Our next prez

LI has gotten used to being a no future guy. Yesterday, however, I had one of those magic Obama moments that seem to infuriate those who don’t see anything magical about Obama at all. A friend sent me the upcoming Time cover, which has a great pic of our next prez.

Our next prez. Is that harp music I hear in the background?

It isn’t that the Great Fly’s legacy will vanish as the credits play November 8th. But the very idea of Obama being the U.S. president is so startling, on so many levels – so non-inevitable – that I even had a fleeting sense that the future contained me. Not something I have, well, ever felt about living in these here states.

However, the best post op analysis of what the last five months gave us in terms of a primary is Susan Faludi’s op ed piece today. I like Faludi novelistic sociology – it is in the best tradition of the Chicago Hangin’ out school, plus some symbolic interactionism well hidden from the reader, back in the guts of the mechanism – but I was not convinced by what I read of her post 9/11 thesis. It suffered from an acute lack of knowledge about the South. At the Great Fly’s back are not the captivity stories of Hawthorne’s 17th century New England, but the great dispossession of the Southeast Indian nations of the early nineteenth century. The smokin’ gun of the naughties has been Jacksonian racism, lock stock n barrel. The multiple and multiplying disasters that has brought down on the heads of those who engaged in it are still underappreciated in the Press, that playroom for the post frat Ivy league crowd.

I was surprised, frankly, that Faludi went off track, since her book on White masculinity in the 90s was so beautifully in synch with the time. Reaching back to the themes in that book, Faludi’s piece on why Clinton became a more attractive candidate as she became a shooter and a drinker, as she pandered to the gun totin’ gas guzzler crowd, resonated with my experience – I too, have thought of Clinton as the archetype of the punitive liberal, always looking for that edge where people are experiencing unallowed pleasure – an advocate of censorship from hip hop to computer games, always trying to make us a village – of the damned. And then there was Clinton the evil, the enabler of our run in Iraq. But the Clinton that sprang free and boxed Obama in the primaries was a much better figure all the way around. She had the humility of a great actress – she no longer worried about her ‘position’ or role, but put on personas as needed. The American presidential election, even now, as we watch the governing class transform itself into a kleptocracy, has its customs, one of which is that the candidates must ritually humiliate themselves. For a few decades after WWII, when decorum seized the elite, the process of humiliation was, to a degree, stifled. And of course the Republicans hate that whole humiliation thing – they can dish it out, but they can’t take it. However, the GOP long ago let the genie out of the bottle, and I think that even Republican candidates – as Mitt Romney’s agony showed – are now required to prostrate themselves.

One can go into the process with a pained look on one’s face, like Kerry, or one can lose all inhibitions, like Clinton. Obama supposed ‘elitism’ is all about his refusal to prostrate himself. Obama is right – he is not an actor, like Clinton, and racial codes in this country leave him little choice than to rely on his essential dignity. The thing is, he has essential dignity. He has essential dignity. My God. It is a rare trait. So, if I were Obama, I would stock up on the collected films of Laurence Olivier to figure out how to maximize his own actor’s persona. (although perhaps not this picture) Clinton obviously figured out that Joan Crawford was her l’wa – who knows what will come out of her mouth next? Some confession that she always thought George Wallace was cute? While Obama can’t and shouldn’t go so low, I think he could use Olivier’s sense of balance for the part he is about to play in this campaign against the rapidly decaying McCain.

killing a mouseketeer for the good of the state

"I'm Mrs. Lifestyles of the rich and famous
(You want a piece of me)
I'm Mrs. Oh my God that Britney's Shameless"

The news stories about Britney are increasingly grim – as those of you who faithfully follow People, Us, and the National Star know quite well. As you’ll remember, the hardest working mousketeer has been prosecuted for not seeing “the harm in working and being a mama”. Quite right, but as soon as she revolted, the machinery of oppression came into play, and she was publicly kidnapped. First act: her children were wrenched from her when she showed them some of the fun side of life (which involved the kind of minor pecadillos – not using the safety seat, etc. - that drive the denizens of the gated community crazy, for there is nothing the G.C. believes more than cocooning its brats in an environment of permanent and ruthlessly enforced invulnerability, hence the monstrous SUV, the soccer mom car par excellence, hence the crammed prisons of these here States, hence the insatiable borrowing to keep a country whose main manufacture is serial war afloat), and were handed over to her talentless and Tartufian ex. The court system, that cat’s paw of patriarchy, did its part to shame and injure Britney just as she was showing – finally – some rock n roll promise. Second act: after her kids are kidnapped, she is kidnapped – in this case, by her parents, who are given the power to control this twenty eight year olds assets before she pisses them away – a process that she could do for the next forty years and never reach the bottom of her cash pile. In the timeless fashion of stardom, when the star threatens the money machine, the star is plunged into a psych ward, then dried out by the use of available patriarchal agents, and finally made abject and humble by the same media that has eagerly profited by their much photographed fall. This isn’t hypocrisy, it is factory work, it is plucking the chickens before you cut them up and plasticwrap them. Which of course happened to Brit. No more flashing her pussy, no more harmless Vegas pranks.

Well, the symbol of everything naughties is succumbing to the pressure, as it was obvious from the get go that she would. This terribly sad dispatch from the Associated Press makes LI, for one, itch to start an Amnesty International campaign: surely Britney is being held hostage by the worst aspects of capitalism in the era of the Great Fly:

“Britney Spears will be allowed expanded visits with her two young sons following a low-key child-custody hearing in Los Angeles.

Commissioner Scott Gordon at the Los Angeles Superior Court expanded her visitation rights in a move which will allow Spears to see her children for longer periods, while her former husband Kevin Federline retains custody.

Mr Gordon closed the hearing to reporters moments after the two stars were sworn in following a request by Spears' lawyer Stacy Phillips.

The 26-year-old pop star's appearance at the hearing, which was held behind closed doors, was a far cry from the spectacle of previous appearances.
A sombre Spears, wearing a brown polka-dot dress and white sweater, arrived early for the hearing flanked by her parents and lawyers.

Dozens of people witnessed Spears' courthouse arrival as a front-seat passenger in a white Land Rover, but it did not compare to the circus that surrounded the troubled pop star's January trip to the courthouse, when she arrived in a black minidress and gold platform shoes, then left before the hearing began.
Federline, 30, was granted custody of the couple's two children - two-year-old Sean Preston and one-year-old Jayden James - at that hearing.

The court heard police were called to Spears' home after she refused to relinquish one of the boys to a Federline bodyguard.

During a break in proceedings, Spears left the courtroom walking hand-in-hand with lawyer Blair Berk to a lift before returning minutes later.
Outside court, Mark Vincent Kaplan, Federline's lawyer, said the longer visits were "recognition of the progress that has been made". Spears smiled briefly but did not address questions as she left the hearing.”

Ah, the prisoner smiles briefly to the unctuous photographers, may they burn in hell. This is what happens when, in a flash of good sense, she refused to turn her children over to the ex’s hired thugs. Oh, on this ruin they will no doubt build somemoney making structure, but remember – a Mouseketeer was sacrificed to build the foundation.
Although I am hoping she takes the opportunity afforded by the court to flee somewhere. I’d recommend Sweden.

disgusting fancy

Among the scholars who are doing the history of science outside of the Whiggish framework - the latter referring, of course, to Herbert Butterworth’s famous phase about the framework that sees the history of science as essentially a progress - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s The Leviathan and the Air Pump is one of the most cited texts. It focuses on the New Learning in 17th century England, which was in many ways an extension of the Baconian experimental impulse. Robert Boyle was not only the premier experimenter, but, more than Bacon, the natural philosopher who set the rules for experimentation.

One of Shapin and Schaffer’s ideas is that the experimental method, depending on witnesses for its veracity, evolves a prose style of witness. Shapin and Schaffer point to Thomas Sprat’s injunctions about the proper mode of representation in his history of the Royal Society – which was, in effect, also a polemic on behalf of the society. Sprat enumerates the inveterate injury done by rhetorical ornament, which was at first the “admirable instruments in the hands of Wise Men” but now have turned disgusting – “They make the Fancy disgust the best things, if they come sound and unadorn’d; they are in open defiance against Reason, professing not to hold much correspondence with that, but with its Slaves, the Passions; they give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching to consist with right practice.” In fact, as Sprat enumerates the faults of the ornate style, he himself falls into a Passion – “For now I am warmed with this just Anger” – but, apparently, this Slave is true to reason, rather than its betrayer. And although Sprat sees the ornaments of rhetoric as being almost beyond reform, he does make a very Protestant recommendation: “They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before that of Wits or Scholars.” [Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, II,117-118]

Shapin has written a biographical sketch of Boyle that picks at what he was like as a person – and how one would, at this distance, ever found out. Born of a rich, rapacious pioneer of the land grab game in Ireland, an ennobled Elizabethan nabob who at one point might have been the richest man in the Kingdom, Boyle’s father despised Ireland – which was the source of his wealth – yet had his children taught Gaelic. Boyle himself certainly retained in his own voice the Irish English intonation, one that his tutors at Eton never could extinguish. More than that, Boyle he was a stutterer. According to his own account, Boyle picked up the stuttering habit when he was a boy from mocking the speech of others. Shapin imagines this might be Boyle mocking the Irish English of others.

While his elder brother was one of the great rakes at Charles II’s court, Boyle was an Anglican of a species now long extinct – an enthusiastic Anglican. Recent work on Boyle has emphasized this aspect of his intellectual character. While maintaining a corpuscular philosophy and advocating for the experimental method, Boyle wrapped these concerns in a general world view that allowed him to attack both Catholics and atheists for a wrongheaded view of God – both, in his opinion, being all too eager to pull God into his creation, and thus fumbling the very root of divinity: God’s exteriority to the world. It is that exteriority that allows God to be a supreme chooser – he can chose the way the world will be because he is not caught within it.

Boyle was an Anglican and directed his Free Enquiry, as well as his other philosophical and theological treatises, against both the Catholics and the ‘atheists” – the latter comprehending all who would make God immanent in nature, instead of standing outside it. But his brothers, as Shapin points out, were notorious Restoration rakes – the very type to be attracted to the libertine philosophy.

While the language of natural philosophy, for Sprat, is going to cast off the Wit’s devious metaphors and the disgusting fancies of the scholar in order to embrace the language of the artisan, Boyle, who was more noble than Merchant, had his own problems with taking the language of the vulgar for the instrument of the wisdom. For where, after all, are the vulgar getting their notions? Are they educated witnesses? Is there any way to escape ambiguity – which is, in its way, as disgusting as metaphor, insofar as it is not the plain way to truth:

“I have often look’d upon it as an unhappy thing, and prejudicial both to philosophy and physic, that the word nature hath been so frequently, and yet so unskillfully employ’d, by all sorts of men. For the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use made of it, without sufficiently attending to its different significations, render many of the expressions wherein ‘tis employed, either unintelligible, improper or false. I, therefore, heartily wish, that philosophers,m and other leading me, would, by common consent, introduce some more significant, and less ambiguous terms and expressions, in the room of the licentious word nature; and the forms of speech that depend on it: or at least decline the use of it, as much as conveniently they can…”

Boyle then gives 8 rules for avoiding the word: 1. Use the word God for natura naturans; 2. use the word essence, or quiddity (tho a barbarous term); 3 “If what is meant by the word nature” is what ‘belongs to a living creature at its nativity” – say, “the animal is born so” – or say that a thing has been generated such. 4. for internal motion – say that the body moves spontaneously; 5. use – “the settled course of things”; 6 for the “aggregate of powers belonging to a body” use constitution, temper, mechanism or complex of the essential properties or qualities; 7. when used for universe, use the word world, or universe; and 8. “If, instead of using the word nature, taken for either a goddess, or a kind of semi-deity; we wholly reject, or very seldom employ it.”

With those hand rules to hand, Boyle can then confidently enter into the thickets of Aristotelianism, before doing battle with the vulgar.

the vulgar nature of Nature

In 1686, Robert Boyle published the “Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature”. Michael Hunter and Edward Davis make the claim that this is one of the essential texts of the Scientific Revolution. In their essay on the making of the text, Hunter and Davis quote one of Boyle’s “protégés”, Scottish physician David Abercromby, who wrote: I therefore look upon this work as the new system of a new philosophy which fundamentally overthrows the foundation – namely, Nature – of all views hitherto held in philosophical matters.” [219] Others, of course, have cast doubt on the very idea that there was a Scientific Revolution. Myself, I prefer the term New Learning. Certainly there was an institutional revolution – no longer were the virtuosi independent players, like wandering minstrels and alchemists. The Universities were still stacked with Aristotelians and bloodletters, and the real action shifted to the Royal Society, or the semi Royal academies in France (although in France, this was supplemented by a correspondence culture which formally associated savants which doesn’t have a parallel in England).

We can go all the way back to the Cratylus to find distinctions being made between speakers of the same language. Among the humanists, the distinction between learned speech and vulgar speech was simply a reality – learning was published in Latin – or it referred to an occult jargon that supposedly could be attributed to traditions that went back to antiquity. Antiquity was the truthmaker, to use a fashionable term from contemporary analytic philosophy. But as the New Learning was about casting off the shackles of antique learning, this distinction would no longer do (although, of course, I am working with clear cut lines that were, in actuality, less clear cut than one could tell from the bravado of New Learning’s sages. Respect for the ancients was not so easily overcome as all that).

So when Boyle writes his enquiry, we are faced with a new set of coordinates for separating ordinary speech from “philosophical” speech. Since Boyle was, on his odd days, a corpuscularian, and a round promoter of the Royal society, one might think that he had a sneaking affection for Gassendi’s re-discovery of atomism. In fact, it is the use of ‘nature’ in the Epicurean sense – the vulgar chatter of the esprits forts – against which Boyle shoots many of his arrows.

As pointed out in my post on the total social fact, inquiry into such phenomena must cut across different discursive spheres. Certainly those spheres are more widely separate in modern societies than they are in early modern ones, not to speak of the premoderns. But the reasons for the drifting apart of the divisions of intellectual labor are, themselves, total social facts. In the seventeenth century, the use of the word ‘nature’ in the Universities, in the circles of the libertines, in churches and among the natural philosophers of the new learning was more closely tied together than, for instance, is the use of the word matter today among the vulgar and the physicists – or among economists and sociologists. Boyle’s discussion of ‘nature’, first as used by Aristotle, then as used by the natural philosopher, then as used by the vulgar, exists on the same conceptual plane – or so I would claim – as Theophile’s use of nature in the 1620s. Boyle’s discussion is an attempt to separate those planes, however, within the limits that religion allowed.

So I want to contrast two seemingly disparate texts: Theophile’s Fragments d’un histoire comique – Fragments of a funny story – and Boyle’s text.

PS - this is how Theophile's "novel" begins:

“The ordinary elegance of our writers are approximated in these terms:

“The Aurora, all gold and azure, hung with pearls and rubies, appeared at the gates of the Orient: the stars, shining out with the brightest light, let their pallor be effaced and became, little by little, the color of the sky; animals on the hunt returned to the woods and men to their work; the silence gave place to noise, and the shadows to light…”

And all the rest that the vanity of the makers of books make such a fanfare with, to the applause of an ignorant public.

A discourse must be firm, the meaning in it must be easy and natural, the language expressive and signifying: affections are only softness and artifice, which is never found without effort and confusion. Those petty thefts that are called the imitation of ancient authors, it must be said, are not in our manner. You have to write a la moderne; Demosthenes and Virgil didn’t write in our time, and we can’t write in their century; their books, when they made them, were new, and every day, we make old ones. The invocation of the Muses, for example, of these pagans is profane and ridiculous for us. Ronsard, for the vigor of his mind, and the bareness of his imagination, has a thousand things comparable to the magnificence of the ancient Greeks and Latins, and resembled them better than when he wanted to translate them, and when he pleased himself with counterfeiting them as in that patarcan Cytherea, of the Tymbrean tripod. It seems that he wanted to render himself unknown in order to appear learned, and that he affects the false reputation of a new and bold writer. In these foreign terms, he is unintelligible for a Frenchman; these extravagances only disgust the scholar and confuse the feeble. One calls this fashion of usurping obscure and improper terms a barbarism and crudity, the other pedantry and smugness. For me, I believe that it is Ronsard’s respect and passion for the ancients that made him think that everything that came from them was excellent and to try to glorify himself by imitating them in everything. I know that a prelate, a man of goodness, is imitable by everyone. It is necessary to be chaste like him, charitable and scholarly, if you can. But a courtesan, to imitate his virtue, shouldn’t take up either his style of living nor his dress. One must, like Homer, describe well, but not with his terms nor by his epithets. One should write as he wrote, but not what he wrote. It is a laudable act of devotion, worthy of a beautiful soul to invoke at the beginning of a work the sovereign powers; but the Christians don’t have to do with Apollo nor the Muses, and our verse today, which is not sung on the lyre, shouldn’t be called lyric, no more than the other should be called heroic, because we do not live in the era of heros, and all these monkey sees are neither pleasant nor profitable to the understanding. It is true that the disgust with these superfluities have given birth to another of our vices: for the feeble spirits who the beginning of pilfering has thrown into the métier of the poets, by the discretion they show in avoiding the extreme stereotypes [resdites], already used up by so many centuries, find themselves in a great sterility, and, not being strong enough or clever enough to take advantage of the objects that present themselves to the imagination, believe there is nothing more in poetry than prose matter, and are persuaded that a figure is nothing, and a metaphor, an extravagance. But, as I said, it is day. Thus, these digressions please me, I let my fantasy go, and I do not turn away my pen from whatever thought presents itself. I am conducting an interruptable, diverse conversation here, and not an exact lesson or an oration by the book. I am not scholarly enough nor ambitious enough to try. My book does not claim to oblige the reader, for its design is not that it be read to oblige me and, since it is permitted for him to blame me, permit me to displease him.”

The Great Fly speaks through us all

Straight from the American Id to your heart – a slogan you can take to the bank!

“To manage the slowdown, Las Vegas is revving up an overseas marketing campaign, and in the United States, it is pitching spontaneous Vegas escapes. “Do it without thinking!” says one television spot.”

Isn’t that what the naughties have been all about?
The Great Fly speaks through us all.

Anti-Newtonian times

One of the most ignored sentences in all of science is found in Newton’s Principia, in which he wrote: hypotheses non fingo. Or, I don’t make hypotheses. Philosophy of science, from Newton’s time onward, has pretended that Newton was Descartes, and that he used the Hypothico-Deductive method – and even, in the time of Popper, that science simply rids itself of induction. Of course, Newton was strongly inductionist, seeing himself as Bacon’s successor there, believing that when the numbers finally came out in your description of natural phenomena, you could get rid of the hypothesis; he was not a logick chopper, no Aristotelian he; and was very finicky about dividing conjecture from what he thought was law (in the draft of the Principia, he changed the term hypothesis of motion into law of motion). Newton was entirely consistent in this. When corresponding about his color theory with Pardies, he wrote: “… it is to be observed that the doctrine which I explained concerning concerning refraction and colours, consists only in certain properties of light, without regarding any hypotheses by which those properties might be explained. For the best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiments and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments. For if the possibility of hypotheses is to be the test of the truth and reality of things, I see not how certainty can be obtained in any science; since numerous hypotheses may be devised, which shall seem to overcome new difficulties.”

Newton succinctly outlines the shape and tenor of economics in that last sentence.
LI was oddly reminded of Newton by the mood and reporting of economic news last week. It was perhaps the most absurd misreporting of any phenomena we have seen since April and May 2003, when the reporting from Iraq was pitched on an equally absurd plane. Indeed, the two events are linked. In both, the mathematics differed wildly from the reporting. In 2003, the mathematics involved an absurdly understaffed occupying force; absurd estimates, or non-estimates, of the cost of the occupation; absurd estimates of the Iraqi “contribution” thereto; absurd underestimates, or non-estimates, of re-building the infrastructure. All of which sank into the background as the strummers of euphoria – reporters, spinners, the usual cast of highly paid liars – created a thick text of delusions. A different set of highly paid liars, but a branch of the same general establishment, looked at the numbers churned out last week by the Executive branch and became positively giddy. Why, there was 0.6 percent growth in the GDP in the first quarter! And employment came roaring back to the extend that there was only a drop of 20,000 jobs in April! And inflation has been nipped in the bud by, well, by magic!

One has only to refer to the numbers to see how insane, and how malicious, this chatter is. An 0.6 percent growth rate that is prompted almost wholly by a business inventory buildup would usually not be good news. An inventory buildup is usually announced as: unsold goods. Which leads to the question of why the doggies aren’t eating their dog food. Which would lead one to plunge into other dimensions of the numbers put out by the Commerce department – the drop in earnings; the rising interest rates for credit cards, auto loans, student loans and mortgages, even as the Fed has put a huge pipeline between the money it has borrowed at one rate and the banks that it loans to at a cheaper rate – which is a way of simply giving the banks money, but pretending not to. This is the largest and quickest government bailout of the wealthy in history. It is also one of the most underreported – where is the headline reading: Government gives Hedge Funds unlimited access to Tax Dollars? Those stories, of course, are re-written so that they are properly oblique, and put in the business section, to be read by those in the know. At the same time that we read the financial crisis is over, we also read that the Fed’s new policy is to accept almost anything for collateral – auto loans, student loans. The absurdity of this policy is in stark contrast with the reporting on individuals making deals with lending companies to refinance their houses. There, of course, it is all about keeping up, with the finest and most Tartuffian references to integrity and morality, the need to pay back, and fucking promptly. I enjoy the outraged comments of householders when these stories appear in the Post – they attach to some errant payer, some holder of two mortgages and a downsized position, and compare life stories – their own of rectitude and all the Prot virtues, the errant payer’s one of Roman debauchery on an undeserved credit line. While, all the while, it is the banks, the financial institutions, the “equity management” companies who own the mortgages who are getting the real deal. And not for chump change. It is important, in trying times in the great era of Inequality, to keep the lens on the small farsidish adventures of the ne’erdowells, and away from the biggest giveaway in U.S. history – except to greet Bernanke as a genius for having produced conditions in which excess inventory will fight excess dollars in the world championship of peekaboo inflation.

The numbers point to numbers down the road that will not be euphoric – and will be underreported as usual, although of course you will register them in your stomach, your routines, in the grocery line, in the mail from the power company. Looking at the employment numbers, for instance, one can venture a cautious, Newtonian hypothesis – a midstream thing, used to explain properties, not model them – that the revision of the numbers will add an extra sixty thousand or more to the unemployed number. Of course, Wall Street quants know this. But they also know that it is best not to know it, and – as Newton points out – if you use hypotheses to mold your data, why, you can come up with any picture you want. We are living, truly, in anti-Newtonian times, and in those times, the truth comes out from the tv marionettes only by accident. So LI was pleased that a truth actually came out of the mouth of Hilary Clinton – which must have surprised both the truth and Hilary – when she said, this weekend: “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”

She should know, since her husband makes his whole and entire living being paid to consult with elite opinion to keep that project going.

the total social fact

Levi Strauss’s introduction to Mauss’s collected works contained an important reflection on one of Mauss’s fundamental theoretical innovations: the notion of a “total social fact.” Since LI’s work in progress on happiness deals with one such ‘total social fact’, the emotional customs that are accepted in a given community or society; and since we have been thinking of how these customs have changed as the market-based industrial system became dominant in Western Europe and the U.S. over the 18th and 19th century, we thought a coupla posts on Levi Strauss and Mauss would not only rhyme, but be timely. Our duel with LCC turned us on to Derrida’s persistent attempt to interrogate the semantic force of the “material” in dialectical materialism – which frames his patient unwinding of Marx’s metaphoric of specters, spooks and spirits. It is here that two total social facts overlap: one is the capitalist rationality of constant movement – of commodities, populations, and technologies - governed by the overarching principle that all agents seek pleasure, and all pleasure is defined by an increase of goods; the other is an older social fact, in which reciprocities are not, in fact, governed by the pleasure principle, but by a construct founded on what an anthropologist have called the sacred, defined by the supposed connection between a worldly temporal power – the sovereign - and the cosmic principle(s) that makes for life. The latter, of course, became the hallmark of the savage in the 18th century, but that savagery was never exorcized by capitalist rationality, which instead chose to either ignore its continued existence within the social whole, under the pretense that it existed in the interstices, or to reduce it – demystify it – as, indeed, the Savage’s form of rational choice. Of course, the savage in this one sided dialogue has no voice in the matter – as Derrida shows, Marx and his opponents all agree on the project of doing away with superstition – and yet, if the savage did have a voice, he or she would recognize pleasure, or the utilitarian’s happiness, to be, indeed, the kind of spirit, or spectre, or mana, whose infinite permutations are embodied in the savage’s cosmology, with all the marks of such a character – the impossibility of anchoring it to one place in the system, the rituals of supplementation that endlessly attempt to make up for its failure, and the curiously rigid theology that has grown up around defining it to a hair’s breadth without ever really explaining it at all – it exists in that breathless space between the self-evident and the impossible. In Marx’s work, the polemical and political texts pull away from the economic work just at this point. To put it simply, the revolutionary moment, which is the moment at which the alienation produced in the capitalist system reaches a saturation point in which it bursts asunder all the social bonds, is impossible to reconcile with the totalizing system of ‘material interests’ that are outlined in the economic work. They work in two different frameworks.

Well, this is a thing to return to later. Now, here, out of the kindness of LI’s heart, is a translation of the key grafs in Levi Strauss’s description of the total social fact.

“One could even say that it [the notion of the total social fact] commands them [Mauss’s preoccupations] since, like them but in a more inclusive and systematic fashion, the notion proceeds with the same care to define social reality; but: to define the social as the reality. Now, the social is not real except in as much as it is integrated into a system, and here we find the first aspect of the notion of the total fact: “After having forcibly a little too much divided and abstracted the social, it is necessary for sociologists to attempt to recompose it in its entirety.” But the total fact does not succeed in being such by the simple reintegration of discontinuous aspects: familial, technical, economic, juridical, religious, under whichever one of which one could be tempted to apprehend it exclusively. It is necessary as well that it is incarnated in an individual experience, and this from two different points of view: firstly in a individual history that permits to ‘observe the conduct of total beings, and not divided into functions”[facultés]; next in what we would love to call (in rediscovering the archaic sense of a term whose application in the present case is evident) an anthropology, that is to say, a system of interpretation giving account simultaneously of what is physical, physiological, psychic and sociological about all the conduits [toutes les conduits] : “The study alone of this fragment of our life which is our life in society is not sufficient.”

The total social fact thus presents itself with a three dimensional character: it must make coincide the literal sociological dimension with its multiple synchronic aspects; the historical dimension, or the diachronic; and at last the physio-psychological dimension. Thus, it is only with individuals that this triple relationship can take place. If one is attached to this “study of the concrete which is complete”, one must necessarily perceive that “what is true is not the prayer or the law, but the Melanesian of such and such an island, Rome, Athens.”

About which, more in a post to come.

birthdays of the LI-osphere

LI wants to congratulate our far flung correspondent, Mr. T from NYC, on crashing the barrier into middle age - middle age will never be the same again! In the above pic, Mr. T.'s son is trying to get dad to shut up. Ah, I can tell this is going to be a lifelong process!

Happy birthday!
And of course this:

And, of course, this:

When questioned on his views
On the crux of lifes philosophies
He had but these few clear and simple words to say

I am going, I am going
Any which way the wind may be blowing
I am going, I am going
Where streams of whiskey are flowing

go to another party/and hang myself

It should be noted that the “third way” – the idea that left/liberal parties would adopt rightwing policies, nourish a wildly wealthy oligarchy, and then achieve popularity managing our consequently affluent lifestyles by superbly clever triangulating – has, predictably, led to the mass extinction of Socialist parties in Europe. There is no longer a leftist option in the UK or Italy – and in Germany, it is in the death throes. In France the left is riven by the struggle between the third way parasites and nostalgia.

Of course, the whole idea was insane from the beginning. To believe that one would protect and nourish a system of vast inequality is to believe that the people on the top will not use their money to enlarge and entrench their advantages. It was a fairy tale for feebs. It got a wonderful press, however, the media having long ago become the most reliable tool of the wealthy. And if you destroy all remnants of a traditional leftist program for a generation, you eventually remove it from the collective memory – it becomes the heirloom of outliers, of academic enthusiasts, of the millionaire revolutionary, the tourists to Chavez land and the like. In other words, it becomes something like high fashion – existing in no relation whatsoever to the vast mass of the populace.

So, the end of the Blair witch project arrived, and predictably, New Labour finished its destruction of Labour by thinning the party to the point that it may go to the happy hunting ground inhabited by Britain’s Liberal party – into the memory hole of history. Blair and Asquith – now there’s a ripe combo for the history books. Somehow, what New Labour had to offer turned the stomachs of the population: a corrupt gang of incompetent neo-imperialists, with the taint of Saudi bagmen and other mysterious sources of billionaire money, the grand producers of a social attitude that would make it impossible to finance the necessary public investment that actually would make Labour significant, rather than popular in a suburban pocket election, an enterprise that refused to put the boot into the House of Lords when it had a chance, the party of the authoritarian attitude towards the human right to smoke dope or access information about the workings of the State - the whole ghastly machine has come crashing down. This is the direct result of letting Blair have his last run. One wonders if the Labour poobahs rue having let the vanity of that disgusting creature overrule common sense? But then, it was a conspiracy of vanity – the poobahs of ‘Labour’ without the ‘New’ are now a dinosaur’s age, and Third Way-ers cast their lots with and made their fortunes on reheated Thatcherism, so they were in no position to see that vanity was leading them to a big fall.

The signs of the times are not good – the first openly fascist party in 70 years has taken power in Italy, with the mayor of Rome giving the fascist salute; an open racist has won the London mayoralty election, and the defenders of ‘tolerance’ and ‘enlightenment’ are also still defending their participation in the indefensible Iraq war. The war was, in foreign policy, just the kind of escamotage Blair produced in domestic policy – a now you see it, now you don’t surrender to the vilest impulses of the right, wrapped in the appropriate pop references and smirky nostalgia for the enlightenment “left”. The decents have the reach and influence of a planter’s mole on the buttocks of the behemoth, but they gather, in their collective crapulence, all the energies, all the hysterical rhetoric, all the contradictions, all the mock Trot gestures, that made New Labour such an obscenity. The combination of an economic slowdown and right wing racism, sure to be a popular card, are just unfolding their tender shoots.

The death of the party
came as no surprise


PS: there’s an excellent post by Yves Smith about the recent Milken Conference thrusts a little proctologist’s scope into the sites where the press attitude, politics and finance come together – the kind of places that loved to invite Blair to talk, and that Blair loved to talk to. Contrast Smith’s honesty with, say, the NYT reporter’s own description of the conference. It should also be pointed out how the crimes of the wealthy are normalized by the press. Imagine the NYT sending a reporter to the Pablo Escobar Conference. Wouldn’t happen. Yet of course the Milken Conference was organized by a convicted criminal, who was able to defend his considerable gains from seizure by the government only because – he used his leverage.

Here’s the first two grafs:


I am still recovering from the Milken Conference, and unlike my fellow blog panelists Paul Kedrosky, Felix Salmon and Mark Thoma, have not written any posts on particular sessions. In part, that was because in my other life as a consultant, I am well aware of the dangers of relying on memory even though mine is pretty good, and I had decided to listen rather than take notes.

But the other reason was in almost all the sessions has a strong element of overt pressure on the speakers to maintain an upbeat tone, combined with repeated reinforcement of Republican/Chicago School of Economics ideology. Normally I would not deem that sort of thing worthy of mention if it were a minor and only occasional element of the program; indeed it would have been valuable if other views had been tolerated and some sparks flew. No, the private sector/deregulation cheerleading was pervasive and baldfaced, and made it hard for me to sort out signal from noise. There were enough cases where I knew the data and knew it to be misrepresented so as to call a lot of what I was hearing into question.

On the idea that conservatives are a happy lot

My editor at the Statesman has been kind enough to shoot me the many unreviewable books about happiness which come in the mail for him. They have been churning and burning off the presses lately – once again, LI is ahead of the curve! (put your hands in the air like you just don't care!)

Of course, LI might be as against the curve as a hot and horny salmon facing a concrete dam, given our goals and assumptions. Everybody, it seems, thinks happiness is a good thing.

One of the books is by a conservative egg head named Arthur Brooks. We tossed the book when we noticed a footnote to a blog post by Jonah Goldberg. We don’t have infinite patience. However, Brooks does make a big deal out of a standard right wing chestnut. Since the seventies, Pew Research has found that Republicans, and conservatives generally, are more likely to say they are happy than Dems, liberals or independents. Pew Research helpfully broke this out by income, so that we aren’t being mislead here by the fact that your hedonic gradient goes up as your income takes you into the upper percentiles. Rather, Pew contends that the big factor is religiosity.

The usual liberal conclusion is that those who want a better regulated financial system and the legalization of gay marriages are more sensitive to the unhappiness of others, as in wishing for a more just and equitable system, for which we bleed. While those who are afraid that socialism is going to creep into the medical system and that we are going to cut and run in Iraq are simply self involved bubble children.

LI, however, sees the hedonic gap as a precursor, a little light, that maybe we aren’t alone in wanting to throw off the conjunction of the happiness norm and our Lebensordnung. In fact, it might be that the assumption that our social arrangements are all about making us happy could be in decline.

As is obvious, over the last two years I’ve been hammering away at happiness triumphant (which is a little like one little termite working on the toe of the Colossus of Rhodes – but eventually, all Colossi fall). I am firmly of the belief that our social arrangements should not be judged on whether they make us happy. Instead of a scale of well being, I would like to see a scale of passional being. Instead of continuing to meekly submit to an order of life that points us all to the synapse linking happiness and more, and urging us to have our little chemicals make that leap en masse and permanently – every day is Christmas in Serotoninville! – I’d like that monkey business overturned, before it wipes out all the monkeys.

My fellow liberals – ask not if you are happy, but if you are in love.

God's curse on em

Mission accomplished day. 50 American soldiers killed in April. Reports in the NYT say 450 some Iraqis have died in battles so far in Sadr City, which means about 800 to 1,000. So perhaps one life in Florida is nothing, but still – today LI thinks about Deborah Jeane Palfrey, a woman mercilessly hounded by a criminal Justice department, ridiculously charged under the RICO act, and so convicted in a kangaroo court by a local Torquamada who got his jollies bullying old prostitutes. Meanwhile, the Johns are forever free, of course, to visit prostitutes again. The old game of threatening them, beating them, killing them, America's number one sport, goes on and on.

Whether she hung herself or was murdered, what happened to her was a disgrace. LI is scraping the bottom of the barrel for the language of indignation. It is not that we want to describe or analyze – no, we want to hurl, to throw. Sticks and stones. The word, thrown out of the mouth at the right time by the right person, can cripple. But we who stand outside of bubbleville, the Closed Gate Communities of the kleptocracy, can hurl any words we want – they won’t get through.

The NYT has a media smirky headline for Ms Palfrey’s death that says everything about those bottom feeders: The Story Ends for the ‘D.C. Madam’. Yeah, it is a story. Not a person. Fuck persons who aren’t in the gated community. Fuck them up the ass. No, just an amusing giggle at the end of a rope.

Ah, may their tongues gangrene and rot off, those tellers of the story. May the stories rise up, someday, and rip them limb from limb.

And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!

Children and monetarists beware

For those of you who delight in the spilling of ichor – the blood of intellectuals – hie ye to Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View, which reprints Jamie Galbraith’s address on the 25th meeting of the Milton Friedman society. A sign of the times that they would invite Galbraith, son of Friedman’s blood enemy. Galbraith begins with a few courtesies, and then utterly destroys Friedman’s work, and then makes like Jack the Ripper with Bernanke’s reputation. It is a rare sight to see such thorough slaughter. There must have been a long pause after it was all over. Did anybody move? Did the master of ceremonies heave himself out of his seat and finally say, what a veeery interesting talk, Professor Galbraith. Oh dear, you have some kind of foaming ectoplasm all over the front of your tuxedo.

The society should pay attention to this useful film about not accepting rides from strangers.

PS – the music of America! that barbaric yawp is still spawning rib tickling vocables. For instance, this is a Wall Street term that comes from the very heart of the Bush culture. From Frank Norris at the NYT:
http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/how-much-capital-do-the-banks-need/
Carlyle has done its part to create those holes. Mr. Rubenstein delivered a hilarious recollection of the credit markets at the top of the market, in which Citigroup and J.P. Morgan competed to lend, offering low interest rates, no covenants (covenant-light in the jargon) and toggle-PIK, meaning the company could pay in kind, with more securities, if it did not have the cash.
As he told it, with a hypothetical billion dollar acquisition, Carlyle funds put up $350 million and borrowed $650 million.
When the music stopped in the credit market last year, the bank was unable to sell such loans in the securitization market — to investors Mr. Rubenstein called the “stuffees.”
The stuffees! Don’t you love living under the Great Fly? Forget comrades, forget citizens, forget motherfuckers. It is a nation of stuffees. And happy to be stuffed!

duellum

Deux guerriers ont couru l'un sur l'autre...

For those interested in such things, the long promised duel between LCC and Jackie Derrida is finally commencing in earnest. Yours truly is in attendence as J.D.'s second.

PS - We are still dueling over there, though we are a little off topic - not too much, I hope. Entertaining stuff for those who enjoy liberal-Marxist dialog - and let's face it, who doesn't?

In this duel, LCC overlooks my sometimes off topic meandering - as, for instance, that I have signally failed to really reference Derrida yet. And I overlook LCC's mimicry of Jacques Derrida as a sort of malevolent Punch, starring in a remake of the Exorcist underwritten by Encounter Magazine.

barthes, the perfect storm, and business bullshit

Groupies of Barthes principle of mythology, that “false nature”, have been having a field day lately with business news. You’ll remember the lyrics to the famous Nature/Culture divide – of course you do:

The point of departure for this reflection was most often a sentiment of impatience before the “natural’ in which the press, art, common sense ceaselessly array a reality which, even as it is the one in which we live, is nevertheless perfectly historic: in a word, I am pained to see, at every moment, how in the story of our actuality, Nature and History are confounded, and I wanted to tighten my grasp, in the decorative exposition of the “it-goes-without-saying”, [ce-qui-va-de-soi] of the ideological abuse which, in my sense, is found hidden in it.” – Mythologies.

With this in mind, LI has been thinking of the “perfect storm.”

In 1997, Sebastian Junger published his story that, as they say, soared to the top of the best selling lists. Finally, a story for the testosteroned among us – brave men and their ships! It proved especially popular among the yacht set.
But what interests me is not so much 1997, but 1998. Oh, if Barthes had only had google and Factiva! For with these simple tools, one can observe the leaping of the memes. In September of 1998, three things happened – the Russian’s defaulted on their loans, the Asian tiger cubs – Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea – suddenly started bailing capital, and Long Term Capital Investment, our favorite hedge fund, started by John Meriwether and co-starring too hard right libertarian Nobel prize winning economists, went belly up. It was a model flop – a model for the current age of flops, with Greenspan timidly managing a bail out that presaged the massive bail outs being effected, at this very moment, by the Fed – who, to the vast indifference of the American public, is making the financial sector all happy by loaning out money at below par rates, so those banks can buy U.S. government debt at par rates and rake in the money, and we can pretend that we aren’t giving it to them. This is called capitalism, my friends. In any case, it was in the golden autumn of 1998 that this started happening:

From Business Week
21 September 1998

Why did rocket science backfire? Sure, the models do take into consideration the possibilities of some failures occurring in the market system that upset normal historical relationships. Indeed, that's why these bets usually involve a series of hedges. What occurred, however, was the financial world's equivalent of a ''perfect storm''--everything went wrong at once. Interest rates moved the wrong way, stocks and bond prices that were supposed to converge diverged, and liquidity dried up in some crucial markets. As Long-Term's Meriwether told his shareholders in a Sept. 3 letter: ''We expected that sooner or later...we as a firm would be tested. I did not anticipate, however, how severe the test would be.''

That is one of the first mentions of the perfect storm to explain a financial disaster. Notice the beauty of it. First, the bilocation – on the one hand, who is more “part” of the financial weather system than a hedge fund? And on the other hand, you have the almost peasant like hedge funders, hunkering down as the rain comes pouring upon them – surely no fault of their own! Although we shouldn’t pursue that thought to far – for if the hedge funders aren’t responsible for the “perfect storm”, why should we hold them responsible for the golden sunshine? Why do we say they make those profits? Why pay them those premiums if it is all weather?
But those who ask such questions are obviously losers and dipshits, and have no place sticking their nose into the Fed’s wonderful equity bubble machine.

The perfect storm of “perfect storms” grew all that autumn. Here’s a sample:

“CNN Interview with Jeff Davis, State Street Global Advisors:
25 September 1998
DAVIS: Well, I think there are -- certainly there potentially could be. I mean, it's been a big -- a big couple of years for hedge fund investing. And investors are looking for protection during crises like this. But we call the August fall the perfect storm where there is a combination of crises around the world that were, you know, one of those once-in-a-lifetime events that keep arriving every three years, to quote a friend of mine. And so we really are nervous about where the risks are right now. And it's difficult, again, for the transparency in the marketplace to let us know where those risks are.”

From the Financial Times, 12 December 1998
12 December 1998
“Allen Wheat, chairman and chief executive officer of Credit Suisse First Boston, made no forecasts when he spoke at a gathering of the investment bank's managing directors in Florida in November.

He said A Perfect Storm, the title of a recent best-seller about a catastrophe off the coast of New England, reminded him of this year's market.
The only difference, he said, was that nobody knew whether it could get no worse or whether they were simply enjoying a brief lull while resting in the centre of it.”

The Economist, 5 December 1998

“Academic financial economists, unsurprisingly, still stand up for the science. Rene Stulz, who edits the profession's top research publication, the Journal of Finance, says, in a new book he is writing, that LTCM's only impact will be as "a nice case study". Most academics hint that LTCM's downfall had nothing to do with the financial models of the two Nobel laureates (an argument that rather irks those Wall Street firms persuaded to invest in the hedge fund precisely because it was using their models).

Their consensus view is that, at worst, the two Nobel winners were guilty of hubris. At best, they were the victims of a "perfect storm" in the markets: several extremely unusual events took place at once, with consequences that could not reasonably have been foreseen, and are unlikely ever to be repeated. And if even the cleverest academics lose money, doesn't that prove their point? The deepest insight of financial economics is that markets are fairly "efficient", meaning that you can earn high returns only by taking big risks. There really is no free lunch.

Yet there is no denying that the recent market turmoil confounded existing financial-economic models.”


By the end of the year, “perfect storm” was in like flint. It was the perfect excuse. It sounded manly. It took responsibility out of the hands of the responsible, and turned it over to the weather – and as all we biliously banal Americans know, everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Ha ha! Nature, you see. And as storms interrupt your train of thought – you who think about these things, in the commercial time right before we find out what Celebrity Dancer will win the big prize tonigth! So, too, we don’t throw a thought at what the metaphor implies about paying people to experience weather. Oh, paying them a billion here or there. Because they are geniuses. Rocket scientists. Who just happen to contribute less to the productive life of this society than a puppy with diarrhea.

So, being connoisseurs of biz bull shit, we were delighted with the incredible interview in the NYT with Robert Rubin, Citi’s consiglieri, who has one message for you and me – Citi might have dropped 20 billion lately, but it isn’t his fault! No sir. Guess what happened? Come on, guess. Begins with P. Ends with m. Two words.

“By the time I finished at Treasury, I decided I never wanted operating responsibility again,” Mr. Rubin, 69, said during a two-hour interview in his office. Sitting in a red-cloth chair and propped against a thick book to support a bad back, he made it plain that responsibility for Citigroup’s staggering losses can’t be laid at his feet.
“People know I was concerned about the markets,” he says. “Clearly, there were things wrong. But I don’t know of anyone who foresaw a perfect storm, and that’s what we’ve had here.”
“I don’t feel responsible, in light of the facts as I knew them in my role,” he adds.
But did he make mistakes?
“I’ve thought a lot about that,” he responds. “I honestly don’t know. In hindsight, there are a lot of things we’d do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I’m inclined to think probably not.”

As we peons know, nowadays, when you go through that ritual in humiliation called a job interview, one of the standard questions is, describe one of your mistakes. The idea is that, as a peon, you are surely just the kind of drooling idiot to smoke around the gas pumps, so lay it out on the table. Give them reasons to pay you less. Luckily, as we get higher and higher, mistakes magically vanish. Weather intervenes. Perfect storms.

Of course, a people who were not utterly servile might rise up in revolt at being served a continuous mixture of the ripest bullshit ever known to man as their pockets were picked.

I can’t wait to meet such a people. I wonder where they live?

Interview with Amanda Marcotte

My interview with Amanda Marcotte is here. As this interview was conducted for my paper, I couldn't really supply a lot of the hilarious bits from Marcotte's book. This had to be edited out, but it gives a concise feel for the book:

On the evidence of her new book, It’s a Jungle Out There, she is a Fight Club Feminist. As in the famous scene in Fight Club in which Brad Pitt announces the rules, Marcotte’s prefaces her book with her own rules:

“Why are people so mean to feminists? Because so much of feminism is the fine art of calling bullshit, and calling bullshit makes people uncomfortable. The first rule of understanding bullshit is that people really love their bullshit.”

The interview was done before the flame wars, and before Seal purged the book of the racist imagery in the cartoons that were used to divide the sections of the book. That's a long story, especially for those of you not following it. In brief, I like Marcotte, I like her work, I like her temper - but in the controversy about her, BFP, and the appropriation of the work of WoC bloggers, her temper has lead her to uncharacteristically underestimate her own bullshit as a white woman. That said, I am particularly pissed off at the shit stirrers who seem to think Marcotte bears the burden for the racism of the whole power structure in America, when she has always tried to reveal it when she sees it. For instance, she was out front in the 'victimization' controversy when Clinton's supporters took to making invidious comparisons between the mild 'victimization' of blacks and the truly awful victimization of women in America - as if one should really feel that Scarlet O'Hara was the victim of Tara - and she has always been vocal about it. Instead of the use of gentle persuasion - to say, look, you are missing the point here - it all became immediate denunciation of Marcotte. On my paranoid days, I think this is because Marcotte's been pretty clear about her preference for Obama, and this is payback by the Clinton people. But on consideration, that isn't right. The exaggerated response is about a silent and amplifying wrong - the lack, in the liberal/left press, of people of color - there are investment firms that hire more African Americans and Hispanics than you find writing for, say, the Nation -and it came out against Marcotte.

More news from the Kingdom of the Great Fly

One of the amusing things about dancing on the precipice in the era of the Great Fly is that every paranoid vision gains a foothold in reality. Take the food crisis. Let’s see, you combine phenomenal growth in former LDCs, climate changes the fact of which are resisted by the moronic inferno, and the richest country in the world making its primo manufacturing objective the export of packaged debt. And whaddya get? Oh, famine and war, war and famine.

Norman Borlaug has an opinion piece that is sure to be unread and unheeded until, say, next year, when bread is five dollars a loaf. Borlaug is the great Green Revolution agronomist. Let’s just say that the Green Revolution gave us ambiguous results – while the Soviets collectivized their farms, the capitalist world treated its agricultural sector to a form of shock therapy, agroteching their way to global corporate farming monstrosities, and the resulting flight from the peasant pea patch to the barrio and bidonville is going to rule our world for a long time. But that is the way the world food supply went. So, if you are going to ruthlessly exterminate varieties and promote monoculture through the length and breadth of the planet, you better be prepared for the consequences – blights that can quickly wipe out the vulnerable predominant strand. This is where the fun stops in the evolution debate, which isn’t just about whether we should create even dumber American yokels than we are wont to mill out of our schools – natural selection as a fact about the relationship between species and environment can come gunning for you, hypocrite lecteur.

First, a little history:

“WITH food prices soaring throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, and shortages threatening hunger and political chaos, the time could not be worse for an epidemic of stem rust in the world’s wheat crops. Yet millions of wheat farmers, small and large, face this spreading and deadly crop infection.

The looming catastrophe can be avoided if the world’s wheat scientists pull together to develop a new generation of stem-rust-resistant varieties of wheat. But scientists must quickly turn their attention to replacing almost all of the commercial wheat grown in the world today. This will require a commitment from many nations, especially the United States, which has lately neglected its role as a leader in agricultural science.

Stem rust, the most feared of all wheat diseases, can turn a healthy crop of wheat into a tangled mass of stems that produce little or no grain. The fungus spores travel in the wind, causing the infection to spread quickly. It has caused major famines since the beginning of history. In North America, huge grain losses occurred in 1903 and 1905 and from 1950 to ’54.”

Then a little natural history:

“Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world’s people. The world wheat harvest now stands at about 600 million metric tons.
In the last decade, global wheat production has not kept pace with rising population, or the increasing per capita demand for wheat products in newly industrializing countries. At the same time, international support for wheat research has declined significantly. And as a consequence, in 2007-08, world wheat stocks (as a percentage of demand) dropped to their lowest level since 1947-48. And prices have steadily climbed to the highest level in 25 years.

The new strains of stem rust, called Ug99 because they were discovered in Uganda in 1999, are much more dangerous than those that, 50 years ago, destroyed as much as 20 percent of the American wheat crop. Today’s lush, high-yielding wheat fields on vast irrigated tracts are ideal environments for the fungus to multiply, so the potential for crop loss is greater than ever.”

And then, of course, the natural history of our Great Fly, that glorious combination of cretinism and short term advantage that we’ve all grown to know and love:

“The Bush administration was initially quick to grasp Ug99’s threat to American wheat production. In 2005, Mike Johanns, then secretary of agriculture, instructed the federal agriculture research service to take the lead in developing an international strategy to deal with stem rust. In 2006, the Agency for International Development mobilized emergency financing to help African and Asian countries accelerate needed wheat research.

But more recently, the administration has begun reversing direction. The State Department is recommending ending American support for the international agricultural research centers that helped start the Green Revolution, including all money for wheat research. And significant financial cuts have been proposed for important research centers, including the Department of Agriculture’s essential rust research laboratory in St. Paul.

This shocking short-sightedness goes against the interests not only of American wheat farmers and consumers but of all humanity. It is tantamount to the United States abandoning its pledge to help halve world hunger by 2015.”

Imagine that – the U.S. breaking a promise!

Meanwhile, back in the the District of Columbian Ass-licking, the Washington Post article about the food riots is, of course, larded with the usual praise of the Great Fly – I am rather surprised that the Post hasn’t yet started calling him The Father of the People:

But administration officials and legislative aides acknowledge that they have only recently begun to focus on the severity of the problem, and humanitarian groups fear that assistance from the United States, which already supplies about half of the world's total food aid, may come too late to provide much benefit in the near term.

The mounting crisis, which has unseated Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Édouard Alexis and prompted riots throughout the developing world, provides a particular challenge for President Bush during his final months in office. Although Bush has received many positive reviews for his initiatives to combat HIV-AIDS and malaria, he is hobbled by dismal approval ratings and bitter relations with a Democratic Congress during a presidential election year.”

Oh, the positive reviews on issues having nothing whatsoever to do with food! Surely they could have larded it with better ass licking than that, however. I would have suggested something like: “Although Bush has received many positive reviews on the massive size of his dick, a priapus that promises plentiful rainfall and prosperity for all Christian Americans…”

We live in Great Times, times of the fulfilment of prophecy, when the ludicrous and the murderous have merged into one soul destroying blob. So excellent!

We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we
had no eyes: we stumble at noon day as in the night; we are in
desolate places as dead men. Isaiah 59:10

Beauty tips

LI is very interested in beauty. We are a beauty maven. The whole thing, the aesthetic, the striving for it, the failing, the study of it. Hell, at the moment we are working part time copyediting the fashion issue of a magazine, so we are rubbing our nose in the manufacture of it, right down to the ColorU blush in Lilac. Yet, whenever we see calls to bring beauty back into the study of literature or art, it seems like the machine starts out all over again. First, the lament that somehow – through theory or through identity politics – they’ve guillotined beauty and are cavorting in her shambles. Then of course there is the appeal to the canonical and emotional power of beauty. That it soothes the wild beasts and the undergraduate at the same time. And then the whole train of associations are dragged into it – as we see in this article on teaching beauty by Jennifer Green-Lewis and Margaret Soltan at Inside Higher Education. It begins with an anecdote about the idiosyncratic veneration all readers give to certain of their favorite texts.

“When his turn came to speak at Norman Mailer’s recent memorial service in New York, the novelist Don DeLillo began by simply holding up his creased and worn 50-year-old copy of Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead.

All lovers of literature understand the nature of DeLillo’s gesture; they understand that behind the little paperback that he lifted for the audience to see lay years of private aesthetic pleasure in its pages — from the college student marveling at its prose to the venerated author of Underworld marveling at the same thumbed passages. That’s the sort of writer Mailer was, DeLillo meant to say: He wrote novels you’re never finished with; and the scuffs and scratches and stains you put in them over the years add up to the archaeology of your own literary life.”

This isn’t a bad start. Unfortunately, instead of asking about that contrast between scuffs and scratches and the glamorous spell cast by immersion in a work, by which the work becomes immersed in the reader – the praying mantis work of reading – we are, instead, taken by steps from attentiveness to the soul – and then the soul becomes the launching pad for the usual, quasi-religious complaint:

Who would ever enter a classroom and invite their students to consider the beauty of a work because, as Nicolas Malebranche puts it, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul"? The word “soul” doesn’t get much exercise in English departments any more, and neither do concepts associated with it — inspiration, consolation, communality, transcendence, love. What do these have to do nowadays with the study of literature? In our public neglect of such concepts in favor of the political and the material, our answer is clear: nothing.
“Of course, literature professors who graduated from English departments in the past 30 years can defend their neglect of matters related to the soul, since in their studies no one talked much about these things either. An English professor recalls the facile “contingency” arguments of her day, which did so much to undermine judgments of aesthetic value: “I felt I had to hide or smuggle in my humanist convictions about ‘what sustains people’ — my faith for example in some quality of shared humanity that makes literary experience meaningful.... I was writing about [James] Joyce’s insights into the touching human need to bury, burn, or otherwise take care of the bodies of the dead — an impulse that is universal, however differently loss and the communal response to it are experienced across cultures. I was afraid I’d be attacked for ‘essentializing’ — for supposing that there are features, shared across cultures, that constitute the essence of being human.”

Surely “essentializing” — a poor choice of word for an acknowledgment of shared humanity — is necessary in the imaginative work involved in recognizing the existence of someone else. As Iris Murdoch argues, that recognition is difficult and demands a leap into the sort of empathy which the imaginative demands of literature encourage. When Murdoch expresses her admiration for T.E. Lawrence because he “let the agonizing complexities of situations twist [his] heart instead of tying his hands,” she reminds us that the real-world value of great and complex art can accustom us to the intricate and often painful ambiguities of the world.”

I can’t resist a side note here – Theophile de Viau, in his Apology, uses the pretty funny verb “quintessentializing.” With which I am well pleased. But to proceed…

This notion of the theory mafia that roamed the halls of academe when I was a grad student – yes, I was a member of Derrida’s Hells Angels in the 80s – would be funny. Except that I had a recent communication, with a professor I am editing, who told me that though my suggestions on how to make her argument tighter were excellent, they would involve “theory” – and, she added, anything that smacks of “theory” now gets you sorted into the non-tenure file. I’m not sure that she wasn’t exaggerating a bit. Still, more than one source has confirmed a backlash against theory in the humanities lately. But as Green-Lewis and Soltan’s article shows, without the constant barking of the theoretical guard dogs, there is an intolerable backsliding into quasi-Victorian malarkey. Which, of course, has nothing to do with beauty. One could well find beauty a universal factor in human societies without finding beauty universal – if that means that some set of objects or styles is universally considered beautiful. This is because the discourse of beauty that, for instance, connects it to the universal is easy to trace to historic conditions. And those same conditions tell us that beauty for the modernists, far from being this soul satisfying moment of universal communion, was considered the result of the most extreme contingency and alienation. For a modernist lineage coming out of Baudelaire and running through the Surrealists, Bataille, pop art, etc., beauty is inseparable from alienation. Here is where I, at least, would begin to talk about beauty – how it transmigrated into an art that hungered for alienation the way the fragment hungers for the whole. It is one of the notable things about surrealism, by the way, that it was quickly adapted by an international group of poets, painters and writers. It was seen to express the landscape of the end of the colonialist period – the twenties and thirties – by Chinese, Turkish and Antillaise poets, Spanish film makers, etc., etc. However, to tell this story about beauty would mean telling a story about transformations, losses, and what the individual attention cannot hold. To block this, Green-Lewis and Soltan bring in the soul.

If they had not so composed their piece as to create that local opposition between theory (which is anti-beauty) and appreciation (pro-beauty) which marks a very limited discourse on beauty, their views on teaching beauty would become much sharper:

“Critics of aesthetics tend to dismiss the “better world” orientation that often accompanies a serious interest in beauty as sentimental, religious, and naïve, an indulgent distraction from the hard truths of our time. But they are mistaken in this dismissal. The ability to establish strong personal agency, and then project certain futures, certain human potentialities, as novelists often do, and the ability to enter into and respond emotionally to those projections, as strong readers do, is a realistic and mature way of expressing faith in the possibility of humanity’s capacity to improve itself.

Dmitri Tymocko, in describing Beethoven’s brilliance, evokes precisely this disposition of passion and reason: “[We] can have tremendous, Beethovenian passions without losing all sense of our own limitation. (As one can have powerful political convictions while still recognizing that reasonable people may disagree.) Beethoven himself may not have achieved the perfect synthesis of these two, complementary qualities. But the evidence of both his music and his life suggests that he tried. Passionate maturity, neither resignation nor moderation nor fanaticism: that, perhaps, is what is truly
sublime.”

The display of “passionate maturity” may be in fact the best that we could ever hope for in our teaching of literature. The centrality of aesthetic experience in the struggle toward adaptation to a world forever changed by the particular political traumas of our time, and in the struggle toward the creation of a more humane world, means that professors of literature have in fact a special, even extraordinary, responsibility. In conveying the fullness of powerful aesthetic gestures, they must convey more than the form and content of particular poems, plays, and novels. They must embody in their very mode of teaching the paradox of passionate control which so often characterizes the greatest works of art; and they must embody the moral value for each individual of this dynamic act of balance.”

Are we to think that beauty is delimited by the “better future” that emanates from the ‘form and content of of particular poems, plays, and novels”? This seems to me to seriously understate the nostalgia in beauty. As for the dynamic act of balance, I’m not sure what exactly that means, here, but I think it entails a very narrow kind of aesthetic practice.

Chabert is back

LI is psyched to see that Le Colonel Chabert is back at her post, after one of her mysterious disappearances from the blogging world - no doubt, she was in deep confab with the Illuminati. LCC's last round was a full scale attack on the 68 French philosophes, like LI's patron saint, Derrida - and you might think it curious that I have any affection for that. But, at least in the world of philosophy, Heraclitus's words apply: polemos panton men pater esti, war is the father of all things. Most of the philosophes are dead now, and depend on us for their continued existence. How sad it would be if that existence consisted of tedious and bureaucratic applications of them to fill in, like a sort of all purpose tar, the crevasses in tenure track papers, continually churning! Far better the fierce response, the sortie from out of the underbrush! And not, either, of the dismissive, Brian Leiter variety, which is all about sheer ignorance - that's not a sortie, that's the tax collector.

the apology of Theophile

LI had more fun with our Theophile post than we’ve had in a good while. Thank you, Amie.

Now, let’s place Theophile de Viau in context, and get on to the marvelous public letter he wrote Louis XIII – in a tone, and with a frankness, that would certainly have been unthinkable fifty years later.

Scholars would place Theophile de Viau in the French Renaissance period. He’s a contemporary of Robert Herrick – of the Cavalier poets. He started out in life with an excellent education – he learned Greek, Spanish, Italian and English at his school, Saumer, and he gained a smattering of the new sciences – or natural magic, as Bacon referred to them. Being relatively wealthy, when he came to Paris, as he confesses in his letters, he fell into vice. Although nowadays he is celebrated as a Gay litterateur – by people who simply sort through history, look for the assfucking, not literature, and pluck out the assfucker – his debauches were, as far as we know from his own words, with women, although Tallement repeats a story that he seduced a boy he was tutoring, and there are enough rumors about Theophile that the hasty searchers for Gay avatars aren’t wholly wrong. But he was not Marlowe – or at least not in this sense. There is a boldness, a recklessness in Theophile that does remind one of Marlowe, though. As Claire Gaudiami has pointed out, for instance [The Cabaret Poetry of Théophile de Viau: Texts and Traditions, 43-5], an 1618 poem, Elegie de M. de C., contains cosmological speculation about the materiality of the soul – composed of the four elements, governed by the stars – and its finitude, on the lines of Vanini, who was burned at the stake in 1619 in Toulouse. And like Marlowe, the record of his banishments, arrests and connections is a strange one – he certainly had influence with King Louis XIII, and the Duke of Buckingham was instrumental in getting him out of some jams – and we do know, following the sodomite trail, that the Duke of Buckingham was rumored to be not only a sodomite, but a corruptor of Prince Charles, and certainly a favorite of King James, famous for his taste in pretty boys. It was this atmosphere that made the Victorians, always eager to find good protestant martyrs to the intolerance of superstition and the Catholic Church, shy away from him. And, of course, it is what makes him wildly attractive to us. Mad, bad and dangerous to know – isn’t this the stuff of our heroes?

So here he is, poet and backdoor man, courtier, connector, the rich man’s son who flees from his debtors, the cabaret poet, to use Gaudiami’s term, the beaux esprit, to use the sneering phrase of his great accuser, the Jesuit Voisin.

Mon esprit, plein d’amour et plein de liberté
Sans fard et sans respect t’escrit la verité.

So, there you have the man who wrote the poem in my last post, more or less.
Which brings us to one of the odder ‘human documents’ of the seventeenth century, Theophile’s Apologie, a letter he wrote the King about his arrest and trial for – well, it is part of his complaint that it was never quite clear what his crime was.
It is an odd document because it mixes a tone of courtly flattery and servility (worthy of an op ed piece in the Washington Post) with the recounting of incidents in a tone that is recognizably modern. That is, recognizably conscious of its modernity – for that is what is modern. Just that. And so the tone in the letter has an intimacy, breaks down the barriers of politesse, with an unusual assurance, as if the way Theophile was writing was just the way everybody wrote. With all the assumption that intimacy, of a sort that did not exist between a husband and wife or a father and son in the seventeenth century, could exist between the writer and the reader – who is, of course, the King. Less invisible than in Velasquez’ Las Meninas, and yet not wholly visible. Well, here is Theophile’s account of his arrest.

“After the interrogation, which contained no accusation, M. de Conmartin assured me that I was dead. I responded that the king was just and that I was innocent. And then he ordered me to taken to Saint-Quentin, after which he took his leave to join the constable, who he had quit in order to help the priests capture me. They tied great ropes around me all over and put me on a feeble, limping horse, which made me run more risks than all the witnesses of my hearings. The spectacle of the execution of some famous criminal never attracted the crowd that I drew to my imprisonment. All of a sudden I am in the holding area, then thrust into a hole in which the ceiling itself was underground. I lay down, still dressed, and draped with irons so rude and weighty that the marks and pains of them remain in my limbs. The walls sweated with humidity; I, with fear.”

Theophile’s first play used motifs from Gongora. Although Don Quixotte wasn’t translated into French until after Theophile died, I don’t think it is so unlikely that he might have read the first volume of it. Louis XIII’s wife was Spanish, Theophile could speak the language – am I stretching to see the intrusion of a new prose style, a cross section of the vernacular of the peasant and the new learning, in this image of a man on a limping horse, surrounded by priests, trussed up like a pig? “The walls sweated with humidity; I, with fear.” It is going to take a long time for English prose to get close to this kind of statement of fact.

Notes for a future study of insanity among the governing class

PARIS — The Credit Suisse Group, the Swiss banking giant, on Thursday reported a first-quarter loss nearly three times worse than analysts had expected as it wrote down $5.3 billion in soured investments.
The bank, based in Zurich, reported a net loss of 2.15 billion Swiss francs, or $2.1 billion, in the first quarter, compared with net income of 2.8 billion francs a year earlier.
“On balance, I was quite pleased” with the results, said Peter Thorne, an analyst with Helvea in London. “In this market, if an investment bank doesn’t report $20 billion of write-downs, you tend to be quite relieved.”

It is no surprise to LI that a system in which inequality of wealth has sharpened as much as it has in the U.S. would spawn a whole new kind of fantasy and reality in the press and the public discourse. So I suppose it comes as no surprise that the Daily Mail - a British tabloid - has a sharper article about inflation than you will read in, say, the NYT. The Daily Mail decided to create its own basket of goods and use them as an index of inflation, and of course what they discover, once you wipe away the wonderful fall in prices of plasma tv, is that inflation as it should be studied - you know, how much extra is coming out of the pocket of your average household income - is a lot higher than anything government reports can account for. Although I must admit, I did admire the butter prices over there in Britain:

"A pack of English butter is up by 36p to 94p..."

Wow, about $1.80 for butter!

PS - Our far flung correspondent, Mr. T., refers us to this article, which tells us - where all the bees went! You will notice that the Floridian beekeeper at the center of the article is doing more productive work for you and me and the earth than all the hedge fund traders put together. Naturally, then, he lives on charity.

I'd never seen anything like it in the State of Texas

I love a millionaire --

The congressional investigation of the credit agencies that looked over the pool of steroidish securities that were pumped into the financial industry and gave them all triple A ratings starts today. The biggest of those agencies is Moody’s:

“Over the last decade, Moody’s and its two principal competitors, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, played this game to perfection — putting what amounted to gold seals on mortgage securities that investors swept up with increasing élan. For the rating agencies, this business was extremely lucrative. Their profits surged, Moody’s in particular: it went public, saw its stock increase sixfold and its earnings grow by 900 percent.

By providing the mortgage industry with an entree to Wall Street, the agencies also transformed what had been among the sleepiest corners of finance. No longer did mortgage banks have to wait 10 or 20 or 30 years to get their money back from homeowners. Now they sold their loans into securitized pools and — their capital thus replenished — wrote new loans at a much quicker pace.

Mortgage volume surged; in 2006, it topped $2.5 trillion. Also, many more mortgages were issued to risky subprime borrowers. Almost all of those subprime loans ended up in securitized pools; indeed, the reason banks were willing to issue so many risky loans is that they could fob them off on Wall Street.”

Now, outside of Texas, Moody is just a name – but inside of Texas, it is the name of one of the great crazy Texas families. There is something delightfully ludicrous in the fact that Moody’s makes its money by selling its sound judgment, given that the Moody family is better known for inhouse squabbling, jailed siblings, and sex scandals. The Moody family is inseparable from their scene: Galveston. There are people who have been to New Orleans. And they’ve been to France. And so they think they know the world. Ho ho ho, if you haven’t been to Galveston, you are still a little wet behind the ears in this world.

Famously, Galveston stopped on September 8, 1900, when the great hurricane hit, which plucked out 8,000 people – out of 32,000 – and killed em dead. Galveston was the richest city in Texas at the time, as you can see by simply going there and strolling among the mansions. Many of those old mansions remain – they were built to survive about anything except the neglect in which they have now dwindled for a century. But even so – even as Houston took over, as it was going to do anyway, as the most important port in Texas – Galveston still had wealthy families. It was fabulously located, for instance, to become one of the great smuggling cities in the Prohibition era. Like New Orleans, Galveston thrived on vice – gambling and prostitution. And it had the Moody family.

The Moody family started out in the cotton trade, then went into insuring cotton merchants, and then went into insurance. They diversified into other industries – hotels, for instance. In the twenties, they about controlled the island – built the one skyscraper in Galveston, bought the paper, rolled in money from the increase in business brought about by oil. And the family proper began to act like the second coming of the Borgias. One of the really great, spoiled Moody’s back then was Shearn Moody – his wife a showgirl, himself a playboy and a good hater. Running the newspaper gave him plenty of space to vent, which he like to do about various and sundry enemies. Here’s a quote from Cartwright’s book on Galveston about Shearn Moody:

“At the peak of the Depression, the Moodys were making money hand over fist, much of it from repossessions. Shearn Moody filled his home on Cedar Lawn Circle with linens, silver and china that had once belonged to creditors [sic]. Conrad Hilton, who managed the Moody hotel chain in the early 1930s, once described Shearn Moody as the kind of man who liked the Depression” “People are desperate for money,” Shearn had told Hilton. “It’s the time to drive a good bargain.”

Shearn Moody was almost to a tee the kind of millionaire portrayed in There will be blood. Here’s another anecdote. Hilton had lost his hotel to the Moodys when they foreclosed on him, but they offered him a deal – merger with the Moody hotel chain, which he would manage:

“But Hilton instinctively mistrusted the younger Moody. He couldn’t forget the remark Shearn had made about the Depression – or the passion with which Shearn regarded his enemies. Shearn absolutely doted on his enemies: he was addicted to them. When Hilton asked Shearn why it was that nine out of ten men who did business with him ended up as enemies, Shearn replied coldly: “Because that’s the way I like it. I’d like it even better if it was ninety-nine out of a hundred.”

Shearn Moody died before his father, so it was due to the old man that the family money ended up in a tax dodge. However, it wasn’t just the tax dodge that was attractive about the Moody Foundation – it was also the fact that the Old Man’s daughter and his grandchildren would be left forever dependent on this organization he had built. Which is how we segue into the colorful life of Shearn Moody, Jr. Shearn Jr spent his young adulthood establishing a reputation as a great 60s partier. Famously, his bedroom had a door which opened on a slide that you could use to go down to the pool. Here’s an anecdote about Shearn Jr.:

“During the 1960s, the ranch was infamous for its wild parties. Billy Furr, a frind of Bobby Moody, remembered that when he walked throught he front door on one occasion he was greeted by a naked woman who asked him to sign the guestbook. “Then I looked around the room,” Furr said, “and realized there were several dozen naked men and women standing around. Somebody told me they were the cast of the San Francisco Ballet. I never found out if that was true or not, but I’d never seen anything like it in the State of Texas.”

Shearn Jr. had many adventures, some that involved Watergate – he claimed he was targeted by Nixon for dirty tricks as he was a Democratic party funder – and some involving a possible assassination threat to George Wallace, and some involving penguins that were imported for the swimming pool, and some involving money that landed Shearn Jr. in jail for a bit.

This is the Moody family, whose company rates your mortgage pools, America. Don’t that beat all, now. Us Texans are gonna be the death of this country yet!