The car and the police state - 1

Sara E. Seo bookends her book, Policing the Road: How cars transformed American Freedom (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980860 ) between two cases. In one case, Wiley v. State (1916), a Police officer in a car – an unmarked car, as police cars weren’t “marked” until the 1940s – named Wiley called out to a car speeding by to stop. He and the police with him suspected that the car was speeding from a robbery. So, with instincts echoed by every officer related shooting since, they trained their guns on the car and shot it up, killing the passenger, a Mrs. Bates. The court decision in this case went against the police:

“In the case of Wiley v. State, which affirmed the guilt of Deputy Sheriff Johns, whose shot had killed Mrs. Bates, the Arizona Supreme Court maintained that even if the Bateses had heard the shouts and refused to stop, the officers’ manner of pursuit “was more suggestive of a holdup by highwaymen than an arrest by peace officers.”

At the other end of Seo’s history is the case of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who was stopped because she failed to use a turn signal. From the moment the policeman pulled her over to the moment three days later when she supposedly hung herself in a cell, is the American nightmare that we see all around us.

Seo notices something crucial about Sandra Bland’s life:
The automobile appeared in nearly every significant setback in Bland’s life. Exorbitant traffic tickets that Bland paid for by “sitting out” in jail. Convictions for driving under the influence and arrest warrants for unpaid traffic fines that severely limited her employment options. Charges for possessing marijuana—her lawyer suspected that Bland was self-medicating—that the police discovered in her car.”

How did we go from Wiley v. State to Sandra Bland?
Seo’s story is not only focused on racism and the police, but more generally on how overpolicing and the automobile form a dyad in the United States. It is a topic that cries out for a Ballardian and/or Deleuzian treatment, but Seo remains a calm positivist about it all. Wondrously enough, her thesis has, I think, never really been explored in depth:

"Before cars, American police had more in common with their eighteenth-century forebears than with their twentieth-century successors. What revolutionized policing was a technological innovation that would come to define the new century. This is, therefore, a history about policing cars and, thus, about policing American society as it fast became an automotive society. It is thus also about the practical, theoretical, and legal problems of policing everybody who drove. "

To put this in a crude way that Seo herself would not countenance, the rise of the cop as overseer of traffic spelled the downfall of the 4th amendment to the constitution – the one about unreasonable searches and seizures. The one about having to have warrants. The fourth amendment never applied to slaves, whose own limited travels in the South were overseen by Slave Patrols. The Slave patrols, as Jim Crow kicked in with a vengeance at the turn of the century, were represented, mainly, by legislation degrading African-Americans on public transportation – the kind of legislation later copied by the Nazis and applied to Jews in Germany. The automobile appeared as, at first, a challenge to this.
W.E.B. Dubois, for instance, was an ardent car driver. He was proud of his cars. Since he traveled extensively in the South, being in a car kept him out of the reach of the Jim Crow laws attendant on trains and buses. Although as the history of police – and mob – interactions with black drivers shows, the Slave Patrol system was not that easy to slip.

Seo’s book – which everybody should read – overturns an old intellectual history of jurisprudence that attributes to the Warren court the new enforcement of prohibitions on police abuse – a new national standard for all states concerning the fourth amendment – by showing that the courts, in reality, were instrumental throughout the twentieth century in increasing police power, based in “reasonable” standards of policing automobiles that increasingly made the cops the judge of when and when not to search, when and when not to stop – basically giving them unlimited powers of harassment. And it is a pretty simple matter to see that in an unequal society, the people who would bear the brunt of harassment would be those who were people of color, those who were poorer, those who the respectable – the white bourgeoisie – were most afraid of.

The possible life - Karen Chamisso

Born gangster from the fist of her momma’s belly

she grew up rolling on her jams and jelly

Two loaded dice were found in her baby hands

The odds were in her favor. Everything was grand

Love money attention and all the last chances

Went up her nose in cold white prances

Cars were totaled, parents were called

Bounced from all the clubs, while police were stalled

The predictions about her in circulation

Always pictured her ODed, or in rehabilitation.

on funding the police: what is Milwaukee getting?

There should be a police union spotlight every day, to sort of show where our police funding is going. For instance, Milwaukee. Milwaukee was the proud city in which two police officers, called by two black women, roundly scolded those black women for dissing fine upstanding citizen Jeffrey Dahmer. Then the police escorted Dahmer's victim, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, back to Dahmer's apartment and left him to Dahmer's care - the torture, murder and cannibal session of the night. One of those policeman made howlingly funny jokes about gays after having helped Dahmer - and, of course, after threatening to take the black women downtown for interfering with the cops. Later, that policeman, John Balcerzak, suffered the indignity of being fired from the force for criminal incompetence. Such injustice couldn't stand, with a strong union behind him, and a likely judge ordered him rehired. Balcerzak went on to become the police union head of the Milwaukee police - a position that meant he essentially ran the force.

An investigation last year found the force operating at peak Blacerzakian levels: 

At least 93 Milwaukee police officers — ranking from street cop to captain — have been disciplined for violating the laws and ordinances they were sworn to uphold, a Journal Sentinel investigation found.

Their offenses range from sexual assault and domestic violence to drunken driving and shoplifting, according to internal affairs records. All still work for the Police Department, where they have the authority to make arrests, testify in court and patrol neighborhoods.

Officers who run afoul of the law often aren't fired or prosecuted, the newspaper found. Consider:

At least six officers disciplined by the department for illegal behavior suffered no legal consequences whatsoever.

Sexual assault - no problem/ Shoplifting? No problem? Drunken driving? No problem.
And so it goes. It is like a mirror image of the victims of police brutality - the POC victims. From shooting dead black people in domestic disputes to shooting dead drunk and asleep people in cars, the police are there.

By 2015-2017, the forked over 21 million in civil suit losses due to cops. 

Police misconduct has cost Milwaukee taxpayers at least $17.5 million in legal settlements since 2015, forcing the city to borrow money to make the payouts amid an ever-tightening budget. 

That amount jumps to at least $21.4 million when interest paid on the borrowing and fees paid to outside attorneys are factored in, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found.  

In some cases, the costs pile up as the city continues to fight the cases for months or years, even after officers have been fired or criminally convicted in the same misconduct case. The costs far outstrip the $1.2 million the city sets aside each year for settling all of the claims it faces. 

So we know something about what the good communities of Milwaukee are getting in terms of supporting their men in blue through thick and thin. Sometimes what with returning victims to serial killers and shoplfiting, the Milwaukee police do confront rape. Luckily, the cop atmoshere definitely puts rape well below stopping black motorists. The PD discovered - or was forced to discover by pressure groups - that it had at least 6,000 untested rape kits in its storage. After "thousands" were tested, the Milwaukee cops arrested a grand total of 9 rapists from those kits in 2019. The union must have hated this: just think, that money could go to vacation homes for police officers! Which is why the department of Justice did the majority of the testing. Milwaukee's own police department apparently had other prioritiies.

So it goes with Milwaukee's crime wave situation. 

Funding the police - what, exactly, are we getting?

25 million in cop abuse suits, and 1500 untested rape kits: Minneapolis

Very Serious People are coming out with the column headline: Defunding the police is crazy!

So perhaps we should talk first about funding the police. What are we funding?

Let’s take Minneapolis, the unexpected center of our disorder. I don’t have a breakdown of how much the Minneapolis department spent on tear gas and the latest military equipment. But we do have stats on how much the city spent on civil suit claims for police abuse: from 2003-2019 the cost was  25 million dollars.

I thought about this timeline and this figure after reading Pagan Kennedy’samazing and wrenching article about the invention and history of the rape kit. 

 In 2019, the Minneapolis police announced a non-fun fact: in the police storage unit they had discovered around 1500 untested rape kits, spanning thirty years. Definitely a bad moment for the chief, who had to explain how he had previously reported that there were around 200 untested kits.

Kennedy reports that there are huge cultural problems with cops and rape investigations. One of those problems is the persistent refusal of the city to shoulder the cost of the testing of rape kits, which comes to about 1500 dollars per kit. Astonishingly, this cost is often borne by third parties – nonprofit feminist groups making money from cake sales and the like.

So we have at least one metric for what police funding is about, and its priorities. Evidently, testing those kits would have cost 2,250,00 dollars. Apparently, the city’s thinking was: we can either check these kits and catch rapists, or for ten times that amount, we can pay for abusive cops.

They chose the latter path. And that made all the difference.

Law and order in the U.S. is not only racist and oppressive, but it doesn’t even keep law and order. It stores the evidence in the storage facility and goes out there and fights the real crime – falling asleep in a car at Wendy’s, passing, perhaps, a phony twenty dollar bill, selling cigs on the sidewalk without a license.

Perhaps policing in the U.S. isn’t very good? A question from a friend.

Police and the "whitening" of Americans

There is an important, but under-discussed part of police history is that is also the history of the "whitening" of immigrant groups that came to the United States.

In the early 19th century, American cities didn't have police departments. Boston was one of the first. At the same time that Boston was constructing a police department specifically to control the less well off or immigrant areas in town, New England and America in general was receiving an enormous influx of Catholic Irish, fleeing the famine and oppression. Famously, what they met on the white Protestant shores of the New World was, at first, No Irish need apply signs. The Irish were considered sub-English - in England especially, but as well in the U.S. Although Germans were also migrating, on the whole, they were protestant. The combination of religious prejudice plus the aura of prejudice against the Irish in England put them into the class of the "not-quite white".

In the U.S., the rituals of becoming white have been explored for the last twenty years by many scholars. Here's an overview of the field.

What interests me is the way police work acted as a vector into whiteness, partly because police work allowed for the direct targeting of black subjects. To become white in the white settler state, a common strategy was to distance oneself from, and stigmatize, black people.
I'm not aware of any borrowing in this field from Rene Girard's theory of negative mimesis. In simple terms, Girard hypothesizes that the social order is built around a fundamental violence: the targeting and expulsion of a scapegoat. In order to not be the scapegoat, one engages in negative mimeses - trying to become the scapegoat's Other.

I have many criticisms of Girard's total explanation of the social order, but the scapegoating and negative mimesis process does work well with the becoming-white of various ethnic groups - the Irish and the Italian-Americans in particular - and the way that policing played a symbolically central role. One that carries over today. The police enact the neurosis of whiteness, to put it in sharp and exaggerated terms.

The meatmarkets I have seen

The meatmarkets I have seen

- Karen Chamisso

Birdsong pulled a labyrinth from my ear.

The birds have their nests, the foxes their holes

who will live with me

in the maze?

Wind and unwind, turn and turn back.

The heroes were netted and dispatched.

I stepped on a crack and a dynasty died.

Their ghosts follow me to this address.

A centerfold is at the center of it all.

O land of cockayne, free drinks and pussy!

To every sailor and peasant, tonight:

Tenderloin, tenderloin, the sirens sing.

‘The gates and yssues of this town are kept with watch and wards.”

Ariadne’s blues echo in the common pissoir.

My tears, my tears flow riverwards.

Jack comes to my  bed to bone ce soir.

The Flaubert-Sand letters: part one

George Sand came in for a pummeling from several of the leading lights of modernism. Proust, for instance, told his friends that he disliked Sand, and that Flaubert, who he revered, must have been “insincere” when he praised her in his letters. Baudelaire was much more venomous. Sand was the perfect opposite of Baudelaire: liberal when he was illiberal, a lover of nature when nature, to him, was irradiated with symbols of its fallen state, and in no way an adherent of his own peculiar Sadian Christianity. In the wake of the controversy raised, in 1862, by her anti-clerical novel, Mademoiselle la Quintinie, he wrote a series of notes comparing her to a latrine (because she fucked who she wanted to and didn’t make any bones about it) and compared her to a concierge and a kept woman. He found her the very type of positivist bourgeois he couldn’t stand: why, in her novel, she even dismissed hell! Hell was as necessary to Baudelaire as it was to Dante. Nietzsche, who read the version of the Flaubert-Sand correspondence edited by Maupassant, attacked her in his usual oblique way in Twilight of the Idols:

George Sand. - I read the first Lettres d’un voyageur: like everything deriving from Rousseau, false, artificial, gassy, exaggerated. I cannot endure this multicolored wallpaper style; as little as I can the plebian-ambition for generous feelings. The worst is the womanly coquettishness with masculinity, with the manners of an undeveloped youth – how cold must she have been by all of this, this insufferable artist! She winds herself up like a clock – and writes. Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all the romantics, as soon as they begin to compose. And how self-pleased she must have been, this fruitful writing-cow, who had something German about her in the worst sense of the word, like Rousseau himself, her master, becoming possible only because of the decline of French taste! – But Renan adores her…”

As always with Nietzsche, there are catches and turns in the vituperation that make it seem unconsciously respectful. One could imagine this inverted. When I first read this, I thought the 'writing – cow' crack was typical Fritz misogyny. But later, reading her letters, I see that Sand uses that phrase about herself, or rather, often compares herself to a cow.

Nietzsche was as well a critic of Flaubert and his theory of impersonality ( behind his visceral dismissal of Sand is that he shares her criticism of that theory - nothing disturbs Nietzsche like the touch of an unwanted ally), and this is why he wants to speak of her coldness, and the coldness of the romantics, whose cult of the self was not, Nietzsche hoped, similar to the beyond-human of his own invention.

Proust, though, admired Flaubert, as did almost all the modernists. This made it puzzling to them that Flaubert clearly thinks of Sand, who from one point of view was the very opposite of the modernists, as a great figure. He even praises her writing and – more than that – has the discernment to mention the novels that, according to today’s Sand-ians, are the height of her art: Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt.

I’ve been reading the correspondence with a lot of admiration, and want to say a few things about it. So I’m going to amuse myself this week, taking a break from the protests, by saying them.

the dystopia of police unions

The question of the police and policing is confused at the outset by the terminology of the tool, the instrument. Even those criticizing the police – such as myself – have a tendency to portray them as the tool of the upper class. In a sense, the tool image is ingrained deeply into the discourse the police have woven about themselves, the discourse of serving the public, or protecting the public.

This misses the crucial political agency and power of the police. It is not simply the selectivity of enforcing the law, the choice made to, say, arrest the black consumers and sellers of illicit drugs and to let white prosperous neighborhoods slide, although it is easy to imagine the police pulling no knock searches on penthouses and mansions in Beverly Hills or NYC’s West side and finding hella cocaine to rock those people to pleas in court. It is also the pressure put by police and their unions to pass certain laws, to create certain immunities, to imagine the community according to police interests. In Minneapolis, a midsized Midwestern town, one can trace a history from Charles Stenvig in the sixties to  Rich Stanek in 2018 to Bob Kroll, the current head of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis.

This is Bob Kroll:

IN AN INTERVIEW in April, Lt. Bob Kroll, head of Minneapolis’s police union, said that he and a majority of the Minneapolis Police Officers’ Federation’s board have been involved in police shootings. Kroll said that he and the officers on the union’s board were not bothered by the shootings, comparing themselves favorably to other officers.

“There’s been a big influx of PTSD,” Kroll said. “But I’ve been involved in three shootings myself, and not one of them has bothered me. Maybe I’m different.” 

 Or in Philadelphia, from Frank Rizzo to John McNesby, the current head of the Fraternal order of the Police in Philadelphia, who made headlines in 2017:

“… local protesters had employed a new tactic, turning up atthe home of a Philly cop who in June had fatally shot a fleeing black man inthe back.

There had been just 10 or so protesters, one wielding a megaphone, but it was enough to disrupt an otherwise quiet Bustleton neighborhood and rattle police, who’d never been confronted at their homes before. Now McNesby was getting his turn at the podium. A measured approach could have smothered the smoldering tension in the room; instead, McNesby doused it with gasoline. “When you go work each day,” he spat into the microphone, “you shouldn’t have to worry that a pack of rabid animals will suddenly show up at your home. … ” 

The Phillymag article is one of the rare ones that actually focus on the driver of police activity and politics, instead of on the windowdressing of police commissions. Here’s another graf:

“Some greatest hits here locally: In June 2010, McNesby declared stringent new rules regarding police misconduct “would be at the bottom of a litter box pretty soon,” then successfully challenged them before the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board. In 2012, McNesby mocked the civilian-run Police Advisory Commission, stating: “No one pays any attention to them.” And in 2015, McNesby declared the mayoral candidacy of former DA Lynne Abraham — a longtime tough-on-crime, pro-cop politician — to be over after she spoke to FOP members about pension changes and progressive reforms.”

Because the discussion about “ending policing” is probably not going to result in “ending policing”, I would think a better direction to take would be – curbing police unions. For instance, making sure that policemen who shoot or taser or maim and then cost the city’s thousands in civil suit damages are fired. Simply that. Why should cities be drained to support employees who wild? But even something as simple as that is not going to happen as long as police unions, interlocked with the Republican party and various rightwing organizations, have the upper hand.

It is rather amazing that the dream of a society in which the worker, through unions, has parity with Capital was only realized by… the police. But here we are, in the era in which past utopias are transformed into dystopias right before our eyes. This doesn’t have to be like this.  

another desperate spring

Broken at the waist by revolution
or vandal, a figure in excelsius deo
waits a stony resurrection flanking
the portal of the priory. The church trembles
in its long malaria of ghosts and smog.
Late spring. Already summer’s heat.

I walk up narrow Rue Gravilliers
past where a tagged mirror salutes
propped upright against a mildewed wall
waiting for collection, too.
A beggar mumbles bien bien
- this is the poetry of presque rien

channeling the oral tumult of my brain
which like yours is all worries and sex.
I pass the goddess in her natural human size
at the street crossing where the shadow
of a sparrow pursues presque rien
and its me mumbling bien, bien.

- Karen Chamisso

The birth of the police union out of the destruction of American apartheid

Robert Sobel’s biography of Calvin Coolidge contains background on the event that catapulted Coolidge into celebrity: his attempt to bust the Boston Police Union. Coolidge was the governor of Massachusetts in 1919, and Boston was a hotbed of political activity – two anarchists from the region, Sacco and Vanzetti, would later impress themselves – their trial for armed robbery and murder, their execution - on the whole decade, creating a cause that brought hundreds of thousands out into the streets throughout the globe. In 1919, the AFL had been busy unionizing police departments. ”… thirty seven cities, including Washington D.C., Los Angeles, St. Paul,  and Vicksburg had police unions, most of them affiliated with the AFL.”

Coolidge, to tell a long story short, busted the Boston police union when they staged a walkout. It was a thorough victory. The AFL stopped trying to unionize police departments. Various Senators, Democratic and Republic, indicated that the threat of imminent Bolshevism was terminated.

That wasn’t the end of the police union, however. It is generally agreed that the next step came in the sixties. As described by Charles Salerno in Police at the Bargaining Table, the civil rights era jumpstarted police unions for two reasons: a., civil disobedience and protest showed police that there was a greater space for union activity than in the past; and b., the police responded to protests on campus and the struggle for civil rights by a sort of institution-wide panic. Policing had meant enforcing the bounds of apartheid, and upholding a white bourgeois social order. As apartheid began to crumble and the student movement made the white bourgeois social order seem weak and perverted, police unionization was  forged in opposition to these things. Salerno goes into a sort of cop romantic revery about the whole thing:

“To witness the wanton destruction and disruption of the schools, not by people unable to attend them, but by those who were fortunate enoghyt to be students, showed the police that nothing was held to be sacred anymore. The police were called onto campuses to restore order and suppress unruly crowds. They witnessed acts of vandalism, disrespect for authority, a severe lack of discipline, open defamation of the American flag, total disregard for law, open profanity, widespread usage of drugs, and physical attacks upon the police.”

Salerno’s narrative is suffused with the cop self-pity and thinly disguised white nationalist sentiment, but it probably accurately reflects the feelings and recollections of the almost all white urban police force:

“All these events had a traumatic effect on the police psyche. They would no longer sit in a corner and lick their wounds. They began to strike back and to take the offensive in an attempt to salvage their dignity and their pride. The Civil Rights Movement and the gains made by minority groups through civil disobedience served as examples to the police. Since they were an occupational minority and an extremely visible one as well, they began to organize into militant or semimilitant groups.”

And thus, out of a highly politicized reaction to the threat to the white order, the police union received its jolt of life – sorta like Frankenstein’s monster, made out of a grotesque hodgepodge of sentiment and organized power. The point is that racism is not just accidental to modern policing, but the glue that held together the unionization of police forces throughout the country.

This is a small but significant footnote in the rightward drift of American society since the sixties and seventies.  

a rainbow Armageddon

Our riot comparisons – Newark, Detroit, D.C. Watts the Rodney King riots – reference years when the U.S. economy was booming. This aint one. Roosevelt was elected, in part, because Hoover reacted to the Veterans march – the Bonus Army – which had camped on government grounds in D.C. by calling out the army, which, under MacArthur, simply overwhelmed the camp with tanks and soldiers, driving the families there away. That was July 28, 1932. Supposedly this was the last straw for Roosevelt, who decided, finally, that Hoover was not just an opponent but the real shit that he so abundantly was. (for Hoover’s chillingidea that we shoulda allied with Hitler in World War II, see Brad Delong’spost, here: ).

The US is facing a gaping hole where the economy used to be, but in White America, at least, until recently, the thought was that we’d puddle-jump it. So we sort of turned to more important topics in the great lockdown, like Animal Crossing, looking away from the two trillion that the U.S. government essentially pumped into the upper 1 percent. Two trillion used to be quite an amount. And when you compare it with what the administration is proposing now – time to cut food stamps! – it seems, well, pretty large. But the media isn’t going to lead any charge against it anytime soon. On the street, however, the idea that it is either starve or change has a new air of reality.

For the twenty-somethings, this reality is coming down pretty brutally. It is a surprising rainbow who are out there marching. It is lovely, but here I speak as a person who has been in demonstrations on the losing side since the age of Reagan’s Contras: demonstrations are covered and then forgotten. The demonstrations against the Iraq invasion were some of the biggest ever seen, and they meant squat.

Thus, the temptation out there to turn it up a notch. In combination with the inevitable poison cocktail of peep’s projecting their own psychodramas and the suspicious marge, the undercover cops and agents provacateurs. If you have ever been active in any left organization, you will have run into these people. They are standard issue guys, mostly, always proposing the stupidest things to an excitable mass of angry people. Your tax money hard at work!

I think we are sliding into the reaction, delayed but perhaps inevitable, to our age of surroundsound inequalities.  I don’t think it is economic determinism to hypothesize that if black median income wealth were equal to white median income wealth, instead of being 13 x lower, black people in Minneapolis, who compose 15 percent of the population, would not constitute 60 percent of the people that the Minneapolis cops use the choke knee on. Inequalities at certain points converge. An unequal healthcare system equals many more corona deaths in the black community, proportionally, than among whites. As a for instance.

In any horror movie, just when you think the monster is dead, he comes back to life for another jumpscare. This is an excellent rule for how things happen.

Henry Dumas, killed by a cop, 1968

My mind is on Henry Dumas today. He was shot and killed in a Harlem subway station on May 23, 1968. At that point, he had written a number of short stories and poems, most of which came out after his death. As for that death, the police at the time said it was a case of "mistaken identity", and letting bygones be bygones, never investigated much less charged the white subway cop who killed him. This was followed by an oopsy moment in the 190s, when Dumas's biographer discovered the file on the case had been lost, due to a merger of departments or something. Dumas was 33. Here's an interview with the man who rescued his texts. https://www.nwaonline.com/…/professor-friend-keeps-alive-m…/

Dumas did all kinds of poems before he was mistaken identity murdered. He was young, it was the sixites, and he was the man to stick his fingers in every pie at that time. Some of his poems have that magic Blakean innocence:

My little boy

My little boy speaks
with an accent.
I must remember sometime
to lean my head down
and whisper in his ear
and ask him the name
of the country
he comes from.
I like his accent.

Here's a more famous poem:

Knees of a Natural Man

for Jay Wright

my ole man took me to the fulton fish market
we walk around in the guts and the scales

my ole man show me a dead fish, eyes like throat spit
he say “you hongry boy?” i say “naw, not yet”

my ole man show me how to pick the leavings
he say people throw away fish that not rotten

we scaling on our knees back uptown on lenox
sold five fish, keepin one for the pot

my ole man copped a bottle of wine
he say, “boy, build me a fire out in the lot”

backyard cat climbin up my leg for fish
i make a fire in the ash can

my ole man come when he smell fish
frank williams is with him, they got wine

my ole man say “the boy cotch the big one”
he tell big lie and slap me on the head

i give the guts to the cat and take me some wine
we walk around the sparks like we in hell

my ole man is laughin and coughin up wine
he say “you hongry boy” i say “naw, not yet”

next time i go to fulton fish market
first thing i do is take a long drink of wine

the foolish exchange in the age of precarity

“… precarity is not a provisional, transient, resolvable juncture of social and productive relations. Precarity is the time that comes after modernity.”

I have often thought that the problem with many leftist theorists is that, in the wake of Adorno, it seems to be a competition for who will be direst.  Substituting for the old appeal to class solidarity the new appeal to the most sensational museum of horrors. Less revolutionary uplift, more history as slash film binging – in which the goal is to develop the best perch from which to say I told you so.

Well, my instinct is to say: fuck that. It seems like a perversion of the honest prophet’s standard, which is to endure visions that are supposed to lead to repentance and reform – which are downers, aesthetically, posed next to catharsis, I do confess, but which are redeemed by utopia, which better be on the horizon or we really are going to be imprisoned in the slasher flick.

That said, Franco Berandi Bifo’s phrase – which I take from his introduction to Frederico Campagna’s The Last Night – seems to resonate with current circs. Precarity has been in the vocabulary for some time now, but as a scandal – as an aberration that a sound economic policy would heal. Bifo is right, however – it is becoming a culture. Far from being an aberration of neo-liberalism, it is intrinsic to devolving all power to the market, and thus arming private power with an enormous weapon, threatening the vast majority in their routines and nests.

…

I don’t know when I first heard the phrase “your money or your life”, but my guess is that it was either uttered by a cartoon animal or by an old movie actor in some film on Channel 17 – which was the channel for old movies in the Atlanta area when I was growing up. And no doubt I said it too, playing highwayman. The stagecoach robber, who in his own time was summarily strung up when caught, became encrusted with movie glamor over the centuries – something that Henry Fielding, who caught a mess of them, is no doubt chuckling about in Heaven. I did not know, however, that this mantra, much more than the pledge of allegiance or the Lord’s prayer, would basically guide my life, and the life of my playmates, teachers, parents, their friends, and the community as a whole. At the time I was growing up – I was what, 12 in 1969/70? – there was a sense abroad in the country that life more abundant was the question we had to face. Civil rights and the sexual revolution and prosperity for the workers and the white collar middle managers was just going to go on forever. It was a delusion. Most of my life has been spent in the ruins of that delusion (although don’t tell the American media, which still exudes the belief that the middle class, defined as those making 400,000 and more a year, are the defining feature of the American landscape). This pandemic shows the extent to which the highwayman’s slogan is breathing down our necks every day.

There have been worse pandemics. But I can’t remember worse state responses. I want the glamor back, at least. Everywhere, the neoliberal state shows that in its obsession with finance, its structured inequality, its devotion of state power to the expansion of the reach and wealth of the upper one percent, it has become an actual menace to its citizens. I wonder if I will ever see the day when the majority just casts off its servility and turns the question on the overseers of our misery. I wonder if the age of precarity is here to stay. Everything in me says that it can’t be like this forever.

II.

In Matthew 16: 25, Jesus sez: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

In the neoliberal era, we have an easy answer:  we don’t have souls! It is a LOL era, and every new atheist can join in and jeer. Myself, though, I think it is the basic question, the one at the root of our time, the question that pervades our economy and our time.

In a sermon entitled Foolish Exchange, the seventeenth century divine Jeremy Taylor did an eloquent song and dance around this saying, in the high Anglican style, rooting through  every word in Greek and Latin. William Hazlitt, in an essay comparing Taylor to Francis Bacon and Thomas Browne, wrote, justly that we do not come to Taylor for new reasons, but for textures. “and enters into all the items of the debtor and creditor account between life and death, grace and nature, faith and good works.” Hazlitt’s metaphor of the account serves us well here, and shows what a keen sense Hazlitt had for the motif. The sermon, as Hazlitt’s description makes plain, is kin to the novel, a secret sharer of that device for making sense of the ceaseless and perhaps senseless flow of what is. As a man at the edge of the era’s conventional and unconventional wisdom, Taylor fastens on to an exchange that is beginning to be called into question by new terms in the new philosophy. He is still immersed in the traditional order, and that makes his exposition about what it means to gain the world of historical and anthropological interest, especially as it casts light on the age old suppositions about fortune and the limits of plenty – the old image of the limited good, the zero sum, the Malthusian limit under which the people of the seventeenth century thought of themselves, just as the figures in Grimm’s Tales thought of themselves, still absorbing the discoveries in America and the Indies.

“First, then, suppose a man gets all the world, what is it that he gets? It is a bubble and a phantasm, and hath no reality beyond a present transient  use; a thing that is impossible to be enjoyed, because its furits and usages are transmitted to us by parts and by succession. He that hath all the world (if we can suppose such a man) cannot have a dish of fresh summer-fruits in the midst of winter, not so much as a green fig; and very much of its possessions is so hid, so fugacious, and of so uncertain purchase, that it is like the riches of the sea to the lord of the shore; all the fish and wealth within all its hollowness are his, but he is never the better for what he cannot get: all the shell-fishes that produce pearl, produce not for him.”

Taylor’s image is not irrelevant, even in a time in which we can get green figs out of season, due to the endless logistics of global trade, the technologies of freezing and fertilizer and the ceaseless exploitation of man and topsoil. We can get foods from Thailand and Iceland if we live in a metropolis big enough to boost of ethnic restaurants. We can enjoy avocados in piles in the Von’s grocery store in Los Angeles in December. However, what we know, or think we know, from the theory of marginal disutility, is that having a billion dollars can buy you a sickening amount of avocadoes, but not the body or appetite to swallow them all down. We know that it is extremely hard to live a lifestyle that actually absorbs a billion dollars – billionaires turn out not to be epicurians, for the most part, but tyrants. It is not the enjoyment of the world, but the power over the world that is the lure in this exchange.

One that, of course, depends, crucially, on the soul. For “soul” in this exchange we might tend to substitute “life”, thinking ourselves quite the enlightened wits and avoiding religiously drenched sentiment. I think, however, that life is as superstitious an entity in this discourse, as imprecise a nominator, than soul – for we are talking about desire, awareness, intention, dreaming, the whole bundle of things that go into the human biographies we walk among, we remember, we are. And even, I dare say, of human things – soul food or Baudelaire’s the soul of wine, soul music and our, if Nelson George is right, post-soul culture.

In Emil Kauler’s standard “A History of Marginal Utility”, the background reference to the ancients is more Aristotle than Jesus. Reference to the Foolish Exchange passage is entirely absent. Rather, Kauler makes various  encouragingly positivist remarks the general indifference of the science of economics  towards religion, such as “Economists [of the 19^th century] no longer thought consistently in accordance with their religious backgrounds.”  In other words, during the work week, they cast of the mind-forged manacles of man, and only on Sunday did they don them, for the purposes of decorum and the beauties of choral music. One should remember here that economist refers to an institutional title, and does not refer to the practical economics being performed by laymen as the landlord pounds on the door for the rent.  

Marginal theory replaced the classical economics labor theory of value in the paradigm of the science in the late 19^th, early twentieth century, the same period that saw the rise of department stores and the second wave of consumer culture – which I would date, symbolically, with the Singer company’s new pay on the installment plan sales pitch to households. The focus was shifted from production to consumption.

In William Stanley Jevon’s system, “utility changes with the rate in which the amount of goods changes” – thus making a plea for the older idea of supply restraints as being the ultimate determinant of prices. Yet Jevons was not your old-fangled Benthamite utilitarian, but the new type, applying a very British nominalism to the very concept of utility. Utility was ultimately determined by the subject, and one couldn’t really find a common essence that one could measure: “To speak simply of the value of one ounce of gold is as absurd as to speak of the ratio of the number seventeen.” Instead of measuring utility itself – that x for which man is exchanging his soul – we can only measure exchange, the relations between commodities and human product in the market – the market in which souls are traded. Jevons is proposing an early version of what would later be called revealed preferences – with the great revelator being the marketplace.

And it is in this matrix of unmeasurable subjects and their measurable addictions, or satisfactions, that we find ourselves and our souls now. Now, in the great pandemic.

From my own experience, the fear for myself and for others, and my observations of some of our buddies and family who are all undergoing le grand renfermement, the thing that is running in our heads is: are we going to die leaving these x-s and y-s – our scattered affections, our life in the office or jerking-off, our sense of politics and literature or video games or junk food behind us as our definition, who we are, what we gained?  In the grand all about, we have pretty much dispensed with the afterlife as a justification. We, here, is actually a minority – I imagine a majority of the population has some idea of the afterlife that I and my system of cultural references don’t share. A more robust sense of heaven and hell, or an other sense altogether.

The margins have had their victory over the marginals. But I’m thinking that this is not the end of the story.

What you get for thinking - a poem by Karen Chamisso

Baby baby they sing they say

They hold on they hold out they lay there

Dead to go and going to stay

Baby Baby they clutch everywhere

That is me, the everywhere my traveling show

Of me and mine and all things divine

-ly self that is dead to go

In the utter throb of my mother line

From the thumb to my heart, you got that?

Baby baby until I stand

Wrinkle in one hand, what I spat

Out in the other, not understanding, you understand?

-Karen Chamisso

the déjà-ecrit

We all have experienced déjà-vu. But what writer has not experienced, as well, déjà-ecrit - the feeling that the thing one is writing has been written before, must have been written before. It is the feeling that reading what you have writen precedes what you have written - and if you have read it, it must have been written by someone somewhere. Going for the gusto, here, I'd guess that the best things - or many of the best things - are written with this eerie feeling. It is a wobble in the author’s authority, for neither the writer nor anyone that the writer knows wrote the sentence, exactly. mene, tekel, upharsin, baby.

The easy re-election that wasn't: Trump in the chute

One of the odder things about American politics this year is the missed opportunity: Trump could be cruising to an easy re-election if he had operated early and not acted crazy. I mean, this is not really an ideological issue. When Richard Nixon upset conservatives by, say, going to China, or installing price controls, he did so because he knew he could steamroller the right and extend his power. Trump resembles Nixon in his attitudes, but he is a very limited man, basically a stupid man, and so doesn't have Nixon's artfulness.

If you look at how the governor's have dealt with the plague, the striking thing is that certain Democratic governors, like Cuomo, were criminally late to do anything, whereas certain Republican governors, like the one in Maryland and whatshisname in Ohio, were on the spot, as much as they could be. In other words, the choice of shutting everything down everything early, masking, social distancing, etc. could easily have been taken by Trump without contradicting anything in his politics. But, like other Western leaders - Macron, Gonzalez, [Oops - kind reader in comments corrects me - Sanchez. Gonzalez was prime minister ages ago!] Johnson, etc., - he did nothing because for him, Asia is way over there and how about that there swine flu scare in the seventies? Rightwing governments like Hungary and Slovakia did the lockdown and tailored it into their racist ideologies - but having made his initial, disastrous mistake, Trump did not know how to tack. He did not see that his Dem opponents, having been mostly as ignorant and arrogant, gave him a great opening. So he went down the chute, from pointless hectoring press conferences to lies about chlorox and hydroxychloroquine.

Now, 96,000 deaths and counting later, he has waded too thick in blood to turn back.

Plutocrat's ball - you just live here

In shock discovery, the NYT has peeped behind its daily explainer about the stock market (it is going up because of, uh, reported vaccines! it is going up because oil prices are sorta going up or maybe not!) and gingerly touched on the fact that the Government has basically become the market maker of first resort. Astonishing. Who would think that a plutocracy would evolve so that the state became a guarantor for the wealthiest 10 percent! I'm just flummoxed.

"While the Fed says it does not seek to keep stock prices up, the market has rebounded some 30 percent since the institution began its giant program to pump trillions of dollars into financial markets. It has bought billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. Treasury bonds and government-insured mortgage bonds, keeping the prices of those bonds up and pushing yields, which move in the opposite direction, down.

The Fed also announced recently that it would start to buy exchange-traded funds that hold a diversified portfolio representing large parts of the more than $9 trillion corporate bond market and would move on to buying corporate bonds directly “in the near future.” Since such bonds serve as the basis for new borrowings, this lowers the cost of raising money for corporations tapping the bond markets."

Jotted on a wet napkin

I had a lotta skin in the game of skin.

Being all bone I sat alone.

The night wanted to wrap itself around me tight

maybe choke me like an illmet date, late.

I drew the skin of my teeth too 

From the deck full of Ensor grins.

What are we playing for I asked skin at the door.

Cruelty, adultery, usual stakes

Sez Skin, hurry and draw it will soon be dawn.

- Karen Chamisso

notes of a useful idiot

In the Futurist Manifesto, A slap in the face of public taste, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Burlyuk and Kruchenykh defended these theses concerning the rights of poets:

1 -  To enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words.

2-    To feel insuperable hatred for the language that existed before them.

3.      To tear with horror from our proud foreheads the wreath of cheap fame which you have made from bathhouse switches.

4.      To stand on the rock of the word “we” amid the sea of catcalls and outrage.

I at first glance, I am not sure about one, believe strongly that 2 is insane, agree with three, and certainly understand and sympathize with 4. Celebrity now is woven of other materials and immaterials – a Youtube channel, an invite to the Miami Basel Plutocrats of Art fair, etc. And alas, the “we” of  a movement of any kind, determined to undo the long bondage of poetry to banality, has disappeared into a blurbish train of watered CVs and the insuperable tones of the NPR poetry reader- a voice that is like a bullet directed at the heart of poetry itself. I’d like to think the bullet won’t work, and that poetry has the vampirish quality of coming alive in every coffin it is buried in when the moon is right.  You can put it down, but it will be back, swinging an axe and breaking in your door.

One, though: I like the spirit of it. I wonder if this is how Twitter, Tik Tok, blogs and the infinite cesspool of comments on Internet is all, somehow, quicksilver to me. The slang, the acronyms, the rapid erasures of jargon and slogan, I am in love with them beyond any ideological position. I’m pretty sure there are no arbitrary words – I’m too Freudian for that. But there are emergents all the time. I often find myself banging out words that do not exist in a dictionary, but should.

So: I’m no retro-futurist, but I am a useful idiot. That counts for something.  

time of our time: Virilio and the Lockdown

In one of his apocalyptic essays, “Une anthropologie du presentiment”, Paul Virilio (a writer whose lightning stroke provocations are bodyguarded by a certain dark mumbo-jumbo, a logic of the worst case scenario, like a man who had been up all night reading, alternatively, Michel Foucault and St. John of Patmos) quotes a line of Octavio Paz:

 “the instant is an uninhabitable as the future”. 

For Virilio, we have been forced to inhabit that inhabitability – this is the crazy-making effect of the acceleration and massive accumulative power of our system of telecommunications:

“In fact, can we still speak of a contemporary world? Shouldn’t we, rather, speak of the anthropology of a world that is not “intemporal”, but in-temporary, intemporal, if this is even possible? Is an anthropology of the instance conceivable, and can it be llogical without denying, in the same gesture, its fully historical dimension?”

If there ever was a time that a certain apocalyptic strain in French philosophy seems to have found the object it was looking for, it is this plague pause, this breaking apart of the con-temporary, this pandemic that came to us on the wings of globalization. Acceleration, the rat race, the routine of tasks that must be done, has suddenly come to a screeching halt, or perhaps a non-screeching one, as the great metropoles suddenly went quiet. And now, just as suddenly, the halt is lifting. What have we seen in this desert of the real, o Lord? A reed shaken in the wind?

Myself, I am fortunately a family man. Inhabiting an apartment in the Marais, of all places (such is the vagary of my never very consistent life, a three Stooge’s adventure), and looking out at a world of close calls without any one of those calls landing too close – though my hypochondria is always on low in the background – I have an odd sense that, for all the irreality that has rushed in on every front, this pandemic is somehow normal, somehow expected.  

I ventured out on un-lockdown weekend a couple of times, and took a gander at the neighborhood streets. I stood outside in line (so called – the French still, charmingly, object to the American submission to the “line” as a linear thing, preferring to cluster about) outside a bagel shop. I walked the boundaries. I saw many masked people, but this was no Mardi Gras – there were many, many unmasked, as pretty as you please, standing or sitting less than a good sneeze’s distance one from the other. Were these people crazy? Or was I?

A little of both, perhaps. I will get real here: it warmed my heart to see Paris limping back to life. I miss the cafes, the uber-expensive dress shops, the galleries, the life, by God, that flows over the streets every day. Yet I am all informed, too, about second waves, about the way the Spanish Influenza’s second coming, when it got serious, killed ten times more people than its rehearsal wave.

What is time? What is our time? What is personal time? Questions that have lept out of philosophy class and into our laps, be we working class or bougie, this Corona-period. Let’s end on the gothic observation of Virilio, who might be right:

“Duration (durée), all true duration, may have become by the fact of the acceleration of realism an everyday illusion, an absence of duration or more exactly, the duration of the absence which no longer allows us to grasp what is there, no those things that are still there to the advantage of the intempestive characer of what happens ex abrupto, of the Accident that from now on out replaces all events.”

Virilio wrote this at the beginning of the great economic crack-up of 2008. Seems less heated now – seems like pretty much a standard description of the impression we all have of our “time”. Put the 666 on my forehead and test and trace: I'm in!