is #metoo still the deal?

 Supposedly, #metoo is dead, and so is lean-in.

Supposedly, the Depp-Heard trial shows how dead #metoo is. And Sheryl Sandberg’s departure from Facebook helps us measure the shelf-life of a book about breaking the glass ceiling, or something.
Lean-in was always a prop to patriarchy. I don’t think this has to be the case with #metoo, which was not about celebrities and CEOs, but rather started among the obscure depths of the media and publishing – among an educated class that has long been proletarianized, but in the nicest freelancy kind of way, with the college debt to prove it.

I myself am still an ardent intersectionalist, and from that perspective, #metoo is not dead. #Metoo is, properly, the preliminary to a strike. It is interesting that the same level in the media in which #metoo was generated is a hotbed, at the moment, of unionbuilding. These are connected phenomena. In the movie and tv industry, the #metoo spotlight was more on famous women being raped, bullied and sexually abused by famous men. I have heard less about unionization in an industry in which company unions, guilds, still have great power, and in which the star system warps our usual notions of work and exploitation. However, as the halfassed “reforms” to the system in response to #metoo refuse to touch on the systematic subordination of women in the industry, I think there is a future for #metoo – a future that will last as long as the abusive system is in place.

The Depp-Heard trial is a satyr play, of course, following the end of Roe; sexism, racism, and the war against the working class all hand in hand, chanting their usual reddit ditties. But don’t believe the hype, the early surrenderers. They have their deal, but it is not mine, nor necessarily yours.

to make the stone stony

 

“The lizards told me that there was a legend among the stones that God wanted once to become a stone, in order to save them from their rigidity. An old lizard opined, however, that this stony incarnation would only happen after God had incarnated himself in all the species of animals and plants and redeemed them. Only a few stones have feelings, and they only breathe out in moonlight. But these few stones who have a feeling for their circumstances are horribly miserable. The trees are much better, they can cry. The animals, though, are the best of all, because they can speak, each after its own kind, and human beings are the best at it. Once when the whole world is saved, all other created things will be able to speak, as in the primitive times that the poets sing.”

Heinrich Heine’s legend of the stones, as recounted by the lizards, comes in his travel book about the city of Lucca in Italy. It rather violates the convention of those travel books that concentrate on the sights, as evidently it begins with the lizards of the Apennines. I wonder if this legend of the stones was on Skhlovsky’s mind when, in Art as Technique, he famously wrote: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”

Skhlovsky’s sentence, if it obliquely refers to Heine’s text, would not be the first time that Art was the substitute of God. This has proven to be one of the enduring themes in the era of art outside the system of patronage – the system that broke down in the eighteenth century, under the coming of steam driven printing presses that allowed for the mass circulation of newspapers, which changed the whole consciousness of the literate class.

I am very fond of Heine. I find it important – an intersignes – that as Baudelaire was crumbling in his latter, syphilis wracked years, he wrote a scathing article about an attack made by a French journalist, Jules Janin, on Heine’s poetry. Baudelaire still had a fine sense of who was illuminated and who was in darkness as far as art went. I don’t know if Baudelaire was aware of Heine’s Lucca book. But I do think he would have recognized the style of Heine’s thought, flickering rather like a lizard’s tongue flickers, out and in, testing the air. Heine was also of course Marx’s friend, and they both liked the fine ironic style of the 1820s and 30s, which combined Hegel and the extravagances of the Grimm’s tales.

I’m feeling a little tree-like myself lately. Even stony. On this day after the ascension.

 

 

 

Power to the powerless?

 I read something by Sherrilyn Ifill - who I respect -in which she emphasizes that those who say we can do nothing are wrong, and that we have the power to mobilize. Meaning, to vote.

I respect the idea, but I want to ask about that power. I want to ask: what power? I think we had that power after Red Lake, we had that power after Sandy Hook, we had that power after Newtown, we had that power after Virginia Tech... so why was the power massively unused? These statements about "our" power become, after a while, disincentives, if all that supposed "power" ends up in the hands of representatives of our will who really do nothing, except ask every election year for donations and votes. The power that Dr. King had, which had to be exercized for a decade, was not in votes, but in civil disobedience and organizing to defy the powers that be. We have definitely lost that - what, after all, would happen to our credit rating? We are powerlessly powerful. The most powerful are so isolated from the rest of us that they view "doing something" as a sort of charity case, breadcrumbs for the peasants. Power doesn't come out of saying that we have power. It comes, perhaps, when we recognize our powerlessness and question the conditions that have caused it.

it's a perfect day (you're going to reap just what you sow)

 

Is the small the image of the large? Is time the image of eternity? Or are we talking about separate domains, here? I woke up this morning feeling like stretching. The rain yesterday had driven away, briefly, the pre-summer heat that was much remarked by the papers. I thought that this morning would be perfect. I thought my life was perfect.  I would make coffee. We would have croissants and coffee. A. would write, Adam would sleep,  and I would read Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning for its perfect first five lines:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

I should say that the last line, which operates as a showrunner for the poem, is not exactly perfectly matched to the complacencies of the peignoir, but then again, an image needs a jar, and we can’t live in complacencies for too long – the small extended becomes not the image of the perfect but the distortion of the perfect, an isolation from the real influxes of labor, time and others that made the peignoir, set the table, grew the coffee beans and oranges, built and named the calendar, and can be unfolded ad infinitum from the smallest social atomie.

Of course, the self, one could argue, the ultra contemporary self, is half papier maché, or half computer screen now that paper’s obsolete, and half sensuality. A tweet, a video, and then it is not simply gone, but its chance is wasted.

But isn’t that the whole American disease? The idea that life is ‘opportunity’. Opportunity, that old devil, which makes us tally up the small as a series of hits and misses. Opportunity costs – what a satanic phrase!

But at least it gets us out of bed.

 

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

 

 

  

Narcissistic Christianity

 Somewhere, in my head, I am kicking around a thesis about American Christianity - and notably, the way Christianity takes a narcissistic turn in America. Jesus, except as a figurehead, no longer counts - and this devaluation of Jesus, not only as a teacher, but as a person in general, is a very narcissistic gesture. Narcissism as the foundation of the relationship with God - a relationship put explicitly in terms of being a white American in relation to God - creates a certain bizarre cultural formation. How the narcissistic turn came about in Cold War and post-Cold War America, particularly in evangelical circles (accompanied by a certain rightwing Catholic group) is a problem for the historian of religion. Of course, it is a problem for us all, in as much as one of the great war crimes, that of spending trillions on the military, has resulted in a narcissicist Christian nation having thousands of nuclear warheads, billions of gallons of napalm, and so on.

the man who went out to find fear

 

In the 00s, that time of Bush and theory blogs, I saw a lot of mentions of weirdness and Thomas Ligotti and Lovecraft and the like, and I paid no attention. I’ve never been a horror movie buff, and though I like Georges Bataille as much as your average American working stiff, I took abjection to be a much more hoity toity thing than Friday the 13^th IV or whatever. Give me a meditation on the big toe or give me death! As the old motto goes.  As a kid, I read some weird tales, or so I vaguely remember, but not Lovecraft. And as an older beast, I have pretty much the same reaction to Lovecraft’s prose as Edmund Wilson did, who dissed him in the New Yorker in the1940s for being the kind of writer who imagines the words instead of the thing. In fact, who doesn’t? It is just that some writers imagine, hmm, better words.

 

However, back in the 00s, I little imagined I would have a boy. I especially didn’t imagine that my boy would adore horror and, at the tender age of nine, become a big Stephen King fan. So I have been trying to backfill, as it were, this tendency with the classics. And here Lovecraft does loom large.

 

This is the reason I, at an age when, if I was an oak, I’d be about 60 feet high with a great ant and bark culture going on in my middle limbs … even I … am starting to read Lovecraft stories. They aren’t terrible, but they certainly aren’t Poe. They lack, to my mind, a certain glee, the switchknife glee which Poe borrowed from De Quincey and the folklore of American humor, the kind of glee that gets into medical school pranks, but which seems to be utterly foreign to Lovecraft. He is a great man for piling up the blurb words – horrid, ghastly, shocking – in front of nouns, which seems a little defusing to me.

 

It is, in a way, funny that Lovecraft, for me, is impenetrable, because I know something of his inspirations – for instance, Arthur Machen – and I have a strong appreciation for that strain in German literature that goes out from E.T.A. Hoffman – to Kubin, Meyrink and in a very different strain, Kafka.

 

What I like in all of these writers is that flicker of gleeful abandonment that one finds, as well, in De Quincey’s Murder as one of the Fine Arts. It is a moment when a certain monological control over the tale, over the listener’s expectations, is violated. We jump across a divide, suddenly. And that moment, so far as I have been able to get through Lovecraft, is banned from the beginning. The typical Lovecraftian device is to make the story posterior to the inauguration of the tale. To me, this is a way of exorcising the liberating, gleeful moment, when the tale, as it were, turns on the teller, and on the listeners.

 

Lisa Downing, in an interesting essay on the notion of “nightmare” in early nineteenth century France, writes of the way a notion derived, in part, from the medieval supposition that a nightmare is an incubus, a demonic bed partner, was medicalized with certain of the same characteristics – notably breathlessness. The nightmare bed partner literally squeezed the breath out of the dreamer: sex and strangulation intersect. Downing suggests that in Gautier’s fantastic tales, the “points de suspension” operate as a mechanism to suspend breathing. Terror is the squeeze of the incubus.

 

‘Terror”. “Horror.” That is the crux of my problem with Lovecraft, who is never very terrifying. Movies and cable tv, with their visual obtrusiveness, are better at creating terror – but rarely create glee. The gleeful serial killer or monster – Joker, the Riddler – are of course meant to be gleeful, they pay homage to glee, and sometimes (“why so serious?”) succeed, but mostly the characters are below that necessary level. One exception is Patrick Bateman in Mary Herron’s American Psycho, whose gleeful abandon gives the tone to the whole movie, and – to me – justifies the horror trope of ending the story on that cliche ambiguity: nightmare or reality? Which neatly closes the circle of the horrid or weird, bringing it back to the sensation of being suffocated in one’s sleep.

The oracles are not dead

In his History of Oracles, one of the major texts of the early Enlightenment, Bernard de Fontenelle proposed applyng a sort of Efficient Markets thesis to God:

“For I conceive that God only speaks to man to supplement the weakness of their knowledge, which is not sufficient for their needs, and that everything that he doesn’t say is of such a kind that they can learn it themselves or it is not necessary that they know it. Thus, if the oracles were given by evil demons, God would have taught us this in order to stop us from believing that it was God himself doing this, and that there was something divine in false religions.”

Like the efficient market thesis, which claims that all current information is reflected in the prices of financial commodities, God, in Fontenelle’s view, only gives out information to humans if they need it – having endowed them with reason for all their other information needs. Efficiency is the most secular of concepts, for it quickly purges any disturbance in the community of discourse, whether that is God or evil demons.

But if we upset the whole notion of efficiency, or decide that efficiency is not co-extensive with rationality, but that the latter must encompass our passions, then the oracles return. They return as poetry.

But not just the word itself – the great poets in their lives seem surrounded by a cloud of meanings and symbols that they cannot escape.

Or so I have been thinking, thinking about Baudelaire. In 1864 Baudelaire, seriously ill with the syphilis that was already effecting him, made a trip to Belgium to make money as a lecturer, of all things. We have the testimony of a Belgian writer, Camille Lemmonier, about Baudelaire’s conference about Theophile Gautier, who he called, with some depth of irony that may not even have been irony, “my master”.

The lecture was to be given to the Cercle Litteraire et artistique.

“Le Cercle littéraire et artistique occupied the gothic palace across from the Hôtel de Ville. Its rude and historic architecture, since renovated as a jewel of great price, a shrine exquisitely ornamented, sheltered at the time some businesses selling grain and others selling birds. All the ground floor and the basements had been given to them. This was one of the activities of the Grand Place. But the stage floor was reserved for the Cercle. One climbed onto the porch, then went up a steep staircase. A door opened, which was that of the conference room. It was there that Baudelaire was supposed to speak. »

Already, the idea that Baudelaire was giving a talk on Gautier in a run down building, the ground floor of which was devoted to grains and the wares of bird catchers – Baudelaire, some of whose greatest poems – The Albatross, The Swan – made exactly that correspondence between the poet and the captured bird – is too too suggestive. Lemmonier, a young writer, was late for the conference. He thought that everybody would be there, all the writers of Brussels, all the fans of poetry.

“I glided into the room. It is still, after all these years, a subject of stupor for me, the solitude of that great vessel where I feared to be able to find a place and which, even up to the shadows of the rear of the room, showed lines of unoccupied benches. Baudelaire spoke, that evening, to twenty auditors…”

He spoke for some time, fulfilling his contract, without a doubt.

“At the end of an hour, the poverty of the audience became still more rarified, who judged that the vacuum around the magician of the Word could be emptied out even more. There only remained two benches – which were lightened in their turn. Some backs slumped with sleepiness and incomprehension. Perhaps those who remained were moved by charity. Perhaps they remained like a passerby who accompanies a solitary coffin into a cemetery. Perhaps, as well, they were the doormen and the officials of the building, who were constrained to remain at their posts by a ceremonial duty.”

Where Baudelaire went became Baudelairian – it was his curse, his mystique, his afterlife. Benjamin references Lemonnier’s essay a number of times in the Passages and reads into it the idea that the audience couldn’t believe that Baudelaire was heaping praise on Gautier, thinking that he would reveal, in the end, by some sarcasm, the hoax. I am not sure about this reading. I wonder if the audience even knew who Baudelaire was – although the trial of Fleurs de Mal for obscenity might have made his name known even in Brussels. Lemonnier was young and hip: he knew of both Baudelaire and Gautier. But the whole scene in the floor above the birdcatchers, in the dark and damp building, ends as a sort of foreshadowing of Kafka’s The Trial.

« The poet didn’t seem to notice the desertion that left him speaking alone between high, dimly illuminated walls. A last word swelled out like a yell : I salute Théophile Gautier, my maître, the great poet of the century.” And his rigid figure bowed forward: he made three bows as though before a real audience. Rapidly a door closed. Then the night guardian took away the lamp. I was the last to remain as the night closed in, the night where, without echo, the voice of this father of the Church of literature had risen up and then been snuffed out.”

That’s a great ending. One almost expects Baudelaire, the morning after, to be taken by two guards out to a quarry in the Brussels suburbs. There he’d be stripped of his suit, stretched out on the ground, and while one of the guards held him down, the other would thrust a butcher knife deep in his heart and turn it there thrice, while Baudelaire would say “like a dog”, as though the shame of it would outlive him.

sometimes an ugly thought becomes a poem - Karen Chamisso

The penis sadness of so many men

Who ran in their youth in packs

With fee fie fo and fee fie fum

Confusing sex with jumping jacks

Settles like a pall on their older faces

- The judges, lawyers, the ceo

The aging blade’s jowly disgraces

The thirty-somes nowhere to go.

As pity to pain, so I’ve been taught,

Is the tribute we must as Christians pay

I try to summon up tears for the lot,

Those dogs in their winter play

This little piggy went to market

This little piggy went home

And wrote oink oink oink on his walls

Brooding on his sweetmeats all alone.

- Karen Chamisso

pain pain pain

 

I’m in pain at the moment. In Sete, I made some sudden movement that I cannot now call to mind, review my movements as I will – but I noticed, walking along the seashore, a pain in my back. The next day the pain was double, and I went to the doctor, who – after having me hop up on the cot in his office, which required resolution – poked me here and there and had me raise my legs – easy! The trouble was just sitting there. Well, the doctor concluded, obviously lumbago! He wrote me a prescription for painkillers and a heat treatment lotion, warned me to take the pill for my stomach – he was most concerned with the effect of the pills on my stomach, which I consider very French – and ushered me out of the office.

Pain is a strange thing, as it sucks in your ego. Suddenly, the littlest movement becomes subject to a calculus that would have been the admiration of Bentham. A calculus seldom met with in the real world.

I have often thought that I would not survive more than a week in the concentration camps, and wonder how anyone would. Lumbago makes me think of the men working the rock quarry at Mauthausen. If one had what I have – these urbanites of fifty or retired professional men – that would be it. The politics of pain is imbricated with politics altogether. Interesting how Burke’s essay on the sublime could be seen to have proceeded his Essay on the French Revolution. Burke’s paradox there springs from his idea that pain and pleasure are not parts of a continuum, but are positive and distinct qualities. One is not the negation of the other but a whole new thing.

“Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference. When I am carried from this state into a state of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should pass through the medium of any sort of pain. If in such a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquillity, or call it what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a concert of music; or suppose some object of a fine shape, and bright, lively colours, to be presented before you; or imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a rose; or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some pleasant kind of wine, or to taste of some sweetmeat without being hungry; in all the several senses, of hearing, smelling and tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure; yet if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of pain; or, having satisfied these several senses with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over? Suppose on the other hand, a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.”
Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to the standard measurements – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:
"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness."
Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:
It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”
Burke’s delight is akin to what Tallyrand, in his memoirs, called the “sweetness” of life under the ancien regime – a phrase much dilated upon by Roberto Calasso in his The Ruin of Kasch.
Burke, of course, was not as steady an advocate for the organic order as all that. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systematicity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defense of irreducible human and social qualities that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology.
There, I’ve wandered widely, and now I am back to thinking: where’s the box of painkillers?
                                                                                2.

Paul Valery, after a night of incessant coughing, went to the doctor and got his advice. Valery felt that the doctor didn’t take him seriously – him, an old grand mandarin. So he wrote in his notebook: “But doctors have the great habit of never thinking. I have noticed this a hundred times. They have the strange idea that everything falls under a classification, and that which is not marked with a name does not exist. Each new name that we invents, like metabolism, conditioned reflex, etc. renders them the service of diminishing their direct attention to facts and more than anything else, meditation concerning these facts. There is no doctor who has an idea of the globally functioning person. (Valéry, 1943)
One of the social functions of the poet, I think, is to give us an imaginary of that dullest and most intense of inner experiences: pain. In the introduction to her History of Pain – a strange title, when you think about it, blending natural history with its social offshoot – Roselyne Rey writes: “Pain always has a language, even if this is a cry, a sob, a physiognomic wincing, and it is at the same time a language: under this guise it inserts itself into the norms of the licit and of transgression, between what we can let appear and what it is necessary to shut up about and hide, norms and codes that depend on cultural formations…” I suspect Rey is conflating parole and language – for my own part, I think pain signifies without being caught up in the nets and grammar of language. Or, rather, if we extend the notion of language to pain as within her examples, we have to extend the notion of language to the non-human – a step that would definitely change our sense of the human. The dog or the tree, in this sense, can also be, in Buber’s term, a “Du” – a thou.
The Undying by Ann Boyer, her memoir-meditation about cancer, has generated a sort of cult. Unlike most cancer memoirs, Boyer has a firm sense of her illness as an ecological event, connected by a million threads to the atmosphere, water, and ground in our surround. New chemical compounds are produced at a rate of 10 million a year, according to the Smithsonian, although the vast majority of those compounds don’t get out of the laboratory. But of those that do, most are not checked for their somatic effects at all.
“The amount and diversity of pesticides, pharmaceuticals and other industrial chemicals that humans are releasing into the environment are increasing at rates that match or exceed recent increases in CO2 emissions, nutrient pollution from nitrogen fertilizers and other drivers of global change,” Emily Bernhardt, biogeochemist at Duke University and lead author of the article says in a press release. “But our analysis shows we’re not spending anywhere near the amount of attention or money that we should be to assess their impacts.”
"The lack of knowledge about how synthetic chemicals alter ecological processes represents a critical blind spot in the rapidly developing field of global ecology," the researchers write in the paper.”
Boyer is keenly aware that she is a target – not in her person, but in her body, which is in reaction to thousands of factors over which she has no control whatever. Targeting is a theme in the chemotherapy she undergoes, as are the externalities; and targeting, with the notion of “precision”, is part of her poetics. A poetics that goes awry in the cancer ward: “Language is no longer compliant to its social function. If we use words it is to approach as a misplaced bomb.” It goes awry even as the treatment is targeted. Targeting, of course, is our post atom bomb condition – our post firebomb condition. Our drone condition, our chemo condition. Boyer’s book struggles against the non-said in the ideology of cancer solidarity, that individualism of suffering which is the basis of the cancer memoir – as though all cancer sufferers were freed, in their traumatic conditionm from the intersectional chains that bind the “healthy”, even as the healthcare industry is where facts of class and gender become literal matters of life and death, pain and addiction, therapy and time. Those whose time is spoken for are those whose therapies must be intermittent, or self-fashioned. Emergency to emergency, the life that is saved is frittered away and fettered.
From Boyer: “I come across a headline: “Attitude Is Everything for Breast Cancer Survivor.” I look for the headline “Attitude Is Everything for Ebola Patient” or “Attitude Is Everything for Guy with Diabetes” or “Attitude Is Everything for Those with Congenital Syphilis” or “Attitude Is Everything with Lead Poisoning” or “Attitude Is Everything When a Dog Bites Your Hand” or “Attitude Is Everything for Gunshot Victim” or “Attitude Is Everything for a Tween with a Hangover” or “Attitude Is Everything for a Coyote Struck by a Ford F150” or “Attitude Is Everything for Gravity” or “Attitude Is Everything for the Water Cycle” or “Attitude Is Everything for Survivor of Varicose Veins” or “Attitude Is Everything for Dying Coral Reef.”
Attitude is the style of the self-conscious target. To free yourself of targethood is beyond the individualist ideology, which settles for targeted compromises with targethood. I think Boyer’s book is a gesture towards a larger settlement, not with mortality – which is the kind of settlement John Donne tries to make in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions – but with the conditions impinging on the wildly different destinies summarized in the mortality index of contemporary neoliberalism. But there is some faint promise of paradise in Donne too, which winds its way through our cancers and chemo and echoes, to paraphrase Lou Reed even now, we who have so much, and those who have so little, and those who don’t have anything at all:
“Even my spots belong to thy Son's body, and are part of that which he came down to this earth to fetch, and challenge, and assume to himself. When I open my spots I do but present him with that which is his; and till I do so, I detain and withhold his right. When therefore thou seest them upon me, as his, and seest them by this way of confession, they shall not appear to me as the pinches of death, to decline my fear to hell (for thou hast not left thy holy one in hell, thy Son is not there); but these spots upon my breast, and upon my soul, shall appear to me as the constellations of the firmament, to direct my contemplation to that place where thy Son is, thy right hand.”

stabbed by the stalactite

 Stabbed by the stalactite

There was a fad, in the eighties, for comparing the French Revolution unfavorably to the American Revolution. In that illwind of a decade, the reasoning was reliably coldwar-ish: the French Revolution led straight to the Gulag, whereas the American revolution led to: America!

In hindsight, and even then, one could see what was bogus about this judgment. For instance, its in your face racism. Black people simply didn’t count for the Francois Furet kind of historian. For another thing, the genocide necessary to create a white nation on the North American continent didn’t count. And finally, the judgment was really not about the Gulag, but about the great countervailing egalitarianism of the post-war years. It was that egalitarian that the cold war historians were particularly eager to dismantle.

Of course, this dismantling was never put so crudely. In fact, a synthesis between in-egalitarianism and egalitarianism was established, under the aegis of neo-liberalism. Here, the destruction of egalitarianism as a force in the political economy was coupled with egalitarianism as a civil matter. To put it in the class terms that were such a taboo in the Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand years, the upper class – which was almost entirely white, but was also a compound of people with different sexual desires and genders – accepted a certain kind of feminism and a certain kind of gay rights; both denuded of their original, grass-roots connection with larger issues of class. This meant that feminism was reshaped to consist of “breaking the glass ceiling” for upper class women, and not at all of paying for housework, or extending socialized childcare to all reaches and pockets of society.

The civil egalitarianism borrowed the mythology of the civil rights movement, but – in a gesture of true cultural expropriation – did not borrow the color the skins involved. In 1960, in the U.S., there were almost no rich African-Americans. In 2015, according to a study produced by the Federal Reserve in St. Louis, rich African Americans – defined as the upper one percent – made up a grand total of 1.7% of the whole.

The best model for the political economy – and the politics that has driven it - of the last forty years is that of a stalactite. Small drops have created a large pointy structure. When I was a kid, the idea was that we were in the midst of a stalagmite change – the drops were mounting from the bottom. The switch from one to the other has sort of defined my life, and billions of other lives.

This is worth thinking about when the next headline catastrophe announces itself: the union busting, rightwing Justice Kennedy resigning; children put in cages and left in the Texas heat; trillion dollar giveaways to the wealthy; the gutting of labor unions. It is trivial, but symbolically large, that the official opposition to rightwing plutocrats is very, very, very concerned that we all stay “civil”. The official opposition is almost surely in or connected to the upper 1 percent.

The overwhelming “feeling” of the last forty years has been one of “not being able to afford things.” For instance, medicare for all is a huge “budget-buster”. Which begs the question: how is it that in a society that is at least ten times as wealthy as it was in 1950, or 1960, when large social insurance scheme were put in place, we have run out of money? The answer is pretty simple: since then, the working class – in fact, every household that makes less than 250 thou a year – has run out of money. All the money is packed in the upper 10 percent, and in the upper 10 percent, it is packed in the upper 1 percent. The inequality is staggering: it is, really, ancien regime, as though the French Revolution had never happened. The experiment is running its course: a political economy in which the cultural expectation of egalitarianism are systematically attacked is one that will, eventually, have to take down even the mask of democratic practices. The idea that abortion rights are being threatened because one farty old man on the Court resigns shows a terrifying blindness to what has happened in state after state for twenty years. It is easier to get an abortion in Ireland than it is in, say, Texas or Mississippi. For working class women, abortion rights – not to speak of the vast vast array of healthcare rights – are a sort of ghost. They are dead, but they still haunt us.

I'd add something to this 2018 screed. One of the things that happened which we pretended didn't count was the failure of the ERA amendment, and the failure of the Dems to pick it up as a rallying issue. With that in place, arguments like Alito's about the constitution, whacky as they are, would be that much more whacky. But it never happened. The recognition of the sovereignty of women over their own bodies, which is embedded in our culture, found no constitutional expression. I think now is the moment to cast off numbness and talk less about voting and more about massive civil disobedience - which is the only way the urge to vote gets stirred up. To do nothing, to propose nothing cause "we'd lose in congress" - which disguises the fact proposing nothing is already losing in congress - and to urge we all vote for folks who have done nothing but urge us to vote more - is to lose the political impulse utterly. This can't be the way we go down. This can't be the promised end.

The evil supreme court: a reaction

 I'm reading - and it make sense - that Alito's text makes room for the court to overturn the Obergefell - no more gay marriages - and would make state laws outlawing gay sex legal. The wall of shit is coming. Meanwhile, the Democrats, after a fast start, have twiddled their fingers. Biden has shown more energy about Ukraine than he ever showed about abolishing student debt. It is going to be a debacle in November for Biden's party. As long as the lifesucking centrist party machinery in D.C. has its grip on the party, it will continue to sink - as it did under Obama, who threw away his 2008 win and went on to preside over these losses: "Their share of seats in the United States Senate has fallen from 59 to 48. They’ve lost 62 House seats, 12 governorships, and 958 seats in state legislatures." Thus completing a historic pattern starting with Clinton in 1994, after which Clinton saved himself by turning right and threw his party overboard. The pattern is the same all over Europe as well. The architects of neoliberalism, the centrists in traditionally liberal and left-leaning parties, produced a situation in which these parties withered. Most spectacularly, the Socialist party under the godawful Hollande - who has recently had the gall to reproach the Socialists, currently making 2 percent in the last election, for negotiating with the "extreme" left under Melenchon. How dare Melanchon give mouth to mouth respiration to that drowned corpse!

The fallout on that level is fascinating showbiz. The real fallout is on another level. The clintonites, the obamaoids, all the movers and shakers have gone on to their millions - literally. The people left behind - a good 80 to 90 percent of the population - are the sufferers. They are, in a sense, deprived of the elementary right to representation, because their representatives so manifestly don't represent them. The striking down of Roe v. Wade is a big step. The ruling class is an almost completely white compact, so the violation of the rights of black Americans are tut tutted and allowed under the semi-Jim Crow rules. But the upper class includes a cohort of women and gays, which gives those two groups more reach in the current plutocracy. That is how breaking the glass ceiling replaced being paid for home labor as a "feminist" slogan.

We will see how the plutocracy responds. I wouldn't bet on some socially liberal turn there. Protecting gender rights can be easily done by those who make above 250 thou by individual initiative. The gated community can protect its own.

The Republicans under Trump did an amazing thing: they remade themselves. Fundamental tenets, like free trade, simply disappeared. I don't think the Dems can do the same thing. They are very much a Sears Roebuck organization. They stand for a fog of good intentions and no action. Their competencies have ossified, and they simply don't know how to take advantage of opportunities that are not first backgrounded by six months of think tank papers and then modified to keep from looking extreme and then are stalled and forgotten in the bureaucracy or the geriatric legislature.

on the Adam's Apple

 Although the “body” long ago became an intangible asset of academic study, certain body parts lag behind in the race for recognition Who, for instance, has written a definitive study of the Adam’s Apple? I went to Ebsco, naturally, for the latest gender scholarship, but was disappointed. Aside from an article in something called Pastoral Psychology, the Adam’s apple article that was the longest was, actually, about the apple in Eden that was depicted in Jan van Eyck’s painting of Adam and Eve.

Thomas Browne, in the Seventh book of Pseudodoxia epidemica, devotes a chapter to the inquiry into what fruit, exactly, hung from the tree of good and evil. He goes through the responses of scholars, and even inquires into why, in the Bible, sometime a detail is given, sometimes it is withdrawn – an inquiry pursued in different texts some four hundred years later by Roland Barthes. However, Browne is not a disturber of the critical peace, but bids us be content with outlines and the general moral : “Since thereafter after this fruit curiosity fruitlessely enquireth, and confidence blindly determineth, we shall surcease our Inquisition, rather troubled that it was tasted, then troubling our sevles in its decision; this only we observe, when things are left uncertain men will assure them by determination; which is not only verified concerning the fruit, but the Serpent that perswaded…”

This indetermination of the fruit is curiously suited to the Adam’s apple, in my memory. I don’t hear in memory’s ear my childish piping – at thirteen, I vaguely remember, the voice broke. An excellent word, broke. There are boys whose voices break and heal with amazing swiftness, so that the lower pitch is suddenly coming out of their mouths like it was always at home there. In my memory, one of the characteristic of bullies is that the deep voice comes naturally. Characteristic of victims is that the voice gets caught in the break, and chirps away, as though in a trap, in every sentence. Myself, I was in the middle range – my voice, a sort of whiny, nasal thing with Southern hints, grew in my mouth until it was what I called my voice. It should be noted, the idea of my voice, of one’s voice, is laughable – the voice is a family tree, a sponge that takes in geographical region, class subgroup, etc. The voice of the freak, for instance, in highschool in Atlanta in the seventies was a high school phenomenon – it was the very voice of reefer. These voices were, of course, owned, but as pets are owned – they are never thoroughly owned, always in a deep part of themselves wild.

The voice and the Adam’s apple are somehow paired in my mind. There were certain boys who, from the seventh grade on, had large Adam’s apples. And then there was the jock’s throat, which seemed to be a pure slab, a cut of meat.

Although mucho attention is paid to puberty’s netherworkers, the genitals, little is paid to the thyroid cartilage. It appears, to quote a dictionary of sexual differences, “as a secondary male sex characteristic … at puberty when the male larynx enlarges and the male voice cracks just about the time that penis development ends.” The coincidence of Adam’s apple, the voice cracking, and the “end of development” of that marvelous app and lifelong companion, the dick, is quite the whammy. As well, of course, hair starts appearing on the lower face, and you have to learn to shave with that Adam’s apple making for a slalom that you have to navigate with your razor.

It all, I remember, vaguely offended me. I was ready for adulthood at 13, but certainly not adolescence. Although I am reconciled with facial hair and my increasingly gravelly voice, and have no complaints about the marvelous app, the Adam’s apple still slightly perturbs me. In photographs, I try to slightly lower my chin and thus diminish the Adam’s apple’s place. It is, of course, going to accompany me to the end, so one would think that egotism would do its bit and blur my image of it so it doesn’t bug me, but the self imago drags it along. Georges Bataille wrote of the big toe, and its uncomfortable ugliness – which I interpret as a hesitation on his part, as the Adam’s apple would be much more on the inhuman/human spectrum. But it is true that the Adam’s apple has, to my knowledge, no fetishism attached to it. It has, at most, what Bataille called a “valeur burlesque”. However, I would have to insist, contra Bataille, that the Adam’s Apple is certainly “base”, that is, the opposite of the sublime or the high. The body, as one learns at thirteen, is not so easily interpreted by old categories, by the feet and the head, by the old symbols, as one was taught.

The Face at the window

 

I was reading to Adam from our Sherlock Holmes book a couple of nights ago. Adam is at an age that he still allows, and even likes, his Dad to read to him, and I am, of course, a ham actor from forever, so I love trying on accents and the whole dramatic reading shtick. The vaudeville in my soul gets little chance to act out, so I take it when it comes.

We were reading “The Creeping Man.” Adam didn’t see what was so scary about a creeping man, so I had him turn off the lights and I crept on my belly on the floor. He admitted that it could be the slightest bit scary. Then we read about the man looking in the window at his daughter in the middle of the night. Again, Adam objected to this as objectively non-scary. I was tempted to go outside to demonstrate this, but I didn’t. However, we did talk about the “face at the window”.

When I was around nine or ten, I slept in a room in the downstairs of our house on Nielson Court in Clarkston, Georgia. It could get very dark in the downstairs. One of my nightly duties – or perhaps it was simply the habit of the nervous boy I was – was to make sure the back door was locked. I always forgot to check on the back door until I was in my pyjamas and the lights were all turned off. I slept in the same bedroom as my brothers, and so I couldn’t just turn on a light, so I had to creep out of the bedroom, through the rec room to the door and check the lock. Looking back, I can of course see the neurosis in this routine – the forgetting of the task, the turning out the lights, the going to bed, the remembering and the creeping out to do it. Looking back, I think I needed, for one reason or another, to play a game in which I scared myself. At the time, though, my real dread was that there would be a face staring at me through the window on the door.

The image of the face at the window is related, on the one side, to the face behind a mask, and on the other side, to the face as pure, malevolent other. There’s a wonderful scene in The Turn of the Screw which, in a sense, sums up the whole scare of the plot. The governess had been going to church with the old nursemaid, Mrs. Grose, and had gone back inside the house to get something, when she saw a man’s face at the window, staring at her. She of course rushes out and tries to find the man.

“There were shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just my lines, and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there’s only one I take space to mention. I wondered why she should be scared.”

 

The game of staring through the window – or the way it becomes a game when the governess imitates the man – is a pretty wonderful circuit, something that Lacan should have written about – although God knows, given the infinite number of Seminaires, maybe he did. Between the scariness of the face staring in and the Governess intentionally standing at the place of the man and staring in, something happens – a sort of exorcism that opens the world of the Governess to the possibility of exorcisms.

I didn’t think in this way when I was a brat, creeping out to check the door was locked and trying to avoid seeing the window in the door. But surely the routine of the face at the window had me in its spell. It was intersubjectively scary.

But Adam is nine, and perhaps he doesn’t want his Dad to go on about “intersubjectivity”. I save this for posting on facebook.

 

The city encyclopedia

  If it were possible to print every said in Paris about current affairs in the course of a single day, one would have to concede that it would make a very strange collection. What a pile of contradictions! The very idea is grotesque! – Sebastian Mercier.

The modern idea sometimes leans out at you from an old volume when you least expect it. This becomes a specialty of the modernist writer – Borges, for instance. I was leafing through the Tableau de Paris, Sebastian Mercier’s masterpiece of urban psychogeography, written in the 1780s and 90s, and I came upon this phrase, and I immediately thought of Ulysses, of Flaubert’s Bovard et Pecuchet, of Benjamin’s arcades.  Modernism is inseparable from modernization, and modernization is inseparable from the city. The city as laboratory and assembly line, the city as a hive of opinion and of the various media cultures – image, paper, entertainment and spectacle, etc. This is what James Scott calls the “Great Tradition” – in contrast with the countryside’s “Little Tradition”. Scott, from his ethnographic experience in Southeast Asia, saw how the Great Tradition sends its envoys into the country to destroy and utilize the Little Tradition. Of course, this is bubble gum like any binary: stretch it too much and it will pop right in front of your nose. Still, it has its conceptual uses.

As does that moment when the bubble bursts. Yuri Lotman, in his last book, Culture and Explosion, proposes “explosion” as a model of sudden cultural transition. In the introduction to the book, Peeter Torop, Lotman’s student,  makes an astute comment:

Those caught inside the processes are unable to escape from the space of the explosion, and as insiders are unable to notice all of the possible choices, all possibilities for the future. With the passage of

time, these choices will have been made, or then again left unmade through the suppression of the explosion, after which the post-explosive moment, that is the moment for describing the explosion, will be actualized. The chaos and diversity of communicative processes will become ordered in autocommunicative self-description.

 

I can’t resist thinking of the Cold War in these terms – that is, in terms of operators in the space of the explosion, which they could see but not, as it were, comprehend. To comprehend means having a grasp of the totality, which in the Cold War seemed to have fallen on the shoulders of geeks planning Mutually Assured Destruction. What kind of totality was that? The monumental aspect of it was all about targeting – targeting the cities and factories for planes and missiles, targeting “what is said” in the streets with movies, tv, newspapers and the many and various educational institutions. The novel was one of these institutions – it had its targets while serving, as well, as an instrument of registration. While the city was the necessary substrate of modernization, the system to which it gave rise was the literal destroyer of cities- which are all perched, now, on the edge of the abyss.

That conjunction of the abyss with the great encyclopedia of the city’s talk might have occurred to Mercier, in terms of the cult of ruins. Mercier was between the generation of Diderot (Mercier, too, was in attendance at an operation on a man born blind) and Volney – he was older than the latter by about 16 years. This, too, is a sort of prehension – modernity had its own antiquity, one further back than the Greeks and less classically finished, more savage.

I don't like Mondays

 

In 1969, Combat – a journal of the left – featured a commentary on the upcoming contest between Georges Pompidou. Alain Poher of the Democratic Center, and Jacques Duclos of the French Communist Party. Combat was unenthusiastic about all three candidates. In the event, Duclos took the greatest score ever achieved by a PCF candidate – 21 percent of the vote. And of course Pompidou won over Poher.

Combat, though, was against abstention, which was a choice discussed on the left. The commentary, by Jean Rous, extensively quotes Lenin, who wrote about the two views that must be taken by a communist in relation to elections in bourgeois republics. On the abstract level, Lenin wrote, the differences between two candidates such as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in England are “denuded of all meaning” and derisory. But from the practical aspect, the view of the masses, these differences are of extreme importance. Thus, Lenin concluded, one should not abstain or boycott the vote unless all indications show one is on the eve of a revolution.

In 1969, the “sixth power”, revolution by the proletariat, was still an actual force. We are in a reactionary era where revolution has been reduced to a slogan for fashion design. This has made the communist view more and more abstract and less and less practical – as contact with the masses has thinned to the point of evanescence. Thus, communism – or Marxism, or eco-socialism, etc. – becomes a political fantasy, and as such can be indulged to the maximum without consultation with or consideration of the masses. This leads to the unexpected merger of dandyism and leftism.

I am so repulsed by Macron, in this election, that I figured I would abstain, no matter what Lenin had to say about the matter. But I’ve been persuaded that Le Pen is enough of a danger to make that option too risky. From the polls, I’d say Macron’s strategy – which has always been to have Le Pen as his opponent in the second round – has worked. It is a strategy that allows him to operate as if he has a mandate when, in fact, his politics is approved by a minority of the population – probably around the 28 percent he got in the first round. I expect Macron in the second part of his reign to be even shittier than he was as president for the last five years. His comic proposal that his swearing in coincide with a display of military might – a truly Jupiterian and Trumpian gesture – is exactly on tone.

From the practical point of view, we can hope for a large turnout in the legislatives to bridle the man. But the system is set up in such a way that he can proceed down the autocratic path he has set for himself – a sort of centrist Orban – and at the moment, I don’t see a lot of obstacles in his path.

I don't like Mondays..

On leveling the playing field, a metaphor in economics

"Only through the forgetting of this primitive metaphor-world, only through the hardening and rigidifying of the primitive capacities of human fantasy that flowed out originally in a hot stream of images, only through the unbeatable belief, this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in brief only through the fact that man forgets himself as a subject and really as an artfully creative subject, does he live with some rest, certainty and consequence. If he for one moment could escape out of the prison walls of this belief, immediately his self consciousness would be over and done with. Already it costs him some effort to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives a whole other world than humans, and that the question, which of both world perceptions is more correct is a completely senseless one, since here we have to measure with the standard of the correct perception, that is, a standard that is not at hand.” – Nietzsche.

The metaphor-world of economics is never more entangled in its antinomies – like a crippled spider in its own web – than when it comes up against the odd question of the distribution of wealth. The neo-classic mainstream exists, in fact, in a world that it only recognizes as an irritant on the way to the utopian moment when the market absorbs all its children in a heavenly rapture – but if it were entirely blind to the fact that the state, that enemy of the good honest corporation and firm, plays a major role in economics, it would face the danger of being merely comic. The liberal solution to the endless differing of market heaven is that the state exists to create a “level playing field”. Mark Thoma, who runs - or ran, as it is now defunct - the excellent blog, Economist’s View, wrote an article on income inequality that contains a canonical version of this notion:
“I’ve never favored redistributive policies, except to correct distortions in the distribution of income resulting from market failure, political power, bequests and other impediments to fair competition and equal opportunity. I’ve always believed that the best approach is to level the playing field so that everyone has an equal chance. If we can do that – an ideal we are far from presently – then we should accept the outcome as fair. Furthermore, under this approach, people are rewarded according to their contributions, and economic growth is likely to be highest.

But increasingly I am of the view that even if we could level the domestic playing field, it still won’t solve our wage stagnation and inequality problems. Redistribution of income appears to be the only answer.”

                                                                            2.

I've never understood the popularity of this belief in America. It seems a contradiction in terms. How can you "level" the playing field, and at the same time allow any unequal outcome? These are in direct contradiction with one another. Any 'playing field' in which one of the players gains a significant advantage will be vulnerable to that player using some part of his power or wealth to 'unlevel' the playing field to his advantage. There is no rule of any type, there is no power that will prevent this. The problem is thinking of the playing field as a sort of board game. You play monopoly and you accept the outcome as 'fair'. The problem of course is that in life, unlike monopoly, you don't fold up the board after the game is over and begin it all again - in other words, the economy isn't a series of discrete games that are iterated at zero.
Thus, the whole "equality of opportunity" ideology has never made sense. If it succeeds, it will dissolve itself as those who succeed most make sure that we do not go back to zero, and that our idolized 'competition' is limited to those in the lower ranks - for among the wealthiest or the most powerful, the competition is, precisely, to stifle and obstruct competition in as much as it injures wealth or power.

To not understand the latter fact is to understand nothing about the incentive for acquiring wealth or power. It is as if economists truly believe that billionaires are searching for the next billion to spend it on candy, instead of seeing them as political players building a very traditional structure of status that will allow them the greatest possible scope for exercizing power, including helping their allies and family and injuring their enemies.

My objection here should spell out the structural dilemma here. In trying to build an economy with a non-interfering state that only guarantees that the ‘playing field’ is levied, you are building, in reality, a massively interfering state. There is no point at which equality of opportunity will, as it wear, work by itself. This is because the economy does not exist as a chain of discrete states – rather, what happens in time t influences what happens in time t1. The board game metaphor, however, exerts an uncanny influence over thought here. From Rousseau to Rawls, the idea of an original position has, unconsciously, created the idea that society is like a board game. That is, it has beginnings and ends; a whole and continuous game came be played on it; that game will reward people according to their contributions. And so on. Here, classical liberalism still has a grasp on the liberalism that broke with it to develop the social welfare state. Both liberalisms, for instance, can accept that the price of an apple is not ‘earned’ by the apple, but both bridle at thinking the price of a man – his compensation – is not ‘earned’ by the man. It must have some deeper moral implication.
As we have discovered, the liberal hope, in the sixties, that the social welfare system would so arrange the board game of society that equal opportunity is extended to all, and so dissolve – was based on the false premise that the players all recognize a sort of rule in which they would not use their success in making moves to change the rules of the game. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the incentive in this ‘board game’ – success consists precisely in changing the rules in your favor. It does not consist in getting rewarded for one’s contribution to the aggregate welfare of the players of the game. The billionaire is of a different kind than the saint. And each, to use Spinoza’s phrase, must continue in their being in order to be at all.
The anti-liberalism of the last thirty or forty years is rooted in this liberal blindspot. On the one hand, the liberal allows his rhetoric to be taken hostage by a pro-forma anti-statism – surely we don’t want the corrupt state to reward the lazy and unscrupulous! Thus, social welfare is presented with a wholly utilitarian justification – it exists solely to help the industrious and the respectable. So the liberal concedes that the protector state is a second best arrangement – and slides easily into bemoaning middle class ‘entitlements’, as if surely the middle class should stand on its own. On the other hand, the state engineered by the liberals does keep growing – it keeps growing because the middle class desperately needs it to maintain their life styles, and it keeps growing because the wealthy use it as a reliable annex to acquire various monopoly powers and as a cheap insurance plan.
What the liberal seemingly can’t acknowledge is that a democratic republic, can only afford the ‘board game’ of private enterprise if the state uses its powers not simply to redistribute or to produce, but to limit – that is, to hedge in and countervail the vested influence of the wealthiest. Thus, the democratic state taxes not only to provide income to the state, or to redistribute money to the less ‘worthy’ – it also does so to materially weaken the wealthiest. Otherwise, the wealthiest will rather quickly take over the state and make a mockery of democracy.
Taxation is the guillotine by other means. Joseph de Maistre once wrote that the compact between god and the state is sealed by the blood shed by the hangman. Wrong about god, de Maistre was certainly right that all social contracts are sealed in blood. No democracy can survive if it forgets this fact.