives the creation of the street and the sidewalk. Which in turn has unexpected consequences for the pace of the city, and its politics. I’m going to get to that topic next, I hope.

colonial asymmetries

Back in the year 2002 – year of accursed memory – I remember reading a Guardian thoughtpiece by Ian McEwan about the impending invasion of Iraq. I don’t expect Middle Eastern expertise from Ian McEwan, but I do expect that heightened novelistic sense of epistemological consequences: the idea that other characters have ideas, which starts the the billiardwork of plots and counterplots and sensibility writ large. So I was rather astonished that McEwan began by dismissing the history of the West’s relationship to Saddam Hussein – the on again off again support – by insisting that a virtuous act in the present shouldn’t be weighed down by vicious acts in the past. What astonished me was the concentration on history solely as it was present in the consciousness of the British, American and European protestors. It was as if that history, which was lived experience by the Iraqis, didn’t count as something that might be present in their consciousness. They might actually have an opinion about the forces that were coming to occupy their land because of the vicious acts of a ruler who was able to afford those acts due to the past rulers of their present liberators. This is the kind of thinking that is rigorously excluded from the high tables of policy makers in the think tanks, which is why it should be the kind of thinking that novelists could contribute – in a sort of countertradition within the belly of the whale, the protest distilled from the collected works of Henry James, or Proust. The limits of the novelistic imagination, though, as is the case with the journalistic imagination, seem to have been etched by colonialism itself.  

As it happens, treating the colonized Other as a blank slate, or as an entity asymmetrical to the real “I”, is the very twin of colonialism, the imaginary that conditions its enactment. That asymmetry contributes not only to what happens on the frontier, but what happens in the Old country. To understand that the European peasant or bourgeois and the Huron shaman or arendiwane  were living on the same plane at the time of their encounter injures the vanity of the colonist’s descendants. This is why a certain anachronism creeps into reading sources. When John Wilkins, in 1641, repeats a “pretty story” of an Indian slave who treats writing on paper as a kind of magic, and views his master as a kind of God, the tone is belittling – and the modern reader tends to unconsciously correct the condescension without looking at the context. In Wilkins time, Britain was rife with stories of magic – of witchcraft, of shapeshifting, of familiars. The French court of Louis XIV was shaken in the 1690s by stories of “black magic”, satanic masses, and the sacrifice of living victims – all apparently supported by the belief system of those with the highest degree of education in France. The French missionaries in New France did combat the “magic” beliefs of the Huron (who called themselves the Wendet – our names and other names chase themselves thoughout history, and today deludes the bien pensant liberal into thinking that finding the correct euphemism settles the problem) in the name of an odd amalgam of natural philosophy and belief in demons. In fact, there was no scientific worldview at the time – and I seriously doubt that this has changed inordinately. Outside of the laboratory, the scientific worldview becomes merely instruction sheets for using tools, and fails to nourish a sensibility, because, how could it?

The great advantage of dualism is in allowing sweeping generalities – generalities in search of a “universal”, in the puffed up language of the scholars. The great advantage of dialectical thinking, that continual oscillation between monism and dualism, is that it allows fragments, subgroups, alternative forces, margins. Its great downfall is to want to wrap this all up, in the end, in a universal history. To embed an account of colonialism in the forces of, say, monetarization in Europe, the abolition of old laws pertaining to property and common rights, the agony of literacy, the overthrow of belief systems around the world, is a task that has not yet developed a method, or a sensibility. We keep getting there, and then getting forced back. And meanwhile, the politics of destruction moves forward faster.

nineteenth century observations about the twenty first century

The difference between intentions and conditions is a tricky topic, one that philosophers dance around, taking different partners to the dance.

In the creaky old nineteenth century, they came up with the magic word “determine” and waved it over this business. So that they ground out phrases like, the economy determines history, or man determines his fate.

Yet what was determination? Was it cause? And if so, why not just substitute the term cause here? But that, it turns out, was a substitution too far. For determine meant something more like: produces the terms in which… And this leads us to a difference between simple causes and conditions. And this leads us to the making of distinctions, which is not an American specialty. Save for Henry James, Americans are not big on making distinctions, which has a sort of sissy feel. I can imagine the bumper sticker: only sissies make distinctions!

But to go back to something that isn’t dumb methodogical individualism. Let’s hypothesize that larger, institutionalized social forces, like the state, or businesses, or parties, operate in reality not to institute some rigid intention or goal (even if they do that too), but, ultimately, to produce the conditions that will make push forward the self-organizing of a set of goals. For instance, you want your Uber company to make a profit, but you also want to atomize the work force, which amplifies the opportunity to exploit that work force, and to that end you cover your Uber company in a self-employment vibe. Or even a self-entrepreneur vibe.

This might seem secondary. But in the long term, you won’t make a profit if the social conditions are against you. It is part and parcel, then, of your short term intention to make possible its reproduction through a series of short terms – all the way to infinity, so to speak. Thus, it always seems that institutions, like people, follow some intention, but it always also seems that their success depends on creating some condition that is beyond the particulars of that intention. 

In “A treatise on efficacy” Jullien compares the Western and Chinese notions of how states and enterprises operate. For instance, he considers Sun Tzu’s notion that the general, before battle, should “ban omens and dismiss all doubts.”

“The whole of this Chinese thought is prompted by a single concept: whatever happens “in any case” “cannot not happen” (once all the conditions are ascertained); in other words, it is “ineluctable”.

“This idea of the ineluctability of processes and so also of success for whoever is capable of profiting from it recurs constantly throughout all Chinese thinking. Even a thinker such as Mencius subscribes to this logic of consequentiality, despite the fact that he adopts a position altogether opposed to the theses of the strategists, since he considers that sovereignty depends not on the relation of forces and therefore the art of warfare, but on the sway exercised by morality. Or rather, morality is itself a force, and a particularly strong one, because it possesses great influence and uses this to effect, in a diffuse and discrete fashion. Be concerned for your people, Mencius tells the ruler, share your pleasures with them, and you will inevitably progressively come to rule over all other princes. That is because all peoples will desire to pass under your authority; they will open their doors to you and will be unable to resist you. Through violence, you will inevitably eventually come to grief, for the power at your disposal is limited and arouses rivalry.” 

Okay, now, this sounds closer to the 19^th century, and its iron laws of determination. Here’s a good example of intention, conditions, and inelectability. In the 00s of mauvais reputation – after about 2005 – there was a moment when the deep thinkers in the establishment realized that Iraq was a disaster. It had created conditions that were ineluctably leading to events that were creating other conditions, none of them good from the U.S. perspective.

This moment, however, passed, like an angel overhead. Because what these deep thinkers did is – they called upon the miraculous. They would say, well, right now Iraq is a mess, but in six months we might have an American lovin’ democracy on our hands! And thus, they dickered with ineluctability, with determination, with conditions, by shutting their eyes. And they were very set on indeterminability. Nobody could predict. Prediction was impossible. And so on. It was as if I decided to build a birdhouse, but claimed loudly that I couldn’t predict, before I finished it, whether it would actually be a supersonic automobile. 

I look back at this moment because I think that not only were the deeper thinkers vastly, bigly, utterly fucked up, but I also think that the mindset of massive excuse-making produced a set of intellectual conditions in these here states. These conditions made it ever easier to make one’s entire career of falsified predictions and bogus analyses. The same conditions that allowed economists to predict in the 00s that we were in the “Age of Moderation” (when we were actually on the verge of the economic precipice), or that allowed the establishment in center-left parties to promote the conditions that would decimate the working class through “free trade” agreements without thinking that destroying their political base would eventually destroy their own political power.

The conditions that have created the great Unintelligence in the states – the Unintelligence that is embodied by Trump, a man of shit destiny  – will blindly keep operating until they are overthrown.

RICO CAPITALISM: PILLAGING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The news that Newsweek has now become a front for a cultish religious organization to launder money made me think of a post about Reader's Digest I wrote in 2009. It is still a pretty good analysis of business culture in the Bush-Obama era. Hell, in the Trump era.

RICO CAPITALISM IN THE AGE OF BUSH-OBAMA

“Now he's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with a bill, to Paulie. Trouble with cops, deliveries, Tommy... ...he calls Paulie. But now he has to pay Paulie... ...every week no matter what. "Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Had a fire? Fuck you, pay me." "The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me." Also, Paulie could do anything. Like run up bills on the joint's credit. And why not? Nobody will pay for it anyway. Take deliveries at the front door and
sell it out the back at a discount. Take a 200 dollar case of booze and sell it for one hundred dollars.
It doesn't matter. It's all profit.”

– Goodfellas

The merger of good business practice and racketeering in the 00s was embodied by the private equity firm, which made the Mafia look like punks. Two hundred dollar cases of booze were nothing when you buy a company with money you borrowed with your potential purchase as capital, thus adding the company’s cost to you to the company’s total debt load, from which – because you have been so successful! – you paid yourself a management fee, and then appointed undertakers to break the balls of any of the employees who’d been there long enough to, say, get a pension, or to have an emotional stake in the company’s success – deadwood, in other words; then you sell off the parts of the company that are working, which earns the management company, those private equity sweethearts, another management fee; and finally lead the company into bankruptcy, thus screwing the banks and the investors, the latter of which had been sitting on the sidelines swallowing pap about the efficiencies brought to the company by the private equity junta. Having followed the fuck you – pay me! Business plan, the private equity partners have long moved on, although not before putting a proper legal distance between the business they picked apart and the consequences.

Mattress companies, shoe companies, if it lives and breaths, if it produced value, if it employed people and was the result of honesty, toil, and the identification of the employees – well then, it deserved, from the racketeering rational choice point of view, to be fucked.

That was the trade – the bright side was that it got the thumbs up from economists, politicians, everybody in the know, all the bright ones in our Bush-Obama culture. You know, the ones who have shoved so much shit down our throats that we have gotten to like it, that it just seems normal to wake up with that taste of plutocratic turds in our mouths, it is just who we are, it is just what living in the Do Tread on Me Nation we call home is all about.

That this was done to Readers Digest sorta figures. Symbols are attractors, and what better symbol for a brisk deathmarch through the valley of the shadow of fuck you than the magazine that, in its humble way, embodied conservative middle brow Cold War culture? The army jokes, the first person accounts of American heroism, the vocabulary builder, the Cold War rants about all the usual topics: drugs, Communism, delinquency. Plus the condensed books, Ultra-Moderne – much like Campbell’s Condensed soups, showing that the process of assembly line production could be applied to the novel. It was a sign of middle class tastelessness – of working for the Middle Brow man - to have bookshelves full of Readers Digest books – in my family, we certainly did. I eagerly went through those books when they came, laughed at the humor in uniform, built my vocabulary with the vocabulary builder, and learned the anti-Communist facts of life. Ronald Reagan’s biographers say that he was an earnest reader of the Digest, and he often quoted from it – which makes sense. In a sense, Reagan embodied the whole RD ethos.

Including the reversal of what you would expect a conservative company to do. Just as Reagan’s experience of the only business he ever knew – the movies – gave him a, to say the least, skewed notion of the relation between labor and business, Reader’s Digest evidently treated their employees, in the HQ in Chattaqua, NY, with the kind of princely beneficence that would have softened Karl Marx’s heart. The Sunday NYT story about the decline and fall of the magazine includes this anecdote about the owners, DeWitt and Lila Wallace: 

Al Perruzza, now a senior vice president, recalls a dinner in the early ’70s at which Mr. Wallace rose, clanked a glass and announced that, effective Monday, everyone at Reader’s Digest would get a 10 percent raise. He sat for a moment, conferred with Mrs. Wallace and then stood up again.
“My lovely wife doesn’t think that’s enough,” he said. “So effective Monday, it’s 15 percent.”
He rose a third time and announced a cost-of-living increase.
“We had spent literally weeks preparing a budget,” Mr. Perruzza says with a grin. “I was sitting with the president of my division. The guy went ashen.”

As the NYT tells the story, Readers Digest, back then, was an incredible cash cow – much to the Wallace’s amazement. Having figured, when he began the business, that he could make as much as 5,000 dollars per year, DeWitt and his wife were rather stunned by how much they really did make:

“By 1929, circulation stood at 290,000 subscribers and brought in $900,000 a year — more than $11 million in inflation-adjusted dollars — according to “American Dreamers,” a book about the Wallaces. By the 40th anniversary of Reader’s Digest, Time tallied up the magazine’s achievements: 40 editions, in 13 languages and Braille, and the best-selling publication in Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Peru — and on and on. Total worldwide circulation was 23 million.”

So they did things like make their Chappaqua campus a nice place to work by hanging art on the wall: "Paintings by Picasso, Monet, Degas,Matisse, Renoir and van Gogh — museum-worthy décor was just another perk of working for a publishing phenomenon, one that sold millions of magazines and books a year, a readership rivaled only by the Bible. Although comparing sales of the scriptures to those ofReader’s Digest has always been unfair, because, as The New Yorker noted in 1945, “the Bible had a head start.””

That art, seen by the 3,000 employees and their family members, has now, of course, been stripped (“Take a 200 dollar case of booze and sell it for one hundred dollars. It doesn't matter. It's all profit.”). In the place of those paintings – o symbol calls to symbol, the worm that turned calls to the mindboggling serfs we are today! - we have this:

“…the walls are dominated by inexpensive prints and lots of corporate propaganda.
That’s right: corporate propaganda. Posters in the corridors of this mostly empty building trumpet something called the FACE plan, an acronym for fast, accountable, candid and engaged. One poster offers simplistic how-tos for running a meeting. (“Ensure that the right people are at the table.”) Another is headed with the words “Vision Statement” and uses lots of empty white space to underscore the point: “We will create the world’s largest multiplatform communities based on branded content.”
That mantra, and all the posters, are the brainchild of Mary Berner, the kinetic former president of Fairchild Publications who landed here with the backing of Ripplewood Holdings, the Manhattan private equity firm that orchestrated the debt-fueled takeover of Reader’s Digest.”

Our fast, accountable and engaged Mary, at a modest 125,000 a month, has surrounded herself with a coterie of “blondes” – as they are called by the stunned remnant of RD culture – to ‘reconfigur[e] the innards of the company’ – as NYT says, building up our biz vocabulary. Reconfigure – strip what isn’t nailed down, burn employees, create on-line presence.

It is a heartwarming story, this, the rescue of Readers Digest, with Ripplewood Partners throwing the company a big life preservers, made out of lead, after RD fell on hard times post-9/11. It wasn’t just that Readers Digest had been rendered rather useless by the internet. It was also that the Feds shut down RD’s sweepstakes. That killed the company with its base. It is one thing to have the condensed works of Taylor Caldwell on your shelves, but quite another not to have a shot at winning the sweepstakes. Underneath the idea of earning your money, we all long for the main chance. Ripplewood saw the bleeding, and stepped in to suck the creature dry.

“Ripplewood, led by Tim Collins, its chief executive, saw turnaround opportunities as well as a chance to roll up the fund’s own media properties, including Time Life Inc., the direct-marketing company that was formerly part of Time Warner. Ripplewood put in $275 million of its own money and had a bunch of partners, which included Rothschild Bank of Zurich and GoldenTree Asset Management of New York.
But the $2.4 billion deal piled so much debt onto Reader’s Digest’s balance sheet that it tripled the company’s interest payments, to $148 million a year. The Great Recession hurt ad sales, of course, and devastated sales of direct-marketed books. Instead of the single-digit percentage growth in revenue that Ripplewood was banking on, revenue declined.
In January, the company laid off 300 people, about 8 percent of its staff.
But even with those measures, the company did not, as Ms. Berner might put it, make its number. In August, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.”

HENRY (V.O.)
And, finally, when there's nothing
1 left, when you can't borrow
another buck from the bank or buy
another case of booze, you bust
the joint out.

CUT DIRECTLY TO:

LARGE CLOSE UP OF - HANDS

making rolls of toilet paper being kneaded into long rolls
with Sterno.

CUT TO:

HENRY AND TOMMY shoving wads of Sterno paper into the
ceiling rafters.

HENRY (V.O.)
You light a match.

Fake news in 1800 - or how to do history

There’s a good rule that goes: by indirection find direction out. Or, translated from the Shakespearese into nice wooden ideology critique terms: since present injustices rest on past ones, one of the ways to delegitimate the former (otherwise known as “waking up”) is to go after the latter with a blowtorch.

That’s a rule of thumb, natch. It can allow the scholarly type to disappear into the tunnels of history-mongering and never emerge again, blowtorch in hand. Rectifying the past is a painstaking business, and liable to blowback. When you find what you want to find, often you have to ask: is this a poisoned gift? But vanity more often whispers: hey, hypothesis and proof, don’t have nothing whatever to do with the unconscious libido.

So far, I am not describing Abbé Gregoire; I’m merely farting around with ideal types. However, there was, in Gregoire’s capacious C.V., room for activist scholarship – especially when he was on the outs. As he was in 1800.

Before 1800, he’d been one of the great lights of the Revolution. It was Gregoire who first addressed the question of the rights of men in 1789. Gregoire proposed the abolition of the academies of the ancien regime. Gregoire was the first who proposed the abolition of the monarchy to the Convention after the flight from Varenne. But, as an opponent of the death penalty, he voted to condemn the king for treason to the country but not to execute him. Among his causes was that of the abolition of slavery, which was, alas, not at the top of the agenda in France in the 1790s, and certainly not in in the Napoleonic counter-revolution either. But Gregoire persevered, even as the convention, post Thermidor, turned against the abolitionist politics of his organization, the Société des amis des Noirs. Incidentally, the neo-liberal turn in the eighties that saw bigwig French historians – notably Francois Furet – adopt the Cold war view that the French revolution simply foreshadowed Stalinism, somehow leaves out of account the slave trade. It is as if about half a million Africans did not perish in the 18th century under the Ancien Regime. Gotta keep your eyes on the prize – Stalin! And pay no attention to the sound of those chains…

But I digress. To get back to Gregoire, all that activity had left him rather to the side as Napoleon rose. Napoleon was the kind of opportunist Gregoire had no time for, plus a bloodshedder. So Gregoire had time for other things: for instance, striking blows against slavery. In 1800, in the European context, anti-slavery was not a popular position, since of course the bourgeoisie was making money hand over fist on the whip and the steal. So Gregoire looked back to the past for friends. And who did he see at the other end of the inverted telescope but the Spanish bishop of Chiapas, Bathelemy de las Casas.

In 1800 he published a pamphlet, Apology for Barthelmy de las Casas, disputing the idea that de las Casas had originated and promoted the idea of the slave trade. Gregoire saw clearly how de las Casas was being used by supporters of the slave trade (a category into which fell, alas, a number of “enlightened” thinkers): here was a humanist, a protestor against the massacre of the Mexican Indian nations, who turned to slavery as a humane palliative for the pains of conquest. And, more than that, there was a rhetorical gesture, here, that was then and is now a commonplace of conservative boilerplate, which involves an “even the liberal” logic: even the liberal de las Casas saw how necessary slaves are!

So Gregoire decided to do something that was, historiographically, significant: he decided to trace the chain of title, so to speak, that led to the charge against de las Casas.

“The badmouthers, finding they could not discover any faults in las Casas, invented one, and for two centuries the calumny has weighed on his tomb.”

This is an accusation, more than a hypothesis, but as in a defense lawyer’s speech, it contains a hypothesis: the attribution of sympathy for, or even the discovery of, the African slave trade to de las Casas was prompted by propagandists and rests on an invention.

The hypothesis has two parts: importantly, one needs to scan de las Casas’s biography and writings to find out what misconstrual was going on here.

Gregoire first works to put his apology in line with a humanistic historiography that goes back to Secondo Lancellotti, an Italian humanist who was relentlessly modern, whose 16th century book attacking the “impostures” of ancient historians (and arguing against the very idea of a “Golden Age” – was translated in the 1770s into French. I’m going to ignore, here, the tempting bypath showing a certain receptivity to the Renaissance in the Enlightenment, and how that worked – and return to Gregoire. For after high fiving his buds (dead, alas), Gregoire plunges into business of the history of the slave trade. He finds that instead of being an invention of de las Casas, it was an affair that was being pursued by Portugese merchants before America was even discovered. He does not find an onlie progenitor, but he does find that the Portugese, from the 1430s onward, were raiding the coast of Guinea for African bodies, and selling them in marts to the Spanish. And he finds that the Spanish, before Columbus’s discovery, had entered into the same trade in competition with the Portugese. Importantly, then, the slave trade was in existence on European soil before the New World was discovered.

Like future historians, Gregoire was well aware that the slave trade was originally derived from another commerce – that of cane sugar. The European fondness for this psychotrope was such that one could make huge profits on maintaining a labor force for the intensive work of cultivating and refining it; and that the level of exploitation (the level of profit) would be even greater if that force was unwaged and disciplined to one great task.

“Black slavery seems to have followed, in modern times, the transplantation of sugar cane, cultivated successively in Spain, in Madeira, in the Azores, in the Canaries and in America.” Like cavities appearing across the mouth of the Atlantic (sorry about that image, I’m reaching a little), the slave trade, sugar cane cultivation, and discovery all formed a malign triad.

Still, all Gregoire has established so far is that the slave trade pre-existed de las Casas. But did he endorse it? “But did Las Casas, depressed by the cruelties exercised against the Indians, propose to the Spanish government to replace them with negros? Marmontel, Roucher, Raynal, Paw, Frossard, Nuix, Bryant Edward and Gentey all tell us so.”

One should rest, here, for a second, and think about why this is more important than simply a historical observation. In 1800, when Gregoire was writing, the emancipatory moment had passed in Saint-Domingue. Slavers plied the waters of the Atlantic still. Slavery had been accepted and embraced in the U.S. The economy that developed from the sugar cane depended, still, hugely, for the flow of funds that was generated by the work of the slaves and the trade in them. There’s a long and bitter dispute that has its roots, actually, in the Enlightenment, between economists (generally apologists for capitalism) who claim that the slave trade and slave produce wasn’t that important to Europe and that it was actually opposed by real capitalists, and economists (generally critics of capitalism) who claim no, the figures are damning. No side, though, claims that the slave trade and slave produced commerce was minor. Any history of the “rise of the West” that ignores slave labor is a lie, and Gregoire’s work is important for calling out this lie at an early date.

Now, break over, let’s return to the claim about de las Casas. Here’s where Gregoire strikes. Repeated over and over again by soi-disant “liberals” of the 18th century, the claim, it turns out, rests on one source: not on something de las Casas had written, but on Herrara, a Spanish writer who made this claim. Interestingly, after reviewing the European writers who repeat it, Gregoire turns to a non-European writer: the Mexican creole writer, Clavigero. I say this is interesting: it is a gesture that breaks with a line of implicit authority that runs through history as a discipline up to this day. The facts, in this tradition, are generated by (white) Europeans or Americans. White males. And the voices of those speaking from outside the department (even if they are inside the subject which the historians are treating) are given secondary status, if they are given status at all. This is an established habit in 1800 – and it is still an established habit in 2018.

Gregoire, then, turns to the 1601 history by Herrera, where the idea that de las Casas advocated for African slavery was first propounded. He notices that Herrera quotes no source, no text, even though the unpublished works of de las Casas were available to him – indeed, he exploited them for his book.

Then, Gregoire does some nice SherlockHolmes-ery. As in the curious case of the dog who didn’t bark in the night, a clue in The Silver Blaze, Gregoire examines if there were other voices raised about de las Casas in the period between 1517 (when de las Casas supposedly wrote to the King suggesting African slaves for the Americas) and 1601. In fact, what Gregoire finds are other candidates who suggested African slaves, and names them. But none of them are the Bishop of Chiapas.

Finally, Gregoire brings together his ideas on he topic, and introduces a discovery: an anonymous manuscript in the national library in Paris that seems to date from Casas’s lifetime, is addressed to the Court in Madrid, and suggests that the Spanish conquest was entirely illegitimate and that the Spanish should give back Peru to the Incas and that they have to restore ownership of all mines, land and property to the Indians. This, of course, is a ultra ultra radical proposition, but a reasonable, and certainly, for the Bishop of Chiapas, a Christian one. It simply doesn’t fit with the idea of mass enslavement of Africans.

Gregoire rounds out his pamphlet with a summarizing paragraph that I like quite a bit:

Look at how the error established itself and took root. Thirty years after the death of Las Casas, there comes a credulous or malevolent history, who, without proof, directs an accusation, unvoiced up to then, against him. Some repeat it without examining it; others conclude that he was the first to introduce the slave trade: here already we have a commentary that exaggerates on the text. Then one ties these ideas to the barbarities justly thrown at the English, Dutch and French colonists, and [this is how] one elevates a whole scaffold of calumnies.”

Fake news in 1601. Fake news in 1800.

Stalinism in America as directed by shameful twitter feminists!

Bret Stephens, the NYT’s star climate change denialist columnist, got shamefully smeared on Twitter for writing, about Woody Allen: “If Allen is a pedophile, he appears to have acted on his evil fantasies only once. Compare that to Larry Nassar’s 265 identified victims.”

These twitter feminists, as the ever heroic Katie Roiphe has named them (Roiphe, in the Stalinist conditions prevailing in the U.S., has only been able to avail herself of our imperiled freedom of speech lately on CBS news, Harpers Magazine, and Slate. In other words, she has been muffled just like Solzhenitsyn in the U.S.S.R!), have found something a bit fishy about a defense that seems to come down to, come on, one little rapish situation with a little girl is no big deal. Of course, as Stephens defenders have pointed out, he did not mean that at all! What he meant was, Allen, who at the time was taking nude photographs of his partner’s 18-20 year old stepdaughter, was way way too busy to go after other of Mia Farrow’s adopted children.

So there’s that.

But, seriously folks… one of the under-remarked elements in the backlash against the Metoo moment has to do with class and race. You guessed it! For what were conservatives like Bret Stephen writing in the 80s and 90s and 00s? Why, they were writing screeds about how bad welfare was, since it was just rewarding the “irresponsible” behavior of the “underclass”. This irresponsible behavior was presented, almost always, as libidinous. Those poor men just couldn’t keep it in their pants! All of which added up to a culture of immorality. One that needed the firm hand of the policeman.

Well, hmm. So we flashforward to the 10s, and what do we see? The apologists for the plutocratic class, and in general for the upper level of management, have suddenly gotten groovy! If Mr. Allen was, say, Joe in the D.C. slums of the 80s, taking nude pics of his stepdaughter, I’m pretty sure the Andy Sullivans and the Bret Stephens of that time would be shocked, and using this as evidence of a wholesale breakdown of responsibility by the “poor”, otherwise known as the exploited working class. But give Joe in the D.C. slums a couple of million dollars, make sure he is white, and low and behold – we can’t puritanically persecute him! That would be awful, and evidence that the PC crowd is executing its master plan:Stalinism in America!

I laugh. I have to laugh. I have to say that the whole Trump era suffers from the fact that its violence, its nonsense, its racism, its lack of even a figleaf of logic, is so damn laughable.  A killing joke.

On the launch of another tiresome centrist think tank

There was an interesting study made in the nineties and reported in Joan Ciulla’s The Working Life. Executives were polled about what motivated workers. Their answers ranged from ceremonies to non-cash awards. They were then asked about what motivated executives, and as one, they chorused: money.

This poll not only gives us a glimpse of how the exploitation of workers generates complex denial rituals among capitalists, but it also gives us a glimpse of how politicians in the neo-lib era think. Both Republicans and Democrats have been agreed, in the last thirty or forty years, that executives need lots and lots of money. Our recent cure for the depression, which was handed out by Dr. Obama and his treasury secretary and Fed Chief, was very, very heavy on the money for executives. But for workers – well, the Republicans have come up with ardent defenses of the second amendment, and the Dems have come up with retraining workers after we pass marvelous “free trade” agreements to undermine their jobs and salaries. Although to be fair, the Dems sometimes come up with things like Romneycare, which makes sure to put in place a complex set of impediments and forms so that the medical care for all thing doesn’t get out of hand. After all, the workers love those ceremonies!

I was reminded of this by the recent launch of a think group dedicated, on the one hand, to stopping the Dem bandwagon of Medicare for all, which has become faddish among Dem pols, and making sure that some “bi-partisan” health care approach, one that is acceptable to “stakeholders” (the investors in insurance companies, drug companies, hospital corporations, and etc.) and the ceremony-fetishizing worker. It is led by Andy Slavitt, who, to give him credit, was great at opposing the drive to abolish ACA last year. He was less great in opposing any universal expansion of health care. And he has saddled up with such great minds as former Republican senator Bill Frist, who sponsored a bill for privatizing medicare when he was in Congress.

Money for capital, non-cash awards for the rest of us: there’s a bi-partisan platform we, or at least the we who writes and the editorials and runs Congress, can get behind!

MY NOVEL IS DONE

I have finally finished my other, my monster, the novel. The Novel! And now I am looking for anyone interested in diving into this attempt to ... no, I'm not going to describe it. But if any reader of LimitedInc is interested, send me a message at rgathman@netzero.net and I'll send you a copy.

Next up is, of course, correcting spelling, making sure the graphs are tabbed correctly, finding an agent, selling it.

kafka's famous laughter

There is a lineage that goes from Lichtenberg’s Scribble book through Lamb, Baudelaire’s Fusées, Rozanov, Pessoa, and – supremely – Kafka, whose request to Brod to burn his papers was, as it were, a request from this history itself, over and above Kafka’s personality. The principle holding this literature together was enunciated by Bartleby – I prefer not to. This is, in the universe of the clerk, equivalent to Lucifer’s non serviam – it ties together the two elements of the scribble and the institution. If we can speak of an institutional consciousness, it is always a consciousness of the system. Jack Goody, in The Domestication of the Savage Mind, notices the importance of the list in all early writing that has been found in the Mesopotamia. Goody divides lists into three types: the list that is a catalogue of names, events and offices, which he calls a ‘retrospective’ list, and which can be thought of as a representation of work-flow; the ‘shopping’ list, or the list that includes expectations and items for future projects; and the lexical list – the proto-dictionary, the list that lists the elements of listing – sounds, letters, numbers. A very important list, according to Goody, in Mesopotamia. All three of these lists are dealt with and syncretized in the clerk’s office – viewing the clerk very broadly as one of the central types of ‘circulation’ worker, as Marx named them. The accountant’s task, for instance, is – for all of its spreadsheet cleverness – directly related to the functions invented in the Mesopotamian bureaucracies. 

The clerk’s literature is a form of Western Dao – Bartleby’s phrase operates in this invisible tradition much as certain phrases from the Chuang Tzu operate to bind together the concept of the Dao. “Therefore a man who has wisdom enough to fill one office effectively, good conduct enough to impress one community, virtue enough to please one ruler, or talent enough to be called into service in one state, has the same kind of self-pride as these little creatures [the cicada and the quail who mock the giant flights of monster birds, etc.] Sung Jung-tzu would certainly burst out laughing at such a man. The whole world could praise Sung Jung-tzu and it wouldn’t make him exert himself; the whole would could condemn him and it wouldn’t make him mope.” 

Sung Jung-tzu’s laughter, to be sure, is different from Bartleby’s inexpressiveness. But in the line of texts that extend from Lichtenberg to Kafka (and into the pit of which, I think, literature in the age of its de-institutionalization is being inexorably lead), there is a laughter that comes out when, for instance, Kafka read his stories out to his friends. Or in a letter to Felice, when Kafka told his fiancé that he was famous in his office for his laughter [Ich bin sogar als grosser Lacher bekannt] and gave the example of his inability to stop laughing when, one day, the president of the Insurance company made a speech bemoaning the accidents of workers and the trouble this causes for insurance companies. In fact, Kafka coulndn’t help laughing, nor could he even look away and disguise his face when the President made his speech. 

the super-ego in the cultural industry

Among bad signs, this is a good one: you are sitting there watching a movie and you suddenly start feeling like Teddy Adorno.

Adorno, after all, was, at least as a writer, the very embodiment of melancholy. He could easily have been incorporated as some opposite to Joker in the Batman universe – call him Melancho. Melancho, the criminal mastermind who leaves a trail of tears at the crime site.

Last night, I had a Melancho moment. We were watching a good film: Three Billboards outside of Ebbing, Mo. We’d been waiting to see this film. The babysitter was in place. The Bastille moviehouse boasted a screen two times the usual MK2 one. Great.

And it was much as I’d read about, and admirable. Frances McDormand was unyielding, and Woody Harelson was charming. But I gradually became aware of a severe mismatch between the nightvision of the world in the film, its dark and daft humor, and the musical score. Not the country songs, which of course Hollywood has to add if there is a rural setting (which is like a caption: rural setting). No, it was the stringwork that began to get to me. The musical score, it struck me, was operating as a sort of psychotic super-ego, making sure that one “got” every sequence.

Take, for instance [Spoilers ahead] the suicide of Sheriff Willoughby. It was hard to watch this sequence, but it was not incomprehensible. Rather, I understood it as one understands a narrative – I understood it via some synthesis of sympathy and intellect.

As, I assume, we all understand such things. But in the immediate aftermath, what does the film do? It starts to swell with a string section. The stringwork was a way of “explaining” to me that life was awfully sad. Of course, in a ruse that tells you the superego’s been here, the explanation really serves as a denial. The strings take away the shock. The underlining takes away the rawness. Life isn’t so sad after all when you have a string section tastefully following you around.

Adorno, of course, understood this as the chief mission of the cultural industry.

And maybe the music was, in fact, essential to the deal.

Every film is a deal. In this case, the writer and director, Martin McDonagh, eveloped a reputation as a sort of Irish Sam Peckinpah of the theater with plays that were as bloody as those of Seneca. This is a reputation that gets you articles in chic glossies. And attracts the attention of the next big thing crowd in the movie industry. But that very invitation then has to be digested by the investors. They have to contemplate whether the chic glossy audience can be translated into a profit margin that will make everybody whole.

My feeling is that the string section really wasn’t for me to feel sad about the sheriff, but rather it was for the investors, it was to make sure that they didn’t feel too sad about me feeling sad about the sheriff. Because if it was too much of a bummer, I’d desert the profit margin, we’d all desert the profit margin, and … there wouldn’t be a profit margin!

This is of course what commercial films do. Sometimes there’s a genius in the system, but that genius is always going to have to go through a lot of investor fat. When this is discussed, at all, it is usually discussed in terms of audiences. What “audiences” like. This conveniently deflects the discussion from what investors like. It is, as always, the subrosa class warfare text in pop culture. In fact, audiences don’t, actually, exist like some immobile Platonic form, the form of Babbits, throwing popcorn at the tragic sense of life and applauding fart jokes. Rather, this audience is a product of the cultural industry, as surely as epidemic diabetes is a product of the corn oil industry.

It made me feel like Melancho.

Good flick, otherwise.

isolationism and bitcoin libertarianism

... and they just said
what they always say

I don’t think of Trump or Trumpism as particularly isolationist, which is the standard charge by the neo-liberal crowd. An isolationist does not increase the already horrific amount of money devoted to the American military. That isn’t just a symptom of some deeper non-isolationism – that is the whole ballgame. Rather, Trumpism exists as another twist in the long logic of power that has made it unthinkable, for the establishment, that the U.S. could for good reasons simply cease to be a superpower. That logic makes it the case that if, say, China, with its newfound wealth, does things in Africa, this is a net minus for the U.S. – because it is always a binary, always win/lose, with our “rivals”.

Fundamentally, I can’t think of any political reason to countenance the seizing of excessive world power by any nation. It has always puzzled us that the right, which doesn’t trust the state to deliver mail, trusts the state with the means of ending the human species. This, indeed, is straining at the gnat and swallowing the ICBM missile. My view is that this disproportion shows the fundamental contradiction in a theory of the state that starts out with an anti-statist ideological coloration while having no real philosophy of governance – that is, having no recognition that governance is in question in every organization. In other words, the question of governance is in play in both the power held by public and that held by private entities. Fetishizing the “contract” – an all purpose, ontological bandage here – allows the anti-statist not to look at the results of the exercise of private power. Given the course we are going in this world of ours, it is only a matter of time before a corporation builds its own nuclear missile. To the cheers, no doubt, of bitcoin libertarians.  

Hitler - a screen memory from America

As is well known, the Hitler comparison is a standard trope among the Internet commentariat. The standard rhetorical reply is to evoke the Godwin’s law, which says that once the Hitler comparison is reached, all further argument is reduced to absurdity or repetition.

Godwin’s law may be right as far as the measurement of information is concerned. However, there is more to say about the insistent use of Hitler, at least from the semi-Freudian/Marxy p.o.v.  

Freud introduced the useful concept of the “screen memory” quite early in his career, in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss.  In an essay in his “Small Writings” about a childhood memory in Goethe’s autobiography, written in the midst of the horrors of World War I, 1917, he condenses the notion down to its essence:

“Obviously, the important value of such childhood memories is only rarely evident. Mostly they seem indifferent, even nugatory, and it seems incomprehensible that it is just these memories that succeeded in defying our amnesia; thus those, who retain them as their memory properties over the course of many years, know as little how to measure their importance as the people to whom they recount them. In order to recognize their significance, it requires a certain art of interpretation, that either shows how their content was substituted through another, or shows their relationship to some other unrecognized but important experience, for which they have emerged as so-called “screen memories’”.

It is, of course, an enormous step from the memories of an individual to the collective memories of a culture. But I’ll leap it here, to ask, what screen memory is “Hitler” the name for?

My theory is that it is the screen memory that allows Americans to project on a completely foreign leader, and events that happened in Europe, a chain of events that were located firmly in the New World, from the ethnic cleansing of the Indian nations to slavery to post Civil War apartheid all the way up to the mass incarcerations that have marked our last thirty years. In other words, the correct comparison for evils that happen in America is not Nazi Germany, but the American past, with all of its complexities. The correct comparison for Trump, for instance, is evidently and obviously George Bush, whose footsteps he is following pretty closely. When the absurd editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, writes about Trump as a “Nero”, I have to laugh, since this same Remnick was all too happy to publish fakey news accounts about how closely Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were bound together in the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq – the bloodiness and awfulness of which is being softened to nothing by the same American amnesia that has now made the war in Vietnam a question of heroic American P.O.W.s, instead of say the multiply more Viet Cong and North Vietnamese P.O.W.s who faced much worse conditions in camps in the South.

You would think that 9/11 would have made us think a bit about how a society treats people who bomb it, but then, that would be a little too much thinking.

In any case, the Hitler comparison and in general the fascist comparisons that are continually thrown up in political discourse in this country are products not of solemn historical reflection, and not of deep and vigorous resistance to Trump, but, just the opposite, of a resistance to see how Trump fits into our national narrative. Trump, as H. Rap Brown mighta put it, is as American as apple pie.

the ideology of who bears the burden

The right argues that society as a whole has no responsibility to an individual who gets sick. The taxpayers, the argument goes, should not pay for this individual's healthcare.

Which is at least a logical argument. But it is a strange one: for how about crime? An individual, x, is robbed. Well, that is sad, but why should taxpayers pay for the tracking down and incarceration of the robber? After all, the robber didn't rob y, who is having to pay for the building and maintenance of the jail in which the robber is held.

The right's response is that the individual, here, should be taken care of by society, but it isn't clear why. Is it because y has an interest in not getting robbed him or herself? But y has a similar interest in not being made ill by a person whose sickness is contagious. And, more broadly, y has an interest in being taken care of herself if she is sick.

To go further: myself, I have no interest in or concern about investing, and if somebody defrauds investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, what do I care? Yet those with investments have an awful big interest in seeing the state punish those who would defraud them.

The logical path that leads to the rejection of universal healthcare is the one that must also lead to the dissolution of public support for the police department and prisons. There is really not a logical difference between a sickness and a felony, from the point of view of the state's interest.

To further the argument: if we treated crime like we treat sickness, then surely the cost of the police work, trial, and prison for the condemned should fall on the person benefited. The robbed family, or the family of a person who was murdered, etc., should, by the same argument that would make them bear the cost of hospital care, be forced to pay the state to keep the murderer or thief in jail. This might be ruinously expensive to families of all but the wealthy – but the answer of course would be to spread the costs privately. We could all buy crime insurance.

The crime insurance would, of course, reproduce what happens now in terms of costs. The costs of justice are shouldered by taxpayers. Insurance, whether public or private, points at one thing: there are costs that the average person can’t bear.

In the past, plutocratic rule was based on the exploitation of the worker, while the exploitation of the consumer was a lesser factor. In the present neo-liberal order, both the worker and the consumer are exploited, with the explosion in life-event costs – health and education, mostly – being the site at which this exploitation is most evident.

And what are we going to do about it? I have a suggestion: get rid of the plutocracy. 

Being lost/Being home

There's the geography of maps, where the objects are a town, a river, a mountain, and then there is the subjective map, where the objects are all object-events: getting lost, coming home, being-in-a-strange-apartment. The subjective map has a very different scale - it measures not inches, miles, or kilometers, but uniqueness and repetitions. For instance, the geography of getting lost depends upon its position in the scale of encounters with a place - getting lost in the same place the second time is a harder thing to do, and eventually, if you keep coming back, you aren't lost at all and the lostness that you once experienced seems like a dream. Coming back home is perhaps the opposite of lostness, an East to lostness's West. Lostness is tied to the radical lack of experience of a place, a failure of recognition, while coming home is tied to the ultra experience of a place, the place raised by the power of some square of the mind and senses.