the vulnerable self

Two blogs have commented on LI’s latest posts. My so called Midlife Crisis writes:

“… LI looks at the reason/emotion split (aka mind/body dualism) through the lens of an essay by William Hazlitt, and finds it wanting. LI interprets Hazlitt to posit that imagination is implicated in decisions and consciousness as much as reason (mind) and emotion (body), and teases out the following moral implication: [quoting me talking about Hazlitt]…

This account of "imagination" leaves it a metaphysical entity (although I don't know if Hazlitt's idea of reason devolved upon a metaphysical mind or the physical brain) and as it is not a satisfactory one for modern science. Still, the analysis of imagination as being neither reason nor emotion and its necessity for decision and action indicates a problems with mind/body dualism.”

Praxis asks some questions, in a longer post, about my whole project and its relationship to Freud. Specifically, how does psychoanalysis, with its use of the pleasure principle, fit in to the rise of a happiness ethic, conditioned by a political economy that justifies itself in terms of a pleasure calculus?

“On the one hand psychoanalysis (by which I basically mean Freud, I’m afraid) is totally aligned with utilitarianism. Just as much as Bentham, or Mill, Freud sees the human mind as a mechanism for maximising pleasure. Arguably the most basic principle of psychoanalysis is the dominance of the pleasure principle – at least until we get to the watershed moment of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, and even that classic text does not straightforwardly reject this doctrine. One way to understand Freud’s project (probably not the best way, but one way) is as an attempt to appropriate for happiness culture even human behaviours that seem, at first glance, the most obvious counterexamples to the idea of pleasure-maximising individuals. So you think we maximise utility? What about masochists? What about depressives? Ah – well –they may not appear to maximise utility; but if we have a sufficiently complex and involuted theory of the emotions, even these self-destructive behaviours can be understood in terms of the dominance of the pleasure principle…

But of course there’s another side to Freud’s work. By seeing masochism, hysteria, obsession, and so on, as products of the same forces that generate even ‘normal’ mental functioning, Freud changes our understanding of normal mental functioning. The pathologies Freud analyses come to be seen as implicated in almost every element of mental life. Morality is analysed in terms of the conflict between the superego and the unconscious; but since the superego is a product of the very desires it represses, psychoanalysis makes it impossible to separate the rational mental functioning of the ethical individual from the irrational animal forces the individual suppresses and rejects. And this in turn is connected to one of the strangest and most productive difficulties in Freud. Having decided that pleasure-maximisation is the basic principle of our psychic life, Freud then gives such weight to apparent deviations from this pleasure-maximisation, that the deviations come to be inseparable from his understanding of pleasure-maximisation itself. This is why Freud starts developing doctrines like ‘primary masochism’ and the ‘death drive’. As Freud goes ever further into his speculative introspective studies, he asks the questions ‘what is pleasure?’, ‘what is it to maximise pleasure?’. And he finds that the maximisation of pleasure is guided by the very forces that appear to destroy pleasure.”

LI of course wrote some comments on their sites, but the comments, which appeared to me, as they were streaming out of the keyboards, to be exemplars of clarity and good sense, appeared, upon a colder reading, to be farragoes of obscurity.

So, here’s a comment on those comments, although it will be a bit oblique. Both comments are about the self. This may explain a little more what I am doing with Hazlitt. If I’ve been obscure, it may be because I haven’t made clear what it is I take Hazlitt’s central insight to be. It is, this insight, that utilitarianism both exposes and empties the self. I am using Hazlitt as symptomatic of a romantic protest against the most advanced ideological formulation of the system of production that was being put in place in England, and, to a lesser extent, in Europe and the U.S. This exposure and emptying is the white magic of capitalism, the shell game played over and over in all its vaults. Exposed as a single unit thrust out of nature and society, and emptied, at the same time, of all determinants except that of calculating pleasure, the self becomes a roll of the pleasure/pain dice; and even here we have not finished our reducing work, since pleasure is much to big a thing to be enrolled in the calculus as it is, in all its phenomenological splendor – rather, it becomes something much simpler: the aggrandizement function. Pleasure is simply more. Already, Kant had spotted the problems with this idea in his essay on Negative values – as I’ve pointed out – since firstly, to assign negative and positive values to pain and pleasure doesn’t orient us when we deal with feelings in which those two poles are intrinsically mixed, and – dynamically – it doesn’t work to state the course or feeling of the overall sensorium – I may have pain doing x amount of work, and receive money for it that gives me y amount of pleasure, but the ys are never going to abolish or in any way combine with the pains – and more than that, the quantities here don’t track any real genesis – the pain, in other words, doesn’t give birth to the pleasure. The utilitarians saved themselves from Kantian strictures by way of vagueness and analogy. We do, after all, make some calculations – is it worth going out to the car and going to the store tonight to buy milk? Do I want to expend so much effort, x, to achieve some objective, y? We, in other words, have a calculative like feeling about the future. Since we negotiate those feelings and perform those actions, decreeing that we are actually calculating hedonically might seem uncontroversial, even though we are calculating over non-discrete units.

Now, Hazlitt’s vision of hell was that legitimacy – the aristocratic/great bourgeois power that ruled Britain and Europe following the downfall of Napoleon – and utilitarianism, which insisted on this algorithmic sense of the self, would combine. This hell prefigures the radical critiques of the 1848 generation, like Marx and Herzen. As I pointed out earlier, I’m interested in the fact that there were roughly three class defined oppositional stances to the happiness ethic that was coming into being in the nineteenth century, and that they, sharing this oppositional attitude, produced tropes, ideas and examples that, in a sense, communicated with each other.
One further note, re Hazlitt’s larger point: the utilitarian self that he feared was defined in its surrender to pleasure, but the pleasure principle here, being defined simply in terms of more created a paradox Hazlitt plays against, but does not find the key to: the strange contempt of the utilitarians for mere pleasure. This pleasure, pleasure with a content – volupte – the sweetness of life – they scorned as useless. In fact, it made them angry – and that anger has branched out and lives in multiple niches in the happiness culture.

Double Indemnity

"Anonymous: I am a new respondent but have read the column for a long time. I believe that you are a natural born teacher turned columnist. Would you please explain at greater length and in more detail the last three paragraphs of today's column. The nest shoe to drop you call credit default swaps but I would like a more detail understanding and how they could trigger a financial chain reaction.

Steven Pearlstein: This is a hard one, and I worked long and hard on those three paragraphs last night. Let's just say there is this huge financial market you don't even know about where banks and hedge funds and big investors make bets with each other, in the form of contracts: A pays B $100 to "insure" that $10,000 worth of junk bonds at Company C don't default. If they do default, then B pays A $10,000. Now what makes this interesting is that A doesn't actually have to hold the junk bond (or the CDO, or the syndicated bank loan, or the municipal bond, all of which can be the subject of credit default swaps). It can buy the insurance, or place the bet, whether it owns it or not. Which is why the market is so big, because there can be, theoretically, an infinite number of insurance policies on every bond or loan."

NEFF
Office memorandum, Walter Neff to
Barton Keyes, Claims Manager. Los
Angeles, July 16th, 1938. Dear Keyes:
I suppose you'll call this a
confession when you hear it. I don't
like the word confession. I just
want to set you right about one thing
you couldn't see, because it was
smack up against your nose. You think
you're such a hot potato as a claims
manager, such a wolf on a phoney
claim. Well, maybe you are, Keyes,
but let's take a look at this
Dietrichson claim, Accident and Double
Indemnity. You were pretty good in
there for a while, all right. You
said it wasn't an accident. Check.
You said it wasn't suicide. Check.
You said it was murder. Check and
double check. You thought you had it
cold, all wrapped up in tissue paper,
with pink ribbons around it. It was
perfect, except that it wasn't,
because you made a mistake, just one
tiny little mistake. When it came to
picking the killer, you picked the
wrong guy, if you know what I mean.
Want to know who killed Dietrichson?
Hold tight to that cheap cigar of
yours, Keyes. I killed Dietrichson.
Me, Walter Neff, insurance agent, 35
years old, unmarried, no visible
scars --
(He glances down at
his wounded shoulder)
Until a little while ago, that is.

After bond fund giant Pimco's Bill Gross gave a back-of-the-envelope estimate of a possible $250 billion in losses resulting from the impact of deteriorating corporate credit and bond defaults on the $45 trillion (notional amount) credit default swaps market, other commentators have been making improved (but still quick and dirty) calculations.

It began last May. About the end of May, it was. I had to run out to
Glendale to deliver a policy on some
dairy trucks. On the way back I
remembered this auto renewal on Los
Feliz. So I decided to run over there.
It was one of those Calif. Spanish
houses everyone was nuts about 10 or
15 years ago. This one must have
cost somebody about 30,000 bucks --
that is, if he ever finished paying
for it.

"Monolines write insurance on debt. But here is the trick. Entities with a worse credit rating than the monoline company can get their bonds insured so that they can have the same rating as the insurance company itself (mostly AAA). So relatively poor-quality debt becomes investment-quality debt because the monoline will pay the interest and principal if the borrower defaults.

This business model is self-limiting, some might say self-destructing! The monolines’ balance sheets fill up with poor-quality debt as the monoline insures only the risk of debt with a worse financial quality than itself. As long as the ratings agencies maintain the monolines’ AAA rating, the trick can work.

But eventually, the market may decide that the poor quality of the debt the monoline insures has irreparably eroded the quality of its own balance sheet. Once that happens, the monolines’ guarantees are worthless and the debt it insures will be downgraded ...

If the monoline guarantees on bonds and credit derivatives were to be removed, the rule of thumb is that every 1 per cent decline in the price of insured bonds would give rise to $10bn of losses on bond portfolios elsewhere in the system. We estimate bond portfolio losses of $150bn-200bn were this to happen ...

Much of this pain (loss) would have to be absorbed through the CDS markets as additional losses to the cost of defaults. Also, the decline in credit quality would also hit CDS prices to the tune of about $40bn-$50bn. In total, we estimate that global losses in CDS markets and the underlying credits they insure would be $365bn-$425bn."

NEFF
For instance, we're writing a new
kind of fifty percent retention
feature in the collision coverage.

Phyllis stops in her walk.

PHYLLIS
You're a smart insurance man, aren't
you, Mr. Neff?

NEFF
I've had eleven years of it.

PHYLLIS
Doing pretty well?

NEFF
It's a living.

PHYLLIS
You handle just automobile insurance,
or all kinds?

She sits down again, in the same position as before.

NEFF
All kinds. Fire, earthquake, theft,
public liability, group insurance,
industrial stuff and so on right
down the line.

PHYLLIS
Accident insurance?

NEFF
Accident insurance? Sure, Mrs.
Dietrichson.

His eyes fall on the anklet again.

NEFF
I wish you'd tell me what's engraved
on that anklet.

PHYLLIS
Just my name.

NEFF
As for instance?

PHYLLIS
Phyllis.

NEFF
Phyllis. I think I like that.

PHYLLIS
But you're not sure?

NEFF
I'd have to drive it around the block
a couple of times.

PHYLLIS
(Standing up again)
Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by
tomorrow evening about eight-thirty.
He'll be in then.

NEFF
Who?

PHYLLIS
My husband. You were anxious to talk
to him weren't you?

NEFF
Sure, only I'm getting over it a
little. If you know what I mean.

PHYLLIS
There's a speed limit in this state,
Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.

NEFF
How fast was I going, officer?

PHYLLIS
I'd say about ninety.

So far, the banking industry has revealed about $65 billion in writedowns for the fourth quarter -- a figure that could climb higher as more results pour in over the next couple weeks. That's more than Bill Gates is worth, higher than the gross domestic product of Bangladesh, and equivalent to nearly 3 percent of the entire U.S. housing market.

PHYLLIS
I want to ask you something, Mr.
Neff. Could I get an accident policy
for him -- without bothering him at
all?

NEFF
How's that again.

PHYLLIS
That would make it easier for you,
too. You wouldn't even have to talk
to him. I have a little allowance of
my own. I could pay for it and he
needn't know anything about it.

NEFF
Wait a minute. Why shouldn't he know?

PHYLLIS
Because I know he doesn't want
accident insurance. He's superstitious
about it.

NEFF
A lot of people are. Funny, isn't
it?

PHYLLIS
If there was a way to get it like
that, all the worry would be over.
You see what I mean, Walter?

NEFF
Sure. I've got good eyesight. You
want him to have the policy without
him knowing it. And that means without
the insurance company knowing that
he doesn't know. That's the set-up,
isn't it?

PHYLLIS
Is there anything wrong with it?

...

PHYLLIS
What's the matter?

NEFF
Look, baby, you can't get away with
it.

PHYLLIS
Get away with what?

NEFF
You want to knock him off, don't
you, baby.

PHYLLIS
That's a horrible thing to say!

NEFF
Who'd you think I was, anyway? A guy
that walks into a good-looking dame's
front parlor and says "Good afternoon,
I sell accident insurance on husbands.
You got one that's been around too
long? Somebody you'd like to turn
into a little hard cash? Just give
me a smile and I'll help you collect."
Boy, what a dope I must look to you!

PHYLLIS
I think you're rotten.

NEFF
I think you're swell. So long as I'm
not your husband.

PHYLLIS
Get out of here.

... NEFF'S VOICE
(Over scene)
So I let her have it, straight between
the eyes. She didn't fool me for a
minute, not this time. I knew I had
hold of a redhot poker and the time
to drop it was before it burned my
hand off. I stopped at a drive-in
for a bottle of beer, the one I had
wanted all along, only I wanted it
worse now, to get rid of the sour
taste of her iced tea, and everything
that went with it. I didn't want to
go back to the office, so I dropped
by a bowling alley at Third and
Western and rolled a few lines to
get my mind thinking about something
else for a while.

A-41 DRIVE-IN RESTAURANT - (DAY)

Shooting past Neff sitting behind the wheel of his car The
car hop hangs a tray on the door and serves him a bottle of
beer.

DISSOLVE TO:

A-42 INT. BOWLING ALLEY

Neff bowling. He rolls the ball with an effort at
concentration, but his mind is not really on the game.

DISSOLVE TO:

A-43 EXT. APARTMENT HOUSE - (DUSK)

It is late afternoon. The apartment house is called the LOS
OLIVOS APARTMENTS. It is a six-story building in the Normandie-
Wilshire district, with a basement garage. THE CAMERA PANS
UP the front of the building to the top floor windows, as a
little rain starts to fall.

DISSOLVE TO:

NEFF'S VOICE
(Continuing)
I didn't feel like eating dinner
when I left, and I didn't feel like
a show, so I drove home, put the car
away and went up to my apartment.

...
NEFF'S VOICE
(Continuing)
It had begun to rain outside and I
watched it get dark and didn't even
turn on the light. That didn't help
me either. I was all twisted up
inside, and I was still holding on
to that red-hot poker. And right
then it came over me that I hadn't
walked out on anything at all, that
the hook was too strong, that this
wasn't the end between her and me.
It was only the beginning.

The doorbell rings.

NEFF'S VOICE
(Continuing)
So at eight o'clock the bell would
ring and I would know who it was
without even having to think, as if
it was the most natural thing in the
world.

Neff goes to the door and opens it.

PHYLLIS
Hello.

Neff just looks at her.

PHYLLIS
You forgot your hat this afternoon.

She has nothing in her hands but her bag.

Fun and Games on Wall Street

Well, LI is nearly there on the 12,500 prediction - just fifteen days late!
Might as well lay down my prediction for this year, which is a year end unemployment rate of 6 to 6.5. Citi melts down - the congress investigates big bad ball players - John McCain looks forward to the next 100 years of our occupation in Iraq - and it is another day of crackle and pop in these here states!

I can tell it must be bad on Wall Street, as all the gleeful econ-bus blogs that were doing the sarcastic thing over the past month about how bad the financial meltdown really is - making with the black humor jokes - have stopped joking. They are unusually sober. There's an old wives tale that just before you get a heavy rainfall of stockbrokers jumping out of 25th floor windows, there is an uncanny quiet - not a peep from the wheeler dealers, the spinners, the bucketshop boys.

This portends a bad bad year for LI. Which is so sad, since we were going to join the lower middle class this year. But it looks like we will have to keep the sharp eye out for nice shady spots under the interstate. At least, however, we can be thankful that brave but daunted CEOs who dropped the casual three billion here, twenty four billion there - out on the street like so many - still are carrying away those 20 million, 100 million packages with them. But don't worry about their companies - unlimited credit from the government will keep them propped up until the next bubble comes along.

Reason and Imagination - fin

“We fell ill on leaving Madagascar to go to the country of the Whites, people thought of the Whites then as cannibals … We suffered greatly on board ship, particularly from the pitching and rolling that caused us to fall. There was no-one to restrain us, or to sustain us, and more than once we might have fallen into the sea. When we arrived in Great Britain we didn't know the White language, not even a word, and the Whites, for their part, didn't know our language, not even a word.”

In the January, 2007 issue of History Today, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones recounted the story of seven boys from Madagascar who were sent to England to go to school – specifically, Class 1 of the Borough Road School in Southwark in 1821. They were the sons of nobility in the court of Radama I. The King was playing off the English against the French at the time. His larger plan was that the boys would be apprenticed at some point to learn manufacturing, particularly gunpowder manufacturing. In the event, the school they went to was based on a cooperative pedagogical principle that sounds truly awful – the teachers would rely on the older students teaching the younger ones, which seems an open invitation to the worst kind of bullying. But remember, this is Britain in 1821.

When Radama died, he was succeeded by his widow, the famous ‘mad queen’, Ranavalona, who embarked on a vast bloodbath and called the students home. Some of them – notably, a pair of twins – managed to survive the Ravalona years.

It says much for the twins' character, formed by their education, that they were both able to prosper during Ranavalona's reign. Thotoos (whose name was now changed to Raombana) became principal private secretary to the Queen, and a field-marshal in her army. We don't know how they compromised their Christian beliefs, taught them in England, with their duties at home. But the twins had clearly learned an early lesson in survival which stood them in good stead throughout their lives. On his death in 1855, at the early age of forty-six, Raombana left a huge and unfinished Histoire de Madagascar, in three parts: legends and traditions; history; and a journal of contemporary events, written from his privileged position at court. More than 8,000 pages of this work, handwritten on English-made foolscap paper, were inherited by Raombana's son, who distributed them among relatives and friends when he was forced into exile to the island of Reunion in the late nineteenth century after Madagascar became a French colony in 1896 and abolished the Merina monarchy. Only fragments of the great Histoire have been published, and less than 6,000 pages have been identified today.
Britain's influence in Madagascar diminished during the rule of the 'mad queen', when she expelled the missionaries who had founded the schools there at her husband's request. Her son, Radama II (r. 1861-63), flirted with the French, and sold the island's mineral and forest rights to an enterprising French businessman, Joseph-Francois Lambert, in return for royalties to be paid direct to the King's family. There was a brief revival of former British glory during the reign of Queen Ranavalona II (r. 1868-83), who had been educated by the London Missionary Society, and who made Christianity the state religion, encouraging the building of schools and churches. But the French, anxious to enforce the rights won by M. Lambert, invaded the island in 1883. In a pan-African deal which gave it control over Zanzibar, Britain subsequently agreed to recognize France's protectorate over Madagascar in 1890, thus ending its own eighty-year connection. The Merina royal family were exiled to Algeria.

The thing that we call Europe, or the West, or the Developed world – the thing that was undergoing the Great Transformation – was connected by millions of like capillaries to the thing we call the periphery, or the colonies, or the Less Developed world. As we saw with Maître, one of the moments of highest tension in his Considerations on France – a moment in which one of his principle theses, connecting human violence and the divine history program – is announced through the citation of a speech uttered by the King of Dahomey. These ‘visitors’ and imports to the texts that present the protest against the triumph of happiness fall into a pattern – although one should be careful not to code the anti-colonial, or anti-European, with all the progressive virtues, or to find it the site of some ‘resistance’. Hazlitt, in the Reason and Imagination essay, also cites an African king at a crucial juncture. The juncture is about the consequence of choosing a morality that is framed entirely around calculations of consequences. Hazlitt, as his commentators like to point out, took up Adam Smith’s sympathy based morality as the basis for his own theory of moral sense. Along with this morality, Hazlitt took up another eighteenth century theme – one that actually starts with Voltaire – which is the theme of unexpected consequences. He wields this theme as his secret weapon to wreck the utilitarian take over of radicalism. It is a takeover first of all of tone. As Hazlitt noted in another essay, On Egotism, the man who comes into a room and announces that he ‘hates’ poetry puts the person who doesn’t at a momentary disadvantage. The statement of dislike seems to be a considered and superior judgment. Hazlitt makes a very clever analysis of this, one that is taken up (although not, I should say, under the direct influence of Hazlitt) by many writers during the 19th and early 20th century, from Herzen to Proust. They felt, in these common conversational habits, the presence of a greater beast – a specter that haunted Europe:

A man comes into a room, and on his first entering, declares without preface or ceremony his contempt for poetry. Are we therefore to conclude him a greater genius than Homer? No: but by this cavalier opinion he assumes a certain natural ascendancy over those who admire poetry. To look down ujpon anything seemingly implies a greater elevation and enlargement of view than to look up to it. The present Lord Chancellor took upon him to declare in open court that he would not go across the street to hear Madame Catalini sing. What did this prove? His want of an ear for music, not his capacity for anything higher. So far as it went, it only showed him to be inferior to thousands of persons who go with eager expectation to hear her, and come away with astonishment and rapture. A man migh as well tell you he is deaf, and expect you to look at him with more respect. The want of any external sense or organ is an acknowledged defect and infirmity: the want of an internal sense or faculty is equally so, though our self-love contrives to give a different turn to it. We mortify others by throwing cold water on that in which they have an advantage over us, or stagger their opinion of an excellence which is not of self-evident or absolute utility…”

While the utilitarians can manipulate social attitudes, they can’t account for them under their theory. Attitudes atomize into millions of hedonic calculations. Which – to get back to Hazlitt’s Reason and Imagination essay – has a macro effect. It is here that Hazlitt, using the slave trade as his example of a social crime that the utilitarians couldn’t adequately cope with, quotes another African king. Ah, the African kings that march across the pages of European literature – and Persian ambassadors and Chinese sages! Hazlitt mentions the throwing overboard of African slaves like so much lumber that was reported on a ship in 1775, and writes that it is an instance where the instance flashes a light on the whole: “A state of things, where a single instance of the kind can possibly happen withwithout exciting general consternation, ought not to exist for half an hour. The parent, hydra-headed injustice ought to be crushed at once with all its viper brood.” And he goes on to this quote, from the account of an African explorer:

The name of a person having been mentioned in the presence of Maimbanna (a young African chiefain), who was understood by him to have publicaly asserted something very degrading to the general character of Africans, he borke out into violent and vindictive language. He was immediately reminded of the Christian duty of forgiving his enemies; upon which he answerednearly in the following words: - ‘ If a man should rob me of my money, I can forgive him; if a man should shoot at me, or try to stab me, I can forgive him; if a man should sell me and all my family to a slave-ship, so that we should pass all the rst of our days in slavery in the West Indies, I can forgive him; but’ (added he, rising from his seat with much emotion) ‘if a man takes away the character of the people of my country, I never can forgive him.’ Being asked why he would not extend his forgiveness to those who took away the character of the people of his country, he answered: “If a man should try to kill me, or should sell me or my family for slaves, he would do an injury to as many as he might kill or sell; but if anyone takes away the character of Black people, that man injures Black people all over the world; and when he has once taken away their character, there is nothing which he may not do to Black people ever afgter. That man, for instance, will beat Black men, and say, Oh, it is only a Black man, why should not I beat him? That man will make slaves of Black people; forwhen he has taken away their character, he will say, Oh, they are only Black people, why should not I make them slaves? That man will take away all the peole of Africa if he can catch them; and if you ask him, But why do you take away all these people? he will say, Oh, they are only Black people – they are not like White people – why should I not take them? That is the reason why I cannot forgive the man who takes away the character of the people of my country.”

news from the war of mirrors front

Ségolène is hot today –

«L’état de grâce s’achève, l’état de disgrâce commence», veut croire Ségolène Royal, qui lâche ses coups: «Le roi s’amuse, vit comme un milliardaire et s’offre même des bijoux de milliardaire.» Face à un Président tour à tour taxé de «désinvolture», d’«improvisation», de «fébrilité», d’«exhibitionnisme» et de «provocation», elle entend «incarner de nouvelles raisons d’agir, d’espérer et d’avancer». Jusqu’au prochain congrès?

“(The state of grace [for Sarkozy] is finished, the state of disgrace begins, opines Ségolène Royal, who unleashes her blows: the king entertains himself, lives like a billionaire, and even gives the jewelry of a billionaire” Against a president reproached turn and turn about with ‘indifference’, ‘improvisation’, ‘general spasticness”, ‘exhibitionism’ and 'provocation', she means to “embody new reasons to act, hope and advance.” Right up to the next convention [of the PS]?”

Sarkozy has been the subject of more admiring press in the Anglosphere than any French figure since Audrey Tatou. This should tell you that there is definitely the stink of a rat about the news. America’s dream of a France plunged even more into the piggery of neo-liberalism is embodied by the man Royal describes well. And, of course, there is the stupid publicity about his rutting habits – which corresponds to the wild misconception the Americans have about the French. Decorum is not a matter of improvisations on the French political scene, as it is in the U.S. I used to think that this was an ace in the hole for the U.S. – I am now not so sure. But to think those can can lovin’ Frenchmen want to see their President act like an aging rock star is pretty much as far from the truth as possible. Oh well. It is the war of mirrors.

ps - ah, for the other side of the mirror, this article by Phillip Blond, apparently a theology prof in England who contributes to the IHT, is a delicious confection of shit and shinola. The thesis is that Sarkozy - the same guy catting around with a pop singer model - may be bringing "high culture" back to Europe. Oh blessed saints above! It is the Tom Wolfe model of world history, where the role of the Absolute Spirit is played by a tough, wise old CEO - with a huge, huge dick, of course, attractive to aaaaall the youngah ladies in the house. These are the times that try men's souls, especially if the souls are stuffed with only so many synonyms for moronic.

Reason and Imagination 3

About Reason and the Imagination – let’s begin with the beginning image, or similitude, in the essay. It is an overdetermined one – the similitude between the map, which is what the utilitarians go by, versus the picture, or the globe versus the local. Of course, maps are not neutral things:

“They [the theorists] had better confine their studies to the celestial sphere and the signs of the zodiac; for there they will meet with no petty details to boggle at, or contradict their vague conclusions. Such persons would make excellent theologians, but are very indifferent philosophers. To pursue this geographical reasoning a little farther. – They may say that the map of a country or shire for instance is too large and conveys a disproportionate idea of its relation to the whole. And we say that their map of the globe is too small, and conveys no idea of it at all.”

Given these images, one might expect a defense of the local, imagination, against the universal, or reason. Which is why Hazlitt’s moral examples are so interesting – because they are not local. They are not British. They are colonial. In this, Hazlitt is following the Burkian machinery, one in which the sublime and the notion of delight play a key role, that always finds reason in images and images in reason, and that was most at work in the impeachment of Hastings and in the denunciation of the French Revolution. The local, for Burke, was founded on local traditions – and the universal was founded on respecting tradition. Go to the end of this logic and you come to the end of empire – but Burke himself did not find that the egress he sought. Instead, his thought envisions empire as a collusion among elites, which, in fact, was a definite aspect of the British rule in India and elsewhere during the 19th century. Yet Burke’s imagery is more extreme, more suggestive, than this outcome would suggest. It presents, perhaps, a surreptitious ideology, an unconscious one, which is why it is so exciting to read, for instance, Burke’s comment to one of his critical correspondents during the Hastings impeachment, Mary Palmer:

“I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces; but who are the images of the Great Pattern as well as you and I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not.”

Hazlitt is also in pursuit of the Great Pattern, and thinks, contra Burke, that it revealed itself in the French Revolution – taking that to span the time from 1789 to 1815, as Hazlitt does – and that the post 1815 radicalism that he tried to influence has turned towards mere patterning, towards calculations based on self interest in which the self’s intrinsic, internal interest in the self is left out of account. And he is especially wary of the fact that once the self is evacuated, the population of selves can become subject to tests – we can test out policy on them. Javed Majeed, in an essay on James Mill’s attitude towards India which were put into his history of India – one of Hazlitt’s objects of scorn in the Reason and Imagination essay – writes this, in defense of Mill’s feelings concerning empire:

“Furthermore, the tensions in James Mill’s project stem from his ambivalent stance on empire. On the one hand, Mill took an economic view of imperialism in India and argued that the expense of government, administration and wars meant that Britain had not derived any economic benefits from India. In his economic writings, he denied the importance of colonies as markets and stressed that they did not yield any economic benefits. He also argued that colonies served as a source of power and patronage for the ruling elite and were used to perpetuate their position. But Mill’s History was divided between this negative view of contemporary imperialism and the possibilities that empire opened up as the testing ground for new bodies of thought which had emerged in the metropolis and which had as their aim the critique and reform of the establishment in Britain itself.” (Javed Majeed in Utilitarianism and Empire, 96)

At this point, LI has to loop back to our own self.

Years ago, in the bitterly poor winter of 2002, LI did a series of posts about Fitzjames Stephen. At that time, we were still suffering from the afteraffects of the Tech boom delusion, i.e. we were busy trying to make it as a freelance writer. Of the idiotic detours we have taken on the way to the grave, none, none has been as shamefully stupid. Hence, the bitter poverty – there is nothing like gnawing on the bone of your own failure to leave that taste of narcissism gone sour in your saliva. Ah, but we have spent the decade since mumbling that bone! In any case, the point of my 2002 series was to illustrate a thesis, which went like this:

1. in the cold war, a historical myth was coaxed into being by conservative intellectuals;
2. the myth went like this: the whole idea of the managed economy had come, by way of crazy Frenchman, Marx, and that Lucifer, Lenin, from the Soviet Union;
3. so that the idea of managing the economy, which was all the rage among the post-war technocrats, was tainted with the Gulag.

I believed these ideas were bogus. The text that codified this bogosity was Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, with the scary, Russo-suggestive Serf in the title, and Hayek’s unconscious parody of Artaud – the plague came from the East! Instead, the whole of the British imperial enterprise in the nineteenth century, especially the governing of India, was the actual locus of the idea that the state, with the proper technostructure, could manage a society. India’s laws were changed to meet an ideal created by the utilitarianists. Property rights were transformed, the rural economy was monetized, and the sub-continent, in British eyes, bloomed. Of course, British eyes did not see wave after wave of famine; they saw railroads and exports. Such success in setting the rules of the game, under the regime of free trade, made various Indian office intellectuals, and those with whom they were connected, begin to wonder if rational administration couldn’t make capitalism itself more efficient. This idea was divided between the right – Stephen being the first to introduce a colonial authoritarianism back into conservative thinking about governing the home country – and the left, all those Fabians who shuttled back and forth between position papers and jobs in Colonial office.

At the time I was putting this thesis together, I was unaware that large parts of this had already been said before, by Eric Stokes, in his The English Utilitarians in India (1959). I did eventually peruse Stokes, but I didn’t quite get him.

Well, those are our back pages. Useless to burrow back there into the warren of our burrows. I like to think of LI as a sort of roadkill of the Bush era, emitting not just the smell of the dead, but creamed in precisely such a way that one can infer the traffic that ran us over.

In any case, resurrecting my history here, Hazlitt – at the time – did not strike me as the dialogue partner that an anti-imperialist liberalism should take up. Now he does. Which gets us to Hazlitt and the slave trade … that I have still another poky post to go over.

Promoting my academia column in the Austin American Statesman

I was editing away today on a dissertation {and I'm looking for more editing, please!) and forgot that I was supposed to be all about me today. Me, as in I, as in not-you, as in my column in the Austin Statesman on two books: Trying Leviathan by D. Graham Burnett and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's groovy Zone book, Objectivity. This is my second column so far, my dearest and nearest, and I'm looking to franchise this baby - gonna send it around to various newspapers in various high ed towns and offer it for peanuts - that is, a week after the statesman publishes it. I'm not sure if this will work, but I'm gonna give it a shot. And if it does work, I'll be your man on the university press beat.

So, did I say Me? Yes. This has been shameless self promotion on the part of LI. Check it out!

PS - here's my editor Jeff's blog post about this.

Carry on you wayward son and other great lines of poetry

Obviously, the place to go on the intertubes today is the Werepoet’s site for the close reading of one of those masterpieces that justify all the effort humankind made 2 million years ago to stand up on its hind legs, to wit: Starship’s We built this city on Rock n Roll. George Saunders, eat your heart out.

Hazlitt and the claims of the imagination

Both in Hazlitt’s essay, Reason and Imagination, and in the Spirit of the Age essay on Bentham, Hazlitt’s argument against utilitarianism proceeds on two levels.

The first level is, so to speak, a defense of the moral integrity of the person that rests on construing the imagination as having a major shaping role in creating the person. On this level, Hazlitt is not just defending the imagination as an instrument of practical reason, but he is making a larger, cultural claim against utilitarianism, which is that utilitarianism does a manifest harm to humans by diminishing their imaginative capacity. Philosophers are more used to the first line of argument than the second, if you take Hazlitt to be using the imagination to play a role similar to Hegel’s recognition. According to David Bromwich, in Hazlitt’s major and little read philosophical treatise, Essay on the Principles of Human Action, he ‘puts forward a single main thesis about the nature of action. It includes, however, distinct arguments on the limits of identity and the freedom of the imagination. The idea of a personal identityt that contiues from past to future is first shown to be an artifice – the past, says Hazlitt, is known thorugh memory, the present through consciousness. We are then asked to realize that we contemplate the future only with the help of imagination. It follows that someone else’s future is potentially as real to me as my own. Since imagination is not limited by identity, and identity itself is discontinuous, the two arguments can be shown to assist each other.”(p.18, Metaphysical Hazlitt)

It is Hazlitt’s cultural argument that, I think, gives us the more original, and even prophetic, insight. However, it is one that has been neglected or misunderstood by liberal moralists, who tend to transcribe this thesis, when they meet it, as meaning that art (which is where they take the imagination to be lodged) has some social use. But Hazlitt is not lodging the imagination in art alone – it is, rather, intrinsic to the very circle of the human. Thus, its squeezing, its distortion, by a utilitarian society is a mutilation on all persons.

It is easy not to see what Hazlitt is getting at here because his case doesn’t break along the usual fracture lines – the happiness of the greatest number vs. the universals of duty. Unlike Bentham, Hazlitt contends that the imagination inevitably intervenes on any calculation having to do with action, since the very basis of that calculation is the imaginative power that allows us to project ourselves into the future. It is thus more primary than the hedonic motive. On the other hand, unlike Kant, Hazlitt is not subscribing here to the early modern psychology that would neatly separate reason from the sensual. Kant, of course, has tried to purify his psychology of the moral terms that overlay the discourse of the affections in order to give us a pure opposition between sensual motive and the motive of reason, but the options still follow the mold of the older bias. And, indeed, that bias has not exhausted itself. The idea that the emotions and moods are ultimately reducible to pleasure and pain, to some pure animal state, is still alive in psychology – thus, happiness is a sort of cloud around a central pleasure, sadness a cloud around a central pain, and so on. In a sense, these are the masks of god – the god of pleasure assumes the mask of happiness, or enthusiasm, or excitement, the god of pain assumes the mask of anger, or of disappointment, and so on. But what shapes these masks, and what are they themselves made of?

All of which I will discuss in another post. The next post, though, will be about the second level of Hazlitt’s attack. Hazlitt’s set of examples when he attacks the utilitarians invariably stray to extra-European – to imperial – instances. The slave trade. India. And for good reason, since the utilitarians flourished in the imperial interface.

Tears again

It kills me. It kills me. In Don Delillo’s Underworld, he has Lenny Bruce giving a performance during the Cuban Missile crisis about JFK’s speech on TV, and he says:

"Kennedy makes an appearance in public and you hear people say, I saw his hair! Or, I saw his teeth! The spectacle's so dazzling they can't take it all in. I saw his hair! They're venerating the sacred relics while the guy's still alive."

And he punctuates his monologue with a “line he’s come to love: we’re all gonna die!”

That was back when superman first came to the supermarket. The monster was just being born back then, and it didn’t seem at all like a monster, it seemed like art: those Esquire writers, like Norman Mailer, going beyond the surface scrim of politics to contact with knowing fingers the Siamese twin tie between the larger than life personality and the larger life at large, the semiotic encoded in the statesman’s gestures, his suits, his dislike of hats… And so this new way of writing about politicos, writing about them as though they were characters in a novel, was born. Born just as the novel was dying out as a dominant aesthetic form – cut out the middleman, make your own in living breathing flesh and blood characters, hire consultants to do it, and then raise up a brood of commentors whose perceptions are as predictably shallow as their upbringing, a background in which was omitted all history, languages, nights of the soul, empathy, imagination, knowledge, and loose this whole dire bestiary on tv and in the papers as a permanent chorus, giving us ever thinner narratives, novels in which Superman gradually lost the irony and became an action movie figure, President Mission Accomplished, and in which now the emphasis was all on the hair, the cleavage, the tears – because this brood weaves novels that will never reflect the sad state of our prosperous days. These are the days when democracy is giving birth to feudalism, to syndromes ong thought to be long extinct – mercenary armies, torture, an executive claiming more divine rights than Charles I ever dreamed of. Accompanying it is the slugs orgy of outrage 24/7, the cretinorama by which all the information by which one could make an informed choice about anything – drugs, cars, toothpaste, politicians – is utterly waylaid in a maze. As our lords and masters intended it to be – make the world hazy and issue credit cards, that’s the plan.

The continuing ‘controversy’ about Hillary Clinton’s tears hurts so bad it is going to make my balls drop off. Nobody gives a flying fuck, except in TV toyland. Oh, it isn’t that sentimentality and mushiness should be off the radar as far as politics is concerned. I propose we do talk about it. I say, let’s talk about the worst, the bloodiest, the most malign sentimentality of them all, which is called toughness. It is the silence the boy substitutes for calling for his mommy. And soon it hardens delightfully over the tyke. Oh how they love toughness, the media Heathers, oh how it makes them cum cum cum all over their peashooters. Of course, the funny thing is that the toughness they sentimentalize about is projected on such amazing, bilious old physical wrecks like Fred Thompson or John McCain. On the other hand, the Ur-gesture of toughness – going into a convenience store and blow the head off the cashier, for instance – is all too yucky. Oh, that scares them so much that they desire even tougher men to lock those tough boys up. So it is tough and tougher, a simp’s progress down the road to the pit. And all that fucked up toughness is unmoored. It is part and parcel of the whole unmoored emotional landscape that has to float above the wasteland created by the corporation and the state, it’s a clip joint sentimentality designed to get men and women down down down on the totem pole to look up and admire, as their heroes, the men and women who systematically plunder them, who contrive their vulnerability, who pride themselves on gambling with the lives of the feebs’ and rubes’ children. They are tough, those who build, cell by carcinogenic cell, the environment of disaster into which we are collectively drifting.

Magic, zombies, the NH primary

Ah, the old dilemma. On the one hand, the Clintons represent the vilest D.C. shit imaginable – war, neo-liberalism, faux progressive politics that gets up in your ass and eats your intestine. And just as you are about to throw them out, they get attacked by – the even viler people. The media krewe of nitwits and combjobs who, over the last week, danced around like the high school students in Carrie, so happy that the wicked Hillary – she’s not a cheerleader girl at all! – was no longer in contention to be prom queen. The sheer overwhelming dreadful gross misogyny of it all made anybody with any heart want to strike them back, to slap those fat sleek faces until they were red. And so the 1998 white magic happens all over again. You can tell from who votes for the Clintons that it is a visceral class phenomena – that’s the sad part. It is the Blue collar belt that really always saves the Clintons bacon, not because the working class are stupid peckerwoods, but because they have a healthy animal instinct for the enemy. Although superficially they might nod along as the anchorman trills through his pack of lies, an instinct scratches. What is so sad is that, in these circumstances, the Clintons are really in the enemy camp. The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. How fucked is that?

I was thinking, today, that someone really needs to start up the Adam Nagourney satire site again that went up in 2004 – this time, I think, as Jokeline, the popular comment thread name for Joe Klein – something that will throw as much shit as possible at the bastards. It is hard to think straight about politics when everything you hate is embodied every day on every channel and every newspaper – a smirking, brainless, sycophantic syndicate of toad eaters whose every gesture and remark is redolent of class privilege, ignorance, and such a remarkable lack of soul, such a vacuum of an interior life, such a cardboard sensibility for the normal drama of human existence that, that, that – I mean, it would shock a zombie how dead these people all are. All those stories about ‘natives’ fearing that photographs drain your soul are obviously scientifically right –for haven’t we watched TV drain the soul, down to the last drop, of those greedy talking heads that elbow their way in front of the camera? They exist solely to cretinize us – to make us stupider and stupider – on the magical principle of like drawing to like. As they draw the last bit of your soul out of fingertips, you can join them in a sort of vampire state of non-being.

So, somehow, that Clinton won – while I so ardently want Clinton to lose, to hear no more of Clinton, to see no more Clinton, somehow, somehow – this news made me smile.

Alien: coming to an economic sector near you!

LI has several posts on the drawing board. We have a post about Derrida and intercessors that is partly a reply to certain things LCC has said about my man Jack; we have to complete our sequence about Hazlitt; and most of all, we want to talk about Alexander Herzen. Piqued by this recent piece in More Intelligent Life about the Moscow Inszenierung of Tom Stoppard’s play in Moscow (and, by accident, doing a lot of editing recently on papers having to do with Russian intellectual life), we started reading Herzen. Long ago, I bought a paperback abridgement of Herzen’s autobiography, and somewhere in the mounds of paper on one of my desk it is probably hibernating, its little heart slowed to a death’s breath by day after day of non-reading.

But all of those fun things are so fuckin’ convoluted, dude! Taking forever to think out and then to write. Whereas I could just refer to this excellent little Financial Times piece by Stephen Roach. Now, at least I know one of my readers – I’m looking at you, Brian! – is as into depression prediction porn as I am. There’s a vast audience out there for those books with titles like: 1980s – Coming Depression! 1990s – Great Crash! 2000 – How the coming depression will change everything! Myself, I’ve even got depressed about this coming depression. The key word seems to be coming. It is always coming, but never arriving. Hey hey, I told you it was porn, didn’t I?

In actual fact, depression (recession is of the same genre of euphemisms as Defense department is for Department of War – it was coined in the fifties to make life seem more comfy) has long ago become a sectional thing, and the Keynesian economy (which undergirds the present neo-liberal order) has gotten very good at compartmentalizing it. The Rust Belt’s depressed – the Sun Belt’s booming. Finances sag, the power market surges. The political advantage of this from the standpoint of Mr. Moneybags, your softshoeing Monopoly card capitalist, is that depression never becomes a category around which political identification can take place. Divide and conquer and all that shit.

But though we don’t think of the totality, the totality thinks of us. And this is what Roach’s article does pretty well, laying out a schema that makes sense of some everduring features in our current economic landscape:

“The US has been the main culprit behind the destabilising global imbalances of recent years. America’s massive current account deficit absorbs about 75 per cent of the world’s surplus saving. Most believe that a weaker US dollar is the best cure for these imbalances. Yet a broad measure of the US dollar has dropped 23 per cent since February 2002 in real terms, with only minimal impact on America’s gaping external imbalance. Dollar bears argue that more currency depreciation is needed. Protectionists insist that China – which has the largest bilateral trade imbalance with the US – should bear a disproportionate share of the next downleg in the US dollar.

There is good reason to doubt this view. America’s current account deficit is due more to bubbles in asset prices than to a misaligned dollar. A resolution will require more of a correction in asset prices than a further depreciation of the dollar. At the core of the problem is one of the most insidious characteristics of an asset-dependent economy – a chronic shortfall in domestic saving. With America’s net national saving averaging a mere 1.4 per cent of national income over the past five years, the US has had to import surplus saving from abroad to keep growing. That means it must run massive current account and trade deficits to attract the foreign capital.

America’s aversion toward saving did not appear out of thin air. Waves of asset appreciation – first equities and, more recently, residential property – convinced citizens that a new era was at hand. Reinforced by a monstrous bubble of cheap credit, there was little perceived need to save the old-fashioned way – out of income. Assets became the preferred vehicle of choice.”

Now, there’s a little sour grapesianism going on here. Bubbles have a bad rep – and deservedly so, at least back in the Tulipomania past. Myself, I’m open to the question of whether we don’t have an affluent enough framework in which bubbles actually do a different kind of job, now – bubbles might be the thing that, in tandem with the sectoral depressions, keep the economy afloat. Much as I hate to say it, they’ve done a really good job at that. While a marginal old fart such as myself has long been among the people who are sat on by the people who are sat on by the people who are sat on in this economy, I’ve noticed much less disgruntlement among the masses about the general sitch. It might be that Roach is right – we can’t borrow any more, the bills come due, the walls of Jericho, NYC, Washingon D.C., Houston, L.A., Dallas, Atlanta and Miami fall, and we all come face to face with the face of capitalism, a picture of which I am including for your viewing pleasure here:



But forgive an old dodderer his doubts. I’ve heard this before. Maybe the years are just wearing away my resistance to being sat on. And of course Roach ends with an unjustified inference:

“It is going to be a very painful process to break the addiction to asset-led behaviour. No one wants recessions, asset deflation and rising unemployment. But this has always been the potential endgame of a bubble-prone US economy. The longer America puts off this reckoning, the steeper the ultimate price of adjustment.”

The General from Hope

You know, when President Backbone way back on January 2005 (Year of the Liberated Pig) made us all choke up as he celebrated the winds of freedom he’d helped waft over the Globe, we didn’t even know the half of it. Comrades on the Decent sites, who know a knight of the Weltgeist when they see it, knew that President Backbone was history’s way of bringing permanent revolution and a New Labour outlook to the benighted and dusky races of the world. They liked what they saw, and who could resist our impossibly handsome liberator, flak jacket in his left hand, big cock in his right hand? Which surely will be inscribed on the coins one day. One face Bush, the other face President Truman, cooking a girl scout on a grill. Because Truman was Man Tough! Just ask famous adult entertainment star Peter Beinert.

We were bedazzled too. So we jumped up and down for joy at this NYT headline: “In Musharraf’s Shadow, a New Hope for Pakistan Rises.” Hope is a strange thing – one might think that the Hope was arising among our Pakistani comrades, all liberated to fight al qaeda for us and shit. But a moment’s thought will demonstrate that the Weltgeist isn’t going to waste hope on the not yet mature Pakistanis. Our comrades there are still, in terms of liberation, a little like children. Children hope for baubles. They hope for ice cream. They don’t want to do their homework. Thus, I think we can safely discount children’s hopes, as cute as they are, in this struggle to achieve world socialism and an I.D. and thumbprint for all – no, this hope is arising in D.C., among serious people. And it has a name: another military dictatorship! Leading to freedom freedom freedom. The picture that accompanies this article is worth a thousand bullets, but the intro grafs are pretty good too:

“ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Over the last several months, a little-known, enigmatic Pakistani general has quietly raised hopes among American officials that he could emerge as a new force for stability in Pakistan, according to current and former government officials. But it remains too early to determine whether he can play a decisive role in the country.

In late November, the general, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, took command of Pakistan’s army when the country’s longtime military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, resigned as army chief and became a civilian president. At that time, General Kayani, a protégé of Mr. Musharraf’s, became one of Pakistan’s most powerful officials.

The Pakistani Army has dominated the country for decades and the army chief wields enormous influence. Over time, as General Kayani gains firmer control of the army, he is likely to become even more powerful than Mr. Musharraf himself.”

I get all swoony, myself, at someone being a “force for stability". So much nicer than someone being a potential military dictator. That is such a nasty word - it simply reeks of Chomskian moral equivalency. But force for stability! That's so New Economy. So the world is flat. It is Davos and everything nice. It evokes nostalgia: the interrogation methods of Guantanamo, the insider deals that accrue billions, the Swiss bank account, and – oh, very heaven – the ability to vend massive amounts of WMD, er, American military hardware to our comrade general.

Every once in a while, a voice breaks out of the chorus and you can hear, bravely and clearly, what American foreign policy is all about.

Now back to our regularly scheduled progam: 1001 reasons that Chavez is the New Hitler.

happiness so far

I need to take a breather and survey the progress of my happiness thesis so far. Since starting on this project last June, I’ve floated certain approaches, had that feeling of brio about certain ideas that crashed and burned, and have had to chisel here and chisel there. And I’ve driven down many dead ends – the deadliest of which has been trying to make sense of the various psychologies of the emotions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Down these mean streets others have walked before me, each ending up with the distinct feeling of being separated from the main, lost among fathomless assumptions and philosophical anthropologies. William James, in the Principles of Psychology, wrote:

“The result of all this flux is that the merely descriptive literature of the emotions is one of the most tedious parts of psychology. And not only is it tedious, but you feel that its subdivisions are to a great extent either fictitious or unimportant, and that its pretences to accuracy are a sham. But unfortunately there is little psychological writing about the emotions which is not merely descriptive. As emotions are described in novels, they interest us, for we are made to share them. We have grown acquainted with the concrete objects and emergencies which call them forth, and any knowing touch of introspection which may grace the page meets with a quick and feeling response. Confessedly literary works of aphoristic philosophy also flash lights into our emotional life, and give us a fitful delight. But as far as "scientific psychology" of the emotions goes, I may have been surfeited by too much reading of classic works on the subject, but I should as lief read verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on a New Hampshire farm as toil through them again. They give one nowhere a central point of view, or a deductive or generative principle. They distinguish and refine and specify in infinitum without ever getting on to another logical level. Whereas the beauty of all truly scientific work [p. 449] is to get to ever deeper levels. Is there no way out from this level of individual description in the case of the emotions?”

James is right about the lack of a central point of view. It is striking: there’s no central organizing principle from which a taxonomy could be deduced. A science that has not advanced to the point of taxonomical agreement is, indeed, a desert.

Twentieth century psychology has advance by, as it were, imposing a taxonomy from the outside in. Instead of a central point of view, there is something like a social contract among psychologists, who have produced their categories by committee. The result is a discipline that has found, at one time or another, almost every human behavior sick, or not sick; that has agreed to certain lawlike regularities – for instance, the ‘law’ that all human beings seek to maximize pleasure – compounded ad hoc out of amalgams of skewed cases; that employs mathematical seeming terms, like ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ to describe the ‘valence’ of emotions, which really derive from the conjunction of old folk psychology of sympathetic magic and the romantic science of trances, animal magnetism, analogies and universal fluids current at the turn of the nineteenth century, which have proved to be truly useless for putting emotions into a natural kinds ordering. In the twentieth century, without a doubt, success has come most often from chemistry and neurology. We might not understand why the chemistry of the brain produces the effects it does, but we often set up pretty reliable correspondences between effects and chemistry. That this is not a deep explanation, a causal one, is not necessarily a disbarring thing – Newton, after all, explicitly warned his readers against thinking that he was providing an explanation of gravity, he was simply describing its laws. For an explanation, all he could do was refer us to God.

Well, poking through psychology has shown me how much we still live in a shaman ruled society, in which ritual words are taken for wonders. Otherwise, my problem on this front is still to come up with a good explanation of how psychology, in the period of the Great Transformation, succeeded in spreading new emotional customs.

A happier path has been opened up through the reading of novels, essays, diaries and the like. There is an objection to this method: these writings, it is said, reflect the elite culture. The self interpretations of the peasant farmer or a Parisian seamstress are simply not going to emerge in a text-based research project about the emotions. To put it another way: the writers give us a false totality.

Now, I’m not in agreement with the dippy post-Marxist historians who think we can safely junk the class concept. But the compulsion to fit the writers into a reflection metaphoric, to see them functioning solely as apologists for a given system of privileges of class, race, gender, etc., simply ignores the historic reality of how the intellectual system operated. There’s a certain social science dumbness about the intellectual imagination – about the trajectory of the the writer, philosophe, poet, diary writer, doctor, alchemist, etc in the class structured system, even in the early modern era. These people often fall in the intermediate group – in a group defined by transactions between different classes, ethnicities, and genders. While it is true that the high bourgeoisie and the aristocrats are well represented among the writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the interesting thing is how many of these writers don’t come from an elite background. And often, when they do, they come slightly damaged – like Samuel Johnson’s friend, Richard Savage. This intermediate group formed one of the channels between all groups – this flashes out best when in stories of scandal, as for instance in the famous ‘Affair of Poisons’, when various noblemen and women in Louis XIV’s court got caught up in a police dragnet that came in the wake of the Marquise de Brinvilliers trial – the Marquise was convicted of poisoning her father, her brothers, and assorted others who got in her way. The police records of the subsequent investigation, which have been exhaustively combed by social scientists, reveal extensive if limited literacy among artisans and working class Parisians. Literacy is perhaps too small a word – I mean, lifestyles that are inflected by reading. The third life (the life after that of sleeping and waking) was already present at the grassroots in 1680.

So I would defend the scope of the testimony of the imagination. Since it is part of my thesis that the changes wrought in the positional market by the transformation from a feudal to a mercantile/capitalist system globally impacted our emotional norms, I rather need that testimony to have scope.

If we grant a class structure in which the classes were not opaque one to another, then I think what we have, from the writer’s position, is this: three themes of resistance to the oncoming happiness culture can be spotted in the 19th century. There was the resistance of the pessimists, which located itself, at least by sympathy, in the aristocratic sphere, and wove the aristocratic ideology while the class itself was dying; there was the resistance from the revolutionary writers, who, again at least by sympathy, located themselves in the popular level; and there was the resistance on the margins of bourgeois life, even by those who were the great ideologists of liberalism, like Mill and Tocqueville. I think this latter form of resistance flows into psychoanalysis at the beginning of the 20th century.

I am still at the hunch level on another aspect of this project: the idea of the hedonic fallacy. The hedonic fallacy projects an affectual state onto a subject that can’t “feel” it - be it a social arrangement or material circumstances. If one of Pavlov’s dogs could speak, he would probably define a bell as a thing that salivates when it makes a certain noise. This projection is very much tied to the utilitarian justification for capitalism – although it is important to remember that utilitarianism of a kind also migrated into socialist thought, and has played a decisive role there, for instance in the productivist regime instituted by Stalin.

So this is where I stand so far. Any suggestions at this point would be helpful!

Meanwhile, Dr. Jeep plays on...

The geneology of contrarianism

Marx’s journalism has suffered a shabby fate – it has not, to my knowledge, been fully collected. One of the nice things about the german site that hosts all of Marx and Engels work is that it is collected there. But in German, translated from the English. It should be collected in English. The man was the godfather of a certain kind of journalism, plus of course there is Marx’s wasplike gift of sting. Marx may have learned from Heine that a pun or an allusion to Shakespeare could leave a lasting burn on the skin of the Beast, but the way he worked this out, the way he would paste up a mosaic of facts and quotes from the newspapers of the time to display the full pattern and palimpset of the oppressor class foreshadowed all the great journalists of the twentieth century. Kraus may not have read him, but he employs the same techniques. So does Tucholsky.

In 1861, when Marx wrote “The American Question in England”, the British establishment, under the spell of “chivalry” as a chaser to imperial power and money, was engaged in the shabby business of support the Confederates on – of course – a strictly moral basis. This support had two aspects: one was the class aspect, and one was financial. As a class, the bourgeoisie, by this time, had gone beyond the old fights with the landholders, the old philanthropic enthusiasm for banning the slave trade. At this point, beyond its function as a wealthmaking potential colony, the South’s whole plantation system had already begun to exert a romantic vacationer’s allure.

Marx, of course, brings the buzz saw to the pleasure dome. What makes this particular article relevant is the way it shows the peekaboo structure of the establishment journalist’s ethos. As they do today, journalists then were happy to live on the surface and stenograph the conventional wisdom of the powerful; however, sometimes they seemed to display flashes of impressive analysis, as though they had up and resolved to dig deep and confront the old mole of history itself, in one of its moleways. Of course, those flashes – nowadays we would call this “contrarianism” – always seem to end up at the same place that the stenography work gets us to: as a bulwark of greed, lust for power, and apology for the politics of an inbred and narcissistic governing class.

Marx’s analysis of the dynamic between the North and the South, and the way it is treated in 1861 by the liberal (as in classically liberal) British press is an amazing work of compression and analysis. As Marx observes, the objections to the North’s hypocrisy and illegitimacy by the British press hide the true intentions of the press under the cover of a Pecksniffish display of moral authenticity. The article is occasioned by a pamphlet addressed to the British on the part of the Union by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The pamphlet was tossed around and given the kind of contrarian treatment by the British press in much the way, say, that the NYT, the Washington Post, and Slate treat Michael Moore’s work: as both wrong wrong wrong and tediously filled with things that are right right right – but the latter being things that we all knew, after all. We all knew them so well that we just didn’t bother to report them. They were known by everybody who counted in D.C., that is. Like: we all knew that the WMDs were just an excuse to invade a country the White House had decided from the very beginning that it was going to invade.

This elitist trifling, this overt intellectual corruption to which the knowing smirk stands in the same relation as the does the buboe to the black plague, has a long and dishonorable history. Marx and Henry Adams were both encountering it, in their different ways, in 1861. Here’s a lengthy excerpt:

We come nearer to the pith of the question by the following remark of The Examiner:

“Mrs. Stowe says: ‘The Slave party, finding they could no longer use the Union for their purposes, resolved to destroy it.’ There is here an admission that up to that time the Slave party had used the Union for their purposes, and it would have been well if Mrs. Stowe could have distinctly shown where it was that the North began to make its stand against Slavery.”

One might suppose that The Examiner and the other oracles of public opinion in England had made themselves sufficiently familiar with the contemporaneous history to not need Mrs. Stowe’s information on such all-important points. The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic party, is, so to say, the general formula of the United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North. At the same time none of the successive victories of the South was carried but after a hot contest with an antagonistic force in the North, appearing under different party names with different watchwords and under different colors. If the positive and final result of each single contest told in favor of the South, the attentive observer of history could not but see that every new advance of the slave power was a step forward to its ultimate defeat. Even at the times of the Missouri Compromise the contending forces were so evenly balanced that Jefferson, as we see from his memoirs, apprehended the Union to be in danger of splitting on that deadly antagonism. The encroachments of the slaveholding power reached their maximum point, when, by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, for the first time in the history of the United States, as Mr. Douglas himself confessed, every legal barrier to the diffusion of Slavery within the United States territories was broken down, when, afterward, a Northern candidate bought his Presidential nomination by pledging the Union to conquer or purchase in Cuba a new field of dominion for the slaveholder; when, later on, by the Dred Scott decision, diffusion of Slavery by the Federal power was proclaimed as the law of the American Constitution, and lastly, when the African slave-trade was de facto reopened on a larger scale than during the times of its legal existence. But, concurrently with this climax of Southern encroachments, carried by the connivance of the Northern Democratic party, there were unmistakable signs of Northern antagonistic agencies having gathered such strength as must soon turn the balance of power. The Kansas war, the formation of the Republican party, and the large vote cast for Mr. Frémont during the Presidential election of 1856, were so many palpable proofs that the North had accumulated sufficient energies to rectify the aberrations which United States history, under the slaveowners’ pressure, had undergone, for half a century, and to make it return to the true principles of its development. Apart from those political phenomena, there was one broad statistical and economical fact indicating that the abuse of the Federal Union by the slave interest had approached the point from which it would have to recede forcibly… That fact was the growth of the North-West, the immense strides its population had made from 1850 to 1860, and the new and reinvigorating influence it could not but bear on the destinies of the United States.
Now, was all this a secret chapter of history? Was “the admission” of Mrs. Beecher Stowe wanted to reveal to The Examiner and the other political illuminati of the London press the carefully hidden truth that “up to that time the Slave party had used the Union for their purposes?” Is it the fault of the American North that the English pressmen were taken quite unawares by the violent clash of the antagonistic forces, the friction of which was the moving power of its history for half a century? Is it the fault of the Americans that the English press mistake for the fanciful crotchet hatched in a single day what was in reality the matured result of long years of struggle? The very fact that the formation and the progress of the Republican party in America have hardly been noticed by the London press, speaks volumes as to the hollowness of its Anti-Slavery tirades. Take, for instance, the two antipodes of the London press, The London Times and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, the one the great organ of the respectable classes, and the other the only remaining organ of the working class. The former, not long before Mr. Buchanan’s career drew to an end, published an elaborate apology for his Administration and a defamatory libel against the Republican movement. Reynolds, on his part, was, during Mr. Buchanan’s stay at London, one of his minions, and since that time never missed an occasion to write him up and to write his adversaries down. How did it come to pass that the Republican party, whose platform was drawn up on the avowed antagonism to the encroachments of the Slaveocracy and the abuse of the Union by the slave interest, carried the day in the North? How, in the second instance, did it come to pass that the great bulk of the Northern Democratic party, flinging aside its old connexions with the leaders of Slaveocracy, setting at naught its traditions of half a century, sacrificing great commercial interests and greater political prejudices, rushed to the support of the present Republican Administration and offered it men and money with an unsparing hand?

Instead of answering these questions The Economist exclaims:

“Can we forget [...] that Abolitionists have habitually been as ferociously persecuted and maltreated in the North and West as in the South? Can it be denied that the testiness and half-heartedness, not to say insincerity, of the Government at Washington, have for years supplied the chief impediment which has thwarted our efforts for the effectual suppression of the slave trade on the coast of Africa; while a vast proportion of the clippers actually engaged in that trade have been built with Northern capital, owned by Northern merchants and manned by Northern seamen?”

This is, in fact, a masterly piece of logic. Anti-Slavery England cannot sympathize with the North breaking down the withering influence of slaveocracy, because she cannot forget that the North, while bound by that influence, supported the slave-trade, mobbed the Abolitionists, and had its Democratic institutions tainted by the slavedriver’s prejudices. She cannot sympathize with Mr. Lincoln’s Administration, because she had to find fault with Mr. Buchanan’s Administration. She must needs sullenly cavil at the present movement of the Northern resurrection, cheer up the Northern sympathizers with the slave-trade, branded in the Republican platform, and coquet with the Southern slaveocracy, setting up an empire of its own, because she cannot forget that the North of yesterday was not the North of to-day. The necessity of justifying its attitude by such pettifogging Old Bailey pleas proves more than anything else that the anti-Northern part of the English press is instigated by hidden motives, too mean and dastardly to be openly avowed.”

Pettifogging Old Bailey pleas have bloomed into a veritable system since Marx's day. We now have to put up with the apparatchiks of contrarianism, the misshaped avatars of inside information, working day after day to close off and erase any possibility of a serious discussion of the power elite, tirelessly in pursuit of the trivial, the apes of the Petro-Gun club. During elections is when you see these apes most at work...

B.. b… but LI was going to segue from this long Marx sequence into the Iowa caucuses. Huh, well, this post is long enough as it is.

James Wood and LI's Reviewer Envy

LI writes reviews. We’ve completed a good thousand reviews over the past decade, mostly small things for Publishers Weekly. When you write reviews as a job, you soon get to know the routines that go into the review in the same way that, say, the debt collector making a telephone call soon acquires an easy sense for how to squeeze the other end of the line.

For some reason, this autumn saw more articles than usual about the decline of book reviewing in the papers, which all of us free lancers know all about. Just as we know that newspaper editors, on the whole, don’t understand how bound up their own fate is with the fate of reading matter. Since the reviewer page doesn’t generate the revenue or the online hits that the movie review section does, the book review section is given the orphan’s share. But what the movie review section does is point the reader away from reading material, and once you have ingrained that habit, reading material, which includes newspapers, starts dropping below the horizon of your life.

So much for special pleading. I intrude the facts of my own bio only to establish a parti pris. I am one of those people who is unimpressed with James Wood. He is, for a book reviewer, a bit of a star. Media places took note when he was hired away from the New Republic by the New Yorker this summer. Now, writing for the New Yorker, for a book reviewer, is to be in a job that was held, at various times, by the likes of Dorothy Parker and Edmund Wilson. It is to the kind of book reviewing I do as the Supreme Court is to a traffic judge in Williamson County, Texas. So much much envy goes into my overall view of James Wood.

And of course there is the problem he has with ‘hysterical realism,’ his name for what Delillo and Pynchon do. It isn’t really better than the literature of paranoia, which is the phrase by which it used to be earmarked. Wood is one of those English writers, like Martin Amis, who take Saul Bellow as the iconic great American novelist. They love the Essayismus in Bellow, they loved the dialogue with the great dead. They loved the comic turns, and Bellow’s damned familiarity with what C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite – whether in academia, or in the literary salons, or in politics, or even in the Mafia – vide Humboldt’s gift. And I understand that. One of the great things about Bellow is his confidence that the writer is one of the power elite. There’s not the anxious social sense that academic critics show about that elite, that resentment barely disguised by an ill digested Marxism. However, because Bellow’s territory is so much the Power Elite ego, his sense of what is happening in America is always a bit shaky. That phrase of his I love – the ‘moronic inferno’ – is exactly the skyscraper office view of what is happening on the street. There is no place in Bellow for voices from the moronic inferno to be heard.

Which separates him absolutely from someone like Delillo. Delillo’s worst book, Cosmopolis, is an attempt to beam up to the billionaire mindset. His great novels, however, are all about going into and out of the moronic inferno. It is a babel of technospeaks in there, and he has an exact ear for them. There’s a beautiful passage in Running Dog in that contemplates the military fetish for the names of hardware, a fetish that has mutated and flourished beyond reckoning in this software addled country; but that is merely one of the hundreds of intricately fetishized lingos, from gangsta rap to self help which Delillo loves to sample. Bellow, of course, felt those lingos creeping up the skyscraper as a threat, as the very heart of the moronic, that tongue grafitti threatening our very ability to think about life and death and meaning. And Wood follows Bellow here. This is why Wood can remark that Underworld is a failure and pen a glowing review about the last Coetzee novel, Diary of a Bad Year – which was a truly embarrassing mess. If you have absorbed Bellow as your model contemporary novelist, you are going to be a sucker for stories in which old men making sweeping humanistic gestures while entertaining the hots for younger women.

Coetzee’s novel is about a novelist with the initials J.C. (which is a reviewer’s opportunity to make English class clucking sounds, gravely informing the reader that we are not to confuse J.C. with the author – why, it is all a clever fiction! Wood, of course, doesn’t miss that opportunity) who writes a series of essays deploring the war in Iraq, America in general, and advancing some remarkably dumb views about biology and evolution to explain his take on feminism. He also writes some personal essays (“Class: write an essay about your encounter with a tree! in five hundred words or less”). These essays are put at the top of the page – at the bottom, at the footnote level, a drama takes place. J.C. notices a woman in his condo at the laundry with a divine behind. He makes friends with her, in a creepy way, by taking her on as a secretary. Her boyfriend is an investment banker, a spouter of neo-liberal arguments, and in general a thug who comes up with a scheme for robbing J.C. of all his Nobel Prize loot using J.C.'s fondness for his girlfriend. After the banker and the girlfriend go to J.C.’s apartment for a celebration of the publication of his essay book, the girlfriend breaks up with Mr. Thug – it turns out that he got drunk and said mean things to J.C. Unheard of, that. There is an implication in that breakup that the young woman has "learned to be herself" through association with the lecherous but impotent old writer. That fantasy of both lusting after a young beauty and improving her mind somehow makes me cringe - of fantasies of beauty and the old beast, I much prefer the final scene of The Blue Angel.

All of this is written in something like a non-style. To praise it (and somehow, I can’t believe that Wood actually liked Diary of a Bad Year, just as I can’t believe that he didn’t recognize the greatness of Underworld), Wood has to adjust our expectations. So this is how he begins:

“There are people who think of J. M. Coetzee as a cold writer, and he might agree, or pretend to agree. “If he were a warmer person he would no doubt find it all easier: life, love, poetry,” he writes of himself in his memoir “Youth.” “But warmth is not in his nature.” The protagonist of Coetzee’s new novel, “Diary of a Bad Year” (Viking; $24.95), is, like his creator, an aging South African novelist resident in Australia, who muses at one moment that his father surely thought him a selfish child “who has turned into a cold man.” His art, he laments, is “not great-souled.” It lacks “generosity, fails to celebrate life, lacks love.”

Yet this is the cold air just beyond the reach of a fire. Coetzee’s chaste, exact, ashen prose may look like the very embers of restraint, but it is drawn, again and again, to passionate extremity: an uneducated gardener forced to live like an animal off the South African earth (“Life & Times of Michael K”); a white woman dying of cancer while a black township burns, and writing, in her last days, a letter of brutal truths to her daughter (“Age of Iron”); a white woman raped on her farm by a gang of black men, and impregnated (“Disgrace”); a recent amputee, the victim of a road accident that mangled a leg, helpless in his Adelaide apartment, and awkwardly in love with his Croatian nurse (“Slow Man”). Coetzee seems compelled to test his celebrated restraint against subjects and ideas whose extremity challenges novelistic representation.”

With that exciting beginning, you figure there is going to be action galore in Diary of a Bad Year, observed with a fine anatomist’s eye. But where Wood writes cold, one should not think cool – one should think, “as in oatmeal that has been left out for a day.”

In the review, Wood barely covers the tendentious job he has laid out for himself. The job is, how to make a silk purse out of a cold dead sow's ear. He takes the obvious flaws that he should be pondering as a reviewer, and weaves them into an appreciation of the artistry of the writer – so artful that the awfulness on hand is simply an indication of the greater genius! Thus you get something like this:

The central characters of both “Elizabeth Costello,” which appeared in 2003, and “Diary of a Bad Year” are novelists, and novelists in the act of dispensing strong opinions. Elizabeth Costello has been giving public lectures, which are reproduced in the novel; the protagonist of Coetzee’s new book has been asked by his German publisher to contribute to a volume of essays that will gather the “Strong Opinions” (this is its proposed title) of six prominent contemporary writers. Many of the protagonist’s essays are reproduced in the novel we are reading. Naturally, the reader wants to make Coetzee’s novels confessional, to claim these opinions as his rightful children. But Coetzee explicitly complicates the question of his paternity, so that these books read less like confessions than like books about confession.
Lest that sound dry, it should be said that “Diary of a Bad Year” is an involving, argumentative, moving novel: if not quite “great-souled,” then deep-souled. Coetzee smudges the traces of his authorial DNA by using a framing device that both hints at and disavows connections between the novelist protagonist and the actual writer. The South African novelist at the center of the new book is teasingly called “Señor C” by his neighbors, but he is by no means identical to J. M. Coetzee, who was born in South Africa in 1940, taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Australia, and won the Nobel Prize in 2003. Señor C is six years older than the Nobel Laureate, often writes elegantly and sometimes a bit demotically (“Most scientists can’t write for toffee,” he claims at one point), and expresses regret that people think of him not as a novelist but as “a pedant who dabbles in fiction.” Distinguished he may be, but he feels obscure, overlooked, worn out. Stockholm has not, apparently, called. He lives in an apartment block in Sydney, where he meets Anya, an attractive young neighbor who is currently unemployed but used to be a receptionist in “the hospitality industry.” Like the elderly Nathan Zuckerman, he is uselessly afflicted with desire, and smothers his lust by asking Anya if she would like to type up the “strong opinions” he has been speaking into a Dictaphone. After a formulaic demurral—as in bank-heist movies, the last important addition to the team always spends a scene resisting—she agrees. Anya calls him Señor C because, it seems, she had thought that he was a South American novelist. Señor C’s strong opinions are divided into thirty-one brief chapters, with titles like “On intelligent design” and “On Guantanamo Bay.” They are a confounding mixture of the banal, the extreme, and the scintillating. Inevitably, his attacks on George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Guantánamo, though righteous, have a slightly overinhabited quality, as if too many other people had been squatting in their public rooms. Coetzee, I suspect, wants us to reflect on the differences in rhetoric between public and private ideas. A passage like the following, from a chapter entitled “On terrorism,” sounds like a bull with a bullhorn, and is very different in tone from the more feline Coetzee, who would surely rather have his claws pulled than commit to print the phrase “It’s déjà vu all over again”.

What to say about that magnificent, ass covering sentence: “Coetzee, I suspect, wants us to reflect on the differences in rhetoric between public and private ideas?” It is perfect James Wood. There’s the stubbornness of the resistant text, which indeed consists of page after page of subdeb punditry – and there is the higher purpose, surely a higher purpose than mere vanity, that it serves when thrown at us in the guise of a novel, trimmed out with a halfhearted story that, in all, doesn't even make for a decent anecdote. Whereas the feline Delillo would simply be tossed about for 'It’s déjà vu all over again', with Coetzee one is witnessing the very birth of irony in this millionth reiteration of the Yogi Berra phrase.

Huh. I didn’t mean to go on so long, but obviously Wood’s tastes bug me – and more, his tastelessness bugs me. Wood’s reputation is partly built on his stern, prosecutorial essays on the likes of Delillo, Toni Morrison, etc., but I believe his rep rests, as well, on his appreciation of the old guys. I don’t think he is untalented as a critic – I liked the essay on War and Peace from the week before, although I did think he went on a little too much with the idea of Tolstoy’s characters being warmer blooded than the rest of us. But I do not at all like the praise of the second rate. Diary of a Bad Year was badly conceived, the essays are poorly written, and the machinations with the characters are cartoonishly dumb. Frustratingly, I don’t feel like Wood would disagree with that judgment – the hedging in the review is all too blatant, an exercise in misdirecting the reader. That, that I find to be disheartening. Far better Wood the prosecutor of hysterical realism than Wood, the sycophant of Great and the Good.

intellectuals and burning libraries

Hazlitt likes to tell you what loves and what he hates. He begins On Reason and Imagination with a declaration of hate right off the bat: “I hate people who have no notion of anything but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea.” The critical parameters, here, are ultimately parameters of feeling. But this is not to say that the parameters are straightforward, or that feeling is direct. Passion has its ruses as well as reason does; in fact, it has more of them. It operates by contact, but contact is unpredictable. This is why the case isn’t settled by this Hazlitt’s statement of interest. For instance, the hatred here is about a certain perverse form of love – the love of a certain type for generalities and forms and creeds. And the hatred produces hierarchy – one type is hated more than another. Although what isn’t hated is the typical object of the obsession defining the type that is hated. So we are already in the mouth of the labyrinth.

Hazlitt wrote On Reason and Imagination, according to the edition edited by Duncan Wu, probably before April, 1823. This was almost a decade after Hazlitt had suffered the terrible blow of Bonaparte’s defeat. Hazlitt had experienced his era gather around him like a nightmare. He ‘set out in life with the French Revolution’ – his father was a Unitarian minister, within that dissenting set that welcomed the Revolution and formed the radical wing of the Whig party. For Hazlitt, Napoleon’s rise was symbolic of the bursting of the chains of class that the Revolution was all about, and the war system that arose in England, about which he is marvelously cutting and incisive, was symbolic of the essentially sneaking character of reaction. It was, at the base, a spy system put in place by a corrupt elite that saw its interest in speaking the rhetoric of liberty in order to have a cover under which it could settle down to its druthers, which consisted in cutting the throat of liberty and using massive debt to create an economic order that would favor it. Hazlitt had seen the generation of radicals that had at first welcomed the Revolution – Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth – become lackies of the established order. His revulsion at this betrayal throbs through his work. But he also saw the radical side on which he cast himself increasingly turn to a rebarbative, utilitarian vocabulary, a rejection of the ‘unbought graces of life’ not because they were really bought by the sweat of the peasant and the worker, but because they were graces.

The problem that Hazlitt confronts in On Reason and Imagination is with his own side; it is a characteristic problem of the liberal intellectual. That intellectual finds that his radical sympathies push him to support groups and parties that are otherwise monopolized by his very antithesis – people who have no more sympathy with the imagination than your average businessman. But where the businessman dismisses imagination as a clog on greed, the radical considers it a serious mark of moral depravity, which one must sacrifice for the revolution. This crude demand provides the subtext for the comedy in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, with the obsolete liberal, Stepan Verkhovensky, discovering to his horror that his son, Pyotr, is an out and out nihilist – an existential philistine, so to speak. Herzen scented this same thing in Bazarov, the radical in Turgenev’s Father and Sons, although Herzen came at this as a socialist, while Dostoevsky, of course, was having his fun as a reactionary. The same relationship – the initial courtship, the alignment of beautiful thinker and hard body radical, the disillusionment and flight – structured the fellow traveler phenomena of the thirties. It is Gide and the Stalinists, or – again on the comic level – Ambrose Silk, in Evelyn Waugh’s Put out more Flags, and Parsnip and Pimpernell – the Auden/Isherwood pair of fashionable radicals. In actual fact, Auden and Isherwood bolted the poltical parties, too. What it is about the liberal intellectual, what it is is this: wherever he goes, he brings literature with him. And that is irredeemably of the ancien regime, irredeemably privileged to the party utilitarian. And if you can’t loot or burn it, at least you can demand that the intellectual give it up in some way – disparage it, assure us all of its essentially useless and valueless nature, of its contingency, of its not mattering. All of this futurity can be seen in Hazlitt’s essay, a preemptive strike in favor of the imagination. I’ll go on from here in another post.