our standard begging post

Limited Inc has not posted a begging contribution post in a while. So I figure it is time to post one. This is an excellent month to contribute to the maintenance of this enterprise if you are so inclined, since this month is proving to be a cruel one to LI's bones. We had a nice anonymous contribution last week - for which, much thanks! Contributors large and small, check out the little paypal link.

the soundtrack

Q: In everyday life, do you sometimes have the impression of being in a film?
Baudrillard: Yes, particularly in America, to a quite painful degree. If you drive around Los Angeles in a car, or go out into the desert, you are left with an impression that is toally cinematographic, hallucinatory. You are … steeping in a substance which is that of the real, of the hyper-real, of the cinema. This is so even with that foreboding of catastrophe: an enormous truck bowling along a freeway, the frequent allusions to the possibility of catastrophic events, but perhaps that is a scenario I describe to myself.”
-From Baudrillard Live: selected interviews.

LI is of the opinion that post-modernity never happened, that all the features that are supposed to be postmodern – the hyperreal, the self as self-reference, the undermining of epistemic certainties by pure doxic moments (doxa, you Platonists will remember, are the half way real) – that all of this is what happens as we wander about the extended sensorium created by modernism. When Gerald Nerval in Aurelia recounts the l'épanchement du songe dans la vie réelle (the effusion of the dream in real life), the segues and montages and dissolves could be referenced, at best, to paintings and optical instruments like the microscope, telescope, and kaleidoscope, but now the dream is shot through real life in every grocery store and gas station rest room. And as for Nerval’s own version of the occult influence of the ordinary on his life – “I’ve often had this idea that in certain grave moments in life, the exterior world spirit, as such, incarnated itself suddenly in the form of an ordinary person, and acted or attempted to act on us, without the knowledge or memory of that person” – this is what I think I meant in yesterday’s post by saying that everything we touch turns to mythology, and it is that quality, raised to the power of an external system, that is the sensorium of modernity, on all tracks.

Which leads me to movie music, and in particular, the way my sense of myself has been bound up, at least since early adolescence, with the idea that there is a soundtrack to my life. Here we have a question for psychologists: what is the meaning and history of the life soundtrack? I know many people who definitely have this same sense – and in fact, those are the people who have always fascinated me in my life. There are many things that go into elective affinity – one of them for me is the intuition that a certain person has this soundtrack, lives with it, nourishes it, realizes, obscurely, that it is important. These people are poseurs, and I do love poseurs – it requires a lot of push back against the inertia of the everyday, which, after a while, wears on even Popeye’s muscle. I do think the soundtrack dies, for a lot of people – who knows, perhaps most people – in the twenties. It might be a sign of one’s retarded development in late modern capitalism to retain it, as I do, into middle age.

I do know, however, that Baudrillard’s sense of living in a film in America leaves out that very important thing – the radio. The cd deck. Without it – especially in those vast eyeaching spaces that you have to speed through, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Texas – the movie-in-life becomes simply a trance of sleep inducing landscapes. I have left behind a little bit of myself – the little bit that lived at a fictitious address in Georgia - in the computers of the state police of each of those states, just trying to get out of there.

Liars all the way down

LI recommends this article by Gretchen Morgensen today. Although it scares the living bejesus out me – since one of the things about the temporary collapse of capitalism is that poor people tend to get wiped out first, and I tend to be a poor person. Shit. In the dream, I am at the wheel of the car, and the brake stops working, and the accelerator jams, and there is a brick wall looming just ahead.

There is a conservative mindset which pops up among the Clinton liberal set that is all about balanced budgets. I think that is fucking braindead. Debt is not a bad thing – for instance, the European economy, with its paralyzed fear of inflation, did not do the necessary in the past six years, ease up lending requirements and use the European real estate market, in classic Keynesian fashion, to operate as a multiplier at the same time as it transferred savings into investment - but reading this made me sick. This is when the evaporation of savings becomes, uh, real:

In 2000, according to Banc of America Securities, the average loan to a subprime lender was 48 percent of the value of the underlying property. By 2006, that figure reached 82 percent.

Mortgages requiring little or no documentation became known colloquially as “liar loans.” An April 2006 report by the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, a consulting concern in Reston, Va., analyzed 100 loans in which the borrowers merely stated their incomes, and then looked at documents those borrowers had filed with the I.R.S. The resulting differences were significant: in 90 percent of loans, borrowers overstated their incomes 5 percent or more. But in almost 60 percent of cases, borrowers inflated their incomes by more than half.

While the poet in me experiences a certain frisson that the Weltgeist so brilliantly propped up the liar war and the liar government on the back of the liar loan economy - the poor forked creature who is worried about bread and shelter is not happy. I do get antsy when bad things impact the "$6.5 trillion mortgage securities market" - I'm funny that way.

ersatz outrage, real outrage, and the boy that go a-lynchin'

LI will, perhaps, shock all true hearts by admitting that we weren’t at all shocked by Ann Coulter’s use of faggot last week. It wasn’t as good a joke as it could have been, but fuck it – it isn’t that we are especially worried that the Conservative Congress of Dimwits is going to hear something that will corrupt them, or their endorsement of various politicians who will do all within their power to give us a nice, toasty, lifeending atmosphere and lead up to it with one bloody and pointless war after the other.

We thought, at most, that this was a sign of the separation of conservative politics from the conservative constituency. It may surprise liberals, but the conservative constituency is not that interested in politics. Fundamentally, it needs to be prodded into paying concerted attention to who rules the country (although I should say, the attention is directed to a counterfeit network of who runs the country – nobody wants the fundamentalist yahoos looking at the life styles of the rich and the famous, they might begin to get all biblical about that wealth). LI would hazard that the fundamentalists are getting more and more fed up with their so called leaders – for the leaders are political creatures. The reason for going to church, asking forgiveness for sin, being reborn, has everything to do with the emotional and existential satisfactions of accepting Jesus in your heart, and little to do with the epiphenomena of laws, wars, tax cuts, abortion, homosexuality and all the rest of it. And when the people of Muskegee look up and see their so called leaders listening to a blonde pottymouth who seems to have more cultural connection to Lenny Bruce than to Billy Graham, I think they are overcome with a deep and justified apathy. I may be wrong, but the faggot remark is much worse for Red Staters than for liberal sensibilities. It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but: taboos don’t exist in society in terms of straight binaries. There is a whole middle ground of decorum, and it is on that middle ground of decorum that your good Southern Baptist takes his or her stand.

But LI can be moved to loathing by small, spontaneous outrages. The recent story about AutoAdmit, an online community that seems to exist to combine the sensibility of the titty bar customer with the maddening attitude of spoiled rich male law student, did move me to go here and sign the petition to stop their obnoxious condoning of sexual harassment. For details about this crewe of the misbegotten, go to this Feministe post. There is a distressing thread, to me, equating the sum of the wrong done by the people at AutoAdmit who take women’s pictures from their homepages, submit them for various bogus contests, make a lot of comments re tits, ass, desire to hatefuck, etc. to a bump in the upward trajectory of a career. I understand why this is quantified in money terms, and in fact I think AutoAdmit should be hit in money terms – I think that if liberal and feminist organizations issued advisories against law schools that apparently contain members of AutoAdmit, the company would change its policy in a heartbeat.

However, I do think it is interesting that in the same week that Girls Gone Wild is blamed on feminism, Boys Gone a-Lynching is given a free pass. Mind, I believe the 20 something generation in this country is much less sexist and racist than my generation was – I have a mild faith in the incremental progress of the human spirit in this department. But the lyncher mentality of rich or upper class males is a huge cultural festuche.

There is a sub-outrage to the AutoAdmit stupidity: Ann Althouse's attack on Jill at Feministe for... well, for something. It isn't clear what. Althouse is a conservative, and her kneejerk reaction is determined by three variables, in descending order: class, race, and sex. If you fill those things in wealthy, white and male, you get the Althouse prize of sympathy, if you want it. Temperaments are important in politics: fill those things in poor, black and female, and you'd get LI's kneejerk sympathy. I have no problem with conservative kneejerk reaction per se - I simply am on the other side of that class war. But disguising it in a fake populism does tend to piss me off. When Russell Kirk was replaced by Rush Limbaugh, it was a deal with the devil.

LI apologizes for the poor quality of the programming this week, surfers

It is nice to see that, according to the NYT, the author of “Party Til You Puke” – Andrew W.K. now wants to discuss the merits of Martin Buber with his fans.

“Mr. W. K. — the initials stand for his real last name, Wilkes-Krier — is a connoisseur of excitement, as anyone who has seen his hair-flinging performances or videos can attest. Lately he’s been exuberant about ideas, like the nature of coincidences and paradoxes and solipsism. Also pancakes. Over lunch near his apartment in Midtown, he ordered a stack of blueberry-banana-chocolate-chip-walnut, a blend of every flavor the restaurant offered — and slowly made a mash of them as he talked about his new passion: thinking.

He has been reading the works of the philosopher Martin Buber, among others, and contemplating consciousness. “I have been very into the idea that the only way the external world exists is by you observing it, and that the only way you can interact with that external world through that observation is to intend it to be,” he said, his eyes closed in concentration. He opened them to eat observably a strip of bacon.”

This is Martin Buber’s theory of reality as a tv to which you hold a channel changer – which has pretty much satisfied us for the last fifty years. The problem with that interaction is that the internal world might come out of you into the external world in big spontaneous doses if you party til you puke, but such are the chances of life.

Well, LI has been closing our eyes, too, trying to think our way through various intractable problems this week. We have been – okay? – a piss poor blogger this week. Sorry. Not only that, but we’ve been making little money doing the stuff that Melena Ryzik – the reporter who interviewed Mr. W-K – is doing in this article: smirkily affirming the prejudices of the reader. We have not queried a newspaper or magazine regarding a thousand words to fill up a couple of columns since – since early February. Although we did just get some nice feedback from a professor whose article on Russian cinema we edited, who advised us to radically raise our prices. So there you go. We are going to have to plea for work a little bit in the next week, probably on this site. Sorry.

While Mr. W-K wrestles with couch potato idealism, we’ve been thinking about a line that popped into our head whilst running around the lake yesterday: we turn everything we touch into mythology.

This wasn’t exactly a thought, and it wasn’t exactly a line of poetry – it was a freefloating externality, a stray, something overheard as the language talks to the language via my brain, a singleton – which is, of course, why I run around the lake. Loosen your thoughts until they are no longer your thoughts. Unlike W-K or Baudelaire (Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime/ Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves/ Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés), I try to turn potential ‘verse’ into propositions – I chop its head off, I pluck it, I gut it, I cut it into pieces. I couldn’t say that this line came out of nowhere – lately, as my suffering readers know, I’ve been thinking about the destiny of figures that are unloosed in literature and life, especially the buffoon and the sage, and how that destiny impinges on the social like the way a particular style will impinge on a text – a nuance that isn’t caught by discourse or the truth table.

Could it really be true that everything we touch turns into mythology? Are human beings machines for making myths?

Well: here’s a dialogue in the Upanishads that gives us two sides on this issue, which ends on a note of pure Beckett. I hope Mr. W-K finishes his Martin Buber soon, so he can move on to the Upanishads. Maybe I should write him a letter.

There was a man of the Garga family called Proud Balaki, who was a speaker. He said to Ajatasatru, the king of Benares, ‘I will tell you about Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, ‘For this proposal I give you a thousand (cows). People indeed rush saying "Janaka, Janaka". (I too have some of his qualities.)’
II-i-2: Gargya said, ‘That being who is in the sun, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, ‘Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as all-surpassing, as the head of all beings and as resplendent. He who meditates upon him as such becomes all-surpassing, the head of all beings and resplendent.
II-i-3: Gargya said, ‘that being who is in the moon, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as the great, white-robed, radiant Soma.’ He who meditates upon him as such has abundant Soma pressed in his principal and auxiliary sacrifices every day, and his food never gets short.
II-i-4: Gargya said, ‘That being who is in lightning, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as powerful’. He who meditates upon him as such becomes powerful, and his progeny too becomes powerful.
II-i-5: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in the ether, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as full and unmoving’. He who meditates upon him as such is filled with progeny and cattle, and his progeny is never extinct from this world.
II-i-6: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in air, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as the Lord, as irresistible, and as the unvanquished army.’ He who meditates upon him as such ever becomes victorious and invincible, and conquers his enemies.
II-i-7: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in fire, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as forbearing’. He who meditates upon him as such becomes forbearing, and his progeny too becomes forbearing.
II-i-8: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in water, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as agreeable’. He who meditates upon him as such has only agreeable things coming to him, and not contrary ones; also from him are born children who are agreeable.
II-i-9: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in a looking-glass, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as shining’. He who meditates upon him as such becomes shining, and his progeny too becomes shining. He also outshines all those with whom he comes in contact.
II-i-10: Gargya said, ‘This sound that issues behind a man as he walks, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as life’. He who meditates upon him as such attains his full term of life in this world, and life does not depart from him before the completion of that term.
II-i-11: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in the quarters, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as second and as non-separating’. He who meditates upon him as such gets companions, and his followers never depart from him.
II-i-12: Gargya said, ‘This being who identifies himself with the shadow, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as death’. He who meditates upon him as such attains his full term of life in this world, and death does not overtake him before the completion of that term.
II-i-13: Gargya said, ‘This being who is in the self, I meditate upon as Brahman’. Ajatasatru said, "Please don’t talk about him. I meditate upon him as self-possessed.’ He who meditates upon him as such becomes self-possessed, and his progeny too becomes self-possessed. Gargya remained silent.
II-i-14: Ajatasatru said, ‘is this all ?’ ‘This is all’. ‘By knowing this much one cannot know (Brahman)’. Gargya said, ‘I approach you as a student’.

some more errant scribbles

I have noticed that no matter how many cups of coffee I drink in the morning, I am still sleepy. Hmm, I wonder if this has something to do with my overuse of sleeping pills? I guess eventually they get you if you don’t watch out – look what happened to Evelyn Waugh.

But to return to … the preface. Yesterday I figured out how to tightly describe Silja’s argument. Today I have to assess her argument, first about the continuity of mainstream economics – is it true that equilibrium models are at the center of economic theory, and is it plausible that the elevation of equilibrium models is an expression of the underlying ontological bias towards substantivism in economics? I’m going to point out that the exceptions prove the rule. The great exception is Keynes, of course. Keynesian economics begins with a grand gesture – the kicking over of Say’s law. In a sense, that is what you have to know about Keynes. Say’s law is the notion that production equals demand, or as the neoclassicals like to put it, demand grows out of production. Keynes discovered, or claimed he discovered, that even the classical economists had doubts about this – notably, Malthus. It is because economists adhere to Say’s law – Robert Lucas, who is a much more important economist to economists, by the way, than Milton Friedman, even made the claim that Say’s Law is an intelligibility requirement for economics – that economists make various bizarre claims. For instance, the claim that the unemployed chose unemployment. With Say’s law in hand, the classical economists and the neo-classicals that follow them had a principle that disallowed, or at least obscured, the business cycle. The way this is put in the gobbledygook of theory is: aggregate demand intersects the aggregate supply curve at full employment and aggregate demand will, a priori, not fluctuate save for disturbance by some endogenous factor.

Now, in truth, nobody actually believes Say’s law anymore. That is, no government will operate on the principle that the market is self-regulating. Instead, the state has operated, since the great depression, on the assumption that it is the state’s business how much the citizens of the state save. Reaganism, while founded in appearance on neo-classical economics, operates as a robust Keynesian engine for destroying savings, and creating ever higher levels of demand. This is an easy proposition to prove, actually. Whenever the IMF and investors go into a country that has a strong public sector – like the Latin American countries of the 1970s – the first thing that happens is that the spending of the public sector goes down, but savings also go down – in other words, there is a rush to consume and borrow. Reaganism is simply a sort of half and half Keynesianism – it seeks to restrict government economic policy to the purely fiscal, while at the same time encouraging massive borrowing. That borrowing, even by the private sector, is considered by lenders to be guaranteed by the state. The avatar of Reaganism in Latin America, Chile under Pinochet, experienced this in the early eighties, when foreign lenders forced the state to take on the debts of private corporations. I guess you could call Reaganism a form of moral hazard Keynesianism.

But I am digressing, damn it.

practice exercises

The death of Jean Baudrillard was marked by an obituary in the NYT that reminded its viewers how important the man was – why, he was quoted in a popular movie, the Matrix. That settles that. Surprisingly, though, the Guardian had two posts about him in their Commentisfree section, stirring my competitive and patriotic juices. What the fuck is happening? England, the land where the phlegmatic philistine was born and suckled, is now more intellectual than our Purple Mountain’s Majesty in these here states, where the masses go to classes? How low have we fallen in this age of Cheney?

The comment threads in the Guardian piece here and here are pretty good, although they eventually peter out in that futile and bizarre controversy that pits the unscientific and wild French against the scientific and rational Anglo-Americans. The many levels of ignorance involved in this controversy continue to astonish me. While the Anglo-Americans do read as though they were scientific and rational, i.e. the level of dullness of articles in analytic philosophy seems to be a quirk that the creators of that dullness are actually proud of, anybody who reads them soon gets that all over weird feeling, since it is like the Mad Hatter doing accounting. The A-A’s are always going on about things like possible worlds, coming up with completely stupid thought experiments, and spending decades formalizing supervenience relations – supervenience coming neither from science nor common sense, but being the overheated product of the cramped scientistic imagination. Actually, the best part of A-A philosophy is its wildness, which has its charms if one can only dust off the language in which it is chained. Meanwhile, for all Baudrillard’s rhetoric of hyperreality, his stuff is firmly anchored in tv, war, money, sex, fashion – watercooler and newspaper realities. Not for him the question: is H2O on our planet the equivalent of XYZ on Counter-Earth 1? On which tottering foundations careers have been built.

Well, as my favorite epileptic St. Paul said, we see now as in a glass, darkly.

But this is all an excuse for me to scribble a few notes in this post re a section of the preface I am writing for Silja’s book. Maybe this will straighten out my God damn argument, and I can just transfer it, minus the fucks, shits, damns, cunts and dicks with which I like to sprinkle my musings. Oops, did I forget pussy and cock? I do want to make the current rightwing blog craze for collecting naughty words easier.

A section of this preface is devoted to defending the conceptual reconstruction of the longue durée of economics that would permit citing economists across a pretty wide chronological spread. The argument that Silja makes is an immanent one: mainstream economics is astonishingly consistent with itself from its roots in the 18th century right up to, say, the attempt by Lucas in the 1980s to define the business cycle in terms of a sequence of equilibrium states – an attempt that even preserves Says law. Thus, the ruptures within economics – most notably, the recasting of the classical notion of value by the marginal utilitarians – do not have the profundity characteristic of ruptures found in other sciences, where real questions of reduction can be raised – interfield reduction is the useful phrase of Darden and Maull. Okay?

So: what does this mean? Well, here’s one way of looking at the story that Silja is telling. Take two moments in economics. One is a famous survey conducted by Leontief in 1982. Let’s quote Mark Blaug: “In a letter to Science, Wassily Leontief (1982) surveyed articles published in the American Economic Review in the last decade and found that more than 50 percent consisted of mathematical models without any empirical data, while some 15 percent consisted of nonmathematical theoretical analysis, likewise without empirical data, leaving 35 percent of the articles using empirical analysis.

Morgan (1988) has updated Leontief’s findings, showing oce again that half the articles published in the American Economic Review and the Economic Journal do not use data of any kind…”

One of the proudest claims of economics is that it is the physics of the social sciences – in fact, the only truly scientific social science. Economics imperialism sometimes goes so far as to claim that economics is the foundation of physics itself – a claim Schumpeter pushed in a rather bizarre passage in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Morgan both compared the economists to articles published in physics and chemistry journals, finding 12 percent of the articles in physics contained no empirical data and 0 percent in chemistry. Economists know this, of course. Alan Blinder has made a typical economist’s joke about it: an economist is "someone who sees that something works in practice and wonders if it also works in theory." The punchline wasn’t supplied by Blinder, but it is: if it doesn’t work in theory, then it simply can’t work in practice, and must be ignored until economists have successfully pressed for policies to destroy it. That is the story of the minimum wage law, for instance.

I select this survey in order to look back two hundred years to Dugald Stewart’s memoir of Adam Smith. In this memoir, Stewart introduced a brilliant phrase to describe the methodological justification that underlies Smith’s theories of language, ethics and political economic – in fact, all Smith’s theories about human institutions. Stewart called this “conjectural history”. “To this species of philosophical investigation, which has no appropriated name in our language, I shall take the liberty of giving the title of Theoretical or Conjectural History, an expression which coincides pretty nearly in its meaning with that of Natural History, as employed by Mr. Hume, and with what some French writers have called Histoire Raisonnee.” This history follows the contours of the “known principles of human nature” to understand “how all its various parts might have gradually arisen.” From theorizing about the origin of language, this method could be ‘applied to the modes of government, and to the municipal institutins which have obtained among different nations.” And in particular: “In his Wealth of Nations, various disquisitions are introduced which have a like object in view, particularly the theoretical delineation he has given of the natural progress of opulence in a country, and his investigation of the causes which have inverted this order in the different countries of modern Europe.” (Stewart, 34-36)

These two moments may seem as divided and different as the Wealth of Nations is, itself, from the mathematically sophisticated modeling of the standard essay in the contemporary mainstream economics journals. Yet a little analysis will reveal that conjectural history is at the very root of the modeling culture of modern economics.