“There is a famous Holderlin poem called “The Autumn”. In it Holderlin describes a foot
of earth, about a square meter, upon which the Duke ofWiirttemberg, Ulrich, is supposed once to have trod. Holderlin describes this piece of forest ground in a very beautiful poem. And now pick up a biology book and see how a piece of forest ground is described there: 16x10 to
the 57th lice, so-and-so many insects, so-and-so many spiders; and then it also says 10 to the minus 7 foxes and twice 10 to the minus six deer. You notice they are two quite different languages. One is the language of statistics: we deal with our surroundings in an unsensuous
way, exactly as we do with the real relations in history. And we deal with lyric peotry in a sensuousw ay with our direct sense for what is near. The two fall apart. The big decisions in history are not made in the realm of what we can experience close at hand. The really big disasters take place in the distance which we cannot experience, for which we don't
have the appropriate telescopes (or microscopes) in our senses. The two don't come together.”
-Alexander Kluge, “The Political as the intensity of everyday feelings.”
In 1827, as Heinrich Heine was approaching London in a steamship on the Thames River, he had a conversation with a “yellow man” who was standing at the rail with him. Heine, overcome by the moment, had expressed outloud his rapturous sense of England, the land of freedom, and of freedom itself, the new religion. The yellow man interrupted his monologue at this point, and, conceding that freedom might be the new religion, pointed out that it was a more complicated thing than was accounted for in raptures. It was a doctrine, he said, adapted its form to its environment - the “national character”. For the English, freedom was a matter of privacy, of the liberty to lead his domestic life as he saw fit:
The English are a homebody people, they live a limited, fenced in family life; in the circle of his family members, the Englishman seeks that spiritual comfort that is denied him outside the house by his inborn social awkwardness The Englishman is thus satisfied with that freedom, that unconditionally protects his personal rights and his body, his property, his marriage, his beliefs, and even his eccentricities. In his household, nobody is freer than an Englishman, if I may use a famous expression, there he is king and bishop within his four walls. The common hustings speech is not wrong: “my house is my castle”.”
Against this, the yellow man weighs the French:
If the Englishman’s largest need is for personal freedom, the Frenchman may, in a crisis, give this up, if one still gives him the plentiful enjoyment of only that part of common freedom that we call equality. The French are not a homebody people, but a social one, they don’t love to sit silently together, which is what they call conversation anglaise, but they run chattering from the café to the casino and from the casino to the salon, their light champagne blood and inborn talent for socializing drives them to a social life. The first and last condition of that, and yes, its soul, is: equality. With the extension of sociability in France, there had to grow in tandem the need for equality, and even if the reasons for the Revolution are found in the budget, its first word and voice was lent by those intellectual roturiers who lived in the salons with the nobility seemingly on the same foot of equality and yet, now and then, be it only in a hardly noticeable, but yet deeply wounding feudal smile, were reminded of the great, shameful fact of inequality. And when the canaille roturière took the freedom to top off the high nobility, this was done less to inherit their properties than their ancestors, and instead of a bourgeois inequality, introduce a noble equality.”
And then the yellow man analyzes the Germans:
As for the Germans, they need neither freedom nor equality. They are a speculative people, ideologues, visionaries and meditators, dreamers, who live only in the past and future and never in the present. The English and French have a present, by them every day presents its struggle and counterstruggle and its history. The German has nothing for which to struggle, and since he began to ruminate, that even so there could be things whose possession would be ever so desireable, his philosophers have been teaching him of the existence of such things to doubt. It can’t be doubted that the Germans love freedom too. But otherwise than other peoples. The Englishman loves freedom like his respectable wife, he possesses her, and if he doesn’t handle her with excessive tenderness, still, he knows how to defend her in a crisis like a man… and woe to the redcoated strapling who breaks into her holy bedroom – whether as a gallant or as a scoundrel. The Frenchman loves his freedom like his chosen bride. He glows for her, he flames, he throws himself at her feet… The German loves his freedom like his old Grandmother.«
The yellow man may have the intangible substance of one of those impossible, garish figures glimpsed by various characters in Master and the Margarita, but his comments expressed the sociology of the day, up to an including the comparisons with types of women, echoing Montesquieu’s geographic notion of the spirit of the laws, but rescored to the tune of the Hegelian obsession with triads.
But I have the triadic habit myself, and think that there is a recognizable social reality underneath the analogy making. More than that, these three understandings of freedom have competed with each other, often in the same national space, and always in some relation with the broader class structure of society. Usually, the social materialization of freedom has been crucified, by the social scientists, upon the insistence that there are two spheres under which we understand the modernization process – the private and the public sphere. The spheres make for a very manageable analysis of history, but do they really capture the reality of friendship, the office, the traffic jam, the tv show?
…
During the Great Transformation the drivers of the system of production changed in their rhythm, spacing, and effects. In Europe, the pre-modern modes of producton depended on the spread of one or other major technology – the wheel, the chariot, the plow – over a relatively long period of time, during which social relations adjusted as they could. But the modernization was synonymous with new rhythms, spacing and effects – a new regime of routines. Not only were diffusion times for new technologies shortened dramatically, but their interdependence created a system of disequilibrium, even as the system’s theorists searched for equilibrium – in the system of money, in the market, etc. – a system in which one part could be touched to produce predictable effects on the other part, feeding back into the first part to moderate and over time suppress the initial touch.
What I want to go into, here, is not that entire system, which lurks behind the walls of the artificial paradise, but a part of it – the technologizations of diffusion itself. The media. Which employs the same social group that is employed as agents of circulation, due to the fact that in both groups, there is the same educational background. The groups overlap, the white collar worker and the journalist, the adverting man and the painter. And in turn, both groups form both the ideologues of the home and the instruments for its penetration by capitalism, the latter under the necessity of creating demand, that second nemesis, a happy nemesis.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
end of Breath
This is the second and last part of the story in the last post.
...
I felt good and military adhering to the discipline I’d outlined for myself. I felt like Mishima or something. That summer I read a biography of Mishima and Sun and Steel, his essays, which I’d found a used paperback copy of in the Dekalb Junior College Bookstore, and I felt that here was a darkly attractive figure who understood balancing the death drive against the life drive, and how that required a regime of spiritual and bodily exercises. So ‘military’, which had always meant something bad to me - stupidity, blind obedience, repression, Coach Sick’s crewcut - meant something different for me that summer. It meant strength, purity, will. Since this time I have been in a lot of protests - against the secret war in Nicaragua, against the Persian Gulf invasion - but I have always had a secret understanding of why people have such admiration for the military, unlike Julia and her friends, who are the people who get me to go to these demonstrations and sign petitions and do phone calling and contribute pieces to anti-war shows. I am clued into the erotics of control, of explicit systems of command and obedience. So there I’d be, I’d get up and get out around six, with the sky still shadowed by night, and I’d run my route. I went down from our court into Gladstone Drive, turned left on Verona Park and turned left on Shiloh Mill, ran a half mile down to the Shiloh Mill Baptist church, ran across the church grounds, jumped the creek that separated their property from the Salem Golf course, ran in the path that snaked among the pine trees around the course, hit Dial drive, then took Naman’s Way back to Verona Park proper, which by this time was showing a little activity - a white haired man in a blue suit would be sucking leaves out of the swimming pool with a long hose behind the big chain link fence to my right, and he’d raise one arm straight up, like he was pointing at something, and then he’d drop it, which I took to be a wave. I considered myself practically home at this point, I simply crossed to Verona Park Road and licked on up to my subdivision, and this last half mile I tried to hightail, I’d kick into my baddest ass run and run my breath out by the time I reached my driveway, when I would stop, then jog around the circle, letting my legs and arms simply shake, gearing down, and then, in the lawn, I’d bend over and hold my ankles and let pant hotly into my t shirt.
I concentrated, as Coach Fregee told us to, on breathing, the in and out, and I also tried to hold a certain balance within myself of energies, thinking that I was being very samurai. I liked to hold back and hold back the moment when I finally had to mouth breath, as opposed to nose breath, then I’d coordinate my rhythm to the way my lungs felt, thinking of them as two living animals inside me. My goal was to prolong nose breathing while I picked up my pace a little more each day, so I tried to cut off mouth breathing as soon as it occurred. The first incident of mouth breathing, I’d change my pace, get back to nose breathing, then speed up. I concentrated just on these things, I tried to keep my mind from straying beyond the confines of my immediate body situation. This, too, I thought of as somehow very Zen. I would concentrate sometimes so much on my body I’d feel like I was going cross eyed.
I’d chosen my course to give me a variety of landscape. Long ago, during a phase in the six grade when I went around with an almanac and was always pulling it out to mull over random and insignificant statistics, I learned that Atlanta was exactly 1,050 feet up in the air (although, admittedly, I wondered whether they had just averaged out heights and depths, or whether that was the highest point, or what, since obviously there were dips and rises all over the city). That meant that Gladstone, as a suburb, was about that high or higher. Coach Fregee, who came from Chicago, said that the times in Chicago were almost better on the average by a minute than the one’s in Atlanta, because of the altitude difference. So I was aware of that. I turned left on Verona Park each morning because I wanted to hit the hill there as soon as possible, thinking that it was sort of a merit. I was really convinced that I gained virtue every day just by making my body do things that put stress upon it, that required will on my part. Although I knew enough to see that there was a paradox here - I asserted my will over my body in order, eventually, to submerge myself in a balance of energies. The threshold to that energy situation was shucking the idea of will, or of individuality, or of the possessive “my” , as in “my body”. There was only the balance, the weighing of light and darkness, the Zoroastrian dimension of dawn and twilight, the hard muscle, the readiness to use it. It was like I was going to become a gunslinger, instead of a mediocre cross country runner.
I liked to compare, while I was running, the effort it took me to get up the hill to getting up it in the car, as I had done hundreds of times. It was then that I discovered what I didn’t like about cars, what in fact I still don’t like. In the car, I was divorced from the power of the hill. Now that power, I thought, was in the set and of the type of the power I wanted to feel in my body, my planetary membership, so to speak. I’d been shaped, in a way that went beyond the metaphorical, out of the earth - certainly out of the earth’s elements. I was not born an astronaut, in some manufactured suit, supported by some elaborate, artificial system, floating in space, but I’d been born out of the earth and I carried the earth with me, I would carry it with me if I were to become an astronaut, I would never be able to transform myself into the substance of any other planet. So I figured. So I began to get very Luddite about the whole thing, about technology and such. I would trot up the hill (step nose breath step nose breath) and realize that when there is nothing resistant about the hill and the power there is broken, one’s body’s power is injured too. I didn’t ‘realize’ this in so many words, but by the end of the summer those were about the words I would use to describe what I’d found out. The car is never quite as germane to one’s body’s issues as the hill, the valley, the stream, the meadow. It was a matter of exposure, I thought. To put myself against the hill, to bend to it, to experience it and remember it in my legs and thighs and with my lungs, with the air that I had to take in and give back, that seemed to me a human necessity. It was taken away by the car, you were stripped of your own power, thinking that power was at your fingertips. So you traded in muscle, all you have, in the end, to keep you respectable as a beast, for speed, which ultimately rushed you into a life where you never had any time. Eventually you’d get fat and lose the ability to run, which in turn would make you susceptible to panic, which in turn would make you defensive and reactionary. I saw it all, I was vouchsafed that vision, in increments, that summer.
...
I felt good and military adhering to the discipline I’d outlined for myself. I felt like Mishima or something. That summer I read a biography of Mishima and Sun and Steel, his essays, which I’d found a used paperback copy of in the Dekalb Junior College Bookstore, and I felt that here was a darkly attractive figure who understood balancing the death drive against the life drive, and how that required a regime of spiritual and bodily exercises. So ‘military’, which had always meant something bad to me - stupidity, blind obedience, repression, Coach Sick’s crewcut - meant something different for me that summer. It meant strength, purity, will. Since this time I have been in a lot of protests - against the secret war in Nicaragua, against the Persian Gulf invasion - but I have always had a secret understanding of why people have such admiration for the military, unlike Julia and her friends, who are the people who get me to go to these demonstrations and sign petitions and do phone calling and contribute pieces to anti-war shows. I am clued into the erotics of control, of explicit systems of command and obedience. So there I’d be, I’d get up and get out around six, with the sky still shadowed by night, and I’d run my route. I went down from our court into Gladstone Drive, turned left on Verona Park and turned left on Shiloh Mill, ran a half mile down to the Shiloh Mill Baptist church, ran across the church grounds, jumped the creek that separated their property from the Salem Golf course, ran in the path that snaked among the pine trees around the course, hit Dial drive, then took Naman’s Way back to Verona Park proper, which by this time was showing a little activity - a white haired man in a blue suit would be sucking leaves out of the swimming pool with a long hose behind the big chain link fence to my right, and he’d raise one arm straight up, like he was pointing at something, and then he’d drop it, which I took to be a wave. I considered myself practically home at this point, I simply crossed to Verona Park Road and licked on up to my subdivision, and this last half mile I tried to hightail, I’d kick into my baddest ass run and run my breath out by the time I reached my driveway, when I would stop, then jog around the circle, letting my legs and arms simply shake, gearing down, and then, in the lawn, I’d bend over and hold my ankles and let pant hotly into my t shirt.
I concentrated, as Coach Fregee told us to, on breathing, the in and out, and I also tried to hold a certain balance within myself of energies, thinking that I was being very samurai. I liked to hold back and hold back the moment when I finally had to mouth breath, as opposed to nose breath, then I’d coordinate my rhythm to the way my lungs felt, thinking of them as two living animals inside me. My goal was to prolong nose breathing while I picked up my pace a little more each day, so I tried to cut off mouth breathing as soon as it occurred. The first incident of mouth breathing, I’d change my pace, get back to nose breathing, then speed up. I concentrated just on these things, I tried to keep my mind from straying beyond the confines of my immediate body situation. This, too, I thought of as somehow very Zen. I would concentrate sometimes so much on my body I’d feel like I was going cross eyed.
I’d chosen my course to give me a variety of landscape. Long ago, during a phase in the six grade when I went around with an almanac and was always pulling it out to mull over random and insignificant statistics, I learned that Atlanta was exactly 1,050 feet up in the air (although, admittedly, I wondered whether they had just averaged out heights and depths, or whether that was the highest point, or what, since obviously there were dips and rises all over the city). That meant that Gladstone, as a suburb, was about that high or higher. Coach Fregee, who came from Chicago, said that the times in Chicago were almost better on the average by a minute than the one’s in Atlanta, because of the altitude difference. So I was aware of that. I turned left on Verona Park each morning because I wanted to hit the hill there as soon as possible, thinking that it was sort of a merit. I was really convinced that I gained virtue every day just by making my body do things that put stress upon it, that required will on my part. Although I knew enough to see that there was a paradox here - I asserted my will over my body in order, eventually, to submerge myself in a balance of energies. The threshold to that energy situation was shucking the idea of will, or of individuality, or of the possessive “my” , as in “my body”. There was only the balance, the weighing of light and darkness, the Zoroastrian dimension of dawn and twilight, the hard muscle, the readiness to use it. It was like I was going to become a gunslinger, instead of a mediocre cross country runner.
I liked to compare, while I was running, the effort it took me to get up the hill to getting up it in the car, as I had done hundreds of times. It was then that I discovered what I didn’t like about cars, what in fact I still don’t like. In the car, I was divorced from the power of the hill. Now that power, I thought, was in the set and of the type of the power I wanted to feel in my body, my planetary membership, so to speak. I’d been shaped, in a way that went beyond the metaphorical, out of the earth - certainly out of the earth’s elements. I was not born an astronaut, in some manufactured suit, supported by some elaborate, artificial system, floating in space, but I’d been born out of the earth and I carried the earth with me, I would carry it with me if I were to become an astronaut, I would never be able to transform myself into the substance of any other planet. So I figured. So I began to get very Luddite about the whole thing, about technology and such. I would trot up the hill (step nose breath step nose breath) and realize that when there is nothing resistant about the hill and the power there is broken, one’s body’s power is injured too. I didn’t ‘realize’ this in so many words, but by the end of the summer those were about the words I would use to describe what I’d found out. The car is never quite as germane to one’s body’s issues as the hill, the valley, the stream, the meadow. It was a matter of exposure, I thought. To put myself against the hill, to bend to it, to experience it and remember it in my legs and thighs and with my lungs, with the air that I had to take in and give back, that seemed to me a human necessity. It was taken away by the car, you were stripped of your own power, thinking that power was at your fingertips. So you traded in muscle, all you have, in the end, to keep you respectable as a beast, for speed, which ultimately rushed you into a life where you never had any time. Eventually you’d get fat and lose the ability to run, which in turn would make you susceptible to panic, which in turn would make you defensive and reactionary. I saw it all, I was vouchsafed that vision, in increments, that summer.
something a little different - 1
I've been thinking of Dostoevsky's habit, in the Diary of a Writer, of inserting, now and then, a story to lighten up the heavy going opinion mongering. And also I have a large backlog of stories, and what the hell? Apparently nobody is reading Limited Inc anymore, anyway. So here's the first half of a story, Breath.
...
When I was in high school, I was on two teams. I was on tennis, and I was on cross country. I ran, for a while, every morning. This was after I had been suspended from school for stealing a van. It was Mikey McCall’s father’s van, and since Mikey was in on it, Mikey’s father didn’t press charges. Still, it was a lot of trouble, and though I felt that stealing the van had definitely been worth it, since I got to see some country, hang out in Austin, which is where Rayber, the other guy I stole the van with, wanted to go, and meet this girl (Julia), I felt like I had better do some penance. At that time I was incredibly stubborn, so I didn’t want to stage some scene where, head bowed, I muttered that I was sorry to my folks, formally grouped, no doubt, on the living room sofa, but I started to express it in my actions, trying to be more helpful around the house, cleaning my room, folding clothes, setting the table, tasks which I initiated without Mom’s prompting.
Dad and Mom had both been pretty grim faced when I came home that night, and they gave me the silent treatment, more or less, while the cop who was over at the house sat with us all in the living room and explained how, if I was his son, two things would happen right fast: I’d get the whooping of my life, and then I’d get a haircut. After Dad had shown officer Bozo out, he said he wasn’t sure that I shouldn’t go to jail.
Mom said, oh, Jack.
I said, maybe you’re right, Dad. I said it in my most clenched style, it came out as barely a whisper. Lately, that is how I was talking to my parents.
That’s where we left it. They were both very indignant for a month, and we shuffled around each other in the house with some feeling of awkwardness. They found the phrase that summed up how they felt and they kept repeating variations of it. I can’t believe, Dad would say, out of nowhere, that you’d do something so stupid. Then his head would disappear behind his magazine, or lose all meaning, staring at the tv set. You are such a smart boy, Street, Mom said, her voice on the edge of sarcastic, although I had never known Mom to adopt overt sarcasm. It wasn’t her style. That she was driven to the length of hinting at sarcasm was her way of showing how much pain I caused her. I knew what was being implied, since it was an article of faith in the house, which I’d heard since I don’t know when, that brilliant people lack common sense, that prodigies end up as garbagemen, and that, if you want to get ahead in this world, perspiration is worth any amount of inspiration. This belief was in disjunction with another belief, the cult of genius, it being Dad’s credo that Einstein and Newton and Thomas Edison were gods, but it wasn’t something one sat down and worked out, logically. To believe two vaguely contradictory things was just a part of the suburban ethos, the suburban tolerance - beliefs were conceived of as being separate, discrete entities, like houses on the block, and contradictory beliefs were just like two houses headed by fathers who didn’t like each other. They didn’t, for that reason, move away or even argue with each other. It was simply known in the neighborhood, by some instinct, that they didn’t like each other. In the city, maybe, that dislike would have come to a head, there would have been some kind of screaming match - at least, that was always happening in cities in movies and on tv - but not in the suburbs. I ‘d heard belief number one, the vague anti-intellectualism re the inevitable deficiency of prodigies, expressed by other people in the neighborhood too, and though it violently offended me, I understood where it came from.
The full implication was that this is what comes of me vaugely flaunting the wounded angel routine, pretending I was so much smarter than my parents. Well, to me this had nothing to do with running away with the van. I was tempted to repeat a few of the stories Dad told me about his adolescence, what he and Uncle Henry did, but I didn’t, partly because that really hadn’t influenced me at all. I just wanted to do it, and I knew what the consequences were going to be. I tried to think that my life was going to be big and broad, that this was just a minor, bad stretch of it - although of course, in adolescence time isn’t like that at all, I would look up and the horizons of the minute would suddenly crowd in on me, showing me in a stabbing flash an image of time’s edged intensity, deepening my helplessness when I was miserable, destroying my common sense when I was happy, throwing me off balance. Although by then I had developed a sense of time’s extensivity, of how one’s energies must be distributed in projects that play out over long periods of one’s life, it wasn’t a consolation to me, because in reality I had never had to engage in one of those projects. So I really tried to get into cross country in the somewhat chastened spirit of a boy who is trying to make amends for having fucked up. I’d been a halfassed runner before, missing practices and always coming in around the middle, but it was in cross country that I really got to know Rayber to be friend’s with, who was an excellent runner, and I felt that, now that we’d had this van experience together, I ought to try to come up to his level on the running front, which was obviously how Rayber was going to get through college. They had let Rayber choose to get off suspension by doing school good citizen work. That way he didn’t have to miss any of the meets. Coach Fregee took care of it, just like Rayber told me he knew he would. On the other hand, since I was suspended from February to March, I missed most of them, although when I came back I was able to connect again with the tennis team. I made it my goal that summer - I was seventeen - to come in at least fourth in one of the meets in the fall.
...
When I was in high school, I was on two teams. I was on tennis, and I was on cross country. I ran, for a while, every morning. This was after I had been suspended from school for stealing a van. It was Mikey McCall’s father’s van, and since Mikey was in on it, Mikey’s father didn’t press charges. Still, it was a lot of trouble, and though I felt that stealing the van had definitely been worth it, since I got to see some country, hang out in Austin, which is where Rayber, the other guy I stole the van with, wanted to go, and meet this girl (Julia), I felt like I had better do some penance. At that time I was incredibly stubborn, so I didn’t want to stage some scene where, head bowed, I muttered that I was sorry to my folks, formally grouped, no doubt, on the living room sofa, but I started to express it in my actions, trying to be more helpful around the house, cleaning my room, folding clothes, setting the table, tasks which I initiated without Mom’s prompting.
Dad and Mom had both been pretty grim faced when I came home that night, and they gave me the silent treatment, more or less, while the cop who was over at the house sat with us all in the living room and explained how, if I was his son, two things would happen right fast: I’d get the whooping of my life, and then I’d get a haircut. After Dad had shown officer Bozo out, he said he wasn’t sure that I shouldn’t go to jail.
Mom said, oh, Jack.
I said, maybe you’re right, Dad. I said it in my most clenched style, it came out as barely a whisper. Lately, that is how I was talking to my parents.
That’s where we left it. They were both very indignant for a month, and we shuffled around each other in the house with some feeling of awkwardness. They found the phrase that summed up how they felt and they kept repeating variations of it. I can’t believe, Dad would say, out of nowhere, that you’d do something so stupid. Then his head would disappear behind his magazine, or lose all meaning, staring at the tv set. You are such a smart boy, Street, Mom said, her voice on the edge of sarcastic, although I had never known Mom to adopt overt sarcasm. It wasn’t her style. That she was driven to the length of hinting at sarcasm was her way of showing how much pain I caused her. I knew what was being implied, since it was an article of faith in the house, which I’d heard since I don’t know when, that brilliant people lack common sense, that prodigies end up as garbagemen, and that, if you want to get ahead in this world, perspiration is worth any amount of inspiration. This belief was in disjunction with another belief, the cult of genius, it being Dad’s credo that Einstein and Newton and Thomas Edison were gods, but it wasn’t something one sat down and worked out, logically. To believe two vaguely contradictory things was just a part of the suburban ethos, the suburban tolerance - beliefs were conceived of as being separate, discrete entities, like houses on the block, and contradictory beliefs were just like two houses headed by fathers who didn’t like each other. They didn’t, for that reason, move away or even argue with each other. It was simply known in the neighborhood, by some instinct, that they didn’t like each other. In the city, maybe, that dislike would have come to a head, there would have been some kind of screaming match - at least, that was always happening in cities in movies and on tv - but not in the suburbs. I ‘d heard belief number one, the vague anti-intellectualism re the inevitable deficiency of prodigies, expressed by other people in the neighborhood too, and though it violently offended me, I understood where it came from.
The full implication was that this is what comes of me vaugely flaunting the wounded angel routine, pretending I was so much smarter than my parents. Well, to me this had nothing to do with running away with the van. I was tempted to repeat a few of the stories Dad told me about his adolescence, what he and Uncle Henry did, but I didn’t, partly because that really hadn’t influenced me at all. I just wanted to do it, and I knew what the consequences were going to be. I tried to think that my life was going to be big and broad, that this was just a minor, bad stretch of it - although of course, in adolescence time isn’t like that at all, I would look up and the horizons of the minute would suddenly crowd in on me, showing me in a stabbing flash an image of time’s edged intensity, deepening my helplessness when I was miserable, destroying my common sense when I was happy, throwing me off balance. Although by then I had developed a sense of time’s extensivity, of how one’s energies must be distributed in projects that play out over long periods of one’s life, it wasn’t a consolation to me, because in reality I had never had to engage in one of those projects. So I really tried to get into cross country in the somewhat chastened spirit of a boy who is trying to make amends for having fucked up. I’d been a halfassed runner before, missing practices and always coming in around the middle, but it was in cross country that I really got to know Rayber to be friend’s with, who was an excellent runner, and I felt that, now that we’d had this van experience together, I ought to try to come up to his level on the running front, which was obviously how Rayber was going to get through college. They had let Rayber choose to get off suspension by doing school good citizen work. That way he didn’t have to miss any of the meets. Coach Fregee took care of it, just like Rayber told me he knew he would. On the other hand, since I was suspended from February to March, I missed most of them, although when I came back I was able to connect again with the tennis team. I made it my goal that summer - I was seventeen - to come in at least fourth in one of the meets in the fall.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Nietzsche and dynamite
According to Maxime Vuillame’s book, Les Travaux publics au XIXieme siecle (1883), the ‘sad’ town of Groeschen was the scene for one of the more spectacular engineering projects of the 1870s – the creation of the tunnel at the base of Saint Gothard mountain for the purpose of laying a railroad track. After the tunnel was proposed, Goeschen became quite different: “Side by side with the old quarter soon appeared a new town, put up in haste in order to give temporary shelter to a population of two thousand miners, mechanics, masons, canteen clerks, making an irruption in this desolate corner. During the nine years in which the work of mining proceeded, Goeschen presented to the tourist the strange aspect of one of those improvised American cities, full of movement, of cries, sometimes of bloody battles; each of the houses that lined the route of a long chain of window displays and cabarets, there was thrown out now the sounds of a waltz, now the sounds of a noisy dispute a l’italienne. Marching down the road, the troops of miners returning in groups from the tunnel, singing “the hymn to Garibaldi” or some old refrain from the other side of the mountains, which they beat out with their still illuminated lamps. A muffled explosion made the air shake, another, five or six in succession; this was the mines that blew up in the subterranean tunnel, taking from the mountain a part of its rock each day. Then, everything re-entered into silence, that was only pierced now and then by the sharp whistle of the locomotives hauling out the underground debris.”
Vuillaume may have noticed the songs of the workers all the more because of his experience in the Commune. But did Nietzsche notice them? Did he see them?
The Saint Gothard project was begun at about the time Nietzsche took up his post in Basel, in 1872. Nietzsche and his sister actually crossed the old pass on a horsedrawn sleigh in 1871, so he would have known the area. The the project was finished the year Nietzsche wrote Daybreak, in 1881.
The preface to Daybreak was written In 1886, while Nietzsche was living in Nice. He read, at the end of that year, a French translation of Notes from the Underground, and depending when one dates the preface, it is possible Nietzsche’s soutterain was influenced by Dostoevsky.
But there is another chain of connections, or at least intersigne.
The first of these is in a letter that Nietzsche writes to Overbeck in 1886, in which he mentions Goeschenen. This is a significant letter for many reasons, among which is the fact that Nietzsche is quite conscious that the sickness he suffers from is not simply a physical ill. Or rather, he sees the double aspect of illness, how it accrues psychological and existential meanings. He complains to Overbeck that it makes him ill every time he returns to Italy, and then he makes the fascinating point that the illness is specifically connected to his feeling of being intellectually cramped and exhausted by his post in the university of Basel. After telling his friend that “your post in Basel, really nothing to envy, but at least it is nothing, as well, to commiserate with, has something prospective and fine, which you couldn’t easily find elsewhere,” he writes revealingly about himself: “Unfortunately, this place is climactically impossible for me – than with whom would I rather now speak of my things than with you and Burckhardt? Thus I have really weighed Basel, and I always enjoy meeting someone from Basel (like I did again today: and each time it occurs to me how impregnated with the Buckhardtian spirit and taste everything is that comes from there: naturally assuming, etc. etc). But finally I thank God (or more precisely, my illness, and in good part you, my dear friend) that I am no longer there. To live in a false milieu and to weaken one’s life task, which I did, so long as I was a philologist and university instructor, unfailingly crushed me physically to the ground; and every advance on my way has brought me, as well, health in the physical sense.” [my translation, SB, 7: 207]
Add to this another letter on September 24, 1886, to his friend, Malwinda von Meysenburg. In it, Nietzsche reports on a simile that will have a fatal charm for him in the coming years:
“At the conclusion I want to write you a few wrds about me, that can be read in the »Bund« (16. und 17. Sept.) [A Bern newspaper]. The title: Nietzsche’s dangerous book.
»Those dynamite stocks, which was used in the construction of the Gotthadt railroad, were supplied with black flags to warn of the deadly danger. Completely in this sense will we speed of the new book by the philosopher Nietzsce as of a dangerous book. We are not strewing any trace of blame in this designation against the author and his work, as little as those black flags were supposed to blame the explosive material. Yet less has it occurred to us to call down upon the lonely thinker by reference to the dangerousness of his book official ravens and crows of the altar. The intellectual explosive, like the material, can serve to do very useful work; it is not necessary, that it be used for criminal purposes. Only it is a good idea, where such stuff is stored, to say clearly: here lies dynamite! ‹«
More even than Whitman, Nietzsche identified with his book – or perhaps I should say, Nietzsche’s identies shifted with the Nietzschian ‘we’. By the time we reach the one of the last texts before Nietzsche’s breakdown, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche has himself become this dynamite. But before we reach that point, in the winter of 1886, Nietzsche, working on the preface to Daybreak, was concerned with what appeared in the book – the book from 1881. He was concerned with the subterranean, the dead, the mole.
It is perhaps a little too facile to say that the Icarian Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of the heights, and the subterranean, the creature of the depths, most naturally meet in a tunnel burrowed under a mountain. A tunnel that is, in its vastness, comparable to some work of nature. But it is the kind of image that I want to put, at least, in the margins of the Nietzschian text, to preside over the question of what Nietzsche saw in his 1881 book that made him speak of a subterranean creature breaking the surface and coming into the light.
…
The Mock community
As the preface is both outside the book and a judgment of what is happening inside it, a good place to start understanding the subterranean is to press on the tension between the lonely beast in the tunnel and the oddly mocking ‘we’. Nietzsche wrote his preface at the same time he was writing the fifth book of The Gay Science, which he claimed in a letter to Peter Gast was written partly in order to establish a symmetry between the two books. He also claimed that he wrote it so quickly that he barely remembered what was in it. The fifth book bears on its face another “we” – Wir Furchtenlos, and the first number concerns “our good cheer”, although the good cheer begins with the very opposite of the good news – rather, it begins with the death of God. In “our good cheer”, the “we” applies to the few who understand this – except the few may be noone at all, no person in the collective, however small, who can encompass the world without God. The shifter in Nietzsche becomes, as it does its enunciative work, as it touches the reader by making the production of the enonce part of a common process, a shapeshifter that escapes the reader, an I escaping the we, and then annihilating itself in an it, in an animal, in a mole, in the spirits of the dead. The dead have no I, in as much as the I only has meaning as a linguistic shifter, because the dead can’t speak. Their I is cancelled.
But of course we, some we, speaks for them, is always speaking for them. Speaking on behalf of the dead is an old community custom. It is literally the law, for the law is intended both to transcend the deaths of the lawmakers and to speak for them.
But this is not Nietzschian “we”. I don’t believe I am mistaken in hearing a tone of mockery in that we that has to do with the coincidence between the shifter and the shapeshifter. It is mockery at the kind of utterance in which the “we” anchors the truth. That anchoring is institutionalized – it is not the we of the intellectual adventurer that anchors the credibility of the philosopher, but his or her post as a teacher of philosophy. If one looks at Nietzsche’s we-s, many are claims to community with the kinds of expertise in which he had no official training, on the one side – and on the other side there was the kind of journalistic we that assumed philosophy, psychology, art as guises for the feuilleton column. The Nietzschian “we” maintains itself – and this is its connection both to the resentment of the reactionaries and the critique of the revolutionaries - between arid academism and newspaper vulgarization in the space of that amateur, the man who understands the world through his experience and reading, or the third life – the one that is spent neither sleeping nor, fully, in waking and its business. These specialists in reading, in an art that has no disciplinary limits or form! These amateurs! The we, then, does signal a community, but it is a community built on mockery.
The fifth book to Daybreak opens with a sort of prose poem, In Great Silence. Here the text presents us with questions that touch on a sort of interweaving: the we, language, silence, and mockery. The we here is Nietzsche and nature. The underground creature, the it, and the dead are all connected to the modernist remove from nature, and its return.
In Great Silence – Here is the sea, here we can forget the city. Although even now we can hear its bells ringing out the Ave Maria – it is that dusky and foolish, but sweet noise at the crossroads of day and night – but only a moment more! Now everything is silent. The sea lies pale and glowing there, it cannot speak. Heaven plays its eternal dumb evening play with red, yellow, green colors, it cannot speak. The small cliffs and bands of boulders, which jut out into the see, as though in order to find the place where it is loneliest, they can all not speak. This terrifying dumbness, which suddenly falls over us, is beautiful and cruel, the heart swells at it – Oh, the slipperiness of this dumb beauty! — How well it could speak, and how evilly, too, if it wanted! Its tied up tongue and the suffering happiness on its face is a deception, in order to mock at your pity. But so be it. I am not ashamed to be the mocked object of such powers. But I feel compassion for you, nature, because you must be silent, even if it is only because of your evil. – Oh, it is becoming quieter, and my heart is swelling up even more: it is shocked before a new truth, for it too cannot speak, it even makes mock when the mouth wants to call out something into this beauty, speak, it even takes pleasure in the sweet wickedness of silence. Speech, and even thought has become abhorrent to me: because don’t’ I hear, behind every word, the error, the fantasy, the spirit of madness laughing? Oughtn’t I do mock my compassion? Mock my mocking?— Oh sea! Oh evening! You are terrible teachers! You teach the human to cease to be human! Should he give in to you? Should he become as you are now, pale, glittering, dumb, monstrous, reposing above himself? Exalted above himself?
Vuillaume may have noticed the songs of the workers all the more because of his experience in the Commune. But did Nietzsche notice them? Did he see them?
The Saint Gothard project was begun at about the time Nietzsche took up his post in Basel, in 1872. Nietzsche and his sister actually crossed the old pass on a horsedrawn sleigh in 1871, so he would have known the area. The the project was finished the year Nietzsche wrote Daybreak, in 1881.
The preface to Daybreak was written In 1886, while Nietzsche was living in Nice. He read, at the end of that year, a French translation of Notes from the Underground, and depending when one dates the preface, it is possible Nietzsche’s soutterain was influenced by Dostoevsky.
But there is another chain of connections, or at least intersigne.
The first of these is in a letter that Nietzsche writes to Overbeck in 1886, in which he mentions Goeschenen. This is a significant letter for many reasons, among which is the fact that Nietzsche is quite conscious that the sickness he suffers from is not simply a physical ill. Or rather, he sees the double aspect of illness, how it accrues psychological and existential meanings. He complains to Overbeck that it makes him ill every time he returns to Italy, and then he makes the fascinating point that the illness is specifically connected to his feeling of being intellectually cramped and exhausted by his post in the university of Basel. After telling his friend that “your post in Basel, really nothing to envy, but at least it is nothing, as well, to commiserate with, has something prospective and fine, which you couldn’t easily find elsewhere,” he writes revealingly about himself: “Unfortunately, this place is climactically impossible for me – than with whom would I rather now speak of my things than with you and Burckhardt? Thus I have really weighed Basel, and I always enjoy meeting someone from Basel (like I did again today: and each time it occurs to me how impregnated with the Buckhardtian spirit and taste everything is that comes from there: naturally assuming, etc. etc). But finally I thank God (or more precisely, my illness, and in good part you, my dear friend) that I am no longer there. To live in a false milieu and to weaken one’s life task, which I did, so long as I was a philologist and university instructor, unfailingly crushed me physically to the ground; and every advance on my way has brought me, as well, health in the physical sense.” [my translation, SB, 7: 207]
Add to this another letter on September 24, 1886, to his friend, Malwinda von Meysenburg. In it, Nietzsche reports on a simile that will have a fatal charm for him in the coming years:
“At the conclusion I want to write you a few wrds about me, that can be read in the »Bund« (16. und 17. Sept.) [A Bern newspaper]. The title: Nietzsche’s dangerous book.
»Those dynamite stocks, which was used in the construction of the Gotthadt railroad, were supplied with black flags to warn of the deadly danger. Completely in this sense will we speed of the new book by the philosopher Nietzsce as of a dangerous book. We are not strewing any trace of blame in this designation against the author and his work, as little as those black flags were supposed to blame the explosive material. Yet less has it occurred to us to call down upon the lonely thinker by reference to the dangerousness of his book official ravens and crows of the altar. The intellectual explosive, like the material, can serve to do very useful work; it is not necessary, that it be used for criminal purposes. Only it is a good idea, where such stuff is stored, to say clearly: here lies dynamite! ‹«
More even than Whitman, Nietzsche identified with his book – or perhaps I should say, Nietzsche’s identies shifted with the Nietzschian ‘we’. By the time we reach the one of the last texts before Nietzsche’s breakdown, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche has himself become this dynamite. But before we reach that point, in the winter of 1886, Nietzsche, working on the preface to Daybreak, was concerned with what appeared in the book – the book from 1881. He was concerned with the subterranean, the dead, the mole.
It is perhaps a little too facile to say that the Icarian Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of the heights, and the subterranean, the creature of the depths, most naturally meet in a tunnel burrowed under a mountain. A tunnel that is, in its vastness, comparable to some work of nature. But it is the kind of image that I want to put, at least, in the margins of the Nietzschian text, to preside over the question of what Nietzsche saw in his 1881 book that made him speak of a subterranean creature breaking the surface and coming into the light.
…
The Mock community
As the preface is both outside the book and a judgment of what is happening inside it, a good place to start understanding the subterranean is to press on the tension between the lonely beast in the tunnel and the oddly mocking ‘we’. Nietzsche wrote his preface at the same time he was writing the fifth book of The Gay Science, which he claimed in a letter to Peter Gast was written partly in order to establish a symmetry between the two books. He also claimed that he wrote it so quickly that he barely remembered what was in it. The fifth book bears on its face another “we” – Wir Furchtenlos, and the first number concerns “our good cheer”, although the good cheer begins with the very opposite of the good news – rather, it begins with the death of God. In “our good cheer”, the “we” applies to the few who understand this – except the few may be noone at all, no person in the collective, however small, who can encompass the world without God. The shifter in Nietzsche becomes, as it does its enunciative work, as it touches the reader by making the production of the enonce part of a common process, a shapeshifter that escapes the reader, an I escaping the we, and then annihilating itself in an it, in an animal, in a mole, in the spirits of the dead. The dead have no I, in as much as the I only has meaning as a linguistic shifter, because the dead can’t speak. Their I is cancelled.
But of course we, some we, speaks for them, is always speaking for them. Speaking on behalf of the dead is an old community custom. It is literally the law, for the law is intended both to transcend the deaths of the lawmakers and to speak for them.
But this is not Nietzschian “we”. I don’t believe I am mistaken in hearing a tone of mockery in that we that has to do with the coincidence between the shifter and the shapeshifter. It is mockery at the kind of utterance in which the “we” anchors the truth. That anchoring is institutionalized – it is not the we of the intellectual adventurer that anchors the credibility of the philosopher, but his or her post as a teacher of philosophy. If one looks at Nietzsche’s we-s, many are claims to community with the kinds of expertise in which he had no official training, on the one side – and on the other side there was the kind of journalistic we that assumed philosophy, psychology, art as guises for the feuilleton column. The Nietzschian “we” maintains itself – and this is its connection both to the resentment of the reactionaries and the critique of the revolutionaries - between arid academism and newspaper vulgarization in the space of that amateur, the man who understands the world through his experience and reading, or the third life – the one that is spent neither sleeping nor, fully, in waking and its business. These specialists in reading, in an art that has no disciplinary limits or form! These amateurs! The we, then, does signal a community, but it is a community built on mockery.
The fifth book to Daybreak opens with a sort of prose poem, In Great Silence. Here the text presents us with questions that touch on a sort of interweaving: the we, language, silence, and mockery. The we here is Nietzsche and nature. The underground creature, the it, and the dead are all connected to the modernist remove from nature, and its return.
In Great Silence – Here is the sea, here we can forget the city. Although even now we can hear its bells ringing out the Ave Maria – it is that dusky and foolish, but sweet noise at the crossroads of day and night – but only a moment more! Now everything is silent. The sea lies pale and glowing there, it cannot speak. Heaven plays its eternal dumb evening play with red, yellow, green colors, it cannot speak. The small cliffs and bands of boulders, which jut out into the see, as though in order to find the place where it is loneliest, they can all not speak. This terrifying dumbness, which suddenly falls over us, is beautiful and cruel, the heart swells at it – Oh, the slipperiness of this dumb beauty! — How well it could speak, and how evilly, too, if it wanted! Its tied up tongue and the suffering happiness on its face is a deception, in order to mock at your pity. But so be it. I am not ashamed to be the mocked object of such powers. But I feel compassion for you, nature, because you must be silent, even if it is only because of your evil. – Oh, it is becoming quieter, and my heart is swelling up even more: it is shocked before a new truth, for it too cannot speak, it even makes mock when the mouth wants to call out something into this beauty, speak, it even takes pleasure in the sweet wickedness of silence. Speech, and even thought has become abhorrent to me: because don’t’ I hear, behind every word, the error, the fantasy, the spirit of madness laughing? Oughtn’t I do mock my compassion? Mock my mocking?— Oh sea! Oh evening! You are terrible teachers! You teach the human to cease to be human! Should he give in to you? Should he become as you are now, pale, glittering, dumb, monstrous, reposing above himself? Exalted above himself?
Saturday, April 16, 2011
notes on paris
So: I walk down rue Rambuteau past the Beaubourg to a Lebanese sandwich stand; I buy a chicken Shawarma to go; I notice, with pleasure, that they have put the fries inside the sandwich, like I like it; I pay for it and press on with my quest to find a bike stand, all the while eating my sandwich and feeling an immense satisfaction that I am walking, this morning, in Paris.
Heres’s the thing: I am, for once in my life, impressed with myself.
Here’s the other thing: I realize that this feeling is quite absurd. I have stuffed my mouth with sandwiches in other villes – in Santa Fe, Austin, New Haven, New Orleans, Atlanta. But Paris is different. The difference, no doubt, is due to the fact that I stuffed my head with literature and Paris since I discovered serious novels and masturbation, when I was 13. Or perhaps I discovered serious novels second. If I hadn’t read Pound, Baudelaire, Stein, Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Balzac, perhaps I wouldn’t feel the ordinary sights beat down upon me like emblems I have somehow re-discovered, emblems of the thing I tried to build up in myself, painfully and – after a while – more out of habit than of any intention. That thing – the cultivated man.
Perhaps if I was a certain type of singer and came to Austin, I would feel the same way, walking past Antones, as I do biking past the Hotel de Ville. And in Austin, I did feel a certain well being on a Saturday afternoon when I sat down with a book, or some editing work, in Whole Foods and drank my coffee and looked about me and almost feel in love with the health and wealth of my fellow Americans, stocking up all around me. I loved their air of ambition, sitting at the tables in that part of the store where we all came to eat lunch, - whether aspiring for serenity through Native American massage or aspiring for hits creating a website for some upscale sports shoes store. But really, for the most part of the past eleven years that I spent in Austin, I mainly felt that something had gone seriously wrong with me and the country, and much as I tried to love my aspiring neighbor, I fell into the bad habit of condemning him for the rape of Falluja in my heart. Me and the country were both going through a personality change that felt like a nervous breakdown. The Bush years scraped its fingernails on the blackboard 24/7, and I couldn’t get enough of it, couldn’t wait to poison myself with the next day’s headlines. I responded to all this with a piece of internal terrorism all my own: I blew my brain up. So the happy ambitious people bugged me, seriously. For the one thing they didn’t aspire to was getting the country back.
My own personal breakdown was compounded by the multiple ways I failed as a writer during the Jr. years. I failed, most notably, in the one critical test that any writer must pass: I failed to get anyone interested enough in my writing to pay me money to get more of it. Besides, that is, the freelance dribs and drabs. Samuel Johnson, who had the soul of a union boss, famously said that nobody but a blockhead ever wrote but for money. This is a pretty exact statement of the case. This doesn’t mean the blockhead writer is necessarily bad, but it does mean he or she is a blockhead. That was the group I fell into. I could even feel the block attached to my neck some days, and some months, whole months, I’d have a crick in my neck. Block heads are bad for the neck and back.
I can’t say I fled to Paris to escape the seasons of down and out. No, my life got better, and my head was freed, before Paris. This was because I fell in love and finally figured out – or, rather, some collective unconscious inside me, emanating from the dearest wishes of every cell, be it of toenail, spleen, or heart, figured out - how to be loved. To be loved may be a passive form of verb, but I can assure you it is existentially active. Don’t mistake the accidents of grammar for descriptions of the world – otherwise, you are so fucked.
But this is another story…
Heres’s the thing: I am, for once in my life, impressed with myself.
Here’s the other thing: I realize that this feeling is quite absurd. I have stuffed my mouth with sandwiches in other villes – in Santa Fe, Austin, New Haven, New Orleans, Atlanta. But Paris is different. The difference, no doubt, is due to the fact that I stuffed my head with literature and Paris since I discovered serious novels and masturbation, when I was 13. Or perhaps I discovered serious novels second. If I hadn’t read Pound, Baudelaire, Stein, Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Balzac, perhaps I wouldn’t feel the ordinary sights beat down upon me like emblems I have somehow re-discovered, emblems of the thing I tried to build up in myself, painfully and – after a while – more out of habit than of any intention. That thing – the cultivated man.
Perhaps if I was a certain type of singer and came to Austin, I would feel the same way, walking past Antones, as I do biking past the Hotel de Ville. And in Austin, I did feel a certain well being on a Saturday afternoon when I sat down with a book, or some editing work, in Whole Foods and drank my coffee and looked about me and almost feel in love with the health and wealth of my fellow Americans, stocking up all around me. I loved their air of ambition, sitting at the tables in that part of the store where we all came to eat lunch, - whether aspiring for serenity through Native American massage or aspiring for hits creating a website for some upscale sports shoes store. But really, for the most part of the past eleven years that I spent in Austin, I mainly felt that something had gone seriously wrong with me and the country, and much as I tried to love my aspiring neighbor, I fell into the bad habit of condemning him for the rape of Falluja in my heart. Me and the country were both going through a personality change that felt like a nervous breakdown. The Bush years scraped its fingernails on the blackboard 24/7, and I couldn’t get enough of it, couldn’t wait to poison myself with the next day’s headlines. I responded to all this with a piece of internal terrorism all my own: I blew my brain up. So the happy ambitious people bugged me, seriously. For the one thing they didn’t aspire to was getting the country back.
My own personal breakdown was compounded by the multiple ways I failed as a writer during the Jr. years. I failed, most notably, in the one critical test that any writer must pass: I failed to get anyone interested enough in my writing to pay me money to get more of it. Besides, that is, the freelance dribs and drabs. Samuel Johnson, who had the soul of a union boss, famously said that nobody but a blockhead ever wrote but for money. This is a pretty exact statement of the case. This doesn’t mean the blockhead writer is necessarily bad, but it does mean he or she is a blockhead. That was the group I fell into. I could even feel the block attached to my neck some days, and some months, whole months, I’d have a crick in my neck. Block heads are bad for the neck and back.
I can’t say I fled to Paris to escape the seasons of down and out. No, my life got better, and my head was freed, before Paris. This was because I fell in love and finally figured out – or, rather, some collective unconscious inside me, emanating from the dearest wishes of every cell, be it of toenail, spleen, or heart, figured out - how to be loved. To be loved may be a passive form of verb, but I can assure you it is existentially active. Don’t mistake the accidents of grammar for descriptions of the world – otherwise, you are so fucked.
But this is another story…
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
another 30 and we're done!
There is a crap statistic that is often passed around on the right about taxes, summed up in this headline form Heritage Foundation: “The Top 10 Percent of Income Earners Paid 71 Percent of Federal Income Tax.”
I am always tickled by this meme, because at the same time, when the Right isn’t thundering about taxes, they will also crow about the benefits of the American economy in the age of freemarket globalisation – among which is the enormous increase in wealth of the top ten percent. Or, as the right likes to put it, the normalization of the millionaire next door.
Put these two memes together and it becomes obvious that the wealthiest can pay 70 percent of the U.S. income tax without breaking a sweat. Their enormous engrossment of higher and higher percentages of the national wealth – the latest figures show that the top 1 percent control some 36 percent of the national wealth. This is a stat from the uber-right Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent hold an astonishingly small 25 percent of the national wealth.
These stats should be carved into the liberal mind with a power drill. Because – alas! – the liberal mind keeps thinking that the bottom 90 percent is going to have to pay more taxes for, well, something – Medicare, social security, our wonderful war machine.
The usually level headed Digby quotes with approval a journalist who is proposing a ‘left’ alternative to the Ryan budget to get rid of the deficit. Special gold stars for those who notice what is wrong with this proposal:
“An equally extreme proposal on the left would balance the budget, first, by raising new taxes--on everybody and, most likely, with particular levies on carbon.”
This is simply nutty.
Here’s what an equally extreme proposal on the left would look like: lets balance the budget by raising taxes on the richest ten percent alone. Let’s raise those taxes so that they pay 100 percent of the income tax in America. Let’s drop the federal income tax load to all individuals in the bottom 90 percent to approximately zero.
That’s right, zero.
This would not dent the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. They would still be as rich as fuck. However, if you wanted to do one thing to create instant wealth in households all across America, that one thing would be simply getting rid of the delusion that taxes are like church tithes. They aren’t. America doesn’t need the widow’s mite. America needs the hedgefunder’s billion.
I find it puzzling that liberals have not figured out that the shift in the composition of wealth in this country gives them an extremely popular issue. Instead, liberals think of themselves as the spinach party. I say no in thunder. I say desserts for the masses. I say let us eat cake. Why raise taxes on everybody? There is no reason that the household making 50 thousand dollars should pay a penny more in taxes at any level - their taxes should be heading downward. If we are really going to all "benefit" from globalisation, the simplest way to do so is to redefine what it means to be rich. To be rich should mean not only engrossing an absurd amount of the national wealth, but paying all the national taxes, save for FICA. Every bit. The right has inadvertently shown the way, here. We have merely to follow.
But how about the Galtian thesis. They might move? I'd love it. Then we could get into serious wealth taxes on the assets they have in the U.S. But in fact they aren’t going to go anywhere. Wealth, we are assured, is extremely sneaky peteily fast. But as we all observed in the crisis, when the crunch came, the rich had nowhere to hide. If it wasn’t for Uncle Sam loaning the banks their little dribs and drabs of billions (adding up to 9 trillion loaned at 0.07 interest between 2008 and 2010), the rich would be out there doing real work, cleaning plates and putting the white stripes down the center of roads. When taxes on millionaires were at 90 percent in the Eisenhower era, there's no evidence that millionaires were buffaloing it to Batista’s Cuba and Ireland. They will moan, they will groan, they will find loopholes. Others who want the millions (and realize that when tax time is over, they still have millions) will take their place. Social mobility, quoi? Survival is to the fittest, and we do want to breed the finest, Galt-ian wealthy. Over time, they will buy enough politicians to lower their rates once again, and we will have to revisit this. Such is history.
Taxing the rich isn't complicated. Let's do it under the slogan: ANOTHER 30 AND WE’RE DONE!
Monday, April 11, 2011
The Nietzschian we
As I wrote in the last post, Nietzsche’s preface to Daybreak begins on a note of anaphoric ambiguity. Although the English translators have decided that the subterranean is a subterranean “man”, the German is not so inexorable – in fact, it seems to softly bore its way back to the animal, to the mole.
The mystery of the pronouns, here, is not confined to the first paragraph. To make my next move in uncovering the logic of the subterranean, I need to reference a few lateral ‘philological’ issues to show that the pronoun has a philosophical weight.
In one of the most famous essays in linguistics, Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb, Roman Jakobson presented a schema of four reflexive relations between code – some particular symbolic form – and the message – some content or signification: 1) the message that refers to the message - which gives us all kinds of reported speech; 2) the code that refers to the code – which gives us proper names; 3) the message that refers to the code, which gives us “any elucidating interpretation of words or signs”; and finally 4) the code that refers to the message, which gives us the shifter.
The shifter is one of the most interesting and often written about category of code/message relations. This is because the code that refers to the message – the fact that a message is an act of enunciation – gives us, among other things, our persons. As Jakobson wrote, the mystery of how to define the “I”, which seems empty of any absolute reference, is solved when one sees that the reference is not to something the I represents outside of the enunciative situation, but must refer, instead, to the status of I as an indexical symbol. Jakobson remarks that the shifter has a special place in the onto-genesis of language: ‘The indexical symbols, and in particular the personal pronouns, which the Humboldtian tradition conveives of as the most elementary and primitive stratum of language, are, on the contrary, a complex category where code and message overlap. Therefore pronouns belong to the late acquisitions in child language and to the early losses in aphasia.” As Jakobson points out, the child often has to negotiate the use of I and you, and figure out how to substitute the I for his or her own name: “This attitude may persevere as an infantile survival. Thus Guy de Maupassant confessed that his name sounded quite strange to him when pronounced by himself.”
Roland Barthes saw that this childish insecurity was the mark of the writer. In an essay on Proust, Barthes remarks on the fact that Brichot, one of Proust’s characters, is reproached with using “I” too much in his articles on the war, and responds by changing the ”I”s to ‘ones”(ons)
“… the problem, for the writer, is not in fact to express or mask his “I’ (Brichot naively does not succeed in doing that and in fact, besides, has no desire to), but to shelter it, that is to say, at the same time, to protect it and lodge it.”
Taking up the thread from Jakobson’s comment about the enfant and the aphasic, Barthes includes in this low company the writer:
In the second degree, which is always that of literature, the writer facing the I is in the same situation as the infant or the aphasic, accordingly as he is a novelist or a critic. Like the child who says his proper name in speaking of himself, the novelist designates himself across an infinity of third persons, but this designation is not at all a disguise, a projection or a distance (the child is not disguising himself, nor is he dreaming or distancing himself); it is on the contrary an immediate operation, carried out in an open fashion, imperiously (nothing is clearer than the “ones” of Brichot), and of which the writer has need in order to speak of himself across a normal message (and no longer “straddling” it [via a shifter –R], fully issued from the code of others, in such a way that to write, far from referring to an expression of subjectivity, is on the contrary the very act which converts the indexical symbol (a bastard) into a pure sign. The third person is thus not a ruse of literature, but it is an act of institution preceding any other: to write is to decide to say ‘he” (and to be able to say it).”
The Nietzschean paradox is that Barthes’ “he”, burrowing towards the surface, does not know if it is a man or an old mole.
And this paradox is derivative of another textual trait: the Nietzschean “we’. Daybreak was finished by the end of 1881, while the preface to it was attached in 1886. During this period of time, Nietzsche developed an affection amounting to a mania for a certain kind of “we” in which he could, as Barthes writes, shelter. But what kind of shelter is this?
In the preface, for instance, there are the following we-s: wir Philosophen, wir Deutschen von heute, wir Pessimisten, wir Menschen des Gewissens, wir Immoralisten, wir Gottlosen von heute. This leads us to the beginning of the fifth section, which begins with a drumroll of we:
Zuletzt aber: wozu müßten wir das, was wir sind, was wir wollen und nicht wollen, so laut und mit solchem Eifer sagen? Sehen wir es kälter, ferner, klüger, höher an, sagen wir es, wie es unter uns gesagt werden darf, so heimlich, daß alle Welt es überhört, daß alle Welt uns überhört!
(But at last: why do we have to say, so loudly and with such eagerness, what we are, what we want and don’t want? Lets look at it colder, more distantly, more cleverly, at a greater height, lets say it as it must be said among ourselves, so stealthily, that all the world overhears it, that all the world overhears us!”
The first thing to point out about the Nietzschian we is that it is vatic – it prophesizes a place for the speaker among a certain community. The prophesy has been so completely fulfilled, since 1886, that one does not blink at Nietzsche including himself among the philosophers – or as in other texts, among the psychologists, or among the artists, etc. Of course, he was a professor of philology. What we don’t blink at betrays a certain hidden anachronism – we project Nietzsche’s future back upon Nietzsche’s present. In his “Dialogue concerning the fait divers”, Jean Paulhan points out that the trope of the hidden anachronism is one of the commonplaces of journalism - one of its more insidious traps:
M: In this regard, I read a very curious fait divers:
Noisy-le-Sec – The robber, Louis Verget, surprised by Mrs. Smith in the course of unpacking her establishment, strangled her. When Mrs. Smith breathed her last, the murderer finished stealing from her: he only found one hundred francs and a watch.
R.M. I only see the most ordinary, and sad things there.
M. Yes, everything is not in the pink in the life of a robber. But wait: I haven’t told you the headline: a murder for one hundred francs.
R.M. In fact, this is a singular headline.
M. It could be the most reasonable thing in the world: in being a murderer, Louis Verget only made one hundred francs (which is little).
R.M. Yes.
M. But isn’t it clear that this sense, which may be wise, is not the real sense.
R.M. I fear that it is not difficult to disengage the real sense. Grossly speaking, this is what I see: that it is more base and criminal to kill for 100 francs than for a million, I suppose.
M.Not perhaps more criminal, but certainly more disgusting. This makes our man a dirty brute.
R.M. But is he really such a brute?
M. Now we are getting there. If he had discovered a thousand francs, or ten thousand, do you think he would have left it?
R.M. No.
M: It is thus a question of the most implausible fantasy. Remark, however, that it seemed acceptable to our journalist, and without a doubt to his readers. Myself, I was caught.
R.M. We return to our illusions. It is enough that the adventure ends with the stealing of one hundred francs that we are naturally disposed – and nothing resists it with too much force – to admit that our murderer only had it in his head, from the beginning, to gain his one hundred francs.”[My translation, Paulhan, OC 2)
This slight but terrifying disconnect between what is before and after is among the things sheltered in the Nietzschian we. And it is also from that ‘intemporality’ that Nietzsche seems, in the preface as well as in many other texts, to oscillate between a slightly mocking claim to a community that, in truth, he was not a part of and a loneliness so lonely that he was dead in it – he was buried, he was a mole, he was gone down into the ground.
The mystery of the pronouns, here, is not confined to the first paragraph. To make my next move in uncovering the logic of the subterranean, I need to reference a few lateral ‘philological’ issues to show that the pronoun has a philosophical weight.
In one of the most famous essays in linguistics, Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb, Roman Jakobson presented a schema of four reflexive relations between code – some particular symbolic form – and the message – some content or signification: 1) the message that refers to the message - which gives us all kinds of reported speech; 2) the code that refers to the code – which gives us proper names; 3) the message that refers to the code, which gives us “any elucidating interpretation of words or signs”; and finally 4) the code that refers to the message, which gives us the shifter.
The shifter is one of the most interesting and often written about category of code/message relations. This is because the code that refers to the message – the fact that a message is an act of enunciation – gives us, among other things, our persons. As Jakobson wrote, the mystery of how to define the “I”, which seems empty of any absolute reference, is solved when one sees that the reference is not to something the I represents outside of the enunciative situation, but must refer, instead, to the status of I as an indexical symbol. Jakobson remarks that the shifter has a special place in the onto-genesis of language: ‘The indexical symbols, and in particular the personal pronouns, which the Humboldtian tradition conveives of as the most elementary and primitive stratum of language, are, on the contrary, a complex category where code and message overlap. Therefore pronouns belong to the late acquisitions in child language and to the early losses in aphasia.” As Jakobson points out, the child often has to negotiate the use of I and you, and figure out how to substitute the I for his or her own name: “This attitude may persevere as an infantile survival. Thus Guy de Maupassant confessed that his name sounded quite strange to him when pronounced by himself.”
Roland Barthes saw that this childish insecurity was the mark of the writer. In an essay on Proust, Barthes remarks on the fact that Brichot, one of Proust’s characters, is reproached with using “I” too much in his articles on the war, and responds by changing the ”I”s to ‘ones”(ons)
“… the problem, for the writer, is not in fact to express or mask his “I’ (Brichot naively does not succeed in doing that and in fact, besides, has no desire to), but to shelter it, that is to say, at the same time, to protect it and lodge it.”
Taking up the thread from Jakobson’s comment about the enfant and the aphasic, Barthes includes in this low company the writer:
In the second degree, which is always that of literature, the writer facing the I is in the same situation as the infant or the aphasic, accordingly as he is a novelist or a critic. Like the child who says his proper name in speaking of himself, the novelist designates himself across an infinity of third persons, but this designation is not at all a disguise, a projection or a distance (the child is not disguising himself, nor is he dreaming or distancing himself); it is on the contrary an immediate operation, carried out in an open fashion, imperiously (nothing is clearer than the “ones” of Brichot), and of which the writer has need in order to speak of himself across a normal message (and no longer “straddling” it [via a shifter –R], fully issued from the code of others, in such a way that to write, far from referring to an expression of subjectivity, is on the contrary the very act which converts the indexical symbol (a bastard) into a pure sign. The third person is thus not a ruse of literature, but it is an act of institution preceding any other: to write is to decide to say ‘he” (and to be able to say it).”
The Nietzschean paradox is that Barthes’ “he”, burrowing towards the surface, does not know if it is a man or an old mole.
And this paradox is derivative of another textual trait: the Nietzschean “we’. Daybreak was finished by the end of 1881, while the preface to it was attached in 1886. During this period of time, Nietzsche developed an affection amounting to a mania for a certain kind of “we” in which he could, as Barthes writes, shelter. But what kind of shelter is this?
In the preface, for instance, there are the following we-s: wir Philosophen, wir Deutschen von heute, wir Pessimisten, wir Menschen des Gewissens, wir Immoralisten, wir Gottlosen von heute. This leads us to the beginning of the fifth section, which begins with a drumroll of we:
Zuletzt aber: wozu müßten wir das, was wir sind, was wir wollen und nicht wollen, so laut und mit solchem Eifer sagen? Sehen wir es kälter, ferner, klüger, höher an, sagen wir es, wie es unter uns gesagt werden darf, so heimlich, daß alle Welt es überhört, daß alle Welt uns überhört!
(But at last: why do we have to say, so loudly and with such eagerness, what we are, what we want and don’t want? Lets look at it colder, more distantly, more cleverly, at a greater height, lets say it as it must be said among ourselves, so stealthily, that all the world overhears it, that all the world overhears us!”
The first thing to point out about the Nietzschian we is that it is vatic – it prophesizes a place for the speaker among a certain community. The prophesy has been so completely fulfilled, since 1886, that one does not blink at Nietzsche including himself among the philosophers – or as in other texts, among the psychologists, or among the artists, etc. Of course, he was a professor of philology. What we don’t blink at betrays a certain hidden anachronism – we project Nietzsche’s future back upon Nietzsche’s present. In his “Dialogue concerning the fait divers”, Jean Paulhan points out that the trope of the hidden anachronism is one of the commonplaces of journalism - one of its more insidious traps:
M: In this regard, I read a very curious fait divers:
Noisy-le-Sec – The robber, Louis Verget, surprised by Mrs. Smith in the course of unpacking her establishment, strangled her. When Mrs. Smith breathed her last, the murderer finished stealing from her: he only found one hundred francs and a watch.
R.M. I only see the most ordinary, and sad things there.
M. Yes, everything is not in the pink in the life of a robber. But wait: I haven’t told you the headline: a murder for one hundred francs.
R.M. In fact, this is a singular headline.
M. It could be the most reasonable thing in the world: in being a murderer, Louis Verget only made one hundred francs (which is little).
R.M. Yes.
M. But isn’t it clear that this sense, which may be wise, is not the real sense.
R.M. I fear that it is not difficult to disengage the real sense. Grossly speaking, this is what I see: that it is more base and criminal to kill for 100 francs than for a million, I suppose.
M.Not perhaps more criminal, but certainly more disgusting. This makes our man a dirty brute.
R.M. But is he really such a brute?
M. Now we are getting there. If he had discovered a thousand francs, or ten thousand, do you think he would have left it?
R.M. No.
M: It is thus a question of the most implausible fantasy. Remark, however, that it seemed acceptable to our journalist, and without a doubt to his readers. Myself, I was caught.
R.M. We return to our illusions. It is enough that the adventure ends with the stealing of one hundred francs that we are naturally disposed – and nothing resists it with too much force – to admit that our murderer only had it in his head, from the beginning, to gain his one hundred francs.”[My translation, Paulhan, OC 2)
This slight but terrifying disconnect between what is before and after is among the things sheltered in the Nietzschian we. And it is also from that ‘intemporality’ that Nietzsche seems, in the preface as well as in many other texts, to oscillate between a slightly mocking claim to a community that, in truth, he was not a part of and a loneliness so lonely that he was dead in it – he was buried, he was a mole, he was gone down into the ground.
Friday, April 08, 2011
on translating the preface to Daybreak
All of the English translations of the preface to Daybreak begin with a simple decision that concerns the first sentence, “In diesem Buche findet man einen "Unterirdischen" an der Arbeit, einen Bohrenden, Grabenden, Untergrabenden.” This has been translated by Hollingdale as: In this book you will discover a 'subterranean man' at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines.” The simple decision here is to add “man” to Unterirdischen. This is a standard practice in translating from German to English, as the former language nominalizes certain adjectives that the latter language wants to return to the modifier/modified form. And yet here one feels that something has been slightly lost. For in the course of this paragraph, it is not at all clear that the Unterirdische starts out as a man, although he, or it, is definitely subterranean. It is impossible, really, not to show one’s hand in translating this sentence, if you translate Unterirdischen as the Subterranean, you must still decide about Bohrenden, et. all.
My translation of the paragraph is much less smooth than Hollingdale’s, but this is what it would look like if we retain the ambiguity of whether the Subterranean is a human or not: In this book one will find a “subterranean” at work, boring, burrowing and sapping. One looks at it – that is, if one has the eyes to see such work of the deeps, as it slowly, thoughtfully, with soft inexorability, comes forward, without revealing too much of the pain entailed by every long renunciation of light and air. It could even be called satisfied with its dark work. Doesn’t it seem like some belief leads it on, some comfort consoles it? For it will perhaps have its own long darkness, its incomprehensibility, its hiddenness, its riddlesomeness, because it knows, what it will also have: its own morning, its own salvation, its own daybreak? .. Certainly, it is turned around: don’t ask it what it wants under there, it will tell you itself, this seeming Trophonious and subterranean, when he becomes ‘a human’ again. One forgets the fundamental rules of silence, when one has so long, like it, been a mole, been alone…”
My idea, in translating this, is that Nietzsche wants, here, to suspend the moment in which the figure we are viewing “becomes a human again’. In that state of suspension between the human and the it, the human and the mole, the human and the spirit of the dead, the full force of the way this subterranean is defined – in terms of a burrowing and boring that exhibits, in that wonderful and rather disgusting phrase, ‘soft inexorability’- helps us understand that this underground will not be of the same kind as Dostoevsky’s. Where Dostoevsky counters the crystal palace with the sewer, Nietzsche counters the human city with the sub or super-human burrow.
We know, however, that the superhuman for Nietzsche is not a matter of burrows. Bataille, in his essay on ‘The old mole and the sur in surrealism”, justly calls Nietzsche an icarian. For some reason the mole in Bataille’s essay is connected to Marx and Hegel, but not to Nietzsche – Bataille ignores this preface, and presents Nietzsche under the aegis of Zarathustra’s creature, the eagle, rather than Hegel’s mole.
“In point of view of appearances and splendor, the eagle is evidently more virile. Not only does the eagle rise into the radiant regions of the solar heaven, but it is situated in permanence with a dominant prestige. The absolutely sovereign character of this virility is implied by the hooked and cutting beak, because sovereign virility cuts everything that enters intoi competition with it, and cannot be cut.
…
“However, reduced to the subterranean action of the revolution’s economic facts, the ‘old mole’ digs out tunnels in a soil that is decomposed and repugnant to the delicate nose of utopists.” (OC II 96)
Already, in this essay, Bataille has learned to manipulate concept-images from Nietzsche. These images are not exactly metaphors or similes, for the analogies they set up they are also part of – after all, the analogy to height and depth is not just an analogy to abstract concepts, but concepts that have been abstracted from physical height and depth, in which physical eagles fly and physical moles crawl. Like the hexagrams of the I ching, or like dream images in Freud’s theory, they cannot be easily purged of their lateral, connotative addenda, nor abstracted to a conceptual schema – since they put into question the process of abstraction, the fine, shedding arc from impression to idea.
While the underground of the mole or the dead spirit is, I have maintained, different from the underground of the Dostoevskian deviant, it is of course related to it. But it is also related to a more primitive moment in the modernizing process, one that is older than capitalism: the social remove from nature.
My translation of the paragraph is much less smooth than Hollingdale’s, but this is what it would look like if we retain the ambiguity of whether the Subterranean is a human or not: In this book one will find a “subterranean” at work, boring, burrowing and sapping. One looks at it – that is, if one has the eyes to see such work of the deeps, as it slowly, thoughtfully, with soft inexorability, comes forward, without revealing too much of the pain entailed by every long renunciation of light and air. It could even be called satisfied with its dark work. Doesn’t it seem like some belief leads it on, some comfort consoles it? For it will perhaps have its own long darkness, its incomprehensibility, its hiddenness, its riddlesomeness, because it knows, what it will also have: its own morning, its own salvation, its own daybreak? .. Certainly, it is turned around: don’t ask it what it wants under there, it will tell you itself, this seeming Trophonious and subterranean, when he becomes ‘a human’ again. One forgets the fundamental rules of silence, when one has so long, like it, been a mole, been alone…”
My idea, in translating this, is that Nietzsche wants, here, to suspend the moment in which the figure we are viewing “becomes a human again’. In that state of suspension between the human and the it, the human and the mole, the human and the spirit of the dead, the full force of the way this subterranean is defined – in terms of a burrowing and boring that exhibits, in that wonderful and rather disgusting phrase, ‘soft inexorability’- helps us understand that this underground will not be of the same kind as Dostoevsky’s. Where Dostoevsky counters the crystal palace with the sewer, Nietzsche counters the human city with the sub or super-human burrow.
We know, however, that the superhuman for Nietzsche is not a matter of burrows. Bataille, in his essay on ‘The old mole and the sur in surrealism”, justly calls Nietzsche an icarian. For some reason the mole in Bataille’s essay is connected to Marx and Hegel, but not to Nietzsche – Bataille ignores this preface, and presents Nietzsche under the aegis of Zarathustra’s creature, the eagle, rather than Hegel’s mole.
“In point of view of appearances and splendor, the eagle is evidently more virile. Not only does the eagle rise into the radiant regions of the solar heaven, but it is situated in permanence with a dominant prestige. The absolutely sovereign character of this virility is implied by the hooked and cutting beak, because sovereign virility cuts everything that enters intoi competition with it, and cannot be cut.
…
“However, reduced to the subterranean action of the revolution’s economic facts, the ‘old mole’ digs out tunnels in a soil that is decomposed and repugnant to the delicate nose of utopists.” (OC II 96)
Already, in this essay, Bataille has learned to manipulate concept-images from Nietzsche. These images are not exactly metaphors or similes, for the analogies they set up they are also part of – after all, the analogy to height and depth is not just an analogy to abstract concepts, but concepts that have been abstracted from physical height and depth, in which physical eagles fly and physical moles crawl. Like the hexagrams of the I ching, or like dream images in Freud’s theory, they cannot be easily purged of their lateral, connotative addenda, nor abstracted to a conceptual schema – since they put into question the process of abstraction, the fine, shedding arc from impression to idea.
While the underground of the mole or the dead spirit is, I have maintained, different from the underground of the Dostoevskian deviant, it is of course related to it. But it is also related to a more primitive moment in the modernizing process, one that is older than capitalism: the social remove from nature.
Thursday, April 07, 2011
The Chiders and the Chidden
The Western world embarked on an experiment about thirty years ago, during the era of Reagan and Thatcher. After eighty years of a movement to mitigate the excesses of nineteenth century capitalism by putting in place a Guarantor state – which Karl Polanyi called the second movement in the history of capitalism, the first one being the installation of an industrial system linked to a market driven economy – the third movement began. The third movement consisted, frankly, of a politics that, while keeping in place the Guarantor system, deregulated industries – notably, the financial services industry – and lowered taxes for the wealthy in an effort to, as it were synthesize the Gilded Age with the Great Society.
Although privatisation and the crushing of labor movements were the surface phenomena of this third movement, it did not simply reprise the nineteenth century. Far from it. For one thing, the social movements of the sixties were transfigured, not erased, by churning ever more people – notably, women – into the labor market. This represented an advance in one way - the unpaid labor performed by women was translated into paid labor int he public sphere. On the strength of this new revenue stream, wealth accumulation and day to day living expenses were also transformed by being strongly attached to the credit market, which, in turn, being deregulated, found more and more creative ways to charge for debt and trade debt. The war state apparatus, which had been a prime driver of the social welfare programs of the 1900-1980 period, were sustained.
And gradually the orientation of the political elite was also altered. In 1980, that elite still legitimized itself by adverting to the well being of the majority of the population in some way. The old images of the past eighty years had still not lost their cultic force.
But over the years, as changes were wrought on the fabric of national economies, this reflex adherence to the principle of the well being of the majority sickened and died.
Among the political elite, for the most part, this sickness unto death dare not speak its name. But the latent conventional wisdom of the 2010s is that the economy exists not for the well being of the majority, but rather for the well being of the small majority of those who have benefited most over the last thirty years.
And it is this way that political issues are now ‘manufactured’ in the media and among the chattering class in D.C., London, Paris and Berlin. Behind the issue of the deficit looms the idea that we must not hurt the ‘savers” – that is, the small minority who have hoarded immense fortunes. Of course, when the question was one of loaning nine trillion dollars at rates close to zero percent to the representatives of the wealthy – banks, hedgefunders, mutual funds, etc. – the question wasn’t even posed. There was no headline about the politics of this form of redistributing wealth upwards in a slump. There was no discussion of it. There was complete agreement that it should be done. The release of documents from the Fed naming names and outlining the mechanism of this fantastically generous welfare program never took up the newspaper space devoted to Charlie Sheen.
How does the conventional wisdom become conventional? Of course, ultimately the ruling class, as Marx has written, exercises dominance over the discourse – but in a sense this is just saying that the ruling class rules. It is the mechanisms of dominance that are interesting.
Thus, I was fascinated by this bit in a post on Matt Yglesias’s blog. MY is a well known ‘progressive’ blogger who is extraordinarily good at absorbing conventional wisdom and extruding it as though it were contrarian. He adheres to the neo-liberal line of the last thirty years, garnished with Obama-esque policy nudges.
This was the beginning of one of his posts yesterday : “I met Brookings’ Isabel Sawhill one time at a conference and she chided me for being insufficiently interested in cutting Social Security and Medicare spending. So I thought she might be into Paul Ryan’s budget ideas, at least perhaps in a Jacob Weisberg contrarian kind of way.”
The “chided” is the part in this that fascinates. To chide implies a certain responsibility one is not living up to. That responsibility is not to the well being of the majority, but instead, to actually doubting that diminishing their lifestyles is a policy we should embrace. It is notable that the chiding isn’t that MY is insufficiently interested in cutting down the average household spending on medicine, or insufficiently interested in making sure that the wealth of the wealthiest country in the world is used to make retirement pleasant and easy.
If one is still caught up in the past, or even in the compromises of the past thirty years, Sawhill’s morality seems upside down. Surely the one thing the Clinton years taught is that deficits are pretty easy to handle if one raises taxes that are paid by the wealthiest – from the capital gains tax to marginal tax rates on those making above 250,000 per year. In fact, it would be quite easy to break out new tax categories that would not weld together the millionaire and the upper middle class in the category, 250000 to infinity. There has never been a problem so simple. But the key here is that the solution is the problem. Because the solution is to discomfort the minority, the wealthiest top ten percent, by taking away from them money that has an extremely low marginal utility for them. Edgeworth, a radical free marketer rather than a Marxist, showed, over a century ago, that the entire running of the state could easily be achieved by taxing the wealthy at a rate proportionate to the lower marginal utility of their fortunes. If, in the same state, there is a family making 50 thousand per year and a family making 50 million per year, true confiscatory taxes would consist of taxing the former family at a minimal rate – five percent – when the same revenue could be painlessly extracted from the later family, who would, in every sense of the word, remain rich before and after taxes.
With the rise of universal education and the technostructure of the contemporary economy, there is, in truth, less need for the wealthy than ever before. This was demonstrated by the collapse of the credit markets, which was entirely due to the rentseeking system by which the wealthy used their fortunes – not in order to gain marginal utility in their persons, but purely in order to gain power.
But this is not a chideable issue. The political elites have benefited enormously from the economic changes of the past thirty years, and, by their lifestyle and their nudges, are committed to the proposition that the state and the economy exists to benefit the top 10 percent. It is in that light that all law and all issues should be tailored. The republican representative who recently opined that the Banking committee in the House of Representatives was there to serve the banks told a particular truth that has a general application: this is the ruling class. Only by holding this truth firmly in one’s mind can we understand the Democratic Party’s “weakness”, or the ‘bi-partisanship” of Obama, or the “Big Society” of Osborne and Cameron, or the odd emotional phenomenon of the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Clegg, who feels evidently that the electorate should understand that the rhetoric of the election has nothing to do with the real issue at hand, to wit, how to run a nation so as to produce maximum benefit for its richest citizens. To think otherwise is to fall on the side of the chidden.
Although privatisation and the crushing of labor movements were the surface phenomena of this third movement, it did not simply reprise the nineteenth century. Far from it. For one thing, the social movements of the sixties were transfigured, not erased, by churning ever more people – notably, women – into the labor market. This represented an advance in one way - the unpaid labor performed by women was translated into paid labor int he public sphere. On the strength of this new revenue stream, wealth accumulation and day to day living expenses were also transformed by being strongly attached to the credit market, which, in turn, being deregulated, found more and more creative ways to charge for debt and trade debt. The war state apparatus, which had been a prime driver of the social welfare programs of the 1900-1980 period, were sustained.
And gradually the orientation of the political elite was also altered. In 1980, that elite still legitimized itself by adverting to the well being of the majority of the population in some way. The old images of the past eighty years had still not lost their cultic force.
But over the years, as changes were wrought on the fabric of national economies, this reflex adherence to the principle of the well being of the majority sickened and died.
Among the political elite, for the most part, this sickness unto death dare not speak its name. But the latent conventional wisdom of the 2010s is that the economy exists not for the well being of the majority, but rather for the well being of the small majority of those who have benefited most over the last thirty years.
And it is this way that political issues are now ‘manufactured’ in the media and among the chattering class in D.C., London, Paris and Berlin. Behind the issue of the deficit looms the idea that we must not hurt the ‘savers” – that is, the small minority who have hoarded immense fortunes. Of course, when the question was one of loaning nine trillion dollars at rates close to zero percent to the representatives of the wealthy – banks, hedgefunders, mutual funds, etc. – the question wasn’t even posed. There was no headline about the politics of this form of redistributing wealth upwards in a slump. There was no discussion of it. There was complete agreement that it should be done. The release of documents from the Fed naming names and outlining the mechanism of this fantastically generous welfare program never took up the newspaper space devoted to Charlie Sheen.
How does the conventional wisdom become conventional? Of course, ultimately the ruling class, as Marx has written, exercises dominance over the discourse – but in a sense this is just saying that the ruling class rules. It is the mechanisms of dominance that are interesting.
Thus, I was fascinated by this bit in a post on Matt Yglesias’s blog. MY is a well known ‘progressive’ blogger who is extraordinarily good at absorbing conventional wisdom and extruding it as though it were contrarian. He adheres to the neo-liberal line of the last thirty years, garnished with Obama-esque policy nudges.
This was the beginning of one of his posts yesterday : “I met Brookings’ Isabel Sawhill one time at a conference and she chided me for being insufficiently interested in cutting Social Security and Medicare spending. So I thought she might be into Paul Ryan’s budget ideas, at least perhaps in a Jacob Weisberg contrarian kind of way.”
The “chided” is the part in this that fascinates. To chide implies a certain responsibility one is not living up to. That responsibility is not to the well being of the majority, but instead, to actually doubting that diminishing their lifestyles is a policy we should embrace. It is notable that the chiding isn’t that MY is insufficiently interested in cutting down the average household spending on medicine, or insufficiently interested in making sure that the wealth of the wealthiest country in the world is used to make retirement pleasant and easy.
If one is still caught up in the past, or even in the compromises of the past thirty years, Sawhill’s morality seems upside down. Surely the one thing the Clinton years taught is that deficits are pretty easy to handle if one raises taxes that are paid by the wealthiest – from the capital gains tax to marginal tax rates on those making above 250,000 per year. In fact, it would be quite easy to break out new tax categories that would not weld together the millionaire and the upper middle class in the category, 250000 to infinity. There has never been a problem so simple. But the key here is that the solution is the problem. Because the solution is to discomfort the minority, the wealthiest top ten percent, by taking away from them money that has an extremely low marginal utility for them. Edgeworth, a radical free marketer rather than a Marxist, showed, over a century ago, that the entire running of the state could easily be achieved by taxing the wealthy at a rate proportionate to the lower marginal utility of their fortunes. If, in the same state, there is a family making 50 thousand per year and a family making 50 million per year, true confiscatory taxes would consist of taxing the former family at a minimal rate – five percent – when the same revenue could be painlessly extracted from the later family, who would, in every sense of the word, remain rich before and after taxes.
With the rise of universal education and the technostructure of the contemporary economy, there is, in truth, less need for the wealthy than ever before. This was demonstrated by the collapse of the credit markets, which was entirely due to the rentseeking system by which the wealthy used their fortunes – not in order to gain marginal utility in their persons, but purely in order to gain power.
But this is not a chideable issue. The political elites have benefited enormously from the economic changes of the past thirty years, and, by their lifestyle and their nudges, are committed to the proposition that the state and the economy exists to benefit the top 10 percent. It is in that light that all law and all issues should be tailored. The republican representative who recently opined that the Banking committee in the House of Representatives was there to serve the banks told a particular truth that has a general application: this is the ruling class. Only by holding this truth firmly in one’s mind can we understand the Democratic Party’s “weakness”, or the ‘bi-partisanship” of Obama, or the “Big Society” of Osborne and Cameron, or the odd emotional phenomenon of the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Clegg, who feels evidently that the electorate should understand that the rhetoric of the election has nothing to do with the real issue at hand, to wit, how to run a nation so as to produce maximum benefit for its richest citizens. To think otherwise is to fall on the side of the chidden.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
the killers and the non-killers: the animal underground
“Let’s remember the implicit code: in the abattoir, everybody does not kill, and this brings it about that there are a set of categorial disjunctions and tacit spatial ones. This code distinguishes the first two groups, the “killers” and the “non-killers” (the administrative personnel and the cleaners), and, at the heart of the group of killers, three sub-groups: the “true killers”, the “occasional killers”, and the “non-killers”. This is divided into different norms or implicit rules: the killers and the non-killers have each their own space; they enter the building by different doors; they never mix in the course of morning breaks; there can be mixed spaces, but the dirty section is forbidden to non-killers: the non-killers are not supposed to look at the slaughter; the killers are not supposed to penetrate into the working areaof the non-killers, etc.”
- From Catherine Remy, When the Implicit Norm is the motor of Normal Activity: deviance and social reactions in an abattoir
Catherine Remy’s article, taken from her fieldwork in a slaughterhouse, is explicitly a study of deviance, taken not in the sense of criminal action, but of non-normal action within a ‘occulted’ space: the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse is a sort of condensed sign, a dream image of the two removes that structure modernization: the remove from nature, and the remove from production.
We have had enough, for the moment, of our first underground, the one inhabited by Dostoevsky’s underground man, who in himself incorporates that ‘broadness’ Dostoevsky took to be the special Russian trait, the trait of the unformed that repulsed Europeans. Wave after wave of degenerates and deviants flow from his underground, existing, the sociologists and cops assure us, in parallel to respectable society and not within it – although the deviants and degenerates, along with Dostoevsky himself, would disagree. In a passage in his notebooks for The Raw Youth, from which I have already quoted, Dostoevsky wrote:
All the cries of the critics to the effect that I do not depict real life have not disenchanted me. There are no bases to our society … One colossal quake and the whole lot will come to an end, collapse and be negated as though it had never existed. And this is not just outwardly true, in the West, but inwardly, morally so. Our talented writers, people like Tolstoy and Goncharov, who with great artistry depict family life in upper-middle-class circles, think that they are depicting the life of the majority. In my view they have depicted only the life of the exceptions, but the life which I portray is the life that is the general rule. I pride myself that I've been the first to portray the real man of the Russian majority, and have for the first time revealed his distorted and tragic side. I alone brought out the tragedy of the underground which consists of suffering and self-immolation, of the awareness of that which is better and of the inability to attain it… The underground, the underground, the poet of the underground — the feuilletonists have repeated this refrain as though it were something I should be ashamed of. The little fools. It is my glory…”
…
The second underground is inhabited by an animal it, which identifies that underground not with the sewer, ultimately, but with the tunnel, or the burrow. It identifies it with an activity – burrowing. Burrowing is a frantic activity, or a stealthy one. And it puts the burrowing creature in relation to light, sunlight.
Such is the structure of the symbols I want to follow in Nietzsche’s preface to Dawn, one of the great texts of the second sort of underground.
In order to follow the social logic – the collective dream logic - of the animal underground, a note here on one of the way nature was ‘removed’ under the auspices of modernization. I have given a mini-history of the removal of the slaughter house and animal cruelty in a previous couple of posts, and so for the rest of this post, I will splice them together and copy them.
…
“Remember, Cridle, those oxen,
blonde giants, dumb, looking upwards to heaven
whilst receiving the lash: it seemed to me
like I was feeling it too – Oh, Cridle, our business is bloody.”
Such are the words of meat goods king, Pierpont Mauler, in Brecht’s 1930 play, St. Johanna of the Stockyards. Meanwhile, in Lyons, the mayor was welcoming a new invention in the municipality abattoir: a “pistolet de l’assomage”. The inventors of this instrument, Jean Duchenet and Karl Schermer, wrote a summary of the benefits of it for the patent office: “The present invention has for its object a system of using a downing pistol (pistolet d’abatage) of which the automatic function and enhanced security renders the usage very practical and completely inoffensive. The manipulation of this tool is completely harmless. Its maneuvering capability is easy, rapid, and its automatic functioning is protected from all accidental deterioriation. With this machine, the slaughter of animals becomes instantaneous. It gains precious time for the butcher, who can proceed immediately, conveniently, and without danger, to stripping the animals.”
Catherine Remy, from whose article I am quoting, explains: if one pushes the idea a little, it is the idea of a combat, or at least of a dangerousness of the animal, that is here evoked and is at the same time combated. … Eduard Herriot, the mayor of Lyons, went and was the first to introduce the pistol, all in underlining explicitly its humanitarian character. For example, in response to a letter sent by one of his co-mayors, E. Herriot qualified the pistol as the “least barbarous means of slaughter.” (60)
If Kant saw the collapse of the human limit, his response was certainly not to rethink the animal. In fact, the animal is – because it is without self consciousness – always and universally a means for Kant. A means for the one who holds the place delimited by the rational existence: the person.
Kant probably did not go down to see the livestock brought into the old slaugherhouse on the Pregel in Konigsberg. It was a very old site. Konigsberg had a lively butcher’s guild. They used to parade gigantic sausages on New Years day. In 1601, they carried a sausage that was almost 1000 ells long and weighed almost 900 pounds, according to Johann Hübner (1762).
But because there was a municpal abattoir, it wasn’t necessarily up to date. The ones in Berlin were notoriously noxious, polluting, and filthy. The floorboards rotted with the perpetual rain of blood from the slaughtered beasts, and sometimes the butcher, arm upraised and ready to strike, would be as surprised as the beef cow when the floor boards gave way, tumbling them both into the stifling darkness below the slaughterhouse. Who knows what was down there. In 1810, the city closed them, so that once again, butchers would slaughter animals on the street. On that same date, however, Napoleon famously ordered an abattoir reform, setting municipal slaughterhouses out in the suburbs, and hiding the killing and stripping of the beasts.
This was a much admired move. In London, beasts were run up Oxford street to the Smithfield Market until 1850. Britain was the home of the first organized anti-cruelty effort, but Londoners could see, every day, how the cattle and sheep and pigs were run. They had to be beaten into making their pilgrimage. However, with trains and with cooling equipment, things started to change. In Dresden, by the 1890s, the municipal slaughterhouse was so clean and sweet that tours were made of it, and the tourist could, after seeing sausages being made, take refreshment in a garden restaurant. Apparently, none of the smells carried. Of course, these slaughterhouses became famous for another reason in 1945, when Kurt Vonnegut and a bunch of POWs sheltered in one from the U.S. bombing attack.
The beast and the rational being, then, were much more shoulder to shoulder in 1781, when the Critique of Practical Reason was written, then they were even fifty years later. As the meat market grew, the meat making disappeared.
…
In 1800, a bill was proposed in the House of Commons to ban bull-baiting. In bull-baiting, a bull was tied to a stake and dogs, often bull dogs, were set upon it. Sometimes, the dogs succeeded in killing the bull, sometimes the bull succeeded in killing the dogs, and most often, the bull and the dogs came off wounded.
The bill was defeated. Even so, it produced enough of a stir that a French academy asked a prize question about whether animals had a right to not being treated barbarously.
Another animal cruelty bill was introduced in the Parliament seven years later by Erksine, the well known defender of Tom Paine. It too was defeated.
Both defeats were mainly due to the eloquence of William Windham. Windham was one of Burke’s Whigs. He served as a minister in Pitt’s war government. He was, evidently, out of sympathy with the French Revolution. Yet the speech he made against banning bull-baiting is a document that defends the pleasures of the rural poor in explicitly class conscious terms; in almost the same terms, Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son in law, denounced the anti-vivisection movement in Britain in the 1890s.
Windham begins by dismissing the argument that bull-baiting has a corrupting influence on the character of the spectators by using himself as an instance: he saw two bull-baitings in his youth, he claims, and has not, since, seen any signs of cruelty or corruption. He then gets to the heart of what he thinks is wrong with the legislation by making it an issue of the culture of the common people:
“A great deal has lately been said respecting the state of the poor, and the hardships which they are suffering. But if they are really in the condition which is described, why should we set about to deprive them of the few enjoyments which are left to them? If we look back to the state of the common people in those countries with which our youthful studies make us acquainted, we find, that what with games, shews, festivals and the institutions of their religion, their sources of amusement and relaxation were so numerous as to make them appear to have enjoyed a perpetual holiday… “ Then he imagines what the poor in the country might say to the reformers: “Why interfere with the few sports we have, while you leave yourself and the rich so great a variety? You have your carriage, and your country houses; your balls, your plays, your operas, your masquerades, your card-parties, your books, your dogs, and your horses to amuse you – On yourselves you lay no restraint. – But from us you wish to take the little we have?”
Windham is objecting, as becomes apparent, not just to interference with bull baiting, but to the tendency to regulate the amusements of the poor for their own good. And in so opposing the bill, he speaks up for that countryside culture:
“In the exercise of those sports they may, indeed, sometimes hurt themselves, but could never hurt the nation. If a set of poor men, for vigorous recreation, prefer a game of cudgels, instead of interrupting them, it should be more our business to let them have fair play.”
This is the note of Hazlitt and Cobbett – and not what one might expect from a reactionary. Nor this: ‘The advocates of this bill, Sir, proposed to abolish bull-baiting on the score of cruelty. It is strange enough that such an argument should be employed by a set of persons who have a most vexatious code of laws for the protection of their own amusements. I do not mean at present to condemn the game laws; but when Gentlemen talk of cruelty, I must remind them, that it belongs as much to shooting, as to the sport of bull-baiting; nay more so, as it frequently happens, that where one bird is shot, a great many others go off much wounded. When, therefore, I hear humane Gentlemen even make a boast of having wounded a number of birds in this way, it only affords me a further proof that savage sports do not make savage people. Has not the butcher as much right to demand the exercise of his sport, as the man of fortune to demand that of hunting?”
Move forward, now, to Lafargue, who begins: “The bourgeois have the tenderness of angels in regard to animals: they feel a closer relationship to the animals than they do to the workers.”
Lafargue is not only following, unconsciously, in the path of the Burkian Windham, but in the path of Marx, who, in his list of the paragons of bourgeois humanism in the Communist Manifesto, includes societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Lafargue finds it infuriating that an English law allows the police to interfere with a scientist experimenting on an animal, and while allowing companies to experiment on their human clients with products mixed dangerous impurities or the like, all to save a bit of money in production:
“John Simon is an English factory inspector. He has studied the tortures to which the tender hearted bourgeois submits children, women and proletarian men in the capitalist prisons, in order to steal the fruits of their labor. He denounced them with a courage never known to the radicals. In his discourse [to a recent congress], he established that there exists two categories of experiment. One practiced by the physiologist on certain animals. The other practiced on thousands of men by speculators. For an example, he cites the classic experiments of Professor Tiersch on mice in order to discover the mode by which Asiatic cholera propagates, and the popular and well known experiment which was practiced during two cholera epidemics, of 1848-49 and 1853-54 on a half million inhabitants of South London by a certain commercial company who supplied these districts with polluted water.”
However, Lafargue is not only concerned with science – although it is interesting that the a defense of the amusements of the common people has transformed, in the course of the century, into a defense of science. He also uses Windham’s example of bird shooting to indict the bourgeoisie for committing acts of cruelty for their own amusement whilst banning acts that repulsed them among the lower orders.
Only by seeing that the dispute over animals and their treatment has deep roots in the common life, a life that was being transformed all over Europe, can one make one’s way, here. There is a delusion that we can get a clear political guide from understanding the pattern of our semantic binaries. They seem to group themselves before our eyes. We look at the history of the word, person, we see a sort of semiotic equivalent of the theodicy here, we think that we can make sense of the civil wars hidden in the word. We say, look at these oppositions deriving from this word that is originally a simulacra of the face, the face as an exchangeable object. Look at the number of semiotic transformations we can touch upon: of the relationship between the face and the body, the clothed and the naked, the man and the woman,, the elite and the common, the man and the beast. But when we look at how these things are imminently constituted and experienced, we find that things are not as we imagined them to be.
Maurice Angulhon, in “Le sang des bêtes. Le problème de la protection des animaux en France au XIXème siècle”, claimed that, unlike the 20th century, the entire onus of the movement to protect animals from cruelty, especially domestic animals, was aimed at preventing human cruelty. Windham, in fact, is responding to a similar claim in England – the spectacle or practice of cruelty to animals among the working classes will lead to either crime or a dangerous propensity to political rebellion. Surely this is true, to some extent, that the chief organizers for the protection of animals were animated by a “curious mixture of profound humanism and social fear.” For instance, under Napoleon, the traditional way of butchering an animal, which was done in the full view of whoever wanted to watch in Paris, was regulated so that it occurred in special abbatoirs. Just as the ladies wore red sewn into their necklines as a memorial of the guillotine, so, too, this prohibition could be seen as another, more fearful homage to the guillotine: “in dissimulating the blade of the butcher one contributed perhaps to avoiding the blade of the street jury.” (85) Industry and animal husbandry were much more visible, nonetheless, in cities where the flow of traffic was measured by the horse, and where the knacker’s trade in sick and dying horses, which were often sold off and starved to death, flourished.
…
Here is the famous report from an acquaintance of Nietzsche’s about the events of January 3, 1889 (although whether this happened on January 3 or December 27, 1888 is under some dispute)
“But the high point was the episode of that day on which Davide Fino saw the professor on the Via Po between two policemen, followed by a crowd of circling people. Friederich Nietzsche had, a few minutes before, put his arms about the neck of a taxi-driver’s beaten horse and refused to let him go. He had seen how the coachmen had beat the four legged creature, and had felt such enormous pain, that he had seen himself obliged to offer the beast his dedication.”
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
where I am now
I had a discouraging day yesterday, surveying the supposedly coordinate pieces of The Tears of Homo Economicus and asking myself, where’s the coordination? Jesus. My original idea was simply to carve a small book out of my Human Limit project, but over the last four months I’ve made certain small and major changes in the potential book, all of which are driven by my flinching the stylistic norms native to the humanities, in which thesis, argument and example unroll with the monological inflexibility of an alarm clock going off. I am not that kind of writer. The demon of the lateral is always at my ear.
In the preface to his dissertation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin compared the nineteenth century compulsion to write within the form of a system to the original energies of the tractate, which, developing at the same time as the mosaic in the West, shared with the mosaic and the stained glass window the same principle of representation: a number of pieces – which congealed, in the tractate’s case, around certain authoritative or sacred citations – were arranged so that their systematic unity only appeared in juxtaposition, which is to say that the unity is extruded onto some external observer. What this means is that the pieces, seen individually and from within, may seem to be little complete bubbles in themselves, little snow globes, but that they are really parts of a grander schema and their meanings are not self contained after all, but partial. The whole meaning supervenes only when the all of the parts are juxtaposed. And all of the parts are juxtaposed when the demon of the lateral ceases to whisper in your ear.
Although cultural historians conventionally ascribe an organic unity to the Middle Ages, in reality, this form of unity-in-pieces is completely mechanical. What I like about the tractate is that it comprehends the essay and the aphorism. It builds not towards the muted shock of the logical conclusion, but instead towards the naked shock of the ‘line’- that is, the quote, the citation, in which ‘proof’ (the prestige of which derives from the institutionalization of truth) is transformed into the beautiful gesture (the prestige of which derives from the anarchy of individual experience). This is the dream of all clerks, all those who sit at desks, all the white collar crowd, all the agents of circulation, whether they admit it, or rather, act on it, or not. It is their clerkly terror and glory.
So I talked to A. about this. She’d been telling me that I should talk to her about what was on my mind.
I said this, approximately. At first, when I was considering this book simply as a sort of mythography following the figure of homo economicus, it seemed simple. I would ask why the term appeared in the 1890s, and then relate it to the turn in economics that was coordinate with the beginning of the consumerist phase of capitalism – which I interpret as the beginning of the modernist distancing from production, on the same order as the distancing from nature. I would point to how this figure, which admittedly describes only a few of the characteristics of any real person, has been used to create policy, and thus imposed as a model on populations that are humanly resistant to it. I would then use the notion of matrixes of exchange to explore the continuing existence of ‘non’ rational forms of exchange, with the idea that these are not non-rational at all, and that the viability of capitalist society depends on the fact that there are a diversity of exchange systems.
But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do something a little more fun. So my second version of this project was to emphasize character formation under capitalism. Returning to the thesis that modernization has occurred under the sign of two removes, I thought I’d use Marx’s notion of the agent of circulation – the clerk, the salesman, the lower white collar employee – as the social niche in which the figure of the homo economicus has the greatest impact and, at the same time, creates the greatest repulsion. The logic of circulation is the logic of demand – which is how the organs of the media originally branch off and become the productive shadow of this segment of the total circulation of commodities. Establishing this link between the agent of media and the agent of circulation is important, as the quantitative character-shaping force of economic man and his counterparts in capitalist society are a result of the quantitatively greater penetration of media into the private life.
Thus, the essays in The Tears of Homo Economicus will cover a great deal of literary and sociological material, bathed in my associations as a reader and dumbfounded citizen of my time, in the service of a relatively small number of theses. Somehow, this should be do-able.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Deviance and the Underground
The discussion of deviance, in the sociology of the Cold War period up to the eighties, was burdened by a vice squad rhetoric and tone, as if the sociologists in question were busy raiding an opium den and kicking the sleepers. Thus, the categories of the academics and the voice-overs in those admonitory films shown in school classrooms to warn young white people against the temptation of various and sundry lurking dangers of the real world, from accepting rides with strangers to sex and drugs, seem retrospectively built out of the same cultural assumptions, under the bulking presence of the same missile system.
Deviance as a sociological concept came out of the 19th century discussion of decadence. Durkheim proposed deviance as a contrast to norms; later, in the 1950s, it was usefully associated with linguistic rituals – both in the way Becker saw how the labeling process works to distinguish the deviant from the ‘non-deviants’ outside of, although not uninfluenced by, the institutional context; and in the rationalizations of the deviant, classified by Matza and Sykes; and it finally fell victim, as a subject in sociology,not only to changing moeurs, which would theoretically simply give us another set of the deviant and the non-deviant, but also to camp. The vocabulary the fieldworkers used to describe the teenage car thief or the marijuana smoker, with its Dragnet cadences, is irresistibly funny, now. It is hard to read, for instance, Howard Becker’s Outsiders, with its search for the one deviant act that begins the career of the deviant (o that fall from grace), without giggling. Even in its time this prose had a period piece flavor. When smoking pot went from an activity practiced by the low life foreigner or the Hollywood blackmailer in a Raymond Chandler novel to one practiced by your average high school kid on the weekend, the subjects captured by deviance – which were always a little ambiguous to begin with, since deviance seems to pulse between crime and weirdness – began their startlingly rapid career of normalization, upending the cops. The camp resonance of the rhetoric employed by the agents of control and their academic minions flowed into the work of writers like Burroughts, Pynchon, and Joe Orton, as well as into underground commix and the prancing beat of rock and the sneers of punk, and in the process part of its seriousness was sacrificed on the altar of stylization, and another part became the basis for a counter-attack, mounted by a left that had learned paranoia the hard way, for the missile wall that protected us had also produced the bomb test and the iodine in the collective thyroid gland. It was style killed the traditional FBI man, and if he still continues to be popular, it is not in the guise of giving the fifth degree to the drug dealer, but as the chaser of UFOs and exotic foreign terrorists, with the new character code demanding that it be his own straightness tht comes into question. Even if deviance retains its terminological privilege in criminology, it has been generally muffled in sociological discourse since the 1970s. Colin Sumner aptly summed up this history in the title of his 1994 book: The Sociology of Deviance: an obituary
However, if the collapse of the sociology of deviance was due to its one-sided blindness to the real social force of style, certain of the classic ideas of the sociology of deviance are still worth rescuing precisely because they predicted this fate – or could be jiggered so as to make it explicable.
I am intrigued myself, as I go after the underground man, by the Sykes and Matza thesis of neutralization. While they were writing about juvenile delinquents in Chicago, Pierre Klossowski was writing about Sade in Paris. The sociologists may seem to inhabit a different realm from the pornographer/philosopher, but in fact neutralization casts light on what Klossowski calls Sade’s philosophy of ‘counter-generalization’.
The Matza and Sykes paper begins by rejecting an idea that, in diffuse form, had gained some currency in the sociology of deviance:
“The basic characteristic of the delinquent subculture, it is argued, is a system of values that represents an inversion of the values held by respectable, law abiding society, the world of the delinquent is the world of the law-abiding turned upside-down and its norms constitute a countervailing force directed against the conforming social order. Cohen sees the process of enveloping a delinquent subculture as a matter of building, maintaining, and reinforcing a code for behaviour which exists by opposition, which stands in point by point contradiction to dominant values, particularly those of the middle class. Cohen’s portrayal of delinquency is executed with a good deal of sophistication, and he carefully avoids overly simple explanations such as those based on the principle of ‘follow the leader’ or easy generalizations about ‘emotional disturbances’. Furthermore, he does not accept the delinquent subculture as something given, but instead systematically examines the function of delinquent values as a viable solution to the lower-class, male child’s problems in the area of social status. Yet in spite of its virtues, this image of juvenile delinquency as a form of behaviour based on competing or countervailing values and norms appears to suffer from a number of serious defects.”
The defects in question stem from a simplifying logic of contradiction. If there is a ‘deviant subculture’, then its norms will be, according to this theory, deviant – they will be the negation of the norms of respectable society – the society of the ‘human product’.
It is here that Klossowski’s interpretation of Sade makes an interesting dialogic partner to this sociological groping around, for in a sense what the sociologists are looking for is what some of the more romantic interpreters of Sade take to be the Sadeian society, which raises the standard of a Satanic revolt against the powers that be. Klossowski, on the other hand, while understanding that romantic moment in Sade, holds fast to Sade’s core Enlightenment belief. It is not Satanism but atheism that drives the Sadeian society. In the Philosopher-Villain, his corrective essay that takes up certain of the errors as he now saw them that populate his earlier book, Sade, my neighbor, Klossowski introduces the useful notion of counter-generality:
“The peculiarly human act of writing presupposes a generality that a singular case claims to join, and by belonging to this generality claims to come to understand itself. Sade as a singular case conceives his art of writing as verifying such belongingness. The medium of generality in Sade’s time is the logically structured language of the classical tradition: in its structure this language reproduces and reconstitutes in the field of communicative gestures the normative structure of the human race in individuals…
With this principle of the normative generality of the human race in mind, Sade sets out to establish a countergenerality that would obtain for the specificity of perversions, making exchange between singular cases of perversion possible. These, in the existing normative generality, are defined by the absense of logical structure. Thus is conceived Sade’s notion of integral monstrosity. Sade takes this countergenerality, valid for the specificity of perversion, to be already implicit in the existing generality. For he thinks that the atheism proclaimed by normative reason, in the name of man’s freedom and sovereignty, is destined to reverse the existing generality into this countergenerality. Atheism, the supreme act of normative reason, is thus destined to establish the reign of the total absence of norms.” [Sade, my neighbor, trans. by Alphonso Lingis, 14-15]
Thus, we have two positions, at least, staked out about deviant or pervert sub-cultures: one in which the pervert sub-culture is in revolt against respectable culture and constructs its own norms while accusing the respectable culture of various hypocrisies and injustices; and one in which the task is to establish, from the supreme act of normative reason, Atheism, the reign of a total absence of norms.
Matza and Sykes take a third position, which is that the deviant sub-culture is held together by an ethos of ‘neutralization’. They reject the idea that the deviant has a consistent philosophy that he follows – rather, they point out that there are a number of respectable people that deviants often admire (they include in this number the ‘mother’ and the ‘priest’, which – for Matza and Sykes – might evoke the Warner brothers films of the thirties, but for me evokes the Sadeian mockery that is directed at just these two figures), and that deviants are not immune to guilt; furthermore, when you listen to what the deviant says when he is caught (that is, for a crime – for again, the deviant in these texts is always becoming a criminal. The idea that the criminal might become the norm, that the respectable might model itself on the deviant, is outside of the ken of the deviant theme), he does not rail against the norms, but rather against his bad luck.
However, man is a creature that needs reasons as much as he needs food. Matza and Sykes suggest that reasons – rationalizations – are needed to actually live as a deviant. But if the deviant is not to make the move of vulgar opposition, nor the Sadeian move of the removal of all norms except that of the death instinct, then he will need some buffer to silence his inner voice:
“Disapproval flowing from internalized norms and conforming others in the social environment is neutralized, turned back, or deflected in advance. Social controls that serve to check or inhibit deviant motivational patterns are rendered inoperative, and the individual is freed to engage in delinquency without serious damage to his self-image. In this sense, the delinquent both has his cake and eats it too, for he remains committed to the dominant normative system and yet so qualifies its imperatives that violations are ‘acceptable’ if not ‘right’.”
This is a fascinating paragraph, for – through the supposed value neutrality of the idea of norms – one receives the impression of a monolithic respectable society that has, indeed, got it right. A society that is so monolithically right that, for instance, there is nothing deviant about said society producing weapons with the power to destroy humanity if it is attacked. At the moment that Matza and Sykes suggest their very useful category scheme, they also produce a moment of neutralization – of style and value – in which one gets a flash of the technocrat working on the human product as the sociological imagination blinks off. Neutralization, I suggest, is not the domesticated genie they take it for, especially if the deviant is not the Other of respectable society, but is rather in a parasitic relationship to the community of human products.
The neutralizations are defined by five cardinal elements, a sociological liturgy:
1. The denial of responsibility In so far as the delinquent can define himself as lacking responsibility for his deviant actions, the disapproval of self or others is simply reduced in effectiveness as a restraining influence.
2. The denial of injury A second major technique of neutralization centres on the injury or harm involved in the delinquent act. The criminal law has long made a distinction between crimes which are mala in se and mala prohibita – that is between acts that are wrong in themselves and acts that are illegal but not immoral – and the delinquent can make the same kind of distinction in evaluating the wrongfulness of his behaviour.
3. The denial of the victim Even if the delinquent accepts the responsibility for his deviant actions and is willing to admit that his deviant actions involve an injury or hurt, the moral indignation of self and others may be neutralized by an insistence that the injury is not wrong in light of the circumstances. The injury, it may be claimed, is not really an injury; rather, it is a form of rightful retaliation or punishment.
4. The condemnation of the condemners A fourth technique of neutralization would appear to involve a condemnation of the condemners or, as McCorkle and Korn have phrased it, a rejection of the rejecters. The delinquent shifts the focus of attention from his own deviant acts to the motives of his violations. His condemners, he may claim, are hypocrites, deviants in disguise, or impelled by personal spite.
5. The appeal to higher loyalties Fifth, and last, internal and external social controls may be neutralized by sacrificing the demands of the larger society for the demands of the smaller social group to which the delinquent belongs such as the sibling pair, the gang, or the friendship clique. It is important to note that the delinquent does not necessarily repudiate the imperatives of the dominant normative system, despite his failure to follow them. Rather, the delinquent may see himself as caught up in a dilemma that must be resolved, unfortunately, at the cost of violating the law.
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