War and Taxes: Marx plus Pynchon

Marx, in the Grundrisse, makes an interesting remark about war:

War was developmentally prior to peace. The way, through war and armies, etc., certain economic relationships, such as wage labor, machinery etc. are developed earlier than in bourgeois society, Even the relationships of productivity and commerce are particularly visible in the army.

Still, Marx clung to the bourgeois imagining of war as something that is not itself a system: “War is self evidently to be understood as though it were immediately economically the same as though the nation through a part of its capital into the water.”

In other words, Marx ultimately sees war as non-productive – even as he sees that it can be developmentally prior to peace. In his list of war’s innovations, one notices that he does not include credit and taxation. As is well known, Marx did not have a developed sense of credit, which he saw as parasitic on productivity. It is, and it isn’t. A parasitic relationship is not necessarily a subordinate one, after all.

Thomas Pynchon, in the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, has a more acute sense of war as a system. He doesn’t, of course, develop this sense as a “theory”, but it becomes a strong narrative thread in Slothrop’s peregrination through war ravaged Europe.

What was happening on the American home front in World War II has been seen through many lenses: the greatest generation unity of the country, the enormous burst in productivity, the end of the Depression. But the lens that might be most interesting to us right now is that WWII marked a decisive change in the tax structure, which has had an enormous bearing on the peculiar American structure of class feelings – that lack of solidarity and identity of the working class that has determined our politics.

In part, this is simply racism. In as much as the upper class in America has been and continues to be overwhelmingly white, the sentimental outbursts of racism are rarer there. This is why the press, when it looks around for racists, finds plenty wearing baseball caps and having trouble with spelling – and doesn’t look to the almost all white system of prep schools, the Ivy leagues, the boards of corporations, etc.

However, there are other roots of labor’s odd affection for its exploiters.

Which gets us to war and taxes. In WWI, Wilson’s government had a newly established tax system – the internal revenue. Internal revenue was designed as a class tax. Before you had to file a return, you had to make a certain amount of money, far above the average salary. In World War I, this changed – those families with incomes above 2,000 per year, for the first time, had to pay a tax. However, that only added about 3 million to the tax rolls – and eventually that figure rose to 6 million. The government really relied on its hikes on corporations and wealthy individuals. From 13 percent, the tax rate for those making above 2 million rose to 67 percent. Since the major source of federal income before that – the tariff – was, so to speak, in suspension, corporate taxes – billed as taxes on ‘excess war profits” – and borrowing made up the rest of the war expenditure.

The borrowing prevented the Republicans who came in after the war from immediately undoing the taxes on the wealthy.  Mellon, perhaps the most powerful Treasury secretary the U.S. ever had, didn’t really want to abolish the income tax, as the radicals in the Republican party did, and replace it with a sales tax. Rather, he saw the advantages of this kind of revenue, and the advantages that came with tax loopholes – a tool used ever since to nourish one or another wealthy interest.

It was WWII that marked the true transition in the tax regime, however. The income tax remained a “class tax” up to the 40s. The masses didn’t generally pay any income taxes. As Sarah Kreps points out in Taxing War, “At the beginning of World War II, for example, only 3.9 million Americans were paying taxes, compared to 43 million by the end of the war. Income generated through taxes had gone from $2.2 billion in 1939 to $35.1 billion by 1945.² The fiscal sacrifice was enormous, and despite these demands for revenue, public support remained high throughout the war—as did the belief that the system of taxation was appropriate, with individuals stating overwhelmingly that their tax levels were fair.”

In the sixties, leftist critics of the New Deal attacked it as a means to preserve an inherently unequal socio-economic capitalist system. Since the Reagan years, though, the critique has generally vanished. It is now viewed as a gold standard even by lefties. Yet the sixties critics were accurate: the creation of the mass tax turned out to be a great class dissolvent. Both the wealthy and the worker were paying taxes, and sooner or later the wealthy would figure out that a tool had been given to them: that the cry of being taxed too much would echo among the mass of taxpayers, who indeed, one could argue, were being taxed too much, especially in relation to the services provided for them by the government – which, at the same time, were being chipped away by political groups generally working in the service of capital.

Kreps points out that American wars – and pick the year for the last sixty to one hundred years when America wasn’t waging war – used to fall within the liberal framework that claimed that wars were a sacrifice – much like Marx speaking of the nation “throwing” its capital into the water. However, it is not clear that this has ever been so. There is a school – which again was stronger in the sixties – that pointed out the predatory nature of America’s wars. These wars, in short, created the vast geopolitical entity of the United States, with all the resources that went with it. One could say, as well, that the wars undertaken or supported by America since and including World War II have created a world-system on American terms that has been enormously profitable for the American economy. In fact, this perception has long been abroad in American culture: under the official rhetoric about the “sacrifice” of war, there is another that sees war as a solution to economic problems: what we need is a war.

Kreps is right, I think, to see the shift in the way America does war as a symptom of the decline of democracy as an ethos and ideal in the American republic. Not only has conscription gone, allowing American leaders to use their volunteer troops as monarchs used theirs, without fearing any radical public complaint, but the wars are also put on the ticket – taxes are not raised, but even lowered as wars are fought and the war industry grotesquely inflated. Krebs view of democracy is that it requires a certain Pavlovian mechanism – the administration of pain by the governing class should create a response by the governed class. When the pain is anaesthetized, the governing class has a non-democratic leeway, and the governed class feels cheated and baffled.

The governed class is just Slopthrop magnified. Something terrible happened to the child, and the man feels a strange hardon whenever his ESP picks up the presence, or the future presence, of a missile. Pynchon plus Marx: our guide to the present disorder.

x men and america

So I saw an X man movie with Adam. X men: the something something something. It is the one where some group finds a “cure” for the mutants. And Dr. Nematode (I know, not his real name. I joke!) leads a mutant revolt against these here States. Meanwhile, the core of the plot is classic: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy kills girl for her own good. Myth, quoi! Wolverine falls for Rebecca, who conceals two souls within her breast, one of whom is some monster who not only wants to fuck – thus seducing Wolverine – but also doesn’t respect anything. For instance, she psychokinetically destroys a house that, from the look of it, would easily go for 2 million in the hot L.A. real estate market. And incidentally kills kindly Captain Picard, who in this movie is Doctor something or other, the Gandhi of the mutants. Then this Rebecca chick teams up with Captain Nematode and they attack Big Pharma island, costing beaucoup in FX, and then she gets mad, her monster is unleashed, she atomizes a whole army, and Wolverine has to use all his strength to approach her for one more kiss and then stabs her to death in the stomach. Happy ending!

Like most high concept (that is, brilliantly dumb) super hero flicks, the allegory of a “cure” for mutants is meant as clickbait for film critics, i.e. anyone with a Twitter account. Thus, instead of discussing bang bang, which, though fun to watch, is not the kind of thing that sustains controversy, one can discuss, say, the “cure” for same sex desire, or whatever. However, the allegory is pretty clumsy in this one. The premise is that mutants are civil beings, i.e. they have rights. But since the mutants kill each other and wreck property with abandon, and yet seem to face no handcuffs, lawyers, or trials, they are really being treated as political subjects and superheros. Of course, this in a way is more realistic to the way things are in the states, where the superhero class – the upper five percent – has to do something extremely nasty to even get to the arrest stage, and, like Jeffrey Epstein, are jailed, if at all, under remarkably mild conditions. Meanwhile, justice for the peon class in America goes like this: arrest, guilty plea, punishment. Something like 95 percent of the arrested don’t face any goddamn trial in the normal sense – that is, where there’s a fucking jury. That would completely overwhelm the system. In the land of the free, we’ve overcome this problem through the clever use of incentives: those who dare to ask for a trial will be found guilty anyway, but their sentence will punish them for having the audacity to ask for a trial. A perfect system! It gets rid of the whole “trial” ethos at one swoop, so we can jail our less successful contingent without spending an inordinate amount of time handwringing about it.

However, Hollywood and tv still love the trial, because the trial is drama. And so over the practical everyday authoritarianism of American life (worse, of course, on every level if you are an African-American) they have woven a pleasant picture of the law working like it did in the wet dream of the writers of the Constitution (giving a bit too much credit here to the writers of the Constitution, but work with me here).

Occasionally, reality gives fantasy a break and you have something like the Weinstein trial, where a 1 percenter, after a mere thirty year streak of rape, is actually sentenced to prison. Building on this thin wedge, I think the superhero paradigm should try out the trial. Wolverine, for instance – what if the cops actually took him in for murdering Rebecca (or whatever her name was). This would be an excellent high concept premise! You’d get two myths (the myth of justice in America and the classical myth that you gotta kill the chick you love if she’s such a slut that she fucks you) for the price of one.
Marvel universemakers, DC universemakers – try this out!

pigeons

The patsy in his lonely fabuloso

builds a home out of a homecoming,

his lifeline out of a lifelong nostalgia.

Later, out and about in the top-feeder city

holding a crumpled brown sack full

of bread crumbs, he finds the usual park bench.

They always find him, wingbursts, the convention

Of their dull gray and street ragged bodies

Juddering heads, automaton legwork, injuries

- b-but, but loved, these dead eyed bottom feeders

as though their back ally flights foretold

the shamanic instant beyond his coil.

DISEASES WITHOUT CURES

In his book, Bad Medicine, David Wootton makes an interesting remark about the symbolism of the stethoscope. It was invented in 1816 by René Laennec out of a problem in gender politics: the norm for female patients of the all male doctor fraternity was to be examined with their clothes on. Thus, the doctor could not lay his head against the chest of the patient and listen to the sound of what was going on inside. Laennec was concerned with phthisis, a nosological category that has now been subsumed as tuberculosis. The stethoscope was a true advance: doctors became much better at diagnosing phthisis. But therein lies the historical burden of Wootton’s book:

“Phthisis no longer exists as a disease: we now call it tuberculosis because we think of it as an infectious
disease caused by a specific micro-organism. The same sounds in a stethoscope that would once have led to a diagnosis of phthisis now leads to tests to confirm tuberculosis. But there is an important difference between our diagnosis of tuberculosis and Laennec’s diagnosis of phthisis: we can cure tuberculosis (most of the time), while his patients died of phthisis––he died of it himself. Until 1865 (when
Lister introduced antiseptic surgery) virtually all medical progress was of this sort. It enabled doctors to get better and better at prognosis, at predicting who would die, but it made no difference at all to
therapeutics. It was a progress in science but not in technology.”

The gap between the ability to diagnose and the ability to cure, or even to understand the cause of a disease, or its etiology, is easy to forget. I often edit articles about medicine, or public health, in the pre-twentieth century period. Some of these articles concern the medical culture of native peoples. And even with the best anti-colonialist will in the world, often the authors simply assume that there is a contrast between a rational and curative Western medicine and a ritualistic and non-curative folk medicine. In fact, folk medicine was medicine up into the twentieth century, and often continues to be today.

The older regime of treating a disease for which there was no certain cure has been much studied, and, contrary to all the bullshit about building up "herd immunity" (by letting the herd be culled of its weak members) was highly successful by stopping infection. To take tuberculosis, one of the great scourges of the 19th century, as an example - a classical example - we assume that this scourge was defeated by streptomycin, one of the miracle drugs of the 50s. But as was pointed out long ago by Rene Dubos, who was a major player with the Rockefeller foundation in finding a cure for tuberculosis, the decline in the mortality from tuberculosis long preceded the cure. Dubos was a pioneer of the ecological school of medical history - recognizing the vast importance of infrastructural factors in the recent surge in the health and wellbeing of human beings. Tuberculosis, in the nineteenth century in the U.S., was responsible for a fourth of all deaths. By 1940 it had plummeted to a 20th of all deaths. A large share of the increase in longevity in the 20th century was due to the decline of tuberculosis. Some doctors estimated that a third of the deaths of the middle age cohort in Europe in the 19th century were tuberculosis related.

If the same anti-virtue ethos was in place in the nineteenth century, instead of public money being spent on sewage systems, the government would have encouraged each individual to dispose of his or her sewage - although the "progressive" 19th century version of the neoliberal would have encouraged safety through a tax break of some kind. The late twentieth and early 21st century witnessed a shocking dectline in the public health structures of most of the "advanced" Western economies. And this is what we get.

the end of virtue

In the eighteenth century, certain ‘total concepts” were believed by the philosophers – for instance, that the republic as a political form depended on virtue as the glue that bound the populace together. As Catherine Puigelier has pointed out, the Enlightenment consensus was that the whole discussion of whether man was born good or bad was falsely constructed: virtue was always and everywhere a product of sociability, of the social. Although – me here, not Puigelier -  it was not just one of many products: the social cannot exist without virtue. The social contract only held, only made sense, if there was an ethos of virtue that enforced contracts – not with violence, but with reasoned agreement.  In this sense, it is what might be called an emergent property.

Voltaire in his Philosophical dictionary – and don’t we need a new translation of the whole unabridged thing? And isn’t this a case for the NYRB classics publisher? – mocks the notion of a sovereign good, of a ultimate state towards which humanity, or the individual, strives.

Le souverain bien en ce monde ne pourrait-il pas être regardé comme souverainement chimérique ? Les philosophes grecs discutèrent longuement à leur ordinaire cette question. Ne vous imaginez-vous pas, mon cher lecteur, voir des mendiants qui raisonnent sur la pierre philosophale ?

Le souverain bien ! quel mot ! autant aurait-il valu demander ce que c’est que le souverain bleu, ou le souverain ragoût, le souverain marcher, le souverain lire, etc.

[Shouldn’t we regard the sovereign good in this world as a sovereign chimera? The Greek philosophers, as was their habit, chewed on this question at length. My dear reader, can’t you see them as beggars arguing about the philosopher’s stone?

What a phrase: sovereign good! You could as well ask what is the sovereign blue, or the sovereign stew, the sovereign walk, the sovereign read, etc.]

Voltaire was a “flat” thinker – he did not ask himself whether the destruction of the hierarchical structure of the good was diagnostic of something intrinsic to the good or intrinsic to the social construction of the good – which aren’t necessarily identical. But the job of destruction did make way for the idea of a republic of individuals. These individuals form a collective not by having no sense of good, but by pursuing the good as they see fit, within the framework of public virtue. Though the abstract hierarchy of good is as absurd as an abstract hierarchy of stew, the real, instantiated good to which the state is responsible still endures, creating a hierarchy that is founded not on the good itself, but on a variety of the good – the legitimation of the social order.

Now, fast forward 275 years. We are witnessing something like the end of virtue, republican virtue. The rightwing parties – in the U.S., U.K., Netherlands, Austria, Australia, etc. – are led by an overtly anti-virtue ethos. This, I think, distinguishes them from 20^th century fascism, which was an extreme right manifestation of the republican ethos, interpreted through race and the adherence to a supreme – and supremely virtuous – ruler.

On twitter, I received a response to something I wrote by a Trump follower. Usually I just block that nonsense, but for some reason I didn’t this time, so we tweet debated, meaning we slung insults and instances at each other. I wrote, among other things, how degrading and stupid it was to have a national leader recommend injecting detergent. The response I thought was classic: “if you think Trump wasn't trolling your side when he said that, you're out to lunch. Your side actually believed he was serious when he tweeted a video of himself being President until 2040.”  

Fintan O’Toole coined the phrase LOLConservatism. This is what he meant. I can’t imagine one of Mussolini’s followers defending him by claiming he is just trolling the libs. That would be considered an insult to Mussolini. There’s been a disruption on the right that is still badly understood on the left, where you will sometimes hear the earnest question: well, what does the right propose to do about, say, pollution, or climate change, or whatever. The idea of Republican virtue, of a sense that the governing class is justified in as much as it is working for the good of society, has dissolved, here. As Margaret Thatcher said, there’s no such thing as society, thus bringing to a true dead end the dialectic between the social order and private rivalry that was once a vital conservative concern. If the state is bound by no sense of virtue, and the only demand made on it is to stop guaranteeing any benefit to the mass of the governed (under the guise of shrinking the state – which is of course a mask, as the state expands its support of Capital in ways that the “middle class prophets” of classical liberalism would never have imagined), then the state has essentially divorced itself from the old, republican ideal.

I am not a middle class prophet, and can’t imagine how the world without a republican ideal is going to work. I do know that world is here. Sad, isn’t it?

Notes on Mike Davis's Monster at the Door: the Global Threat of Avian Flu

the reason the doctor knows everything is because he’s been everywhere at the wrong time and has now become anonymous. - Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

So I went into this pandemic with my eyes closed. I had no real notion, save from some rare reading, what a pandemic was, what it meant, how it worked.  Since, I’ve looked up things, I keep up with the world-o-meter every day about infections and deaths, I rage against the stupidity in the U.S., and in the E.U., I think about the fact that under fucking Sarkozy France had a more rational stock of medica materia for use in epidemics than it does even now (Sarkozy! I’ve long despised Hollande, but to get nostalgic for Sarkozy you have to be driven mad by circumstances), I’m your regular horsefly caught in a jam jar. But I have only begun to understand the modern ecology of the pandemic by reading Mike Davis’ Monster at the Door: the Global threat of Avian Flu.

The first two chapters of the book should clue you in: this was a mass death foretold, and it is only going to get worse if we don’t rethink globalization globally. It is a book so full of info that is shocking and overlooked that well, it is a sadness.

Item: the mad Trump idea that Covid19 was a laboratory creation is probably wrong, but it is almost certain that H1N1, an influenza type that appeared in 1971, was the result of a lab accident in the Soviet Union or China.

Item: covering up lab accidents and epidemic threats is common. H5N1/97 is one of the deadliest Avian viruses, although it is rare, yet, that it crosses over to people. It is a virus that does things like, well, causes birds to literally bleed from their eyes and all other parts so that they “melt”.

““It reproduced much faster than ordinary flu strains, and in cells that ordinary flu strains couldn’t live in, and if you grew it in eggs, it killed them. This virus, said Lim [a Hong Kong scientist], was like an alien.” Indeed, when veterinary researchers in Athens, Georgia, infected a poultry flock with the recently isolated human strain, the entire flock died within a day. Horrified scientists, who had never seen such a rapid killer, immediately donned biohazard containment suits and dosed themselves with antivirals; this ignited a controversy about the safety protocols necessary for work with the Hong Kong virus. Influenza diagnostic labs, at least in the United States, were not equipped with the elaborate containment systems required for working with such a potent virus: federal biosafety guidelines had not anticipated an influenza that acted like the nightmare protagonist of a sci-fi thriller.”

Did you know that an avian flu epidemic was discovered in Holland in March 2003 that required the destruction of millions of chickens from a strain that caused conjunctivitis among people who had contact with it? Did you know these strains are popping up all over – for instance, H6N2, which infected  tens of millions of birds in California  in a four-month period beginning in March 2002, leading to a mass slaughter that was kept quiet, since the agribusinesses involved thought that it would scare people. Right. Or that Canada had a severe virus outbreak in 2004 in Fraser Valley, British Columbia, that the Canadian government intentionally covered up,

“Several dozen workers involved in the gassing and incineration of the 19 million chickens subsequently developed conjunctivitis and/or flu-like symptoms; two definite H7N3 cases were confirmed but the victims were infected by different strains, evidence that the virus was evolving at very high speed.¹⁵⁹ There was also considerable controversy about the disposal of infected chicken excrement after expert testimony that the virus might survive for as long as three months in manure.”

Item: all of the stuff about herd immunity is hooey. You either have deathtolls in the hundreds of thousands or you apply the 19^th century techniques of quarantine, plus 21^st century testing and tracking. This has been happening much more frequently than I know about – and I would guess most people. In Hong Kong, in South Korea, and especially in Guangzhou province in China.

Item: the global food economy has undergone a “livestock” revolution, as Davis rather clumsily labels it. That means that the amount of chicken and pigs, living in close quarters, has increased exponentially in number and in concentration.:  “pork and poultry constitute 76 percent of the developing world’s increased meat consumption, and poultry has accounted for almost all of the small net increase in rich countries’ food consumption. The viral “food supply”—poultry, swine, and humans—has been dramatically enlarged.” Deal is, you concentrate the animals in small areas, and you expand the population, and you have no global veterinary watch – one of the crucial points in the book is the minimal overlap between human health organizations and veterinary organizations – you are practically inviting in flu. Especially as you have a wild bird population that has evolved over a million years to mostly coexist with a number of virus types in their bodies. Odd thing is, the species crossover of these viruses to humans results in a change in the symptoms and attack of the viruses – from the digestive system to the lungs.

Item: the hunt for wild animal meat, in Africa and Asia, is a result of various changes in the global economic system. For instance, in Africa, those demographics that used to depend, largely, on fish can’t anymore – because European and Asian fishing fleets have sucked up their fish supply like a vacuum cleaner. At the same time, the forests are being cut down, and the cutters are hungry: so they want to eat meat. What’s on the menu is anybody’s guess.

So yes, the next flu might jump from some weasel to a chicken to a human, or from a weasel to a human directly.

I’m itemizing – the information load in this book is amazingly dense, and one feels like scrawling down items on a piece of paper in order to remember them. But it is also amazingly well written, moving like a thriller in which you find out, on the end page, that you are the victim. And unlike other books about epidemics, the concentration is not just on the U.S. or even Europe. Like “The Victorian Holocaust” – Davis’s superb book on famine in the late nineteenth century – there is an attention paid to India, Latin America, and Africa that is unusual. The Spanish Influenza (which might really have been called the Kansas Influenza, since it probably popped there) is usually written about only in terms of the states – but the scythe was much much heavier in India, where, under British rule, with the food and supplies taken away for the war and British imperial matters, 10-14 million people died. Never watch a movie glorifying the Raj without remembering – it was an empire built on millions and millions of skulls. The British rule in India is one of the great human disgraces.

America the defective

Reading the comfortable neo-liberal comments that overflow the NYT opinion page and twitter, that are obviously pronounced at dinner tables and in emails that contain (attached) the latest "marvelous column by Tom Friedman, who nails it" - all of which are about Trump the barbarian and none of which are about America the defective - I am reminded of a sentence of Montesquieu's: "When Sylla wished to give liberty to Rome, Rome could no longer receive it, having only a feeble remnant of virtue left. And as it had always even less, instead of waking up after Caesar, Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, Nero, Domitian, it was ever more the slave; all blows were directed against the tyrant, none against the tyranny."

New England, 1886

Her little life lay on the bed
Concentrate as that sword
Intent, edged, unsheathed
Prophesized by the Lord

Not to bring peace but more life
Than any outside her closed door
And she interred like a knife
In the kitchen’s silverware drawer.

She awaited her chance for the attack
To be bloodied under his touch
From which there’d be no going back
- but it never came to much.

Her papers were put away
Her dresses were folded up
Her brother was heard to say
She was strange even as a pup.
- Karen Chamisso

the poet

“… the fact that the film presents extreme closeups

Of the genitals in function” made

All the stags grin monomaniacal. One became

a poet and taught the trade. In the flicker

Of his stag film eyes

what was I and I

- genitals in function in extreme closeup

underneath my underneath.

“But I guess they’re really young, and they always look beautiful”

Somebody said to somebody as I carried the party

Home on my back, like Aeneas carrying his daddy.

- Karen Chamisso

The "we" of stupidity

Robert Musil once gave a famous talke entitled “On stupidity” [Ueber Dummheit]. The title is doublesided, at once about a topic and a citation of a previous talk entitle On stupidity given given by a Dr. Johan E. Erdmann, a Hegelian philosopher, in 1866. Erdmann developed a theory of stupidity in this talk that is articulated around the metaphor of the keyhole. The stupid person, in this metaphor, sees things through a keyhole, and from this vision generalizes without limit. Thus, the stupid person sees something about sickness – or reads it in a newspaper – and immediately generalizes what he has seen. Stupidity, in Erdmann’s view, is a curious amalgam of narrowness and absolutism.

“… one’s own I would be the only keyhole, through which he looks into the stocked hall that we name the world. Stupidity is thus to be defined as the spiritual circumstance in which the particular itself and its relationship to itself figures as the single mesure of truth and value, in short: everything is judged according to its own particularity.”

Erdmann appeals to his intuition: surely one could statistically pick out the stupid person through an enumeration of the times certain expressions (always instead of often, all instead of many, and “we” [Man] instead of I) crop up in this person’s speech. Paradoxically, the egotism – the self assertion without self-consciousness – is expressed not by the “I”, which indicates partiality, but the “we”, which indicates absoluteness.

Musil’s talk was given in 1937 – an ominous year in Austria. Already, Austria was ruled by a quasi-Fascist government. The strong labor movement of the 20s had been bloodily quashed. Those who could feel how things were going were searching for tickets out. Musil places his talk in a curious non-genre – it is neither scientific nor artistic. It is speculative, and not generalizable. In short, it is essayistic, a bounding and rebounding between opposites.

In 1937, it was not “clever” to call up, by name, the stupid or the powers of the stupid. This plays a role in Musil’s essay:

“… it can be dumb, to praise oneself as clever, but it is not always clever, as well, to maintain a reputation as stupid. Nothing here allows us to generalize; or rather, the single generalization that seems to apply, must be, that it is cleverest to allow oneself to be remarked in this world as little as possible! And really, this line under all wisdom has been drawn often. Yet more often is half-use or symbolic-representative use made of this misanthropic conclusion, and then it leads our observation into the circle of the commandments against pride and yet more expansive commandments, without letting us leave the realm of dumbness and cleverness completely.”

In 1937, the wisest were becoming aware that there are moments when exiting history turns out to be impossible, and being unremarked does not matter when being remarked is not the question: only being on the list is the question.

There has been a number of literary studies about the emergence of “betise” as a modernistic theme – Roberto Calasso has noticed a lineage between Flaubert, Leon Bloy, and Karl Kraus on the subject. 

Certainly, Erdmann’s essay seems to echo traits in the paper media world, as seen by Kraus: a narrowing “we” that promotes received ideas as eternal truths. Flaubert and Bloy both associated stupidity with the bourgeoisie, the privileged audience of the press. There is another story about the rise of the paper press that is just the opposite – about the broadening of the “information flow”, the globalization that comes with the newspaper. The newspaper embodied a whole new temporal dominant: that of simultaneity. Its very layout made, say, the marriage of a princess and the sex murders of an insane criminal coexist on the front page, which gives us a very different sense of time than the traditional chronicle, where the social hierarchy is reflected in the flow of the narrative.

I would speculate that the history of stupidity in the modern era – from the nineteenth century until now, the era of capitalism – is marked by the separation of the fool from the stupid. The fool – that figure in Erasmus and Shakespeare – is, supremely, a trickster. Being a fool is a vast joke, as well as a form of what you might call transgressive simplicity: it is represented by the fool in King Lear. One of the marks of Lear’s fallen state is that he can be effected by what his fool says – as the fool shrewdly remarks.
That trickster function continues on into the era of mass circulation papers, but is very much on the margin. From the margin, what the fool sees is the power of stupidity, in which the media is complicit. Or perhaps one might say, in which the media is caught up. For Kraus, that meant that all times were end-times – because all times were filled in by stories and comments by the press, by “Zeit-ung”, which was a debasement of Zeit [“time”] itself. 

In the kind of logical paradox that Musil knotted over, this state of perpetual alarm disarmed him before the rise of Hitler, about whom he had “nothing to say.” There are dead-ends everywhere: even in calling out stupidity.

Measuring Progress by refusing to cry

Tränengruss – the greeting by tears – is a ritual that fascinated a number of anthropologists in the early 20th century, especially Georg Friederici, who wrote a monograph entitled Tränengruss der Indianer. Friederici gathered material from the oldest European – Indigenous encounters. The colonialist and exotic fascination was a factor in his descriptions, but clearly the weeping greeting was not a myth:

[Among the Tupi] The women of the family performed the chief role in this ceremony. When a foreigner or even a native of the same tribe neared one of their huts as a visitor, he was allowed to enter and take his place on one of the hammocks. The naked women placed themselves strategically around him, laid both their hands before their faces and began to vigorously weep and lament, pitying the overcome fatigue and dangers of the way of the guest, and making him compliments. The rule demanded that the guest also cry, or, if he, as a European, had no stock of tears on hand, that at least he acted as though he did.”

The naked women and the dry eyed Europeans – it is a powerful colonialist image, no? Marcel Mauss, whose essay, L'expression obligatoire des sentiments, written in 1921, concerned not only about the ritual of tears described by ethnologists but also, as was pointed out by Chris Garce and Alexander Jones (2009), the mass mourning and numbness that was felt across the world after World War I – the European lack of tears – pointed out that the weeping greeting was also known in Australia. Garce and Jones speculate that Mauss was thinking hard about how to mourn the unknown soldier, the unknown flu victim, the unknown civilian casualty, the massacred and the massacre-ers. This was both the obvious question, post-war, and the buried question. Buried, repressed, and returning like the repressed on a national scale with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. As Garce and Jones put it:

“Mourning for those who never returned from the battlefields--i.e. those masses of individuals whose deaths could not be assimilated within the logic of national sacrifice--quickly assumed a spectral quality of unresolved political significance. "The obligatory expression of feelings" thus symptomatically draws attention to "our much missed Robert Hertz and Emile Durkheim" and to these fallen compatriots' studies of Australian funerary rituals. In re-reading his colleagues' ethnological works, Mauss would rediscover Hertz's and Durkheim's arguments that aboriginal women, more than other segments of so-called "archaic societies," occupied a mediating role between the living and the dead. He also noticed the prevalence of "greeting by tears" not just in Australia, but sheer across the ethnological record.”

We’ve seen a return of the idea that women mediate between the living and the dead in the notion that the female leaders of states have been much more competent in dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the neo-liberal ban on tears – except when shed by men, who are, de facto, brave men, preferably with military service – has still been the norm, and has had its effects in the settler countries – the U.S., for instance – as well as elsewhere. Such is the rule that forbids the stock of tears that when the lockdown comes to an end, the story will all be about “rebuilding” the economy, and the dead will have to bury their dead.

It poses a question, doesn’t it? When did the Europeans and all those societies upon which they put their heavy hand lose their stock of tears?

Midlife crisis of the oracle

“To Serapion of Athens, the stoic, who was himself a poet and who criticized the bad literary taste of his times in sustaining the point of view that the verses of the oracles, since they were authored by Apollo, chief of the Muses, could only be excellent, Boethius the Epicurien replied, pertinently and impertinently: have you heard the story of the painter Pauson?

“No”, responded Sarapion.

“You should know this story. Having received a commission to paint a horse rolling on the ground, he painted one that represented a horse running; as the buyer got angry, Pauson began to laugh and turned the canvas upside down: thus, the bottom became the top, and the horse no longer seemed to gallop, but to roll on the ground. This, according to Bion, is the fate of certain trains of reasoning, when they are reversed. Thus some, instead of pretending that the verses of the oracles are beautiful because they are written by God, would say, on the contrary, that God was not their author because they are so bad. The first claim may be uncertain, but what is certain is that the oracles are composed in a manner that is unworthy of divinity.” – The oracle controversy, Robert Flacelière

The oracle is bored, finally, of the future

Ablution in the cold water of the spring  

Autopsy of the victim, the signature

In the disposition of the organs, fate’s writing.

The wisecracks from all the golden codgers on the wall

The epsilon, the laurel wand, moving down the hall

To the chamber where you get your meds and electroshock

So little and so much makes a poet

When the gods have decided to put in their hand

Just as the city’s sack is found where nobody knows it

In the spilled guts of the sacrificed ram

Oh Popeye when you play upon your guitar

Do you play the things that will be or that are?

She sees ambiguity shaped by ambiguity

and that wisdom is hidden in a children’s joke

or in some stray, scrawled obscenity

in a jakes or toted in a poke.

To pose riddles and not ever guess her own

Has turned her voice into a frog’s voice, and her heart into a stone.

A review of Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine

Asclepius was the child of Apollo and Coronis, a mortal princess. Out of jealousy, Apollo struck Coronis with a lightning bolt when she was pregnant, but rescued the child in her womb. Medicine  begins with a femicide. We've always suspected as much.  But as always in the heavily redacted and montaged world of myth (where all that is deep is condensed with all that is shallow, where the cartoon apes the archetype), there is another story too: that Chiron the Centaur, who taught Achilles, also taught Asclepius. He taught music as well, which is how Achilles cured himself of his anger towards Agamemnon. As well, he taught the virtues that calmed the soul. Thus, as is pointed out in Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine, Chiron taught medicine, music and justice as entangled one with the other and, ultimately, one.

There’s a certain kind of medical essay, a book-like essay, that obscurely keeps the faith with that unity. Lewis Thomas in the U.S. is the best known practitioner – Szczeklik was that figure in Poland.

One expects, from these essays, certain doxa: information that has the righteous aura of believe it or not. You will learn, in Catharsis, for instance, that there are 82 distinct terms for different types and properties of the pulse listed in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary. There’s paradoxical pulse, there’s bigeminal pulse, there’s thread pulse, and so on.

The music in Catharsis begins, literally, with the heart beat, and goes through myth and personal experience – the case studies, patient’s whose histories are eccentric, revelatory – and science.

Before the Internet there was Indra’s net. There was as well Ananke’s – Ananke, the Greek goddess of fate. Although Goddess is not quite right – the net of fate was stronger than the Gods. This is the starting point.  The essays in Catharsis are oriented to the modern mythographerk, Roberto Calasso,k taking myth as a soundtrack, lifetrack, culturetrack. In the vocabulary and procedures of medicine,  Szczeklik sees a thousand ties to what lies outside the “science of medicine”. In order to see this, Szczeklik seizes on the terms and practices of the doctor, for instance the “anamnesis” – the name for the patient’s recounting of his history – which Szczeklik associates with Plato’s notion that memory precedes perception in the order of knowledge. In medical terms, the patient’s story precedes the doctor’s observation. The net in which all cause and effect is caught, where memory and observation converge, is what medicine is always going to be about, at least practically. Ethically – which is to say socially and politically – it is about catharsis, purification. 

“Some people have assumed that the text about katharsis in the Poetics has been amputated by an “unknown censor”; others have expressed the view that it was the subject of a separate, irretrievably lost essay. Some have even said in hushed tones that the Stagirite deliberately left the crucial issue of art open ended, because it eludes unambiguous intertpretation. Did he perhaps notatice that in the first syllable of the word he meant to define an ancient, unfathomed mystery lay spellbound? We fist find “Ka” at the beginning of the history of ancient Egypt as “one of the most difficult concepts for the Wewstern mind to grasp”. It was associated with the force that sustains life, the power of creation, and the soul of man. Centuries earlier, at the dawn of Hindu civilization, Kas was the name of the father of the gods, the life-giving element that pervaded the world. The god’s name Ka meant “Who?” – and the first reaction to it was “boundless awe”?”

This is the theme that links Szczeklik’s humanism to his Catholicism. It is a seductive idea that Szczeklik presents without presenting its opposite – something like Bataille’s notion that filth (can) make us free. Something like the feminist notion that the construction of the virtue of purity has participated in that original, Apollonian femicide. The anti-humanistic theme is not addressed or even very addressable from Szczeklik’s point of vantage. 

The strong tones that contrast pollution and purity slow down Catharsis as it travels from Paracelsus to modern discussions of, say, doctor assisted suicide, which prompts credal negations that are all the more disappointing in as much as we know the vast referential pharmacopiea that Szczeklik deals in earlier is dispensed with abruptly by references to Pope John Paul.

Still: I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for medical essays this plague season. It should be cut, I think, with the harsher diatribes of James Le Fanu’s The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, which I reviewed in 2001, here. 

Is it like fun

“Is it like fun? Writing

was always hard hard for me, but I think I’d love love

to be a writer.” To be a poppy, though…

The green pod bending

the bristly, slim green stem, or

- “right right right, I bet it must be

like a fucking orgasm if like everybody reads

your book” -

Look

how a stem shoots out from the others

mission creeps the pod forward which stick out horizontal

to the ground

rather than the stem bearing the curling weight of

those downward pods.

They are built for wind,

for distribution, for coverage.

Can one imagine

(“what’s the name of your book?”)

what they imagine if such things  flicker

in the green vegetative soul? A world of poppies.

A utopia of poppies.

Every flower is an aggressor.

- Karen Chamisso

what is herd immunity?

What is herd immunity?

A lot of old fights continue long after they should in science, if science were this instrument that the positivists extol. We are seeing one now, which is all about epidemiology and “herd immunity”.

It is worth noticing that the groups attacking epidemiology are using the same instruments that were honed in the fifties. In 1951, Doll and Hill, in Britain, published a famous epidemiology paper linking cigarette smoking to cancer. This was the first of a flood of studies linking the two. The cigarette companies, under the guidance of certain genius advertisers, found many a compliant scientist to batter against the whole idea of using the statistical models employed by Doll and Hill. These people made one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century: in the interest of ideology and profit, you can legally obfuscate mass murder and get away with it. Thus, as cancers connected to smoking regularly swept away half a million peeps per year all through the late sixties, seventies, eighties, government did nothing but put warnings on cigarette packs. While Cold War scholars regularly brought up Lysenko to show how ideology crazily led to terror in Stalin’s Russia, they simply ignored these figures and this social phenomenon.

Their heirs have made it impossible for the world’s second largest economy, the U.S., to do the least thing towards averting the climate catastrophe we know is coming. And they are the same peeps who are behind the “let’s open the economy” crowd. Having those cancer deaths under their belt, the Corona-virus deaths will be as nothing.

One of the weapons that they bring to this battle is an unexamined notion called “herd immunity.” From the halls of George Mason University to the streets of Stockholm, this “mathematical model” is supposed to show that lockdowns are poopy ways of dealing with a minor problem.

So, what is herd immunity? A simple definition is that it is the resistance of a population to the invasion and spread of an infection. We should contextualize this definition – it arose from considerations of the level of vaccination needed to suppress an infection. Thus, for instance, they vaccinate against the hoof and mouth disease among cattle trying to firewall that disease so it does not have relays to get into the unvaccinated part of the population. There are new cows being born all the time, so there is, de facto, a new unvaccinated population coming into the picture. And the disease itself is evolving in relation to the vaccine, so that if enough of the population is not vaccinated it is possible that the evolution of the microbe will lead to resistance that overwhelms the vaccine.

Notice that all of these situations depend upon a vaccine. They also depend on the situations of the population, which can be determined by many factors. Among humans, sanitation and nutrition are pretty strong factors in the spread or suppression of infection. The percentage of the vaccinated in terms of the suppression of a disease can vary. For polio, for instance, Jonas Salk thought that an 85 percent level was needed. In practice, 70 percent was achieved in most countries, and even then there were occasional outbreaks. Still, by 2016, one of the most common oral poliovirus medicines was withdrawn, because it was no longer considered necessary. Still, other polio vaccines are in place and have been implemented in mass.
Compare this regime to the regime of having no drug to cure the disease. In this case, herd immunity means something like: the herd will be culled so that the resisters will survive. Or as George Scott said in Dr. Strangelove, I’m not saying our hair won’t be mussed, 15 to 20 million casualties tops!

The traditional method of fighting against infection, in the absence of a vaccine, has been quarantine. Quarantines are notoriously hard to enforce, since they require coordinated action by a large group of people, some of whom might find it in their interest to violate the quarantine. This is especially true if the population is composed of groups with different levels of vulnerability. This kind of thing is embodied in, say, infrastructure. In the late nineteenth century, many cities embarked on enormous and ambitious sewage projects, because sewage was a well known vector for disease. Though the wealthy had alternatives, they as a group were still vulnerable in cities, so they cooperated. Contrast this with AIDS, where one group is most affected, and a whole population can get by without too much worry about catching it. In this case, the vulnerabilities of one group can be seized by others as a political ploy, or they can be ignored, etc.

When we hear the comforting words, mathematically modeled, we have to remember that the modeling is only as good as the empirical data, and that is not very good. So far, mortality rates have differed considerably. Testing rates which are supposed to give us samples of the larger disease picture often end up giving us pictures of how much testing is going on – especially when we have wildly different samples.

What is brought into focus in these times of crisis is the expendability of a population in terms of the larger socio-economic system. In the 50s, when the AEC became aware that fallout was spreading a potentially lethal radiation load on a population located hundreds of miles from the bomb sites, they came up with a phrase that beautifully condensed the way established power thinks: the low use population. Indeed, is only a matter of time before some rightwing economist dances on the heads of all our dead parents and crows about the silver lining in terms of entitlement for all these old folks dying. Not to speak of the white settler offspring who have absorbed the idea that the virus has much more severe consequences in African American communities – communities that have seen their asset growth basically frozen or in decline from 2000 – and starts celebrating.
And this is the lesson of herd immunity in the C-Virus era: the herders don’t care.

The game of dress up: male novelists/female characters

Angela Carter once wrote that she read novels when growing up for, among other things, insights into being a woman. She read the English writers of the period – a period when Leavis’s “Great Tradition” – and naturally she read D.H. Lawrence – the Leavisite candidate for the truly great English writer (Virginia Woolf being bashed for snobbishness and Joyce for being not sound). As Carter writes, “I smelled a rat in D.H. Lawrence pretty damn quick.”

This does not mean she dismissed Lawrence as an artist. But he was the kind of novelist she wanted to pit herself against, moving aside that stone on the English novel – up to and including my quasi Christian metaphor of the stone being moved aside, the kind of resurrectionary theme Lawrence was all about.

One of her insights into Lawrence involves, well, the same problems that I think about when writing fiction with female characters. 

It has to do with dress-up.

If you read Raymond Chandler, you will notice that, for all of Marlowe’s tough guy gestures, he has the heart of a clothier, a Hollywood costumer. Take this from The High Window:

‘She was wearing a brownish linen  coat and skirt, a broadbrimmed straw hat with a brown velvet band that exactly matched the color of her shoes and the leather trimming on the edges of her linen envelope bag.”

Her linen envelope bag! The fetishizing aura overflows – as auras tend to – when we reach that fashion accoutred bag. Freud isn’t in it, brother.  How many of us know what an envelope bag even is? On the other hand, Marlowe is a product of Hollywood, no bones about it, so that we read these heroic descriptions without wondering too much about this information, as why does Marlowe even know about an envelope bag?

Lawrence, as Carter notices, is also indefatigably fussy about women’s clothing. For all that he was after an encounter with the dark gods buried in Etruscan vases, he was always going on about what his women were wearing. Carter has some great remarks about Women in Love, his “most exuberantly clothed novel” which  “furthermore, is supposed to be an exegesis on my sex,

trusting, not the teller but the tale, to show to what extent D. H. Lawrence personated women

through simple externalities of dress; by doing so, managed to pull off one of the greatest con

tricks in the history of modern fiction; and revealed a more than womanly, indeed, pathologically

fetishistic, obsession with female apparel. Woman in Love is as full of clothes as Brown's, and

clothes of the same kind. D. H. Lawrence catalogues his heroine's wardrobes with the loving care

of a ladies' maid. It is not a simple case of needing to convince the reader the book has been

written by a woman; that is far from his intention. It is a device by which D. H. Lawrence

attempts to convince the reader that he D.H.L., has a hot line to a woman's heart by the

extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and

submission.

Yet Lawrence clearly enjoys being a girl. If we do not trust the teller but the tale, then the

tale positively revels in lace and feathers, bags, beads, blouses and hats. It is always touching to

see a man quite as seduced by the cultural apparatus of femininity as Lawrence was, the whole

gamut, from feathers to self-abnegation. Even if, as Kate Millett suggests, he only wanted to be a

woman so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself, since

nobody else was good enough for him. (The fantasy-achievement of this ambition is probably

what lends Lady Chatterley's Lover such an air of repletion.)”

I’m sure that my own games of dress up, as much as I research them and try to think of the clothing in terms of the choice of the wearer rather than the judgement of the observer, as much as I agonize over the style of the clothing and the styling it evidences, are cons as well.  On the other hand (he said, defensively)  the way my male characters dress is, as well, a bit of a con, in as much as these are fictions. Clothing is so helpful because it is, as well, a an attempt to fictionalize – wearing clothes might warm us, but it also shields us, helps us stagemanage our bodies, gives us a feeling of being ourselves as characters.  It is true, often, that there are breakdowns in the clothing game in fiction. To give a movie instance – I just rewatched  Terminator (yes, this lockdown is dragging) and the Schwarzenegger character successfully clothes himself in pants and shirt that come from a person maybe four sizes smaller than him, without ripping, while the human from the future – I forget his name – steals trousers from a drunk tramp without noticing once that these trousers are well pissed in. They even fit him, the human from the future, I mean.

This is supremely not having an eye for clothes, and it is unusual in a Hollywood film.

The clothing option doesn’t necessarily make the character. I can know and feel many of Dostoevsky’s characters without remembering his descriptions of their clothing, because they are perfunctory – unlike Tolstoy’s, or Lawrence’s. That is the deal with characters, male or female, and what they wear – wearing is meaningmaking. I think that we go from the clothing in when we make characters. I don’t think of my female characters, oddly enough, as naked. And that is perhaps a fault. God, as he made abundantly clear in Genesis, definitely meant us to be naked.

“Who told you that you were naked?” asked the LORD God. “Have you eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”

And thus the Lord God learned that his characters do have their own lives.    

Why the Labour party should split up

The leaks about the Labour party that came out last week have been, I think, largely overlooked, partly because the same media that sympathized with overturning Corbyn and collaborated on the project doesn’t really want to revisit the story. But it is definitely an exemplary story.

The leak shows that the rightwing of the party – the third way people, the Blairites – spent much of their time in the election against Theresa May, which Corbyn just missed winning, doing things like dissing black members of the party, knowingly diverting and wasting party funding, and goldbricking in order to bring about a Tory victory. The thinking was, the Tory victory would then overthrow Corbyn.

Now, every leftist is, by nature, paranoid, for good reason: if you attack powerful forces, it is common sense to think they will attack you back and operate in the sneaky ways they have operated to get, say, tax breaks and shit. But the whole Corbyn moment was premised on the idea that Labour is still a viable party for the left.

In America, this is often viewed in terms of… America. American provincialism, right? So that Labour is the Democratic party, the Conservatives the Republicans, etc. However, this seems to absurdly de-contextualize Britain, which, in spite of its Brexit, still has more similarities, as far as its political system goes, to a European country than to the U.S. In Europe, over the past twenty years, we’ve seen an enormous breakup of the Left. In France, the Socialists have simply disappeared. In Germany, the SPD is now on par with the Greens. In Italy, the Communists metamorphosed into many combinations, all of which packed a smaller and smaller political punch, until the ultimate Third Way politician, Matteo Renzi, a historic failure.

In Britain, the context is rather similar.  Colin Kidd in the LRB in 2012 has argued that Labour without Scotland would be a permanent minority party, and that divorce from Scotland has come to pass. Ross McKibben at the same mag pointed out that Labour dropped from 54 seats in Scotland to 1 in 2015.  Just last week, a Guardian columnist, Andy Beckett, pointed to the ten year run of Tory rule and asked, justly, whether Britain had turned into a one party “democracy”, like the Christian Democrats in postwar Italy.

All of this poses a question: if the center right is so ardent about keeping its Blairite claws into Labour,  and if Labour has no map to victory for the foreseeable future, why continue to contest possession of a moribund property? Why not start a separate party, a Corbynist party, using Momentum’s infrastructure to begin with?  Parties do die. Or evolve into something totally different. Corbyn’s moment in the Labour party looks more like the last hurrah for a once vital Labour left than the future.

One can easily imagine the realigments that would take place while the Tories rule for the next decade, as looks most probable. A green-red coalition with a British Left party – a Center coalition between a Blairite Labour party and the Lib-Dems – and the dominant Conservatives, sometimes allied with various ephemeral fascist parties.

Of course, I am discounting one of the major realignments that could well happen: the further split up of the UK, as Scotland becomes independent and Northern Ireland votes to reunite with Ireland. One thing seems probable to me, though: Labour is dead as a vehicle for the “left”. It will never happen.

Sometimes,like today, I fail to feel

Sometimes, like today, I fail to feel
Sensibility, like my lost shadow's sister
follows me around all blank and peel
and I'm all what's up mister

from room to room, from closet to closet
a numbskull under the skin
which I display in the bathroom in close-up
-selfy with a death's head grin.
-Karen Chamisso

an anthropology of the 1 percent

Ethnographic field studies of peasants, hunter gatherers, farmers, powerful village men, etc. are common. Field studies of rich American families are less so.   Off hand, I can only think of George Marcus’s studies of  rich Texas families in Houston and Galveston, which was nevertheless full of insights.  Marcus uses a term that the muckrakers used – dynastic wealth. His view of wealth is still wedded, however, to the notion of the family, especially in terms of male heirs.

Myself, I think that we should look at modern wealth from the perspective of the “house”. This is akin to the dynastic perspective – we think of the “house” of Windsor, meaning, vaguely, parts of the extended family of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. A house his, on the one hand, a concrete building, and, on the other hand, a synecdoche for the entirety of the property. “Members” of the house can include servants, as well as the less endowed cousins, aunts, uncles and others who have some claim on the property.

In Marcus’s work on the rich, the invisibility of wealth is one of the great structuring themes. It is mostly the case with the non-wealthy that their visible environment, from car to apartment to house, is their real wealth. The asset of most Americans is a house – although many have a few stocks, the vast majority of stocks and other financial instruments is owned by the wealthy. These things are wealth, too, but they can’t be seen the way chattels can. Marcus proposes a parallel with the Kauli, a people in New Guinea:

“In talking about the people of the other world, the Kaluli use the term mama, which means shadow or reflection. When asked what the people of the unseen look like, Kaluli will point to a reflection in a pool or a mirror and say, "They are not like you or me. They are like that." In the same way, our human appearance stands as a reflection to them. This is not a "supernatural" world, for to the Kaluli, it is perfectly natural. Neither is it a "sacred world," for it is virtually coextensive with and exactly like the world the Kaluli inhabit, subject to the same forces of mortality .... In the unseen world, every man has a reflection in the form of a wild pig . . . that roams invisibly on the slopes of Mt. Bosavi. The man and his wild pig reflection live separate existences, but if something should happen to the wild pig, the man is also affected. If it is caught in a trap, he is disabled; if it is killed by hunters of the unseen, he dies.”

The Kaluli reference is not a mere affectation, but a way of making something intelligible that is beyond “inherited” wealth.  I have to quote Marcus at length, here:

  The dynastic fortunes that I have studied in Texas over the past few years are complex creations of various kinds of experts and of lineages of descendants two to four generations away from founding entrepreneurial ancestors. A dynasty is commonsensically a family, but after much experience with this form of social organization, I find that it is primarily a fortune instead. Concentrations of old wealth, however, have no one particular locus or materialization; in short, they have no presence. Rather, a fortune has multiple, simultaneous manifestations within a variety of interconnected but isolated social contexts that encompass the long-term fates and daily lives of literally hundreds of people. In initiating my research, I followed common sense and took the family-literal flesh-and-blood descendants, and particularly those who seemed to be leaders or in positions of authority-for the dynasty. I soon discovered in their here and now lives the profound influence of the equivalent of the unseen world among the Kaluli-the complex world of highly spec- ialized expertise that through an elaborate division of labor, not only structured the wealth but, also, created doppelganger facsimiles of the descendants-roughly similar to the Mt. Bosavi wild pig reflections of Kaluli persons-variously constituted as clients, beneficiaries of trusts, wealth shares in computerized strategies of investment, and accountants' files. While the unseen world is richly registered through sound and imagery in the here and now of the Kaluli, it distinctly is not among the descendants within dynastic families.”

These houses, I propose, are what is at play, anthropologically, in the ownership of corporations. The idea of the stock market as a way of transferring ownership to more efficient managers is not born out by anything in our real economic experience. But these complex transfers of ownership as the politics of various houses – this makes much more sense. The great houses in medieval and early modern Europe were founded, above all, on a warrior ethos – they were seized in wars, they warred with each other, and they warred outside of Europe in crusades and, eventually, in the massive war against the indigenous peoples and culture of Africa, the Americas, and Asia.