the charming Mr. Rove

Rove’s resignation today is in secret correspondence with the post I was going to write, but haven’t, because I am exhausted – for some reason, I’m not gettin’ my Zs. Well, let me do some of this in my sleep.

I’ve been reading Allan Brandt's The Cigarette Century. I read Helen Epstein’s review in the NYRB, and thought that the tone was off: Epstein claimed that her Mom’s death from lung cancer could be directly blamed on the cigarette companies. Myself, I always think, we all know quite well that smoking causes lung cancer. But I picked up the book, and I have had to modify my view about cig companies. There is a beautiful chapter in this book entitled “Constructing Controversy” which outlines not only the way the tobacco industry manufactured a “scientific controversy” as a political tool to prevent regulation of cigarettes, but the way their procedure introduced a whole new, dire dimension to American political life.

The deal went down like this. After Hill and Doll’s epidemiological study showed the causal link between lung cancer and smoking in 1951, the cigarette makers faced a crisis. The cancer study could have utterly collapsed sales, or so the makers thought. What were they to do? In the event, they got together, hired a pr firm, Hill and Knowlton. Hill and Knowlton wisely decided cigarette companies couldn't just advertise that they were safe - they needed a pr mechanism that was subtler than that. So the companies ponied up money for a false front 'research' think tank. H and T issued a “frank statement’ of concern from the collective industry. The statement promised to safeguard the public health. Then they set up the Tobacco Industry Research Committee - H and T made it clear that the think tank had to have 'research' in the name, as that would make it seem unbiased. Then they went looking for buyable scientists to form an advisory committee. The scientists would have preference when it came to research money. Plus, of course, the scientists were vetted on whether they were predisposed to doubt the epidemiological link. Whether, for instance, they smoked themselves. And finally they needed a man of integrity. Rather as the Exxon crowd has found, in the MIT scientist, Stephen McIntyre, a wonderful sceptical face to put upon a massive con job when it comes to ‘debating’ Global Warming, the TIRC found C.C. Little. He had great credentials. He’d headed up a Cancer institute at Bar Harbor, been a university president, won a lot of respect for his cancer research. However, he had an idee fixe, which was that cancer was genetic. And this idee fixe couldn’t stomach another causative agent for any cancer. So, as the evidence from animal research in the fifties mounted, as more epidemiological research was done, as the lemon lemon lemon kept coming up on the cancer machine, he impeturbably stuck to the Hill and Knowlton script that the industry found the case ‘unproven.’ Meanwhile, the TIRC busily sent mass mailings to doctors and buttonholed pliable journalists and editors, brilliantly orchestrating a campaign to make it look like the cancer link was headed into greater scientific uncertainty when, actually, the research was becoming more and more conclusive. The papers loved it, just as they loved cigarette advertising. The old days of blatant lying in the news biz were being modernized. Lying was done now by omission and the hosting of fake sides to debates which were carefully framed to help the multiple choice challenged reader get which was the right and which was the wrong side – and not get sidetracked by any risky and anti-business like side at all.

It was all splendid. Per capita consumption of cigs actually rose after the cancer link was found, from 3,344 a year in 1954 to 4,025 in 1960. The profits were gorgeous. And, considering that about 450,000 people die annually from smoking related lung disease, we are talking a good 2.4 million deaths – not to speak of the number of lungs that have merely been operated on.

The cream of this capitalist jest is that the tobacco companies were worried about those deaths. After all, those were customers. They were researching making less carcinogenic fare. But could they? Behind the scenes, tobacco industry scientists were actually discovering carcinogens in cigarette smoke. While the TIBC, set up to do research on lung cancer, never, well, did any, secret memos from research done for the tobacco companies that Brandt got hold of tell a different story. For instance, for Phillip Morris, a scientist named Helmut Wakeham had discovered 15 different carcinogens in cigarette smoke by 1963. And more. In one memo, he wrote about “cardiovascular ailments that may arise from smoking are due to the physiological effects of nicotine.”

You have to hand it to the cigarette companies. That kind of fake controversy and intellectual dishonesty was ahead of its time. What was needed to make it truly come alive into an all American fun filled broomhandle up your bottom was combining it with the populist anger of the always inflamable peckerwood contingent. The cig companies didn’t see that. Like Balboa dying at Darien, they glimpsed only the glitter of an alien ocean. It took the petro companies in the seventies to create that final little bit, just for you, thus bringing about the political atmosphere we live in, and the shroud of misdirection that any issue - Iraq, global warming, national health care - immediately runs into. Rove-like creatures require careful cultural preparation before they can really do their little thing. A significant proportion of the American booboisie has learned to cretinize itself all by itself. They hardly need any training any more. Horatio Alger meets Dr. Mengele in a happy ending, a laff riot. I about died! Two thumbs up!

Robots should not be allowed to own dogs

As LI readers know, there is only one issue for us in the Presidential primary so far: revenging Seamus! This video of Mitt Romney is revealing – for instance, it reveals that he is a robot. LI thought that he simply looked like a robot from photos we’d seen. We hadn’t seen him on tv or video. This interview proves, I think conclusively, that Mitt Romney is a primitive robot. The chuckle, for instance, is a voice response first put into robots in 1956, I believe. The plasticene skin, which was developed at the same time, was also used on the 3314 Ken Busy Doll, 1971. You’ll also notice other features that were borrowed from the Ken Doll: bendable elbows. Hands that can grasp and hold items, bendable legs. The accoutrement for the Romneybot is pretty sophisticated. Some of the clothes seem almost to be designed for human beings, although, if you take a closer look, most of the buttons and zippers on the front are fake. The clothes unzip from the back, so you can pull your Romneybot clothes off without them ripping.

LI has complained about the quality of the MSM for years, but this is a new low point. By omitting to tell us that Romney is a robot, they are holding back a piece of information that voters should have, I believe. Although of a different body type, objective observers will note that he was produced by the same people who designed this Nomura X-70 Space Robot. If he is president, will the Nomura company get special attention when bidding on government contracts? This is something we want to know.

But whether he becomes a president or not, Romney, as a robot, shouldn’t be allowed to own a dog. For one thing, he has an exaggerated idea of what dogs do, jumping wise. He seems to think that Seamus simply jumped up on the roof of his station wagon, and that the jump had nothing to do with the taking that live wire and the putting it in contact with Seamus’s butt. As a robot, this might seem entirely natural. I’m sure that all the Romneybots go on battery pack during the night, and plug in in the morning. But live dogs are different.



One other thing. I think the Mitt Romneybot in its current iteration needs an updated emotional cuing module. Humans, for instance, don’t smile and chuckle when asked whether they disobeyed laws concerning animal cruelty in the states of which they were governor. I am pretty sure, viewing this video, that if Romney were accused of a drive by shooting that killed a four year old, his response would be to smile and chuckle and say that he wasn’t aware that drive bys were against the law. However, in the earlier line of Romneybots, the cuing was probably wired like that because back then, the modules were pretty big. They came in a rectangular box that was two inchs by four. New emotional response modules now come wafer thin. The GOP should definitely invest in rewiring this part of the Romneybot before he gets nominated. However, this raises other questions: does the Romneybot have a state of the art motherboard or not? I hope this question is answered as we prepare for electing a future strong but compassionate president.

Tony Wilson, rip

Yesterday I read that Tony Wilson died Friday. This bummed me out. If you lived in Austin in the eighties and you were a grad student in philosophy – there were an amazing number of us – or a bright and likely undergrad in the Art school, the movie sound track for your life was very likely to come from Joy Division. I moved to Austin in 1985 from New Orleans. My New Orleans sound track was Donna Summer and the Talking Heads. Even though Donna was well on her way down in 1985, I had an abiding sentimental attachment. And fuck, I still do – don’t be telling me that Bad Girls isn’t one of the great albums, cause I don’t want to hear that shit.

Well, I had a sort of marginal knowledge of Ian Curtis. It was one of the people in the house I lived in who piled on the Joy Division. She had picked up the bug from a very popular instructor at that time, Rick Roderick, who’d also, I think, introduced Louis Mackey (my master’s director or whatever you call it) to Joy Division. And according to some story that was being passed around, Louis had actually met New Order when they came to Austin. All of this is rumor, twice removed and now recalled haltingly, but the point, here, is that the music was also a set of associations and rumors.

The Unknown Pleasures album did seem to permeate the little society of that time – looking back, it seems like we were all following some call to fuck up our lives as much as possible in as short a time as possible as a protest against the Ice Age that was Reagan. In philosophy, and in U.T., Derrida was still some kind of radical unknown, so you could get a good, dicey rep just by having read a bit of him. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was perhaps the age of the last stand of Liberal Arts, before they became wholly subordinate to what the Big U. does now – the churning out of business students, and the bending of all disciplines to provide tasty models for management papers. Derrida is now big in the journal published by the Academy of Management. And I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. In New Orleans, I’d been politically involved in the movement for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, which was called the movement against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua although, in actuality, it was the movement to spread the revolution from Nicaragua to the entire continent and up through Mexico. Although, funnily enough, I lived for a while with a group of Nicaraguan exiles who were Contra supporters, and who were helping people get into the U.S. in a less than legal fashion (which meant I never knew who would be in the house), and we got along perfectly. But I’ve never let outright contradictions in my life worry me. In Austin, there was a lot more talk about politics and a lot less political activity. That suited me: I was definitely tired of showing up with the rest of the crewe to put out the coffin and the leaflets on Jackson Square of a Saturday morning. I’ve never been an early riser.

It is funny to think how much Tony Wilson, of whom I had never heard of in the 80s, shaped the Austin sound track. We were all hopping down that lipstick traces trail. And I was not ever even a great fan of New Order – it was simply there, in the air. It was what my buddies listened to. It was the perfect music to brood in, it seemed like. And brooding was glamorous.

Now I don’t think the best band Tony Wilson promoted was Joy Division. That was Happy Mondays, by a long shot. Of course, Bez, for an American, is incomprehensible – Bez represents that opaque point in Englishness that I will never understand, ever. What is he doing? Who knows. But what was important about Tony Wilson wasn’t so much in the bands he promoting as in the idea that the music was about riskier choices in a rich world. If you have such a great life movie sound track, you have to do things in your life that are worthy of it, even if they are rotten and stupid things that plunge you into karmic debt. That is what I loved, and still love, about pop music. That is something Wilson understood.

feeding a meme

LI is amazed that this freakonomics blog post hasn’t set the blogspore on fire:
“The Science of Insulting Women”

Melissa Lafsky has actually had to the stomach to watch a VH1 show called the Pick Up Artist, which apparently was taken from a book the secrets of picking up women. It is quite the mystery, but there are guys out there willing to unlock it, and aren’t we all blessed by their pointy headed presence. Anyway, one pick up artist on the show advocates something called “negging” – please, strangle this word in its cradle – which is “a move that involves interjecting an insult during an initial conversation with a woman.”

Lafsky relates this to a recent study of men insulting women by psychologists Steve Stewart-Williams and William F. McKibbin, published in the July Journal of Personality and Individual Differences.

“Their first set of data consisted of a survey of 245 men with a mean age of 25.8, all of whom had been in heterosexual relationships for a mean length of 43.1 months. Each man was asked to record how often he insulted his female partner in the course of a month, choosing from a list of 47 insults divided into four categories: “derogating physical attractiveness” (e.g. “You’re ugly”); “derogating value as partner/mental capacity” (e.g. “You make my life miserable” or “You’re stupid”); “derogating value as a person” (e.g. “You’re useless”); and “accusations of sexual infidelity.”

These men were also asked to record how often they performed any of 104 acts labeled “mate retention behaviors” during that same month, including “direct guarding” (e.g., secretly following a partner when she goes out alone) and “public signals of possession.”

A second set of data came from 372 women who were asked to detail the number and type of insults they received from their partners, as well as the males’ mate-retention behavior rates.

The results showed that men who piled on the insults (particularly those in the “derogating value as partner/mental capacity” group) were far more likely to engage in mate retention behaviors, suggesting that “men’s partner-directed insults may be deployed as part of a broader strategy of mate retention.”

Myself, I think this points to the curious psychopathological eruptions that seem to take place so often in the comments sections of those blogs that are written by women. Insult/retention – going on since Adam blamed Eve for making that fucking fruit salad, and then said, "never leave me baby. If you leave me, I’ll kill myself. You fucking bitch."

A verset contained, of course, only in the secret Gnostic version of that story.

the feeling tone of the interzone

LI has seen, from the comments so far about our emotions project, that a certain part of that project is obscure. It isn’t the purpose of our project to promote negative feelings. It is, rather, to promote the idea that the positive/negative classification of feelings is wrongheaded. This part of the story we are telling is pretty simple, actually. Classification in science is not simply a random ordering. Given a well formed classification system, finding the location for a species or a thing in the classification system should tell you something about it. What the principle is can be disputed, of course. And folk classifications do make some sense. It is, for instance, true that the majority of complex organisms swimming in the ocean are fish – or may have been at one time, before nurdles, overfishing and fertilizers. But it is a misnomer to think that whales and dolphins are therefore fish. To decide that happiness and mildness are positive and sadness and anger are negative is a similar scientific misnomer, or so we claim. When classifying animals as fish or mammals, the body type’s adaptation to a typical environment has to be definitely and necessarily considered, but you are going to still find flightless birds, lungfish and whales to account for. You’ll need another classifying principle besides locomotion (flying, swimming and walking) to get you there.

Now, LI has been scouting around to find allies in the psych business. We were happy to come across this article by Ralf and Maureen Erber – “The Self-Regulation of Moods: Second Thoughts on the Importance of Happiness in Everyday Life” (Psychological Inquiry, 2000) which reports on some psych experiments the Erbers designed to test ‘mood repair’. The upshot of the experiments was not that people reverted to a happiness norm, after having been ‘induced’ to be sad from watching, say, a sad movie clip, but that they sometimes remained sad, and often times reverted to indifference. The Erbers start out by saying, pretty firmly, that the hedonistic presupposition in psychology is all too unquestioned:

“Back in the 18th century, Newton thought of light as consisting of material corpuscles. This idea became the accepted assumption about the nature of light in the science of physical optics. Consequently, scores of scholars directed their research efforts toward finding evidence of pressure exerted by light particles on solid bodies. Of course, once light was conceived of as a transverse wave motion, as became common in the 19th century, the search for physical deformations as a result of exposure to light began to appear somewhat comical.

Psychology is no different from physical optics in that it makes some basic assumptions about its subject matter (human nature) that have influenced and continue to influence our theorizing and research agendas. The assumption we have in mind is the widely accepted idea that humans, by and large, seek pleasure and avoid pain. It has its origins in the writings of Jeremy Bentham (1789), who, by conceiving of pleasure and pain as our "sovereign masters" essentially proposed a hedonistic theory of human motivation.

Bentham's principle of utility has in one form or another permeated much of the theorizing in psychology. Freud, at least in his early work, subscribed to positive hedonism of the future (Troland, 1928) by conceiving of all human instincts at being directed toward seeking pleasure. Similarly, drive reduction theories (e.g., Dollard & Miller, 1950) proposed that ridding oneself of aversive arousal was crucial for understanding human behavior and thus embrace negative hedonism of the future. Thorndike's (1898) "law of effect" that became the bedrock of reinforcement theory contains the dictum that "pleasure stamps in; pain stamps out," and thus includes elements of negative and positive hedonism of the past.

In all fairness to psychology it needs to be said that the assumption of humans as hedonistically driven creatures has not been without its critics. Titchener (1908) proposed that pleasure seeking and pain avoidance may be but two of many forces that drive human behavior. McDougall (1923) went so far as to suggest that pleasure and pain may serve no motivational purpose at all, but instead serve as mere signposts indicating that instincts have successfully or unsuccessfully run their course. Finally, Allport (1954) held that whereas hedonism may explain the behavior typical of childhood and adolescence (and perhaps among those who fail to grow up), it fails to explain the many instances of adult behavior that originate from a sense of duty, loyalty, and commitment in a satisfactory way.

Given the time that has elapsed since these arguments were advanced, one might expect hedonistically tinged theorizing to be a thing of the distant past, especially in a discipline as enlightened as social psychology. However, an inspection of theories looking at such diverse issues as attitude change, attribution, altruism, impression formation, and the mental control of affect reveals that this is far from being the case.”

We have remarked only parenthetically about Bentham. However, since we our view of the shift in emotional customs tallies with Polanyi’s notion of the Great Transformation, we should probably give the utilitarians a lot more attention. Note to self.

The article discusses a couple of ‘mood repair’ experiment. The idea of ‘repairing’ a mood, of course, is rooted in the whole positive negative logic. But beyond that, it is rooted in the idea, about which I have been arguing with my friend Alan on his site, that behavior can be explained by a template of happiness-seeking. Thus, say, if you are induced to be sad, your natural response is to find that course of action or that stream of thought that will make you happy, even if the happy object is the tenuous one of the memory of a happy time. In relation to sadness, LI made the case that sadness seeking is characteristically isolation seeking – one seeks to avoid human contact. The Erber experiment went like this:

“To test the general idea of mood attenuation prior to social interaction with a stranger, we (Erber, Wegner, & Therriault, 1996) conducted a set of studies in which we made participants either happy or sad through exposure to cheerful or depressing music. Subsequently, half the participants were led to believe that, following the main experiment, they would work on an unrelated task either by themselves or with a stranger in a room across the hall. All participants were then asked to indicate their preference for reading a set of newspaper stories, identified by their headlines as humorous and uplifting, sad and depressing, or affectively neutral. Consistent with our expectations, participants who expected to complete the second part of the experiment by themselves preferred stories with headlines suggesting mood-congruent content: Sad participants indicated a preference for depressing stories whereas happy participants preferred cheerful stories. Also as expected, participants who expected to complete the second part of the experiment with a stranger preferred mood-incongruent stories. Specifically, sad participants preferred cheerful stories and (contrary to predictions made from hedonistic approaches) happy participants preferred depressing stories. According to our social constraints model, participants made these choices presumably as a means to attenuate their previously induced mood prior to meeting the stranger.

These result suggest that mood, by itself, does not serve as a primary motivational force in terms of the maintenance and attenuation of moods. Rather than using everything in their power to (a) maintain their happy mood and (b) repair their sad mood at all costs, our participants adopted strategies designed to maintain happy and sad moods in the absence of social constraints (i.e., when there was no anticipated interaction with a stranger). However, in the presence of a social constraint, happy and sad participants relied on strategies that enabled them to extricate themselves from the mood we had previously induced.”

LI has a post coming up regarding these kinds of experiments, and Kurt Danzinger’s history of them.

The Erbers have not seceded entirely from the world of Wundt’s graph. If you will recall, the negative emotions are so called from being beneath a certain baseline of indifference. For a long time, that baseline was considered an abstract and impossible feeling tone. But the Erbers are contending that it exists as the mean to which all moods tend. They call it the cooling effect. Since the question they are posing has to do not just with moods but with emotional cuing for social situations, their hypothesis is that the ‘neutral’ mood is the best strategy to meet unpredictable social interactions. “Unburdened, free from preoccupation with our feelings and its resulting distractions, a neutral mood allows us to be sensitive to multiple mood affordances suggested by the complexities of the social settings.”

Finally, the Erbers consider an objection that is bound to pop up in these kinds of issues. If, as the ideology of triumphant happiness maintains, we are all striving to be happy, then what the Erbers are describing are simply short term detours to the long term end.

“We would like to think that the social constraints model along with its supporting research indicates that hedonistic theories of mood regulation provide insufficient accounts for how people manage their moods. Quite contrary to hedonistic predictions, we found, among other things, that sad people appear to make no attempt at attenuating their mood in the absence of social constraints. Furthermore, happy people are willing to forego their good mood when appropriate social constraints are present. At the very least, this seems to suggest that pleasure seeking and pain avoidance may not be the primary forces at work in the self-regulation of moods.
However, one could argue that our observations are not so much an indication of strategic mood regulation but instead reflect a kind of hedonism of the future. Happy people anticipating to interact with a stranger may engage in some sort of hedonic calculus in which they weigh the benefits of maintaining their good mood against the possible costs, such as the possibility of embarrassment or the fear of an unfavorable evaluation. Thus, any attempt at bringing a present good mood under control may ultimately be in the service of avoiding feeling bad in the future. It is difficult to dismiss this argument outright. Nonetheless, we believe that there are several things that are wrong with it. First, it is based on a logic that suggests that all forms of human behavior, including those that appear to be self-defeating or self-destructive, are ultimately motivated by some form of hedonism. But as we all know, a theory that explains both the occurrence of A and non-A in the end explains nothing at all.

Second, hedonism of the future seems ill suited as an explanation for why sad people would maintain their sadness in the absence of social constraints. Assuming that they do that because they expect some benefit like improved insight or increased self-awareness (e.g. Wood, Saltzberg, & Goldsamt, 1990) would create logical issues similar to the ones inherent in trying to explain why happy people would relinquish their good mood.”

I am not entirely satisfied with the first objection. It commits the positivistic fault of confusing logic and structure - it might be that a true theory may so explain a given sphere that the occurence of both x and non-x validate the theory in that sphere. However, there has to be an argument why this is so. I don't think the hedonic view has a good argument about that.

Sorry for the huge quotes in this post. Because I am accumulating these things against some future essay, I’m being a little callous about the blogging genre. One of the things I discovered long ago was that long quotes in posts are tedious. I am, mostly, aware of my duty: which is to paraphrase. But in this case, I need the quotes.

the jitters

In his book, Capitalism, Social Privilege and Managerial Ideologies, Ernesto Gantman cites a story told by the pioneering organizational psychologist, Elton Mayo, who is associated with the famous Hawthorne experiments in which workers were encouraged to form self organizing units in a Western Electric factory – the seed of the teamwork idea that has crept like kudzu over the work environment. Mayo was very concerned with anomie, and puzzled over the very existence of such repulsive things as Leftists and unions. In one of his books, he tells about an experience he had with some union members who opposed the adult educational initiative of the Workers Educational Association in Australia:

“The greater opposition always came from a particular group of individuals, affiliated to a Leftist party, and Mayo affirmed that he came to know them well enough to be able to outline their psychological profile. According to him, they lacked friends, except at the party level; they seemed unable to easily relate to other people; they lacked coversation skills; ‘all action, like social relationship, was for them emergency action’; and finally, ‘they regarded the world as a hostile place’ … - in sum, a profile that matched Janet’s neurotic individuals. When one of these of [sic] union members received a psychological clinical teatment, ‘he made a good recovery and discovered, to his astonishment, that his former political views had vanished.’ … For Mayo, this example offered a clear lesson that social adjustment was obtained at the expense of the abandonment of antisystem political ideas.” (53)

Gantman’s prose is painful. Sorry about that. But the story is wonderful. One of the great diffusers of psychological science in the twentieth century was the corporation. One of the great diffusers of psychological jargon in the twentieth century was the business consultant class. But, oddly, this fact seems never to have been given the play it should have been given. While much attention has been devoted to the morganatic marriage between Marxism and psychoanalysis – a problematic marriage, since neither partner was willing to play the role of the bride – the much smoother course of love between capital and the bending of the mind, as categorized and organized by the experts, is demonstrated in one horrible management school tract after another.

But there is one thing we are all aiming at – that is, to see our former political views, that nest of vipers, vanish. Actually, it is true that there is a small group of people for whom all action is emergency action. They are celebrated in films like Terminator II, but only in their rightwing militia phase. Yet LI has, perhaps, more in common with those rightwing militia types than the sunny buyer of products guaranteed, on the package, not to have been used in experiments on animals. The world puts us on edge.

Memo from the minister

Hey, I haven't begged for contributions to LI in a while. I sorta forgot. Here's a begging post - if you have some spare bread and you feel particularly charitable, check the paypal thing you'll find on this page. August is the cruelest month for yours truly - apathy spreads among the academics, nobody wants editing, and the reviewing work dwindles down. So now, if ever, is a good time to fork over the ready.

emotional custom

In Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, one of the key early chapter is entitled Habitation and Improvement. The chapter title is taken from a letter about the enclosures of common land in England. Polanyi takes this as an archetype of economic transformation: the enclosing of the commons by the Lords and, later, by the bourgeoisie in the Tudor period meant destroying old forms and destroying, literally, old houses, the huts of the tenantry. Polanyi grants that, in the end, the wool industry did develop England. Looked at purely in terms of economic growth, this was a triumph. But, as Polanyi points out, looked at from the viewpoint of the uprooted peasants, it was a disaster. However, the state, or the Crown, mitigated that disaster by slowing the process.

But the state could not play a similar role in the Industrial revolution. It could only play an opposite role, tearing down old laws to allow laissez faire free reign. Why? Polanyi claims that the machinery needed to produce commodities in the Industrial Revolution brought with it necessities that were socially transforming:

“But how shall this Revolution itself be defined? What was its basic characteristic? Was it the rise of the factory towns, the emergence of slums, the long working hours of children, the low wages of certain categories of workers, the rise in the rate of population increase, or the concentration of industries? We submit that all these were merely incidental to one basic change, the establishment of market economy, and that the nature of this institution cannot be fully grasped unless the impact of the machine on a commercial society is realized. We do not intend to assert that the machine caused that which happened, but we insist that once elaborate machines and plant were used for production in a commercial society, the idea of a self-regulating market was bound to take shape.

The use of specialized machines in an agrarian and commercial society must produce typical effects. Such a society consists of agriculturalists and of merchants who buy and sell the produce of the land. Production with the help of specialized, elaborate, expensive tools and plants can be fitted into such a society only by making it incidental to buying and selling. The merchant is the only person available for the undertaking of this, and he is fitted to do so as long as this activity will not involve him in a loss. He will sell the goods in the same manner in which he would otherwise sell goods to those who demand them; but he will procure them in a different way, namely, not by buying them ready-made, but by purchasing the necessary labor and raw material. The two put together according to the merchant's instructions, plus some waiting which he might have to undertake, amount to the new product. This is not a description of domestic industry or "putting out" only, but of any kind of industrial capitalism, including that of our own time. Important consequences for the social system follow.

Since elaborate machines are expensive, they do not pay unless large amounts of goods are produced. 6 They can be worked without a loss only if the vent of the goods is reasonably assured and if production need not be interrupted for want of the primary goods necessary to feed the machines. For the merchant this means that all factors involved mast be on sale, that is, they must be available in the needed quantities to anybody who is prepared to pay for them. Unless this condition is fulfilled, production with the help of specialized machines is too risky to be undertaken both from the point of view of the merchant who stakes his money and of the community as a whole which comes to depend upon continuous production for incomes, employment, and provisions.

Now, in an agricultural society such conditions would not naturally be given; they would have to be created.”

The creation of those conditions was the creation of a new way of looking at life – through the money economy:

“But the most startling peculiarity of the system lies in the fact that, once it is established, it must be allowed to function without outside interference. Profits are not any more guaranteed, and the merchant must make his profits on the market. Prices must be allowed to regulate themselves. Such a self-regulating system of markets is what we mean by a market economy. The transformation to this system from the earlier economy is so complete that it resembles more the metamorphosis of the caterpillar than any alteration that can be expressed in terms of continuous growth and development. Contrast, for example, the merchant-producer's selling activities with his buying activities; his sales concern only artifacts; whether he succeeds or not in finding purchasers, the fabric of society need not be affected. But what he buys is raw materials and labor - nature and man. Machine production in a commercial society involves, in effect, no less a transformation than that of the natural and human substance of society into commodities. The conclusion, though weird, is inevitable; nothing less will serve the purpose: obviously, the dislocation caused by such devices must disjoint man's relationships and threaten his natural habitat with annihilation.”

What is obvious to Polanyi may not be obvious to us all. But the book is devoted to making us see the process of that dislocation and its consequences. Among other things, Polanyi has a much less romantic view of the relation between state and private enterprise than Hayek. For Polanyi, laissez faire is the result of state planning.

But that gets us off on another topic.

LI has been thinking of Polanyi as we’ve been contemplating our emotions essay. It is essential to this essay to get across the fact that the shift in the way the emotions were ordered had to do with Polanyi’s Great Transformation. What we are seeing is a dislocation in emotional habitation, or – as I’m going to call it – emotional custom. Following the rise of a certain way of talking about emotions – the rise of valence, in psychology, and the diffusion of a classificatory system related to it, and yet not synonymous with it, in everyday life, is simply following a thread in the shift of emotional custom.

Notes on the worldfuck

And now for ... some of the larger features of my ongoing essay.

LI took the paragraphs below from a post we did in March. It is one of my good posts – we mean it, man. (and there’s no future … in England’s… dreaming). There is a pleasing and systematic dovetailing of notions , here, as those who read LI with the religious fervor of the early martyrs of the Church will surely notice: to describe the development of that total social phenomenon, the triumph of happiness as a norm, is to trace one songline in a map that shows how the total system – the industrial system, the epiphenomenal ideologies, and the war culture – came together in one gigantic worldfuck. Let others worry about world lines and world view – us sentries on the borderline between the present and the Last Things are permanently worried about the worldfuck.

So here is what I wrote in March:

Left and right did not define the twentieth century. The century was defined, in our view, by two things: first, the treadmill of production – that system which is falsely defined as capitalist because one of its surface characteristics is the market system – which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th century, followed out its logic in all systems (communist, fascist, liberal capitalist) on a world wide basis, having laid the foundations in the 19th century (the development, for instance, of the terror famine in Ireland and India by the British was surely the model for Stalin's agricultural policy) and collapsed the agriculture-based culture that humans had lived under for the past 12,000 years. That was surely the most significant thing that happened in the 20th century, and no ideology led it, no ideology opposed it, and no ideology even envisioned it. The anxiety naturally attendant on the end of civilization created a macro feature, which I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability – basically, that process by which populations, feeling ever more vulnerable even as they became ever more affluent developed systems meant to render them invulnerable – that is, an ever more threatening war culture, with an ever greater destructive reach – which, of course, rendered them ever more vulnerable, an irony that was not rhetorical, but systematic. 9/11 was, in part, a moment in which the nakedness of the system was revealed – a system that could, theoretically, respond to ICBMs traveling over the poles, couldn’t respond to 19 half educated men with box cutters and homemade bombs. And… of course it couldn’t. Defense is a collective fiction, which is its function – being a fiction, there is never a limit on the amount of money one can spend on it. It is, theoretically, inifinitely expensive, while its payoff, as a defense system against all threats, is nearly zero – it will never defend against all threats. That’s ever, with a big fucking E.”

Maybe in my next post I will get to the proto-industrialization of the European countryside. Wouldn’t that be a treat!

LCC is back

Le Colonel Chabert is back from the dead - a in-joke for Balzacians that she will, I think, enjoy. I'm glad to see her back, although she was immediately summoned to battle on her first post, with the usual vaudevillian thread. I'm hoping she will continue to do some of her slooowly sloowly posts, as well as the usual flash of the dagger things. I am really hoping one day she does a post about Victoria de los Angeles, because I just interviewed a man who was de los Angeles' great friend, who wrote a portrait of her for the New Yorker - and I, a true putz when it comes to opera, god damn it, had never heard of her before. My knowledge goes about as far as Kiri ti Kanawa and then stops. Disgraceful, I know. Not that I let on! The man I interviewed - James McCourt - has written a cult opera novel that was re-issued by the NYRB press, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, with a preface by Wayne Koestelbaum. Now Voyagers, coming out in October, is the Ulysses of camp Manhattan.

eine kleine pedantry

A little note to myself about the emotions. Remember, o readers of mine, that I would like comments, if you have any, about the 'negative' and 'positive' emotions.


In the early modern period, there were three points of view that determined the discourse of the passions. Firstly, there was the medical view, based on a system of four internal humors. Second, there was the characterological view, which projected a gallery of different human types: the miser, the jealous man, the hypocrite, the clown, etc. A disposition and a role, from this point of view, were tightly bound. And thirdly, there was the religious view, which impressed upon the emotions a certain moral order. As the social foundations for this three fold view changed - as a new system of production and a state assisted free market arose - the discursive modes changed: for instance, the Galenic physicist gave way to the physiologist, just as – as a creator of character types – astrology gave way to physiognomy and various proto-anthropologies, and the church gave way – to an extent - to a whole, competing set of institutions – businesses, the state, political movements, etc. – but the threefold structure remained.

the fall of the zipless war - a heartfelt lament

In Revelations, the Lord says to the Laodecian church: "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of My mouth.” After reading Michael Ignatieff’s apologia for his pro-war beliefs in the NYT Magazine this Sunday, LI'd recommend that the demiurge try projectile vomiting with the liberal hawks.

The essay is full of the kind of witless, quoteladen prose by which Ignatieff rose under the wing of his mentor, Isaiah Berlin, from one edition of Bartlett’s quotations to the other. Now, Berlin’s moderation in all things often led to essays that said all things, or quoted all the people who said all things, before drifting to a crashingly inane point – but there was a glint and edge in his best essays, for instance about the Romantic tradition in Russia. Ignatieff is a different story. His learning is mostly balderdash, and his reputation has been garnered in that easiest of places to gain a reputation, the international human rights whinefest.

He was just the type to pump the war before the invasion. I have a vague memory of another NYT Mag piece. He, George Packer, Peter Beinart – the pro-war liberals do sort of melt into each other like the tigers little Black Sambo let race around the palm tree, gradually turning themselves into butter.

After making a cliched and pointless contrast between theoretical academics and practical politicians, Ignatieff gets down to the business of the day: blaming somebody else. Ah, but in his fingerpointing, he does want us to realize what a tenderhearted little peebrain he is. Turns out he was moved to the depth of his dancing shoes by the cries and whispers of the Iraqi exile group. Another one! We’ve already heard this record from Beinart, but Ignatieff adds his own evil drop, from his dessicated, self-centered murdering motherfuckin’ heart:

“The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions. I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds. From that moment forward, I believed he had to go. My convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that very reason, I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.”

Of course, a little present day context might be called for here before I comment on this fucked up, shitty, self-serving piece of garbage. Here’s a story (it is also on the AP) in the Guardian, getting of course no play whatsoever in the American press, about the electricity and water situation in Iraq at the moment:


Aziz al-Shimari, an electricity ministry spokesman, said at the weekend that power generation nationally was only meeting half the demand, and there had been four nationwide blackouts over the past two days. The shortages across the country were the worst since the summer of 2003, shortly after the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, he added.

Power supplies in Baghdad have been sporadic all summer and now are down to just a few hours a day at most. The water supply in the capital has also been severely curtailed by power blackouts and cuts that have affected pumping and filtration stations.

Kerbala province, south of Baghdad, has been without power for three days, causing water mains to go dry in the Shia holy city of Kerbala, the provincial capital.
Hazim Obeid, who sells clothing at a Kerbala market stall, said: "We no longer need television documentaries about the stone age. We are actually living in it. We are in constant danger because of the filthy water and rotten food we are having."

And here’s a story about about Iraq’s refugees, from – of all sources – the Houston Chronicle:

It is the silent face of war. The crest of refugees that was predicted before the Iraq invasion began in 2003 did not really develop until last year, after a sharp surge in sectarian fighting that followed the February 2006 bombing of the Askariya shrine, a revered Shia mosque in Samarra, Iraq.

That attack dimmed hopes for Sunni-Shia reconciliation and spawned a wave of vengeful attacks. A second attack on the remains of the mosque in June destroyed its two minarets, setting off fresh reprisals.

Fleeing to Syria

This type of killing is new in Iraq. Saddam was a Sunni Muslim who made sure that Sunnis held power despite their minority status. When challenged, he used brutal methods, including mass murder, to suppress Shias, Christians and Kurds, but there was little of the vicious, street-by-street fighting seen between the groups today.
The result has been a mass departure of those with the means to flee. So many Iraqis have crossed into Syria that the U.N. processing center at times seems like a small city, with its own taxi stand and vendors selling sweet mint tea and freshly baked bread.

" We are getting people from all levels of society, including people who were wealthy and those who had nothing but the clothes on their backs,"said Korvis, whose staff interviews Iraqis when they arrive.
Syria has been denounced by President Bush and other world leaders for sponsoring terrorism, meddling in Lebanon and crushing dissent, but U.N. officials generally praise President Bashar Assad's government for helping the refugees.

"The Iraqi children have access to the Syrian public schools, and that's an amazingly positive step," said UNHCR spokesman Sybella Wilkes. U.N. officials also are grateful that the Syrian government has kept the border with Iraq open to refugees despite the huge number of people coming in.”

This is just so we keep in mind what the suggestions of motherfuckers like Ignatieff have led to.

Now, let’s go back to the ‘practical’ question. I’ve done this so often it is like playing scales, but since LI’s viewpoint still seems to be a minority, we will bore our readers once again with the obvious.

In the months leading to the invasion of Iraq, two things became obvious. One was that the U.S. really wanted to exercise unilateral power over Iraq in the occupation. The other was that the Bush administration was seriously, by a magnitude of 10, underestimating the cost and human resources needed to occupy Iraq. Shinseki pulled the rug out under any pro-war position by simply calculating the standard figures for the occupation of a country the size of California, with the population of 27 million. These aren’t really mysteries. He came up with 400,000 troops to make the occupation even possible. This wasn’t a prediction that the troops would successfully squelch any insurgency – rather, it was the minimum needed to secure the country. To secure a country means not only diminishing or annihilating violence, it means securing the infrastructure – that is, making sure that the country doesn’t starve, that the power flows, that the sewage system works, etc. Now, given that base figure, one can come up with costs. In the run up, Glenn Hubbard came up with a 200 billion dollar figure. However, that was a figure gotten from using a Rumsfeldian troop base, about one fourth Shinseki’s figure. So multiply Hubbard’s figure by four and you get a pretty good cost estimate – 800 billion dollars.

Okay. Now, why is it that those people who were pro-war never approached these figures with a ten foot pole?

Well, children, there is an easy answer. These motherfuckers wanted a zipless war. And they want further zipless wars, as per the advisors of Hilary and Obama, busy writing up tough scenarios in which more U.S. soldiers would be involved in more witless conflicts.

In a zipless war, the population of the most heavily armed and likely liberal aggressor – the U.S. – is called upon to invade numerous countries and occupy numerous territories – all of course in the name of human rights. The problem is this: this kind of thing could actually be noticed by the population of the U.S. The population might question the rightness of continuing such an over the top, immoral policy leading to mass murder, starvation, and endless misery for generations. In particular, they don’t like casualties and they don’t like paying a lot of money. The latter is the main drag on liberal hawk aggressiveness, in fact.

So, what to do? Why, what you do is you devise a war that doesn’t cost too much, is techno pretty – plenty big bombers! – and that impacts mainly on the segregated and isolated volunteer army section of the country. You treat that army as basically the president’s mercenary force. Then you go on tv and lie, lie, lie. You write articles and lie, lie, lie. Being part of the motherfucker corps of honchos, there is no down side – you’ll never have to live with dysentery, or watch your daughter limp around without a leg, as per this video. Nah, if things go wrong, you can say it is all because you have such a big motherfucking heart. Cause you are just the nicest motherfucker who ever advocated mass murder.

Well, the delusion was that Rumsfeld was right, and that zipless war was possible. It seemed so sweet in Kosovo! It hovered there like some dream invite to debate serious people on the war in 2003, sponsored by the AEI and Heritage foundation, at which you’d make useful connections! A dream that did come true for many, let us not forget. Beinart is not the only one who has profited handsomely both from supporting the war and repenting the support of the war - a twofer! So excellent. But since the war turned out to be zip-full and you couldn’t put a nitwitted crook like Chalabi on the Iraqi throne and make it look all democratic as you erased fifty years of anti-imperialist struggle and hooked Iraq back into the petro-chemical cartels, why, you cast your moist gaze over the country and realize – so softly and sadly – with that feeling that you’ve been too good, just too good - that the Iraqis (sob)… the Iraqis have … failed you. You you you. You motherfucker. You’re the one whose faith has been broken. Like a child discovering there is no toothfairy. Those Iraqis, god fucking damn it, just weren’t, well, good enough for you to have extended your benevolence to. Like that bitch 5 year old girl in the video, limping around and shit. Anti-american as all get out. How can you trust people like that?

And of course you get to write an article for the other motherfuckers out there to nod their heads to. Zipless war – oh when, great World Soul, will we get the zipless war that the revolutionary contingent, from motherfucker Ignatieff to motherfucker Hitchens, can watch on tv with motherfucking pride? Life is a motherfucker.

emotion among the moderns: note to self

I'm warnin ya/
Style waits for no bitch – Kimberly Jones

Last night I was coming out of Whole Foods, stocked with beer and fish, and ran into a reader and friend of this site, and his wife. We all shot the shop shit for a while as a nice Austin day dwindled into nighttime tv all over the hillsides and through every home and street of the burbs. And this reader warned me against featuring posts with the redoubtable Wundt, since you could stick a warning on such posts – terminal boredom ahead.

But I defended myself and did my rap about the abuse of happiness essay that is growing in my head. And I figure I should get that rap down, cause, as Lil Kim says, I don’t want a flaw in my flow.

The rap goes something like this. Before the early modern period, the aspirational structure for most people had to do not with acquiring goods or changing positions, but with growing older. That structure for the feudal world developed complex roles, or what I’d call myths, appropriate to that aging process. Accordingly, the social sense of the passions was tied to the possibilities presented by this age specific, gender specific, position specific world. But in the early modern period, that aspirational structure began to come apart as the feudal system began to come apart. That you could aspire to rise or to change your position created an aspirational drift, so to speak. It was no longer the case that one or one’s family would remain in a natural position – and after the terrible famines that struck in the middle of the eighteenth century, it even became the case that people on the bottom (save for the Irish) in the developed countries would probably not starve. As the old structures became unstuck, one sees two synchronic effects: on the one hand, the old notions about the passions give way to a new way of thinking about feelings. The importance I’m giving to volupte in the seventeenth century is that it operated as an entering wedge to de-structure the ways in which the passions were socially experienced – which means socially controlled, socially interpreted, socially ordered. At the same time, the roles or mythical figures of aging were shaken up. One of the oddly unstudied effects of the creation of a manufacturing and marketing system – a production system that underlies our economies today, and underlay all developed economies, communist or capitalist, in the twentieth century – is that the older forms of age segmentation, that is, the making sense of youth, of the middle of life, of old age, according to an agreed set of tropes, roles and stories began to dissolve. This dissolution speeded up after 1870 – that is, with the beginning of the consumer culture phase of capitalism.

So, what I am doing is trying to describe dimensions of a multi-dimensional event – in particular, the symbiosis between two things: the making of happiness into a keystone emotion, a norm, and the making of youth into a keystone age segment, into a secular virtue along almost the entire length of the lifespan. Very odd things.

Looking at how the vocabulary of negative and positive emotions emerged from psychology to pursue an astonishing career in folk psychology is simply one entrance to this Castle.

From Bain to Fechner: parade of the nineteenth century dustbunny psychologists

Having done some more research on the fascinating topic of origin of the concept of the negative and positive feelings in psychology, LI has decided that our previous post on Wundt was way too hasty, too abbreviated, too brutal in the way we are handling the evidence, too bracketed from the question that we really want to answer here, which is not so much a question of who invented these terms as the question, why did they catch on? What happened, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, that people began to talk about their feelings in this way? How was this talk diffused? How did it so quickly gain a footing outside the field of psychology; a field, at that time, dominated by philosophers and lacking the institutional embedding in corporations and universities that it now has? LI has gotten ambitious: we want to turn this topic into a whole, publishable essay. And we’d appreciated attacks, hinged or unhinged, on these things. Commenters, on your marks!

To give a sense of the parameters of the question set I’m pursuing, let’s quote, once more, that remark of Carroll Izard’s:

“Scientists as well as laymen agree that there are both positive and negative emotions. While this very broad classification of emotions is generally correct and useful, the concepts of positiveness and negativeness as applied to the emotions require some qualification…”

This remark would not have made any sense in 1850, but it can now be claimed as the most banal and uncontroversial state of the case. That, in a nutshell, is what I am after here.

To get our bearings, let’s go first to what the state of the case was in the 1850s. There’s an essay on Alexander Bain by John Stuart Mill, published in the Edinburgh review in 1859, that nicely summarizes the ‘return’ of scientific psychology to Britain, after the energy of the Scottish school was exhausted and the Comtean positivists seemed to dominate the field in Europe. After praising Bain’s luminous explanation of the nervous system and expounding his defense of associationism against the apriori school – which would, in today’s terms, be the defense of empiricism against Chomsky’s rationalism – Mill remarks on the disappointing results that derive from applying associationism to the emotions. But Bain, in Mill’s view, is at least a good natural historian of the emotions:

“He has, however, written the natural history of the emotions with great felicity, in a manner at once scientific and popular; insomuch that this part of his work presents attractions even to the unscientific reader. Mr. Bain’s classification of the emotions is different from, and more comprehensive than, any other which we have met with. He begins with “the feelings connected with the free vent of emotion in general, and with the opposite case of restrained or obstructed outburst;”[*] the feelings, in short, of liberty or restraint in the utterance of emotion; which he regards as themselves emotions, and entitled, on account of their superior generality, to be placed at the head of the catalogue. He next proceeds to one of the simplest as well as most universal of our emotions—Wonder. The third on his list is Terror. The fourth is “the extensive group of feelings implied under the title of the Tender Affections.”[†] The consideration of these feelings is by most writers blended with that of Sympathy; which is carefully distinguished from them by our author, and treated separately, not as an emotion, but as the capacity of taking on the emotions, or mental states generally, of others. A character may possess tenderness without being at all sympathetic, as is the case with many selfish sentimentalists; and the converse, though not equally common, is equally in human nature. From these he passes to a group which he designates by the title, Emotions of Self: including Self-esteem, or Self-complacency, in its various forms of Conceit, Pride, Vanity, &c., which he regards as cases of the emotions of tenderness directed towards self, and has largely illustrated this view of them. The sixth class is the emotions connected with Power. The seventh is the Irascible Emotions. The eighth is a group not hitherto brought forward into sufficient prominence, the emotions connected with Action. “Besides the pleasures and pains of Exercise, and the gratification of succeeding in an end, with the opposite mortification of missing what is laboured for, there is in the attitude of pursuit, a peculiar state of mind, so far agreeable in itself, that factitious occupations are instituted to bring it into play. When I use the term plot-interest, the character of the situation alluded to will be suggested with tolerable distinctness.”[*] This grouping together of the emotions of hunting, of games, of intrigue of all sorts, and of novel-reading, with those of an active career in life, seems to us equally original and philosophical. The ninth class consists of the emotions caused by the operations of the Intellect. The tenth is the group of feelings connected with the Beautiful. Eleventh and last, comes the Moral Sense.”

These categories have certainly lost their sway with us, There is something almost camp about the emotions attendant upon hunting and novel reading, as though the British Raj were an event in the natural history of human emotion. But the most important thing is that there are no dimensions here upon which to locate the feelings. Nowhere is there any mention of positive and negative emotions, or their distribution along a continuum. Rather, we have a sort of gathering of emotions rather like the flavors in a recipe book.

Already, though, in Germany the terms of the science of feeling were changing. Heidelberger, in his biography of that very strange man, Gustav Fechner, points out that Fechner was strongly impressed by Ampere’s division of electrical current into ‘mathematical entitities”. In Fechner’s “Preliminaries to the science of Aesthetics (Vorschule der Aesthetik), Fechner imposes a similar structure on “Lust” and “Unlust”:

“Now there are many concepts and connected expressions which are related to things and relationships according to the measure of the current or immediate yield of pleasure or pain they produce, as, after the pleasure side, the pleasant, sweet, appropriate, dear, stimulating, nice, pretty, beautiful, etc., to which correspond an equivalent number of pains. We conceive both as aesthetic categories and distinguish them as positive and negative. “

Similarly, there are positive and negative practical categories, or those that yield pleasure or pain as the result of the consequences of things and relationships – giving us terms like useful or advantageous.

Fechner was an important figure in the intellectual life of the later 19th century. James Clerk Maxwell actually wrote an essay using the Fechner coinage, Psychophysik; Wundt, of course, also adopted the term.

Yet the correspondence of negative and positive quantities to pain and pleasure and the expressions connected to them did not entirely develop from Fechner’s rather simple idea. Which of course is something I will take up in another post.

PS Ah, I have spotted a mention of positive and negative qualities attached to feeling before 1850, in one of Kant’s pre-critical essays: “an attempt to introduce negative quantities into Worldly Wisdom "[Weltweisheit, an odd word for philosophy] of 1763. In the second section, he goes from considering the mathematical representation of the attraction and repulsion of bodies to Seelenlehre, considering whether ‘pain [Unlust] is purely a lack of pleasure, or whether it is a cause of the robbery of the latter, thaqt is in itself something positive not purely the contradictory opposite of pleasure, to which it is opposed in our interpretation of the real [Realverstande], and thus whether pain could be called a negative pleasure?” Kant considers cases, including the taking of a medicine that ‘tastes like pure water” but that gives a pleasant feeling to the imbiber over the expected state of health. ‘in the taste he doesn’t feel any pleasure, but the lack of it is not a pain.” Then Kant instances the story of the Spartan woman who is brought her son on his shield – the son having suffered a glorious death. “Name the degree of pleasure arising from the first cause alone 4a, and the pain a simple negation of it = 0, thus we have, taking them both together, the value of the satisfaction at 4a+0 = 4a, and thus the pleasure was not at all diminished by the report of the death, which is false.”

This does prefigure the pain/pleasure calculus of Bentham. Yet this instance lacks a sense of the continuum and direction of feelings. This is an echo of that theological premise that evil is, ultimately, the power of nothing.

libertarians, rally round! our freedoms are being threatened

LI was reading the Elle article in the NYT for professional reasons – you never know when you can use information about a magazine’s masthead changes – when we were pulled up short – or perhaps the word is socked in the jaw – by the following graf:

“The September issue includes a new column by Nina Garcia, the fashion director whose manicured claws appear on “Project Runway,” and some intriguing articles, notably Megan Deem’s critical report on Myfreeimplants.com, a Web site that connects women with men who would like to sponsor their breast implants.”

And people say that American men are uncharitable!

This put a whole new light on the current battle, by the administration, to stifle the expansion of health care benefits to kids before it threatens to make them healthy. I think a congressman from LI’s great state put it best:

“Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, said the bill embodied the Democrats’ “vision for the future: socialized medicine and Washington-run health care.”

“The bill uses children as pawns in a cynical attempt to make millions of Americans completely reliant on government for their health care needs,” Mr. Sessions said.”

Can you believe those socialists? Children, innocent children, who desperately want the mumps, measles, tuberculosis, rickets, broken bones and other minor and major injuries to either carry them off or be healed solely by the magic of the marketplace are now being forced into totalitarian healthiness by the Dems. And then, right there in an article on Elle, we see that the demographic which, by all accounts, gives the Republicans its base of support – men – bestirring themselves from the bottom of their souls to contribute to a charitable cause – breast implants – without expanding the government. The libertarian in me joins with the humanitarian in dancing around an inner tree of liberty at the very thought.

extinction beyond the zero - in the realm of the frozen erection

Three such chief directions may be distinguished; we will call them the direction of pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings, that of arousing and subduing (exciting and depressing) feelings, and finally that of feelings of strain and relaxation. Any concrete feeling may belong to all of these directions or only two or even only one of them. The last mentioned possibility is all that makes it possible to distinguish the different directions. The combination of different affective directions which ordinarily takes place, and ... influences which are due to the overlapping of feelings arising from various causes, all go to explain why we are perhaps never in a state entirely free from feeling, although the general nature of the feelings demands an indifference-zone. – Wundt, Outlines of Psychology.

In truth, the problem treated by them [the ‘psycho-physicists] is a special aspect of the problem, not its totality; they are inquiring whether, in the ‘transformation’ of pleasure into pain, and vice versa, there is, in the passage from one contrary to the other, a point of neutrality or indifference. Wundt graphically represents the phenomena by a curve: the portion of this curve above the line of the abscissa has a positive value, and corresponds to the development of pleasure; the portion below corresponds to the development of pain, and has a negative value…” Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions.

In the beginning, the emotions were neither positive nor negative. So where did the classification come from, how did it spread, and how has it become so popular? Why are we supposed to think that there is a straight continuum not only between pleasure and pain, but between ‘positive emotions’ – happiness, serenity, love – and ‘negative emotions’ – anger, boredom, unhappiness? Couldn’t we just as easily evoke a continuum between anger and boredom? Which one would then be the positive one? Which the negative? And what does continuum mean?

When Wundt graphed a ‘feeling space’ in order to develop his three dimensional model of emotions in the 1890s, he was operating under the same influence that affected Jevons, which was to the field theory of Maxwell and Faraday. Philip Mirowski’s series of books on this topic, as well as Silja Graupe’s Basho of Economics, exhibit in a critical light the price to be paid for adapting economic theory to parameters analogous to those used to discuss energy – with utility being the analogue to energy, or being a ‘field of vector potentials.” Similarly, Wundt was concerned with the ‘direction’ of feeling – not its qualitative, or phenomenological side. In 1879, Wundt founded a psychological laboratory at the University of Leipzig in order to study and measure feeling. There had already been some use of scientific instruments to evoke and register feeling. The mad Dr. Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne had used electric shock, applied to certain muscles of the face and neck, to provoke fearful grimaces in subjects. He had a certain Adrien Tournachon photograph these descendents of the medieval gargoyles. But the correlation between an expression and a mood – a way of making the mood come to the surface of the body, so to speak – was not what Wundt’s laboratory was about, in particular. Also, Wundt didn’t have a peculiar theory of the divine teleology of the facial muscles. What Wundt did have, by the 1890s, was a three dimensional model of feeling that, in contemporary psychology, has been reduced to two dimensions – valence and intensity.

You will notice that valence is an odd word, a word from chemistry. Psychology has a beggar's habit of borrowing scientific jargon to dress up commonplace notions, much as French writers used to insert a ‘du” or “de” in their name, to imply nobility.

However, Wundt’s work was not exactly on everybody’s lips. The story of how negative and positive emotions got their valance is the story of how psychology blended into the fabric of modern industrial society – whether capitalist or communist. There is some truth to the way this issue is handled in standard books on emotions, as for instance in Carroll Izard’s Human Emotions (Izard is a very influential psychologist):

“Scientists as well as laymen agree that there are both positive and negative emotions. While this very broad classification of emotions is generally correct and useful, the concepts of positiveness and negativeness as applied to the emotions require some qualification…”

Indeed. To bring out this history – which is to tell the story of how happiness became the triumphant, the keystone feeling – is to feel, deep inside the multiplex of modernity, the throb of several superimposed currents, tides, the locked routines of control and command, the layout of office spaces, the psychology of incentives, advertising, and weaponry, the never before achieved trick of getting populations to shell out good money to build the tools for their own extinction, a silent extinction beyond the zero indeed, all the while becoming happier and happier.

“Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters, the little sucker would have de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlovian terms, “extinguished” the hardon reflex he’d built up, before he let the baby go. Most likely he did. But as Ivan Petrovich himself said, not only must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditioned reflex, but we must also realize that extinction can proceed beyond the point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero. Italics are Mr. Pointsman’s. – Gravity’s Rainbow



And that requires looking at the career of Kurt Lewin, among others. Which we will look at in our next post on this subject.

PS: Alan and I continue to debate happiness issues at his post here.

From murdoch to valences

Though perhaps I shouldn’t write it, I’m rather happy about Murdoch’s purchase of the WSJ. In recent years, the ideological hardline, which used to be confined to the editorial page, spread to the cultural page – basically meaning that the children of Heritage Foundation wanks, the Ledeen Jr. generation, were writing the reviews. And LI was not. If Fox is any indication, Murdoch knows when to narrowcast – the news and editorials strictly for the dittohead crowd – and when to broadcast – the Simpsons, The American Batchelor (now with more tits and ass!) and other assorted goodies. So hooray! Time to query those guys. I wonder if my bud Eric has survived the past four years purge…

…

Okay, in the latest slo mo episode of Happiness Triumphant, the Aristotle years, Alan has replied to me and me to Alan on his site. As I was looking up stuff in psychology textbooks, it hit me that the canonical use of ‘valence’ terms – the use of positive to denote some emotions, and negative to denote others – must have a history that LI could track. You don’t read about ‘negative’ emotions and ‘positive’ emotions in the 18th century, or before. And for most of the 19th century, emotional talk might be about noble and ignoble emotions, or it might use the old Galenic vocabulary of temperaments (which, with major modifications, LI wants to get back to), but it doesn’t conform to the valence talk that is now the psychological norm. Of course, I could imagine a psychologist saying that valence talk is about scales of intensity, blah blah blah, and is translated into vulgar negative and positive talk by self help books – but that isn’t true. This is a typical passage from the Handbook of Emotions (Lewis, Haviland Jones):

“Results revealed that the imagery of negative emotions (fear, anger and sadness) was associated with higher EMG activity over the brow muscle regions than was the imagery of the positive emotions (happiness) (178)”

And since -except if you are a Hegelian – negative cancels out positive, the co-existence of a negative and positive emotional complex would seem to be ruled out, not to speak of the attractiveness of negative emotions. Even though occasionally a psychologist will come out of the cellar, when the dogs are quietly salivating, for a cigarette break and find that, uh, we live in a world in which people pay money to go to movies to be afraid – and they do extreme sporty things too – and they join armies and shit. At this moment, psychologists summon the vocabulary to make the obvious into a delightful bundle of confusing terms.

‘Second, valence is by no means a straightforward characteristic of emotisons. Fedman Barrett, for example, in a recent study found that

“First, the desirability of a mood and the hedonic quality [valence] of a mood are related, but not identical entities. Secondly, the desirability of a mood is also related to the level of arousal the mood denotes. Thirdly, desirability components are related to the self-report ratings of mood, but the ratings also reflect the hedonic tone and level of arousal describing the internal state of the respondents…”

Another way of stating this finding might be as follows: Just as there is a goal-relevant type of emotional intensity, there would appear to be a goal-relevant type of emotional valence, what Feldman Barrett calls ‘desirability” as opposed to “hedonic tone”. Fear, for example, may be inherently unpleasant in some sense, bring about, in many cases, various intensities of ‘aversive arousal (Lang 1995). But it is also apparent that, in some instances, fear is sought out and enjoyed. Bungee jumpers, spectators of a horror or suspense film, and roller coaster riders routinely experience pleasure in the fear induced by the chosen activity.”

In this way, like Columbus discovering the New World, William Reddy, the author of those immortal words (in The Navigation of Feeling), discovers the meaning of the word “rush”. I hope you showed his discovery to his teenage kids. They would be so proud! Will miracles never cease?

So LI has taken a gander at the roots of this cumbersome conceptual framework and found – gosh! – that about the time classical economics was re-formulating itself around a physics model that emphasized equilibrium among molecules, psychologists were also absorbing the models of energetics. More in a later post.

bergman

They all die.

LI has described in an earlier post how watching a series on PBS that showed Ingmar Bergman’s films up until 1965 had an alchemical effect on us, charged us with a sense of how exotic, exciting and essential it is to struggle with life and death, a truth that was buried as deeply as possible beneath the grass and the fill and the junk and the clay atop which our little Atlanta suburb was built. But bury a truth as deep as you want to, it will creep up and get into your living room, your milk, your cubicle, your computer, your war, your taxes, your children and the one thing that can never ever happen in the world, your death.
In 1989, Bergman staged Mishima’s play, Madame de Sade. In one of the scenes, some lines by one of Gunnar Ekelof’s poems, Etudes, was framed on the wall. Here is the 3rd section.

Each person is a world, peopled
by blind creatures in dim revolt
against the I, the king, who rules them.
In each soul thousands of souls are imprisoned,
in each world thousands of worlds are hidden
and these blind and lower worlds
are real and living, though not full-born,
as truly as I am real. And we kings
and barons of the thousand potential creatures within us
are citizens ourselves, imprisoned
in some larger creature, whose ego and nature
we understand a little as our master
his master. From their death and their love
our own feelings have received a coloring.

As when a great liner passes by
far out below the horizon where the sea lies
so still at dusk. And we know nothing of it
until a swell reaches us on the shore,
first one, then one more, and then many
washing and breaking until it all goes back
as before. Yet it is all changed.
So we shadows are seized by a strange unrest
when something tells us that people have left,
that some of the possible creatures have gotten free.

Translation by Robert Bly.

book list

My friend Lorin, who edits over at FSG, pressed an ms into my hot hands a couple of years ago. It was Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land. Unfortunately, the number of ms. that are pressed into my hot little hands, plus the galleys that come in every week, are such that I have fallen into the bad habit of rarely publicizing anything. Also, I don’t really want LimitedInc to be too closely connected to my fading career in cultural journalism, since that would be too… well, boring for LI readers. Recently, Winn found Lipsyte’s novel hilarious and wrote a post on it that made me think. Especially this sentence:

"I know it's just more of that neurotic confessional crap which is all that is left of the American novel, but it's done from a funnier angle than Augusten Burroughs brutalizing the memory of everyone he ever knew for cash.”

Actually, I don’t think that is all that is left of the American novel. From my seat, the nineties were a really good decade for the American novel, while the naughties have been more disappointing. So I thought I’d list novels – not just American ones, and including translations – that you might want to check out since, say, 2003.

As I’ve already promoted, to the best of my ability, Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, let’s take that as a given. But for those with a taste for great nineteenth century novels should check out The Maias by Eça de Quierós (New Directions) which came out this month in a truly wonderful translation by Margareta Jull Costa, who has doggedly been trying to insert Quieros into our consciousness. For some reason, even good novel readers neglect the Iberian novels, even though Quieros, Clarin and Galdos should really be as known as Balzac Flaubert and Zola. Among other things, I love the way Quieros is kinaesthetically alive to the drift, the fatal drift, of the governing class he portrays in The Maias. Life is charming, even though, visibly, life is getting worse. And a certain fatal torpor stays every hand.

I liked Delillo’s Falling Man much more than the reviewers. Delillo has become a cause for certain reviewers, like James Wood in the New Republic, who dislike his influence. They hate his cynicism, as they see it, and they find the famous style – oh, how certain reviewers hate style in a novel – disgusting. There’s a naturalistic default in the review world, which I, actually, find disgusting. However, it is impossible, I think, to read the final chapter, which puts you first on the plane coming into the towers and then throws you into the confusion on the staircases, without being, well, winnowed, worked over. Yeah, the Falling man performance artist motif should have been shot – Delillo is best at spotting how weird normality is, and he goes astray when trying to spot how weird weird is – but it is the best novel on 9/11 so far, by far. Another very good debut novel which is structured around 9/11 is Sons and Other Flammable Objects by Porochista Khakpour , which is coming out in September. It is the story of a California-Iranian family, and Khakpour doesn’t know how to make it move after a certain point, but she’s gotten down certain things about the Persian diaspora, especially in the first half, which are excellent. The best thing in this novel is the portrayal of the mother, Lala. I know that woman – or such was my feeling while reading the novel. It is coming out in September.

Other novelists that have come out in the 00s that LI would recommend:
Adam Langer. Crossing California was, I thought, an amazing debut. Set among various highschoolers in Chicago during the time of the Great Hostage Crisis (a pretty unpromising setting), it had a theatrical, antic cast – the high school novel as masque.

Ellen Ullman’s The Bug. Best novel so far about the software engineering. Hey, there isn’t a lot of competition! Still, there you go.

Most beautifully written English (and American) novel of the decade so far is Line of Beauty by Alan Holinghurst. A novel about gay sex in the Thatcher days. And about class. And about what happened to the U.K. The recent festuche on the intertubes about confidence and experience should have referenced this novel. Holinghurst is the guy who wrote the Swimming Pool Library. Now, it is my experience that straight men are somehow afraid to read gay lit. But don’t be afraid, guys – sure, you’ll get the odd woody at the sex parts, but more from the fucking writing than the fucking. There are a few writers today – Banville, for instance – who could score the death of a fly into an apotheosis of all things mortal and beautiful. Holinghurst is one of them.

They gave a national book award to William Vollman’s Europa Central, and I was glad they did. But the novel before that, Argall (2003), Vollman told me in an interview I did with him, was his worst selling novel. It is, well, difficult. It is another telling of the Jamestown story – much different from Matthew Sharp’s Jamestown (I recommend Sharp’s book to all and sundry). But if you have the patience for the cod Elizabethan, it is a lovely thing, and full of Vollman’s obsessed take on violence and sex and sex and violence. Of course, I even liked his Tenderloin novel, but I have a high tolerance for water sports scenes.

Let’s finish this off with the obligatory reference to the rediscovery of Irene Nemirovsky (Suite Francaise) and the two novels of Gao Xingjian – One Man’s Bible and Soul Mountain. So, though far from exhaustive, there is a lot of fiction, recent fiction, out there And it isn’t all narcissistic journal entries snarkified into a narrative emphasizing, once again, that we lead and must forever lead thin, thin lives. Because I, too, hate that shit.

a little miss and the greatest orator: happiness again

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle takes a stab at illustrating happiness, and then defines it using the method one uses to describe organisms – he sorts through its various constituent parts. This being long before functional accounts of organisms, there isn’t any attempt to show the necessary connection of these parts or how their coordination brings about happiness. On the other hand, though in some ways a rather wild analysis, much of what Aristotle says has been adopted by economists to talk about well being. Happiness, regarded from the outside, then, and reduced to its most typical circumstances, looks something like to Aristotle:

“

It may be said that every individual man and all men in common aim at a certain end which determines what they choose and what they avoid. This end, to sum it up briefly, is happiness and its constituents. Let us, then, by way of illustration only, ascertain what is in general the nature of happiness, and what are the elements of its constituent parts. For all advice to do things or not to do them is concerned with happiness and with the things that make for or against it; whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do.

We may define happiness as prosperity combined with virtue; or as independence of life; or as the secure enjoyment of the maximum of pleasure; or as a good condition of property and body, together with the power of guarding one's property and body and making use of them. That happiness is one or more of these things, pretty well everybody agrees.
From this definition of happiness it follows that its constituent parts are: -- good birth, plenty of friends, good friends, wealth, good children, plenty of children, a happy old age, also such bodily excellences as health, beauty, strength, large stature, athletic powers, together with fame, honour, good luck, and virtue. A man cannot fail to be completely independent if he possesses these internal and these external goods; for besides these there are no others to have. (Goods of the soul and of the body are internal. Good birth, friends, money, and honour are external.) Further, we think that he should possess resources and luck, in order to make his life really secure.”

Further in the Rhetoric, Aristotle elaborates – for instance, that wealth would consist of having plenty of coin and slaves. This concantenation has served as a useful guide to the limits of conceptual talk about happiness, but not a very good guide to its cause, or as an explanation, really, of the feeling of happiness and the use of happiness to describe these states. In other words, why should we call any of this happiness?

Hume elaborated a critique of Aristotle’s hierarchical notion of happiness and its attachment to certain conventional circumstances, in his essay, the Skeptic, that may well have been what Tolstoy was thinking of when he famously wrote, in Anna Karenin, that all happy families are alike. Hume’s skeptic claims:

“The inference upon the whole is, that it is not from the value or worth of the object, which any person pursues, that we can determine his enjoyment, but merely from the passion with which he pursues it, and the success which he meets with in his pursuit. Objects have absolutely no worth or value in themselves. They derive their worth merely from the passion. If that be strong, and steady, and successful, the person is happy. It cannot reasonably be doubted, but a little miss, dressed in a new gown for a dancing-school ball, receives as compleat enjoyment as the greatest orator, who triumphs in the spendor of his eloquence, while he governs the passions and resolutions of a numerous assembly.”

Hume’s comparison of the little miss and the orator is alive in the debate today about the relationship between wealth and happiness – which is a debate that is not very loud, and is pursued idly, but that does have to do with the very reason we feel we have to keep the treadmill of production going. Although distantly – long ago the governing class decided that the happiness or unhappiness produced by economic growth would have no relevance to the question of economic growth.

Now that we've all read Nietzsche, we may be disposed to give Aristotle points. We might see this view of happiness, which excludes any interior state and depends wholly on exterior circumstances, as consistent with that great, Homeric culture we all get a little nostalgic for, now and then. Hume's skeptic, in this view, is an example of the leveling that comes with the discovery of interiority. After all, one of the things about Aristotle's list is that it is very frankly about a triumphant aristocracy that could well be overwhelmed by slave revolt or exterior enemy, and would then be unhappy. There's no happiness in defeat. Except it turned out that there was - which may be why the Hellenic period, a period when the Greeks were defeated, was the golden age of the Stoics and Epicureans, both of whom held to notions of happiness that weren't tied so explicitly to the warrior ethos.

However, what interests me is that even with Aristotle, these circumstances are labeled with an affective word: happiness. For the Hebrews, for, say Job, those circumstances would be blessed - not happy. And for those Homeric Greeks - wouldn't they have talked of fortune? Of being fortunate?

Already, here, something is going on.

cet envoûté éternel...

When we quoted Jacques Derrida in our post the other day about the media’s double audience, our far flung correspondent T. in NYC raised an eyebrow. Mr. T. likes the idea of this blog never mentioning Derrida in the same way that Georges Perec never uses the letter ‘e’ in La Disparition. The referential absence eventually calls attention to itself by the force of its tremendous silence. And we understand Mr. T.’s point. Actually, we got the same idea from Derrida himself. Somewhere, perhaps in the lectures on Ponge, perhaps in an interview, Derrida claims that one of his essays on Hegel is really all about Ponge. If memory serves. Now, the cool thing about that claim is that Ponge is not mentioned in the essay. Of course, this is the kind of gesture that drives Derrida’s enemies just up the wall. And there is something obviously facile in saying, oh, I wrote x and I was thinking of y. To make the claim non-facile, you have to work with obsessions and themes that would make it meaningful as a compositional principle. I consider it a form of l'envoûtement – a seduction/abduction, a possession through charms. The devil, of course, used to practice l'envoûtement. Often the magician takes an effigy that is connected in some way with the victim – for instance, a follicle of the victims hair is mixed in with the dough or clay from which one creates the effigy – and by this means gains control over the victim. It is a metaphysical kidnapping. Artaud returns to the term in his last writings, and literally considers those writings a form of contre-l'envoûtement. For Artaud, it was the drugs and electroshock and conceptual schema of the psychiatrists that was winding him in, and against which he had to protect himself:

« Le même personnage revient chaque matin accomplir sa révoltante criminelle et assassine sinistre fonction qui est de maintenir l’envoûtement sur moi, de continuer à faire de moi cet envoûté éternel …”

(the same person returns each morning to perform his revolting criminal and murder- sinister function, which is to maintain the spell they have on me, to continue to make of me that eternal victim of enchantment.)

To perform the contre-l'envoûtement, that piece of magic, one must inverse the spell – one must operate on the hazardous path of the negation of the negation.

Now, to my mind, this conflict between these regimes of spells gives us the musical structure of Derrida’s work. A lot of philosophers ignore, or are ignorant of the fact that a text has a musical structure. Not J.D. This is why Derrida uses blanks and silences in the way he does – there is always some abduction or elopement going on there, out of the seraglio of Western metaphysics and into the streets!

Anyway, in that spirit, I like the idea that I am abducting Derrida from the professional deconstructionists and the spiderweb of a by now canonical language and I do it partly by using his things without referencing the name. It isn’t sorcery anymore – it is called sampling, kids. Standard DJ stuff. But I’m not clever enough to do this with complete consistency. If I was, would I have written this post?