Locke on personal identity 2

So what does? How is the personal life identified? 

This is an agitated question, and it is expressed in an agitated text. Locke, normally so normal-mouthed, makes a pre-Voltarian move in the midst of this chapter by including the story of the rational parrot. Nothing prepares us for this story – the movement of the text has been straightforwardly argumentative until we suddenly receive an anecdote that takes up its own section, concerning a parrot who, according to a high and credible source, apparently spoke with understanding. The purpose of the rational parrot is, in a way, to parody – parroty – Descartes’ vision of the rational difference. Locke hopes to loosen our sense of rationality as the key to personal identity, because he wants something that loops through the conscious and the unconscious. He does not want his waking Socrates to be different from his sleeping Socrates. He faces this problem in a different spirit than Chuang Tzu:

“Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.”
Instead of the transformation of things, Locke is looking for the thread upon which things can be transformed. And yet, like Chuang Tzu and the butterfly, as he does so, he keeps pressing against an infinite regress -  not of butterflies and humans, but within his notion of the human:
“…to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for; -- which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls self: -- it not being considered, in this case, whether the same self be continued in the same or divers substances.” 
The game is afoot with the phrase: “it is impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive…” Because that second order perception must, then, be perceived by a third order one, and so on. How long does this infinite series of acts last? How long does Chuang Tzu dream he is a butterfly? It seems, here, that personal identity is threatening our hard won sense of the identity of the body, in as much as the person in the body-person act seems to exist in a time that is not coordinate with the “same time, same place” time of the body – it seems, rather, to exist infinitely and instantly at the same time.
But Locke does not choose to pursue these complications. Rather, he chooses to face the Transformation of Things with a different problem: that of the interruptions of forgetting and sleep. Sleep of course poses some problems for Locke’s notion of consciousness: do we perceive we are asleep when we are asleep? And do we perceive that we perceive it? Certainly we build around our sleep, we fall asleep, we say, I was asleep. But Locke approaches the interruption of consciousness from a different angle than sleep – a more difficult state to claim: that of forgetting. We forget. We don’t, here, even know that we forgot. Until we are reminded, somehow. Unlike sleep, forgetting has less certain rituals associated with it.  Locke wants to circumscribe the question posed by forgetting to personal identity to one having to do with identifying the person with substance, or identifying the person with consciousness. The latter is Locke’s choice. This is how he deals with the problems it poses:
“But it is further inquired, whether it be the same identical substance. This few would think they had reason to doubt of, if these perceptions, with their consciousness, always remained present in the mind, whereby the same thinking thing would be always consciously present, and, as would be thought, evidently the same to itself. But that which seems to make the difficulty is this, that this consciousness being interrupted always by forgetfulness, there being no moment of our lives wherein we have the whole train of all our past actions before our eyes in one view, but even the best memories losing the sight of one part whilst they are viewing another; and we sometimes, and that the greatest part of our lives, not reflecting on our past selves, being intent on our present thoughts, and in sound sleep having no thoughts at all, or at least none with that consciousness which remarks our waking thoughts, -- I say, in all these cases, our consciousness being interrupted, and we losing the sight of our past selves, doubts are raised whether we are the same thinking thing, i.e., the same substance or no.”
That we are always forgetting intrudes a startling psychological fact on the human scene: what are we always forgetting? We are always forgetting most things. The perception of our perception of perception; the knowing of the knowing of our knowing; the past; where the ball rolled under the sofa when we were three; being three; being fifteen; yesterday; what happened half an hour ago. Yet this list of what we are forgetting makes sense only if we are forgetting it. We, in a sense, own this forgetting. It is a fact of our consciousness. What is important to Locke is that the question of whether we are of the same substance is not pertinent to the matter of that thread which winds through our repeated, our perpetual disappearing acts:

“The question being what makes the same person; and not whether it be the same identical substance, which always thinks in the same person, which, in this case, matters not at all: different substances, by the same consciousness (where they do partake in it) being united into one person, as well as different bodies by the same life are united into one animal, whose identity is preserved in that change of substances by the unity of one continued life. For, it being the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself, personal identity depends on that only, whether it be annexed solely to one individual substance, or can be continued in a succession of several substances.”

  

Locke on personal identity 1

Locke begins his chapter on identity and diversity by what seems to be a refusal of philosophical and theological speculation – a refusal, that is, to consider either Stoic cyclical time or theological eternity:

“When we see anything to be in any place in any instant of time, we are sure (be it what it will) that it is that very thing, and not another which at that same time exists in another place, how like and undistinguishable soever it may be in all other respects: and in this consists identity, when the ideas it is attributed to vary not at all from what they were that moment wherein we consider their former existence, and to which we compare the present. For we never finding, nor conceiving it possible, that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude, that, whatever exists anywhere at any time, excludes all of the same kind, and is there itself alone.”

Notice the drum beat of the “same”, here, doing the conceptual work – the “same kind”, the “same place”, the “same time” – as though the identity “fix” is in. Locke, in other words, is placing this discussing in a certain locale – very much sub species non-aeternitatis. The neighborhood of sameness reaches out through all time and space, but it at the same time normalizes that time and space for the purpose of identity. Locke did not make this move because he was unaware of other ideas of time and space – in fact, the chapter is full of references to those other ideas, especially those associated with the idea of the pre-existing self of the Cambridge Platonists. And at the same time, Locke is also aware of Newton. In fact, his tremendous whack at all non-respectable metaphysics is made as a sort of  “clearing the ground” for the work of the true magi, of whom the most eminent was Newton. Now, Newton in his scholium had written of various senses of time – which applied to various approximations of reality:

“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.”
What does Newton meant by “flows equably without relation to anything external”? What after all would be this external thing? Space? Or the observer? Newton explains further that “It may be, that there is no such thing as an equable motion, whereby time may be accurately measured. All motions may be accelerated and retarded, but the flowing of absolute time is not liable to any change. The duration or perseverance of the existence of things remains the same, whether the motions are swift or slow, or none at all.”
Newtonian absolute time became an important reference in the 19^th century after thermodynamics tried to capture an irreversible temporal direction in the universe - which Botzmann provided the equations for. J. Loschmidt criticized the discrepancy between Boltzmann and Newton, the latter of whom clearly allows for equations of motion that are reversible in time. “This means that if a system of hard-sphere particles starts a backward motion due to the particles reversing their direction of motion at some instant of time, it passes through all its preceding states up to the initial one, and this will increase the H-function [entropy] whose variation is originally governed by reversible equations of motion. The essential point to be made here is that the observer cannot prefer one of the situations under study, the forward motion of the system in time, in favor of the second situation, its “backward” motion.” (Alexeev, 3) Notice that this observer is an observer ex machina – for in a sense the observer, being external, cannot penetrate to absolute time, having no footing according to Newton’s scholium. And it is this that may justify Locke, who plants the observer at the very beginning of his chapter with the telling phrase, “we see”.
It is from the position of what we see that Locke wants to proceed. Thus, it is in the observer’s world that we travel, and in which, for Locke, personal identity insists. It will insist fiercely in the rumble between finite spirits and bodies, for Locke quickly throws out the relevance of our idea of God, the third substance in Locke’s system. God is equivalent to the self-evident, an absolute point of view that combines a number of piously ornamental traits (is everywhere, is eternal, etc.) that do not interfere with the real argument about identity.
That argument comes down to what sense we are to make of personal identity when we borrow the terms from our notions of bodies. Locke, beginning with the observer’s notion of the identity of the moment with itself and the place with itself, would seem to have to continue in this vein. In that sense, every passed second and every dissipated ray of light would enforce a change in identity on the living. This is an idea that Locke rejects:

“In like manner, if two or more atoms be joined together into the same mass, every one of those atoms will be the same, by the foregoing rule: and whilst they exist united together, the mass, consisting of the same atoms, must be the same mass, or the same body, let the parts be ever so differently jumbled. But if one of these atoms be taken away, or one new one added, it is no longer the same mass or the same body. In the state of living creatures, their identity depends not on a mass of the same particles, but on something else. For in them the variation of great parcels of matter alters not the identity: an oak growing from a plant to a great tree, and then lopped, is still the same oak; and a colt grown up to a horse, sometimes fat, sometimes lean, is all the while the same horse: though, in both these cases, there may be a manifest change of the parts; so that truly they are not either of them the same masses of matter, though they be truly one of them the same oak, and the other the same horse. The reason whereof is, that, in these two cases -- a mass of matter and a living body -- identity is not applied to the same thing.”

In the observer’s world, we notice that it is a question of the observer himself.

The observer has one characteristic that distinguishes it from ‘parcels of matter’ – it is alive. Plant or animal, it has a living existence. Locke’s vitalist move is even expressed in terms that will later be refined into a vitalist philosophy: unlike the watch, which receives its impetus from without, the organism receives its impetus from within. That impetus will later be the much sought after vital force of romantic science and its aftermath.  

Locke however does not stop with that impulse, which merely gives him a living thing. He moves on to the enigmatic co-determinant of personal identity: consciousness. And it is here that he engages with a set of questions that, while being very  much of the time –metempsychosis, resurrection – are aids to Locke’s picture of consciousness. It is an argument that, I think, has a great influence on the function of character in Anglophone countries.

a little lesson in flat tax propaganda

A little lesson in flat tax economics and propaganda

There is a way of keeping gasoline prices low. It consists in the government price controls. You enforce a top price for gas, say 1.90, and allow noone to sell above it.
Of course, any economist worth his Econ 101 will tell you that won’t work. It interferes with the nature of the price system. Prices are set “naturally” in the market place acc

ording to the laws of supply and demand. Even if one concedes to institutionalists that prices are determined, as well, by the firm, according to a complex system of emulation – government price controls would simply cause either shortages, or black markets, or both.

But these same economists have no problem writing in the NYT – as Richard Thaler recently did – decrying the “complexity” of the tax code and urging flat rates. Even if the flat rates are tiered – say 29 percent for the wealthiest, 15 percent for the 99 percent scum – this, these economists will say, would clean up our tax problems in a jiffy.

Now, formally, what these economists are doing is – urging price controls. To see this, we have to see that political bodies are markets of a particular type - rather like auctions, or futures markets, in which the products consist of positive expenditures and negative ones - the latter being taxes. A tax deduction is, basically, a sneaky way the government can pay for a behavior. When the legislature votes to depreciate the tax on gas production according to a certain schedule, it doesn’t do so because it wants to complicate the tax code – any more than a soup manufacturer wants to complicate the price system by selling soup at 3.99 per can, rather than 3.50 or 4. Taxes, like prices, are the products of negotiation. Lobbyists spend incredible amounts of money, campaign contributers contribute incredible amounts of money, the most cretinous members of a Representative’s family land the most munificent positions, all as part of a system to give tax advantages to one or another party. These tax advantages produce competitive advantages, which is why cutting taxes on this or that product, or to encourage this or that behavior, is routinely advocated by the same economists who will then turn around and maunder about fake flat rates. The House of Representatives and the Senate, when considering taxes and budgets, are not doing anything much different than futures markets.

So what would happen if you set a tax rate for rich people who make a million a year at a flat 19 percent, no deductions? In time a, you would have a flat 19 percent tax, with no deductions. In time b, defined by the second day of the legislative session, you would have forty proposals for deductions, of which any number would pass. And every one of those forty would be attached to some propaganda effort to make it seem necessary – in the same way that advertising is an integral part of the price system. In an auction like system like the modern legislature, this is as “natural” as supply and demand is in the price system. In fact, a rich person would be insane not to bid, in the case of a flat tax, for exceptions. Because rich people exist as rich people by ... making more money. And there is no honeypot so sweet as the government.

Thus, like price controls, flat tax rates would require a few minor structural changes in order to really work. If you have price controls on gasoline, for instance, the best method would be for the state to Sovietize all gas producers and centrally plan supply, perhaps using the military to evict owners of gas fields. See how simple this is? In the case of flat tax rates, we would have to simply abolish the constitutional provision that allows legislators to set tax rates forever from the point at which the flat rate was passed. Again, this is simple. You just need a military coup to overthrow the democratic system.

In other words, when people tell you about flat tax rates and their advantages - see the Republican platform - they are either, a, lying, b, ignorant as dirt, or c, a University of Chicago economist.
Q.E.D.

a peculiar argument: Locke on personal identity

There’s a peculiar form of argumentation that emerges when ethics meets ontology – an encounter is that is comparable to mudwrestling in quicksand. We often derive, from a moral premise, an ontological conclusion. There are, for instance, multiple instances of the derivation, from normative ideas of responsibility and promise keeping, to an ontological fact about the continuity of the person. Locke, in the Personal Identity chapter of the Essay on Human Understanding (Book 2, chapter 27) – which is what I really want to write about - provides us with an instance:

“… if the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping are not the same person. And to punish Socrates waking for what Socrates sleeping that, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more right, than to punish one twin for what his brother twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like, that they could not be distinguished, for such twins have been seen.”

Locke implies here what is argued by other philosophers, which is that punishment is about what is right and what is right is about what a person does. Now, Locke was no doubt acquainted with feud and the regulation of kin responsibility which not only figured in early Anglo Saxon law, but in other codes as well. These codes were certainly found to be “right” by those who followed them. The attenuation of such transference of responsibility is even behind the king’s right to punish – he does so as the representative of the community that is wronged, even if the wrong is private. But even if one grants that a system of morality might be based on the responsibility of the person who committed the act, is the system of morality that founds responsibility on kin somehow getting something wrong about personal identity? Do we discover ontological facts about persons, and then reform our notion of right and wrong?

To argue that we do would require having some historical and anthropological evidence. But even before we begin to look for this evidence, we have to ask what type of discovery would make the difference, here.

One tradition in philosophy would reject the idea that the intrusion of ontological fact upon ethical custom changes our idea of right. Instead, just the opposite is the case: because we need persons for a particular ethical system, we find them. Thus, it is ethical custom that produces the ontological vision. We can tell this story as a genealogy of morals, taking it for granted that the play of moral developments takes place above some basic ontological level. However, we can also ask about this assumption. Why shouldn’t we be able to discover, by way of ethics, new and pertinent ontological facts? Or is the discovery of phenomena and its laws wholly the affair of the natural sciences? Of course, perhaps the sciences, too, have an ethical organization.

Another tradition in philosophy would insist that ethics is rooted in universally shared common sense, and that this common sense does deliver certain ontological facts for our edification and entertainment. Thus, for instance, when we show that an argument or conclusion is ridiculous, this is a proof: nature abhors the ridiculous. Nature is, after all, what is natural to men as well as facts about plants, molecules, and mosquitoes. And it is a natural to man to have a self.

A self, in this view, produces social affects – and so, as it is causal, so it is ontologically active.

If, then, we speak of persons as fictional – or, to use Locke’s term, as forensick – fiction should be taken to mean approximate, in the same way that one atom in a gas is handled approximately in the equations of chemistry. Of course, atoms can only be handled in the aggregate, whereas persons are, as it were, bigger. But the same sort of reasoning applies. In this sense, we can say that persons are ‘estimates’.

Zona and the Ponzi scheme

  
-New Masses.                                                                                                              I have a tendency to relapse into simple minded Marxist explanations, a habit that has served me well as the Great Recession mangles on. One of Marx's contentions was that capitalism tends to immiserate the proles. This is an often laughed at contention - what ho, all the prosperity generated in the freemarket West lo these many years! And in fact much prosperity was generated when there was a strong union factor able to swing the government - naturally, the ally of the rich - into using its countervailing power. But as we look at the facts and figures that stream in about the Great Moderation over the last coupla decades, one thing is striking: the average household in America owes as much as it owns. Or in other words - in practical accounting terms, Marx scores! The great moderation is so called because the condition under which the regime in which credit substitutes for wage increases had to be moderate - a matter of slowly, deliberately constructing a system of pinches from the outside, no single one of which hurt that much. Oh, a little more unpaid overtime. Oh, a little higher insurance premium. Oh, a little change in the credit laws to the disadvantage of the borrower. And then of course we got the bump, and our pluto-presidents, Bush and Obama, made sure  that the gigantic capitalists were helped, and basically pissed on the majority of Americans. So we are now on the downslope of the Great Moderation. And if Marx is right, the immiserative machinery is going to get a little more fierce. In spite of having had a bad night debating, really, Obama looks set to be re-elected, barring utter disaster, the GOP will still own the House, the Dems the senate, and we will play this game one more time.
But in the longer view -  Karl has been right on the money. The neo-liberal dream, with its fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of capitalism, has been, on the other hand, absolutely wrong. That is, the sincere third way people - not the Tom Friedmans. The third way - which dominates the Dems and Labour - can be simmered down to this core principle: the guarantor state that arose in the thirties and provided social insurance for the populace can be replaced by a private sector version of the guarantor state, where the work of social  insurance is performed by investment. The wage worker invests in capital and reaps the fruit of capital's growth and profitability. Of course, we overlook the fact that this profitability comes about by freezing the wage worker's wages and eventually shipping his job to someplace where it can be done more cheaply. The idea, here, has a utopian roots in various socialist schemes of the 1830s, which also wanted to put the prole on both sides of the table. The problem is that this ignores the fact that the money that is made on one side of the table - capital's profit - comes from the surplus labor that comes from the other side of the table. What the third way, or neo-liberalism is, is ... a Ponzi scheme. And that Ponzi scheme is the major determinant of our politics at the present time.

On the death of character

On June 18, 1944, a detachment of prisoners from Auschwitz were unloaded at Kaufering, five kilometers from Landsberg  Germany, and collected into a concentration camp there. The prisoners were set to work building large underground bunkers that were intended to protect an airplane parts factory. According to a secret account kept by one of the prisoners, a priest, Jules Jost, about 28,838 Jewish prisoners were kept there, including 4200 women and 850 children.

At the same time, an army doctor named Gottfried Benn was stationed in Landsberg. Benn is of course one of Germany’s most famous twentieth century poets. In 1933, he had sided with Hitler, and written a famous letter addressed to emigrés writers – and really to Klaus Mann – in which he wrote that their complaints were besides the point. When they called Hitlerism “barbaric”, Benn wrote, they were betraying their own intellectual inadequacy and obsolescence: “… this is my counter-question, how do you imagine history moves itself? Do you think it is particularly active in French spa resorts? How do you imagine the 12^th century, the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic feeling: do you think that this was discussed? Do you think, in the North of the land from the South of which you now write to me, someone dreamed up a new architectural style? That we voted for domes or towers? That one debated over Apsides, round or polygon?”

The emphasized words were all connected to the weak mode of politics that Thomas Mann, in the Observations of a Non-political man, had connected  to the complex made up of civilization and the intellectual (associated with France) as opposed to culture and the bürgerlich (associated with Germany). But Benn had moved on from the conservatism of Mann – like Ernst Junger, he had moved towards a politics of masculine decision, in which things like debate, discussion, dreaming would be crushed. Crushing –this was what history did. It smashed. It crushed. And it shaped the way nature shaped.

Of course, Benn had left his enthusiasm for Hitler behind him by 1944, but he had not entirely left this idea that history and nature were one inhuman thing. And this ideology – with its proximity to the real crushing of human material going on in a concentration camp five kilometers from Landsberg – was part of the sweep of the Novel of the Phenotype he wrote, with its subtitle, Landsberg Fragments. In the first fragment he poses the aesthetic question in terms that resonate with his notion of a sort of anonymous collective history deciding on domes or towers, when he considers the notion of narrative itself: “Why knead together thoughts in someone, in a figure, in shapes, when there are no more shapes? Invent persons, names, relations, when they are simply futile?” In a sense, Benn is writing about the post concentration camp world –the world in which persons, names and relations truly are futile. And still, one has to ask whether we are not simply being asked, once more, to see an aesthetic category crushed by history; and whether “history” hasn’t been given virtues it does not have, causal powers that are, in truth, tautological: whether we aren’t being sold history as, in fact, the scheme of causes, which would mean that it naturally causes events. Cause, in other words, causes events.

Yet if we take a more generous interpretive approach, we see, in Benn’s notes, indications of a way of thinking about character that preceded the concentration camp. This way of thinking began to emerge in the modernism of the 1914 generation as a response to mechanization, to the artificial paradise of chemistry and consumerism, to newspapers and films, as much as to war.  In the post-war period, the same reasoning under different styles – structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist – came to the same conclusion: that the bourgeois realism of the character was obsolete. Roland Barthes, in the first cool,scientific phase of his career treats the figure, the personage, in the realist tradition as one that is wholly constructed within the text’s discourse, radically dividing it from its off-the-page correlates: from the critical point of view, it is thus as false to suppress the personage as it would be to make it jump off the paper [faire sortir du papier] in order to make it a psychological personage (endowed with possible motives)…” (SZ) The paper that intrudes here and does such decisive ontological work allows us to understand on the personage on the paper functions in that universe – but in the same gesture it invalidates the ethos in which both sides, paper and off-the-paper, are joined in one social whole.

In Barthes second, hedonistic phase there is a retreat from this high modern ascetism. The text becomes, again, an object of pleasure – an off-the-page pleasure that is satisfied somehow on the page. The text becomes porous, readable, fragmentable, and paper becomes a more enigmatic matter altogether. This retreat does not erase the high modern moment but quotes it – delivering it to the maximum ambivalence in which all liminal creatures, zombies, vampires, leaders, characters, reside.  

myths of american capitalism

Myths of American Capitalism

Inspired by Joseph Stiglitz discovery that the American Dream is a “myth” – which would seem tautological to me, but I’m not an economist – I have been thinking about current myths in American capitalism. It seems to me that the top one, at the moment, has to do with upper management. It goes like this: upper management in American companies are paid top dollar because, like athletes, they have certain irreplaceable skills that make them worth it.

This idea is hauled out every time a company has a good couple of years. GE makes fifty billion dollars in profit over four or five years, and Jack Welch is hosannahed as a genius.

There are two parts to this myth. The first part is that upper management and professional athletes are in the same category.

The best answer to this is: nobody ever bought a gadget from Microsoft because they had seen Steve Jobs manage the product from R and D to the market. 

Athletes and movie stars aren’t paid for their skills – they are paid because there is a demand for their skills. These skills are theatrical and visible. If basketball was played in secret, the wages of the players would soon diminish to zero, or around that amount. There is a great deal of marketing that goes into making sure that the players are seen. That is the point. Unfortunately, nobody was bringing up this point in the 1980s, when Harvard Business Journal, among others, was floating the idea that upper management needed to be paid vastly more. The figures are stark – CEOs, who were once paid 20 times the median wage of workers in their companies, were soon taking home one hundred times, two hundred times, four hundred times their median employee. Because athletes and stars are public figures with very public salaries, and because these salaries were going up, the CEO propagandist set – including most mainstream economists – latched onto the easy comparison. In fact, though, the comparison is completely bogus. Salaries in entertainment and salaries in fortune five hundred executive suites are moved for very different reasons.

However, there is a second part of the myth. In this part of the myth, what the firm does is conflated with the upper management. If a clerk at a store processes twenty more people on a good day, we don’t conflate the clerk and the store’s increased revenue. But somehow, we are supposed to conflate the management and the business phenotype.

A good way to get a handle on this is to look at two things: the company’s record in relation to other companies in its sector, and the company’s record over time.

Now, the indexes  for a  company’s record differ. Is it profit, or is it stock prices? In the eighties, there was a definite turn to the company’s stock price as the ultimate index of company merit. Now, this seems, to me, to be reductive and wrong, but even so, it was often trotted out as the alpha and omega of company mightiness. In the stock boom that occurred from 1981 to 2000, this was a very favorable record for the upper management.

Notice, however, that one average, the stocks of Fortune five hundred companies stagnated for ten years – from 2000 to 2010. In fact, they went down enormously from 2008-2010. Notice, too, that this had no effect on the salaries of management. They did not slip down from being 200 times the median wage to, say, 10 times the median wage.

Notice, too, that outliers would, sooner or later, converge with their sector. GE is a great example. Jack Welch pumped up profits at GE by creating a very exaggerated financial unit. In 1997, Fortune magazine published one of those “let’s drool over a CEO” article about the great and transcendent genius of Welch, “scaring  the hell” out of competitors, entitled: GE CAPITAL: JACK WELCH'S SECRET WEAPON. Here’s a graf:

“Capital, as it's known inside GE, is less a business than an energy source, radiating growth through a mature--some might say lackluster--conglomerate. You can see it in GE's third-quarter results, where Capital comfortably outgrew its parent. But not until you break down GE's performance in recent years are you struck by the glow of its nuclear core. Nicholas Heymann, an analyst at Prudential Securities, calculates that from 1991 to 1996, GE's revenues would have increased just 4% a year were it not for Capital, which more than doubled the growth rate to 9.1%. And its 27 businesses, ranging from credit cards to computer programming to satellite leasing, now generate 39% of GE's earnings, up from 29% in 1990. As some analysts see it, Wall Street's confidence in Capital is the main reason GE stock is rising at a rate that makes the overall market advance look modest, up 123% in two years, vs. 63% for the S&P 500.”

 Running the tape forward, we get to 2009. Here’s the Business Insider headline: The Man who destroyed GE

  And here’s a graf:

As GE's stock struggles to hold $7 $6, a level at which it is still arguably expensive (17X cash flow), shareholders are calling for CEO Jeff Immelt's head.
And it's true: Jeff has had 7 years to reduce GE's dependence on the business that is sinking the ship--GE Capital--and he has chosen not to do so.  Until last fall.  When it was too late.
But let's not forget who built GE Capital in the first place: GE's legendary CEO, Jack Welch.”
Incidently, who rescued GE Capital?
I said the Fed/
I kept them from bleeding and bleeding the red/
until they were good and stone cold and dead.
Here’s a story from Bloomberg:

“General Electric Co. sold about $16 billion of commercial paper through a Federal Reserve program to unlock credit markets frozen in September 2008, making up 2 percent of the central bank’s total purchases.

GE, whose GE Capital unit was the biggest U.S. issuer of commercial paper in 2008, said in October of that year that it planned to use the Commercial Paper Funding Facility to support the Fed’s efforts to make credit available at the height of the crisis. The program purchased a total of $738.3 billion, according to documents that the Fed released today.

Under the plan’s rules, GE could have issued as much as $98 billion, according to the company’s regulatory filing for 2008. The $16 billion was repaid as it came due in January and February 2009, the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company said. GE’s finance unit remained profitable throughout the crisis, helped in part by tax credits.”

Notice the words of this announcement are nicely phrased to make one think that GE is simply ‘supporting’  the Fed. This is like a drowning swimmer supporting the lifeguard. Warren Buffett loaned General Electric money at this time on a ten percent interest schedule. Uncle Sam, well, he charged 1 percent or below. However, we pretend that this unfortunate episode didn't happen. We built it, as all the white boys from Bain shout. This, of course, is also part of American Capitalist mythology, but more on that at another time.

So the question is why upper management was so successful in going on a peculative run that tilted the very composition of wealth. This is where myth – also known as economic models – intersects with certain odd facts about the labor market.

As the CEOs were becoming world dominating plutocrats, an odd thing was happening in the world of education: business schools were becoming dominant at universities. What this means is that there was more talent pouring into the management labor pool. But hark! Notice that in this supply and demand story, salaries went up instead of down. Lands sakes, it is as if the labor market is… another myth.

What happened in the 80s was simply good old fashion guilding. Guilds now stretch across thirty percent of the American work force. These are the invisible barriers to entry that prevent, say, myself from setting up a business as a doctor. The state comes down like a ton of bricks to support the doctor’s monopoly, and would put me in jail, thus spitting on free markets and the right of people to decide for themselves. The same thing would happen if I set myself up in many a licenced position. These are, of course, guilds. On the one side, they operate to protect the public. On the other hand, the public pays for that protection. It is the other hand that gets erased, of course, in the stories guilds tell about themselves. Upper management monopolies, however, while having a guild like structure, don’t represent the convergence of the state and private power. This actually makes the actors in the upper management guilds very nervous. What they have, instead, is a rigged up power involving doubledealing by the representatives of the investors. In form, upper management is more like the mafia than like doctors or lawyers. And having the power to shut off the kind of bargaining moves that would send their compensation packages down, they use it.

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which we actually used the technology we have not just to get robots to make parts of cars on assembly lines, but also to manage companies. Impossible? All that tacit knowledge?  If we look at the way companies converge in their sectors over time, we see something that at least theoretically cries out for formalization. And in fact we have the systems: we have expert systems that could, for instance, have pretty much advised GE on how to invest and manage the company as a whole. The top level of management, far from being creative decision makers, are mostly dealers in what computers do best: algorithms. ROI algorithms. If GE had computerized most of its upper management functions back in the 90s, and reduced Jack Welch’s salary to around 150 – that is, 150,000 per year – they would not only have saved the perhaps billion he cost  them over ten years, but they would have ended up pretty much converging with their sector -  which, of course, they did. GE’s common stock price when Welch left in 2000 was 60 dollars and fifty cents, while in 2010 it had declined by almost forty dollars. Was this because Welch was a better CEO than Immelt?

Well, he may have been. On the other hand, he was pretty much the same old same old when compared to his predecessor, Reg Jones.

“John Francis Welch (i.e., Jack) took the reins at GE in 1981, following a long, exhaustive, and competitive succession process overseen by his predecessor, Reg Jones. But, contrary to the notion that Welch inherited a moribund company, things were going pretty well already. Over the course of Jones's stint at the top, which began in 1972, revenue had grown at an average annual rate of 12 percent, and earnings had grown at 16 percent. The spin offered by Robert Slater, author of The New GE: How Jack Welch Revived an American Institution (as well as three other Welch volumes), is that Welch "did not want to wait until General Electric was in trouble.... To keep those figures from declining, Welch knew he had to push the company to become more competitive." Janet Lowe, author of Jack Welch Speaks and the recent biography Welch: An American Icon, echoes this line: "The challenge for Welch was to spot trouble before it occurred, to take preventative measures, and to make the most of GE's tremendous momentum."
Fine. And in fact GE has averaged a solid 12 percent annual earnings growth throughout Welch's time at the top, and about 15 percent over the last eight years. But if no trouble had yet "occurred" when he took over, and GE already boasted "tremendous momentum," why credit Welch with a revival rather than with maintaining a past record of excellence? The truth is that while CEO biographers need a larger-than-life hero, GE did not. Indeed, as James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras explain in their celebrated and insightful 1994 book Built to Last, the firm has enjoyed success under a series of innovative chief executives stretching back to the early 1900s.” http://www.robwalker.net/contents/mm_welch.html
So, how much did Reg Jones make, as compared to Jack Welch?

“In 1975, the most widely acclaimed CEO in the United States was Reginald Jones, the chief executive at General Electric. Reginald Jones took home $500,000 in 1975, a sum that equaled 36 times the income of that year’s typical American family.

In 2000, the most widely acclaimed CEO in the United States was Jack Welch, who also happened to be the chief executive at General Electric. Welsh took home $144.5 million in the year 2000, a sum that equaled 3,500 times the income of that year’s typical American family.”

 

Life without resistance

Watching Hollande move to Sarkozy-lite policies, and his economics minister, Moscovici, respond to a question about Keynesian politics as though Keynes were the new devil (poor Marx, downgraded to second devil status!), one … lurches between disbelief and the sense that this was all pre-ordained. Both the Left and the Right in Europe accepted the neo-liberal straight-jacket long ago. It has worked out well – for the upper tier of bureaucrats in both the public and private sectors. The social distance between this tier and the man I came upon, yesterday, sleeping in the street before the post office on the Rue des Archives, yawns as wide as ever the distance between the 18^th century aristocracy and the peasantry. Chamfort, one of my favorite dark writers, tells an anecdote in his Maxims and Portraits about one of the daughters of one of the Princesses, that is, one of the granddaughters of  Louis XV. She was playing with one of the maid servants and she looked at the maid’s hand, and then she looked at her own. And she asked why the maid had as many fingers as she did. A perfect anecdote. Of course, our leaders know that we all have the same number of fingers, and you can even make it up the bling bling ladder if you serve the appetites of the rich in some way, but in most ways, the gulf is wide and the interests are disparate between those at the top and the rest.

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, Robert Heilbroner, the guy any non-economics major has to love for having provided the most well written short guide to economics (The Worldly Philosophers), wrote an essay for the New Yorker on how much the triumph of capitalism invalidated the predictions not only of the Marxists, but of the founding fathers of capitalism itself – Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, etc. Their central model always involved declining return to investment – and, society wide, this would mean either decline or – in Mill’s case – the famous stationary state. None of them, in other words, bought the story of growth as the new and necessary horizon of the future. Marx, ironically, seemed much closer to that view, but he disentangled growth from the capitalist engine of growth,  private enterprise. It was the latter which would eventually fail, while the horizon of growth it had driven would split away from it.

Heilbroner thought that capitalist had outlasted the predictions of the prophets for a number of reasons: one was that they thought of growth in too narrow a sense. The substitution of commodity for commodity, for instance, turns out not to be, as it would be in logic, a matter that leaves an economic state of affairs alone, but instead creates new opportunity niches that produce more growth in directions that were unseen before. Heilbroner puts it like this: … the special province of capitalism has always been finding ways of expanding its commodity frontiers by moving activities from the sphere of personallifeinto that of profitable business. Particularly in modern times, every generation has extricated itself from satiety by reinventing its own standard of living. Even Marx,who was keenly alive to capitalism’s capacity for generating outlets of expansion, would have been nonplussed by the extent to which such once wholly noneconomic pursuits as family entertainment, meal preparation, housework and exercise have been ‘commoditized’ by TV, precooked foods, detergents and running shoes.” All of which, I would point out, are technologies that produced new spheres of substitution, which is a necessary element of the dialectic that creates technological change. The latter is considered by mainstream economists as something “exogenous” to the economy – hence, the myth that the economy changes through technological shocks, and their ain’t anything planners can do about it. This is the pulling the rabbit out of the hat point of view about technology, or, more simply, magical thinking. Unfortunately, it is the magical thinking that has governed the plan de-industrialization of much of the developed countries, which was in full bore as Heilbroner was writing in 1989.

But a more important marker that one finds in this essay, and that will help us measure how we have arrived at our present paradoxes, is Heibroner’s important sense that capitalism is a regime. Underneath the separation of politics and economics that characterizes it (that is, the officially political institutions do not produce, devolving that function to the private sphere), capitalism resists internal and external revolts in the same way any regime does – by creating a sort of ideal spokes-class for the entire society. That class is the businessman. It is a class that is protected by infinite amounts of footwork in the media world. Within that class, however, things have shifted from 1989. It has become more financialized, more self-reflective about what it is doing and how to take advantage of areas for profit, and – from the outside -  more greedy. Greed, however, doesn’t really describe the rich – it is rather an attempt to use an archaic ethical vocabulary to describe a shift in ethics – in ethos, in character, in self-identification. In a sense, the businessman class has become ever more sensitive to resistance. Money operates, at the highest level, to produce a smooth world. It is a smooth world legally – if you are a Russian oligarch with a seedy past and might have abetted a few murders on the way to wealth, you can still easily get residence in the UK, for instance – whereas if you are a Somali fleeing famine, tough luck. Money crashes down line-time – the queuing time that determines the shape of access for everything from medical care to groceries for most people. I could list the number of areas in which resistance is liquidated for the wealthy, but we have all seen the standard amount of Hollywood films, so we know this already. Hollywood in fact imagined the resistless life in such a way that the businessman – not usually talented in imagining lifestyles – has accepted it as fact.

It is the businessman’s sense of the resistless world which is really at play in such things as taxes. Why would a man with one hundred million dollars worry if the tax bill cuts into a portion of that wealth that has zero marginal utility for him? Because that wealth is him. The wealthy identify with their wealth. Taxes are, in this sense, pure resistance. And resistance is intolerable.

One is often astonished at the things that CEOs negotiate. Jack Welch, for instance, negotiated a contract with GE in which GE basically bought and gave Welch all the commodities that are usually associated with domestic  life: a place to say, transportation, food. Welch earned millions, and buying these things would have meant little to him. But the symbolic power of having everything bought for him – of overcoming the resistance of the cash nexus itself –was the aphrodisiac.  

Heibroner, picking up from Schumpeter, did have a sense that the businessman who represents the capitalist regime might be the Achilles heal of the regime:  “Capitalists, in whose name the system is organized, no longer possess the basic powers that accrue to persons of similar importance under earlier systems; unlike the most minor feudal lords, for instance, they cannot try, imprison, or forcibly muster “their” workforces, or enjoy the privileges of a legal code different from that applicable to other groups..”

This gap is perceived by the capitalist, in the present state of our regime, as  resistance; the policymaking elite that has grown up since 1989 finds it increasingly intolerable that such resistance exists. Hence, the policies that have been adopted since the crisis are characterized by two things: massive immunity for the financial elite that crashed the system; and massive, punitive economic policies for the wage class. The immunity is, on the one hand, a small thing – but it looms large symbolically. That the banks could simply defraud Libor and remain comparatively unpunished for it – punished as though they had jaywalked – speaks to a larger issue: the inability of states to resist socializing the debts of banks, while at the same time refusing to nationalize them. This is of the essence of the current plutocratic system. And that it has not emerged as an issue in any of the democracies that have held elections since the crash – in the UK, France, Spain, Greece, and now the U.S. – is a definite sign that we have moved further into a regime in which the capitalist is closing that gap, liquidating that resistance.

Romney and Locke

Romney’s video – which is now as famous as Paris Hilton’s sex video, and like P.H.’s, shows what the rich do when they are naked – actually plays on the strings of national memory, going all the way back to our beloved John Locke. Locke, as we all know, was very important to the founders. In his own life, actually, he was very concerned with America, for he was, as Robin Blackburn points out in his history of New World slavery, a member of the Board of Trade, which dealt with matters from the colony. Incidentally, one of those matters was  slave conspiracy. Locke had an excellent opportunity, whilst attending such meetings, to put into policy terms his notion that slavery was a natural consequence of the state of war between “a lawful Conquerer and a Captive.” As Blackburn notes, during Locke’s time on the Board, it vetted many documents coming from the colonies, including the Act for Suppressing of Outlying Slaves, in which we read this:

“WHEREAS many times negroes, mulattoes, and other slaves unlawfully absent themselves from their masters and mistresses service, and lie hid and lurk in obscure places killing hoggs and committing other injuries to the inhabitants of this dominion, for remedy whereof for the future, Be it enacted by their majesties lieutenant governour, councell and burgesses of this present general assembly, and the authoritie thereof, and it is hereby enacted, that in all such cases upon intelligence of any such negroes, mulattoes, or other slaves lying out, two of their majesties justices of the peace of that county, whereof one to be of the quorum, where such negroes, mulattoes or other slave shall be, shall be impowered and commanded, and are hereby impowered and commanded to issue out their warrants directed to the sherrife of the same county to apprehend such negroes, mulattoes, and other slaves, which said sherriffe is hereby likewise required upon all such occasions to raise such and soe many forces from time to time as he shall think convenient and necessary for the effectual apprehending such negroes, mulattoes and other slaves, and in case any negroes, mulattoes or other slaves or slaves lying out as aforesaid shall resist, runaway, or refuse to deliver and surrender him or themselves to any person or persons that shall be by lawfull authority employed to apprehend and take such negroes, mulattoes or other slaves that in such cases it shall and may be lawfull for such person and persons to kill and distroy such negroes, mulattoes, and other slave or slaves by gunn or any otherwaise whatsoever.”
Or as us Continental Philosophe types say: Martin Heidegger, eat your heart out.
But besides countenancing genocide, Locke was also on the cutting edge of freedom. Freedom, in the Anglosphere tradition, takes a rather bizarre turn from its old theological and philosophical uses. It becomes attached more and more to property. The freedom to own becomes, in this tradition, the very soul of freedom, its breath, its majesty. Tacitly, the more you own, the free-er you are – which is of course reflected in a legal system tilted massively against the poor and towards the wealthy, which we keep like a beloved pet barracuda to this very day in our mock democracies.
Still, if property is the root of freedom, those who have no property are an embarrassment in a free state. They represent, well, non-freedom. Naturally, their superpowers of non-freedomness involve them in sucking the property from those who have them – or, in other words, quantitatively lessening their freedom. The image of the poor as parasites was not an invention of Locke’s – it was certainly part of a larger fear of the masses that one finds in all over Europe at the time –but what was different was attaching this fear of the poor to the idea that they were, in a sense, the antithesis of freedom. Thus, by a rather bizarre alchemy, those people who benefited least from the system, who, by any practical view of the system, had the least power, posed the gravest threat. This inversion of social reality has had a long and glorious career in the Anglosphere: most recently, the right has been drooling over its theory that the financial crisis arose cause black and Hispanic poor people, prodded by the government, tricked poor honest bankers  into subprime loans and couldn’t pay them, thus causing the downfall of the true and onlie system of Operation Freedom, under our beloved Bush.
Locke would have recognized the truth in this story. Locke, in his pamphlet to the Board of Trade on the Poor Laws, which responds to the appalling rise in the charge for keeping the poor (a diminishment of freedom if there ever was one), cast about for ways to repair the situation. He came up with solutions that Romney himself might consider. There were the working schools, where poor children from three (when idleness starts cropping out like a disease) to fourteen could be maintained in blessed industry; then there is the revival of Elizabethan laws against beggars, where Locke proposes seizing them and taking no shit from them, but hustling them off to seaports, finding places for them on ships, and treating them like galley slaves for three years time – which should be sufficient to do them in; and the maimed, of course – who have an excuse for begging – should be stuffed into a house of correction.

If I were Romney, I’d be reading my Locke. He’s your man for regaining the Freedoms We Have Lost to the rascally 47 percent.  

hide and seek from a metaphysical point of view

The essence of childhood is playing. For me, the essence of that essence was not War, not Red Rover Red Rover, not baseball, kickball, badmitten, solitaire, smear the queer, acorn fight, not Battleship, Monopoly, Chinese Checkers, Life, Operation, not dress-up, swinging on the door, birds, spying – no, the sum and mirror of childhood and, I think now, life was hide and seek. I look back over the vast and forbidding snowfall of years, I look back over the forbidding terrain of physical growth, short term memory loss, and the painful and constant realization of the drain of a million trivialities that has utterly wasted 99 percent of my spiritual energy, I look back  on myself pintsized (a vision that substitutes a photo of myself for a tactile and living image – I cannot imagine being three feet high, it is beyond the limits of my imagination), and hide and seek looms up  as the emblem of the labyrinth into which I had fallen from another labyrinth, that which extends on the negative  side of the zero hour of birth and touches nothingness – labyrinth to labyrinth. Hide and seek involved the elemental spirits: an It, a countdown, hiding places, a base, and tagging. I still remember certain successful hiding places: the clothes hamper in the Colonial, a large cardboard box – a mover’s box in which to hang clothes – in Dad’s part workshop, the prickly vacancy between the pittus porum and the house on Nielsen Court, the upper branches of a pine tree in the bit of woods three blocks away, bellydown among the dust under a bed somewhere… Of course, finding a hiding place was only the first order of business, since the point was to creep out of it at the right moment and make a dash for the base without being tagged by It. The game involved an uneasy détente between the senses – the visible (hidden/not hidden) and the tactile (tagged/not tagged). We could easily come up with the semiotic wiring of the game through the putting into play of such oppositions.

We could do that. But I want to think about It. In a way, It was the most interesting figure in the whole drama. That It was called It may still be the most tremendously poetic event of my life; it is an unending source of wonder. I have read philosophers speak of the beginning of their vocation as a wonder about how things were made – how, to be more general, there was something instead of nothing – but my vocation started with the wonder of It. It seemed distilled from the adult metaphysics that papered over all the mysteries with farreaching linguistic assumptions. It rains, it happens, it is what it is, how is it out there, how is it going – that it is the old mole for true. It, in other words, is a premonition in ordinary life of what Nietzsche called the Ubermensch, and I’d really like to know if the young Fritz played hide and seek, and if the German version of the game calls the counter It.

However, It is not just about the more-than-human. It is about the transmission of negative power. It is about being the King of the Golden Bough. With one touch, an It conveys its succession. This is the origin of politics,

I think – politics begins and ends in hide and seek. 

And it also speaks to touch, that especially uncanny sense, which we have a tendency to make the hands responsible for, although of course our feet touch, our sphincter touches,  our lips touch, our noses touch, and we touch where we have the skin for it. We touch things outside of us. Living in this interface is no joke, and  confusing enough that we need, quickly, to sublimate some touches and highlight  others and come up with rules.

From these rules, the flowers of anxiety spring.

One of the great things about hide and seek is it casts that anxiety into the 

form of art. This is something we can do. The music of hide and seek pitches 

numbers (in the form of a countdown) against giggles. Giggling was always part 

of the rivalry between the hiders and It. Hiders sometimes were discovered 

because they giggled – but on the other hand, giggles tease the hunting It. 

“Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer.” The It, like Mallarme’s faun, both

loves and regrets the tipping point moment when the nymphs recede – 

when the hiders reveal themselves – not only because the It can then 

transmit Itness to some lagging hider, but also because, opening his 

eyes at the end of the countdown, he has in a sense reversed the world. 

That is the point of counting backwards – backwards is the witchy direction, 

the anti-dialectical motion, it is the motion of the Sabbat, reflected in 

saying the lord’s prayer backwards, or in general in all backwards rituals

 – and thus the world in which the It’s eyes are opened is not the world 

of waking, but the world backwards, the world entered by a back door 

(Kleist, in On the Marionnette theater, has his dramaturge speak of our loss 

of Paradise in this way - "But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim

stands behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to

see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back." This is a precise description

 of hide and seek). That is of course the world of dream, which in so far as 

it is identical with itself, is simply the world.  At the same time, it isn’t,

 that is the dream world is a play world, since the dream is solitary, and 

It –whose solitude is so extreme that it is an It – is about to cast off his

solitude and his It-ness in an act of contact. He couldn’t do so if the very

ground of the possibility to do so wasn’t encoded in hide and seek. Hence, 

the giggles, which are – as any Kantian could see – transcendental. And this

is the proper way to take transcendental moments – they are funny.

It is the funniest thing in the world, being It, being a hider, playing hide

 and seek. My intellectual development is arrested, or just arrested enough, 

to see the glimmer of the messages here – but I have spent my whole life 

trying to decode them.  

 

the myth of the modern reader

This happens.

I decide that I need to understand Heraclitus’ famous fragment, ethos anthropos daimon. It is on my to do list. So I go to some journal articles. I look up Bruno Snell. I look up some books. I am trying to get a handle on daimon. I look up T.M. Robertson’s translation and explanation that daimon can me fate and can mean divinity. I look up Richard Geldard’s book on Heraclitus. And it is in Geldard’s book that I come across one of those assumptions that litter academic books – an assumption about how “we moderns” view things – that makes me doubt the sociological bones of Geldard:

“The problem with “Character is fate as the translation is that in both denotation and connotation no sense of the word daimon as spirit orsome power either within or without is even implied, unless one wishes to burden the word “fate” with excessive determinism. Moern readers, however, feeling free of ruling ruling forces (except the power of DNA, perhaps) understand such translation to say that as human beings we hold our destiny in our hands soley by virtue of our character.”

Modern readers? I have no idea what modernity Geldard lives in. The country he is writing in, the United States, contains, for the most part, readers who consistently affirm that they believe man was created by God. Another lively section of the modern readers cohort affirms a hodgepodge of new age beliefs, which seem to center around various ideas about reincarnation and past life experiences. Geldard has obviously never visited the “philosophy” section of a mall book store (if there are any left), where the shelves are crammed with “metaphysical” books in which self-help and a certain cosmology are nicely blended – for modern readers.

I am not blaming Geldard alone – phrases like this drip casually from many an academic pen. Having swallowed some notion of “modern” which comes entirely from a small part of their own lives, that passed in a classroom, they casually set forth this heuristic fiction as sociological fact.

I was raised in fairly modern circs. Air conditioning, vaccines, cars, computers, jets. All the accoutrements. And I have rarely met anyone who did not feel that outside forces were operating in their lives. One of the phrases one hears regularly, when one listens to people’s life stories, is that there was a “reason” for things. The reason one, for instance, had bad relationships x, y, and z, is so one could have good relationship “a”.  The reason Smith had a car accident is so Smith could learn to be kinder to his children. The reason Jones had to go through bankruptcy is so Jones could learn the true value of worldly goods. These heuristics proliferate not under the surface, but on it. Go to a crowded restaurant at noon and listen to what the people at the other tables are talking about, and you will likely hear a “reason” story, or a variant.  This notion of a reason operating in one’s life is as widespread in the United States as the idea of a daimon, or of a fate, in Greece, as far as I can tell.

My irritation with Geldard has to do with my encountering, all too often, casual remarks about “moderns” which seem to have no footing in anything besides the mind-forged image academics have created of each other, all believers in the most up to date modern science and masters of their rational self-interest. The creation of this fictitious image  has other consequences – for instance, the creation of a fictitious teleology, with the modern looking back on the past as something that “leads up to” us. In a sense, this is the intellectual “reason” story. It confuses a fact about the seriality of the time line with a stronger sense of ‘leading’ that, well, seems daimonic.

Once one grows sensitive to it, one begins to find the “modern readers” trope and the way it functions in academic writing fascinating. For one thing, modern readers are always better readers. Or, if they have lost some connection to the past – the past that is too sentimental, too racist, too crude – the writer is  there to do the proper brokering work. So intent is the academic on this brokering work  that he or she rarely looks up at the world of narratives in which the “modern reader”  moves, which includes a superhero with spiderlike qualities, whole cable stations devoted to dramatizing romance novels in the most sentimental way possible, other “reality” tv shows about discovering the ghosts in haunted houses, etc., etc. The video game and most crude division between good guys and bad guys are standards of modern narration, as are effectless murders’, childish FX, and periodic moral panics involving such things as widespread satanic abuse in a vernacular that is lifted almost verbatim from the witch panics of the 15^th century.

So this use of the “modern reader” gives me the heebee jeebees. I want to say: The modern reader, boss – he dead.  

Michael Gordon, warmonger, up to his old tricks

Michael Gordon, the gross warmonger reporter at the NYT, has a headline story today in which big tears are shed over the fact that the U.S. didn't even get a nice little military base in Iraq - oh, the grief! I always like to think of Gordon in terms of his various triumphs in reporting about Iraq. Who can forget his eagerness to relay fake information about Iraq's nuclear weapons before the war? This is typical Gordon, lying through his teeth, helping to bring on hundreds of thousands of deaths:

“WASHINGTON, Sept. 7, 2002 -- More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to

enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.
The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms. President Hussein has met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq's top nuclear scientists and, according to American intelligence, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West."
It is sweet that the NYT has a policy of retaining reporters who relay absolute falsehoods - as long as they are in good with the Pentagon! Makes me feel all comfy inside.

The GOP wants to raise your taxes

I find the GOP strategy of alienating the 47 percent who pay no federal income tax rather puzzling. A family of four, husband/wife/two kids, now pays about a 5.6 percent efficient rate in income tax. This means that well over 47 percent pay from 0 to 5 percent. The number is surely well over 50 percent of the American electorate. In essence, the conservative paranoia that we now face a world of “takers” has already happened. It is not in the interest of those who pay 5.6 percent to have their taxes raised and their benefits cut. This is precisely the GOP policy. In fact, it is the end of a long GOP strategy on taxes that has worked well. The GOP has campaigned against taxes, and the medium household has been happy to vote for them on that principle. The GOP, that household has noticed, never really cuts ‘entitlements’ – not to the medium household. They are prevented by the Dems, to an extent, and by their own hypocrisy. But finally ideology is overcoming strategy, and the GOP is actually running on a plank to lower the taxes of the rich and to raise the efficient tax rate of middle income households. The Democrats, who are looking up their butt at a mirage deficit, seem to be lagging behind events. Romney’s video tape might wake them up. The GOP wants to raise your taxes. That should be the Dem mantra.

Individual and character

Is individualism a philosophy? Is it a code about the way people think in modernity, or are thought for, thought for that is by institutions and organizations and the people who put up signs and the people who say, fill out this form? Does it describe a society centered around markets? Or is it a theory that helps us understand societies that center around markets, if there are any?

This is a question that confronts us as we try to assemble the lines of descent that went into the making of character in the late seventeenth century. There is a theory, put forward by Jacques Bos, that the character writing of the seventeenth century can be seen as a stage in the making of individualism – the character that the character writers are concerned with is all external show and symptom, “a representation of a certain category of human beings…” Our task is to discover how, from this literary stylization of the person, we get to the twentieth century, where “there is an almost self-evident connection between the words ‘character’, ‘individuality’, and ‘inwardness”.   

Bos’s notion of the the problem fits in with a broader sense of the way the ‘civilizing process’ in the West has gone. The individual and individualism are contrasted with an earlier communalism, out of which, for good and ill, the Western Paleface has broken.

But I’d like to harry  the idea that the individual and individualism are what we are all about in the twentieth and twenty first century, as well as this rather Hegelian sweep towards the inward. It is not that these are illusions; rather, I think character is something more than their factotum, and that its assembly and spread – across fiction and fact, through the spheres of representation, is a movement containing other movements.

To start off, then, one needs a sense of where individualism came from – that is, as a sociological category – and a sense of how it has been used by historians.

The analytic story goes back to the two decades between 1830 and 1850.

In Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime and the Revolution, which he published in 1856), there is this paragraph about individualism:

“Our fathers did not have the word individualism, which we have forged for our use, because, in their times, there was not, in fact, an individual who did not belong to a group and who could consider himself absolutely alone; but each of the thousand little groups that composed French society only thought of themselves. Thus it was, if I may so express myself, a sort of collective individualism, which prepared souls for the true individualism which which we are acquainted.

And what is the most strange is that all of these men who hold themselves so apart one from another became so similar to each other that it was enough to make them change places to no longer recognize them.”

Tocqueville is no random witness to individualism, since he was perhaps the first to use the term in a sociologically sophisticated way in Democracy in America. The United States even then had the reputation of being an individualistic country.

Tocqueville’s notion of distance, of being apart,  of being alone seems, then, to be part of what individualism is. The beat, here, falls upon the individual apart from his social ties. Yet there are a number of paradoxes here. In the United States, one of the commonest severe punishment that one can inflict on a prisoner is solitary. In solitary, the individual fills his cell in complete solitude. The individual is all- and that all is his punishment. This should help us see that individualism, with its logical stress on the private and the lone person, is, at the same time, not solitudinarianism – the individual is not primarily conceived under invidualism as solitary. This semantic fact is often washed away when we try to grasp invidualism from a quantitative point of view, as though it were about individual atoms. If the individual and the solitary were synonymous, this would be an uncontroversial move. But one has to merely dip into the rich semantic flow of ordinary language to see that the solitary is the negative projection of the individual. “He is a loner” is not a compliment in American speech. “He is a self-made man” is a compliment in American speech. The path of solitude and the path of the individual are not the same path; yet they can be confused due to the conjoined meanings of alone and lonely – the individual, like Robinson Crusoe, is envisioned as ultimately acting alone, even if we project him into corporate headquarters.  But he is not envisioned as being alone – because then he could never get into corporate headquarters. He wouldn’t want to.

Tocqueville was writing at a time when individualism was also being discussed in socialist circles. Steven Lukes points out that individualism became the target against which early socialists, like Blanqui and Cabet, spoke out. In Germany, Karl Marx in the German Ideology – written in the 1840s as well - spent much of his time hashing out what the individual was from a social perspective. It is with Marx that we start getting a sense of the individual as something linked not to the soul, or even to social distance, but to production – to the economic system”

“The difference between the personal individual and the contingent individual is not a conceptual difference, but instead a historical fact. This difference has, in different times, different meanings – for instance, rank as something contingent to the individual in the 18^th century, plus ou moins even the family. It is a difference that we must not make for every epoch, but that instead every epoch, under the different elements that it finds itself in, makes for itself, forced, actually, not by concepts, but through material collisions of life. What appears contingent to later times as its opposite to earlier, and also among the elements of the earlier that are passed down, is a form of commerce, which corresponds to a specific development of the forces of production. The relationship of the forces of production to the form of commerce is the relationship of the form of commerce to the occupation or activity of individuals.”

This strongly anti-conceptual approach to the individual – who emerges first as a social fact within the forces of production that embody the collisions of life – gives Marx a sort of history of individualism. Individualism  waits on the emergence of the individual, rather than individualism arising in the educated class and bringing into existence the individual. Marx’s story, then, leads us firmly away from the solitary – who emerges in life’s collisions too, but within another set of conditions – and sets up his attack on Stirner, who in Marx’s view is engaged in rescuing an archaic social category and conflating it with the individual in a massive act of bourgeois self-mystification. Whether Stirner’s notion of egotism and the “Own”  is really bourgeois self-mystification or the expression of a nausea with a modernity that set the teeth of the children of the bourgeoisie on edge – I will leave to later. In any case, Marx’s targets shifted in the 1850s to the political economists, and here I think he was able to put to better use his sense of parody and bafflement. The  Robinsonades of the economists really do play a strong, self-mystifying role in building up the codex of capitalism.

Marx set the terms for economic historians looking at the sociology of capitalism, and its origins. Those origins would be linked to the individual as a creature of economics. We should look, in the medieval period, not for what the saints wrote in their summas, but for what the smallholders wrote in their wills. If pre-capitalist society went as it was supposed to go according to Marx, we would find that the properties of the small holders were bound by laws and customs that would disallow or strongly hedge about the market. The same of course would be true for the large landholders. Given the largely agricultural nature of Europe, this meant that any sort of trade would be shaped by the larger system of production that based the producer on the family, on bloodties.

It was just this thesis that was challenged by Alan Macfarlane in the 1970s. Macfarlane went through the records of a small area of Essex, Earls Colne, and he found that in the midst of the feudal night (or if you will, the humane society of peasant England), smallholders seemed to be selling their lands left and right, and disinheriting their children, and in general pursuing their individual interests like the money mad characers in Balzac’s novels.

For Macfarlane, the market in land in the sixteenth century discredits the theories – like Karl Polanyi’s – that periodizes the creation of the system of “fictitious commodities”, such as land and labor, at a much latter date. Similarly, it destroys Marx’s thesis about the origins of agricultural capitalism, which does not start with the large landholders squeezing their tenants, but with the smallholders creating an active, non-family centered market in land under the nose of the large landholders.

Macfarlane’s interpretation of his data has, however, been subject to a number of shocks since he published his thesis in 1978, in The Origins of English Individualism.  Notably, Govind Sreenivasan has studied the same corner of the English world and found much greater family continuity in small landholdings than are accounted for by Macfarlane. Sreenivasan, whose expertise is in German peasant society of the early modern period, went over the records for Earls Colne and found that the land-family bond was much stronger, statistically, than it was represented by Macfarlane. He drew up an indictment in his article on the matter that went after three aspects of Macfarlane’s thesis:

“First, the depiction of the weakness of the land-family bond is exaggerated. Secondly, the description of the causes of the turnover of property is incomplete and therefore misleading. Thirdly, the reconstructed concepts of kinship and property are directly contradicted by the sources.”

Pulling back, what we see here is that the dispute about land tenure is set in the terms Marx lays out in the German Ideology. It is a materialist approach to individualism. Which, in a neat U-turn, comes back into an infuses the system of production that makes possible materialist approaches. But in following this turn, we tend to lose sight of, and normalize, the idea of the individual, or the easy notion that we live  in a liberal order that promotes individualism. Because if the individual is taken in the Stirner sense – if its materiality is not its place in the system, but its place as an organism born and bred and having a brain that does certain things all the time – then we are also talking about a cosmic vision of the world – how the world is put together, what the limits are on human beings, and how they live within those limits. These are not reducible, point by point, to their horizon of possibility – the system of production. This is, I think, what makes Marx’s notion of alienation so important, and so intrinsic to revolution – for revolution is the other horizon of possibility from which the capitalist system can be analyzed.

I am taking my cues from this tension in Marx.  From Marx to surveys of smallholder sales in the 16^th century, we can run the individual into the space he – always he in the history, a significant and overlooked warp – inhabits and infer the creation of individualism as a matter of habit and a mental tool – but we must also not overlook the fact that the individual in the market is a phenomenon that points to a larger thing – a murderable forked thing, something that casts a shadow inside himself, a non-planetary shadow, a thinking shade.

Earl Colne may seem a long way from Theophrastus, but as in fact the history of “character’ in the seventeenth century is about the way a term and concept in learned culture sinks into ordinary culture, which makes it important to have a broad sense of ordinary culture and the forces – the conflicts - that shape it. And I think it is also important to have a sense that the learned culture is not a progressive culture. Its learning does not represent the forward flight of the absolute spirit.