I’ve become a reader of Floyd Norris’ blog over at the NYT. I’ve noticed, with some amusement, that any time a vague and distant hint arises that the rich in America might be oh, oh, slightly too… rich, the comments section is reliably flooded by screeds against socialism and for the American way.
It makes me long for a snappy way to point out that capitalism was not abolished in the U.S. in the fifties, nor was the Reagan tax cut on the wealthiest the second coming of Adam Smith in the eighties. What is funny about the rabid defense of the wealthy is that I imagine it often comes from the non-wealthy. It isn’t like billionaires are trolling blogs. But what they are defending is, of course, absolutely against their interests. It is the great American paradox: the almost saintly disinterestedness of the American householder in defense of systematic greed.
There are a number of ways to redistribute wealth down. Imagine, for instance, that unions had been strong enough, back in the eighties, to peg earnings to the ratio between upper management and the lowest paid functionaries in a company. Back then, the ratio was about 70 to 1 – today, it averages something like 300 to 1. If the unions had done this and the CEO level had succeeded in extorting the pay packages they had today, we would be living in a utopia in which the merest entry level receptionist would be taking home 150-200 thou. This would be excellent – except of course that corporations would no longer make profits. Instead, they’d be pouring all their cash into paying their workforce. Still, at the 70 to 1 ratio, upper management’s efforts to increase their compensation packets would have significantly pulled the earnings up of the entire workforce.
Unfortunately, when you don’t have powerful unions, you have to rely on the countervailing powers of the state. You have to work, then, to raise the taxation on the upper tier considerably. You have to do this not only because you need to pay for public investments, but because there is a macro good to great income equality. For one thing, it discourages economic activity that is, in reality, mere churning. Looking at the mortgage mess, one can see more and more clearly how the fantastic, Pirenesian structure of false economic activity has worked since 2001. It has allocated money not to the most productive, but to the most churnful. For another thing, more equality now means more equality latter. As the gap widens between the resources of the rich and the not-rich, it becomes exactly what we socially reproduce. Those non-rich who, for instance, decided that the death tax, otherwise know as the estate tax, was just terribly unfair to their children actually screwed their children terribly, because they are not leaving the kids fortunes, whereas the fortunate few are – thus aggravating the already unfair structure that separates rich from non-rich children. The cost of abolishing the estate tax is borne by the non-rich in such areas as trying to get their kids into top schools and the like.
But what most impresses me about expropriating a good share of the wealth of the wealthy is its environmental impact. As anybody with the eyes to see can see, the last twenty years have been years of great GDP growth in many countries. In fact, the whole Tom Friedman-esque economy is oriented towards steroiding GDP. Why? Because if you are going to have increasing inequality, growth is the way that the middle income sector – the vastly more numerous non-rich – can, at least, maintain their lifestyles. But GDP growth could also be called the Diminishing Environmental Return. DER is the natural result of overexploiting a system that is limited in many ways. Put up a zillion towers for cell phones, and you can say bye bye to songbird populations – make your McMansions of tropical wood, and strew them with the kind of wiring that gives you 24/7 instaconnectoinstamaticinstatubelivegirlsxxxxpronomatic action, and you can say bye bye to the environment of Sumatra. Down the intertubes it goes. It is an incredible waste of resources, which is the total result of the elite decision to grossly exacerbate the wealthiest’s share of the wealth. With a greater equality of income, of course, GDP doesn’t have to grow as fast. The drift of our current society into endless war, endless stupidity, an endlessly degraded public sector, the unwinding of all those hard fought democratic gains of the last one hundred years, is the direct result of a simple arithmetic ratio. To repair this – to go back to the managed capitalism, as Kuttner calls it, of the past – isn’t socialism – it is the self interest of the vast mass of American citizens.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
From My Third Life
LI has a book column to write about two books: Objectivity, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, and Trying Leviathan, by D. Graham Burnett.
Daston and Galison mount a pretty impressive marshalling of evidence of the way, in a number of sciences over the past two hundred years, we can see three distinct regimes of representation. The first regime, truth to nature, or the search for types and ideals, G. and D. date to the eighteenth century – the second regime, objectivity, or representation that strives to eliminate any subjective bias, emerges, in their scheme, in the nineteenth century – and the third regime, trained judgment, which organizes ‘mechanically objective’ representations in terms of trends, thus reintroducing a form of consensus subjectivity, emerges in the twentieth century. Periodization doesn’t imply that this is a history of zero sum games - the rise of one regime doesn’t entail the extinction of a formerly dominant regime. However, it does imply something more interesting: the rise of different techniques of becoming a scientist. One casually speaks of the scientist as an observer, but in fact, observation is a trained act, and the training is structured around what, exactly, it means to see a phenomenon, what one is looking for, how one proves that what one sees connects to a given theory.
Obviously, I will have to refine all of this in the sugar mill of reviewing. In general, though, this is what the book is about.
All of which is an excuse to quote Marcel Schwob.
Marcel Schwob is not a name to conjure with. For the most part, even your most bookish literatus has forgotten Schwob. But he has interesting fans – among them, Borges, Bolano, and Calasso. Which is a lineage as exciting to me as the descent of Bonnie Prince Charles from James II was to your average raving Highland Scot. I’d fight under their colors.
Schwob was a fin de siecle writer. Like Mallarme, he knew English and translated from that language. He was Robert Louis Stevenson’s friend, but he also knew Jarry – Ubu Roi is dedicated to him. Myself, I’d read his name in The Banquet Years, I believe, but had never had the urge to reach for Schwob until I read Calasso’s brief essay about Imaginary Lives. Calasso claims that “the flame of this book is not yet extinguished. Today, when many who read Borges are discovering the subtlest, most vertiginous magical charm of the fantastic and a certain secret mathematics of the story, they will recognize a master in Schwob and a model of this literature in his book. … Marcel Schwob… invented a new genre of adventure literature which sought no immediate contact with reality, but rather took the byways of philology and mystification…
So I searched on the Intertubes, and of course found a site dedicated to Schwob and – hurray! – a decent archive of his texts, including Imaginary Lives. The book consists of a preface on the biographer’s art and twenty two brief lives, from Empedocles to Burke and Hare. Reading the preface, I came upon the following passage that … floored me. There are bits of literature that stick in my brain. They become a sort of third life to me – after my waking life and my dreaming life. And I know exactly when something is destined for that third life.
Here’s the quote:
History books remain silent on these things. In the rude collection of materials that are furnished by testimonies, there are not many singular and inimitable breaks. Ancient biographies in particular are miserly with them. Valuing only the public life or the grammar, they transmit to us the discourses and the titles of the books of great men. It is Aristophones himself who gives us the joy of knowing that he was bald, and if the pug nose of Socrates hadn’t served as a touchstone of literary comparisons, if his habit of walking about barefoot hadn’t been part of his system of philosophy by showing contempt for the body, there would only have been conserved of him for us his moral interrogatories. Suetonius’ gossip’s tales are only hateful polemics. The good genius of Plutarch sometimes made an artist out of him: but he did not know how to understand the essence of his art, snce he imagined ‘parallels’ – as if two men, properly described in all their details, could resemble one another! One is reduced to consulting Athanasius, Aulus Gellus, scoliasts, and Diogenes Laertes, who thought he was composing a kind of history of philosophy.
The sentiment of the individual was more developed in modern times. The work of Boswell would have been perfect if he hadn’t judged it necessary to cite Johnson’s correspondence and his digressions on books. Aubrey’s Eminent Lives are more satisfying. Aubrey had, without a doubt, the instinct of biography. How aggravating that the style of this excellent antiquarian is not on the same level as his conception! His book would have been the eternal recreation of the select few. Aubrey never felt the need to establish a relationship between individual details and general ideas. It was enough for him that others sealed the celebrity of men of whom he took an interest. Most the time, one doesn’t know if one is dealing with a mathematician or a statesman, a poet or a watchmaker. But each of them had his unique trait, which distinguished them forever amongst mankind.
The painter Hokusaï hoped to get to the ideal of his art by the time he was one hundred years old. At this moment, he said, every point, every connecting line traced by his brush would be alive. By alive, we understand him to mean: individual. Nothing is more similar than points and lines: geometry is founded on this postulate. Hokusai’s perfect art required that nothing be more different.”
This story about Hokusaï is ingenious and – as it happens – gives me an angle to look at the story of objectivity as told by Daston and Galison. For it is in the space of that reversal of geometry itself – from a science depending on the similarity of lines and points to the perfect art in which each line and point is alive – that one finds the anguish in the scientific drama of objectivity. For to represent, say, crystallized urinary deposits just as they are seen under the microscope, in their one time only state, is eventually to succeed from the whole purpose of scientific representation. One can’t build a science on the one time only – without regularities the urinary deposit, the snowflake, the species of woodpecker, the star, the canals of Mars, become a hyperclear orgy of distinctness. And in this orgy there is no master of ceremonies – even the stick that would point out the details is an insufferable interference with the phenomenon as it is. Integrity, not aura, is the scientist’s pole star, but integrity, too, falls victim (to its own weird success) in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Daston and Galison mount a pretty impressive marshalling of evidence of the way, in a number of sciences over the past two hundred years, we can see three distinct regimes of representation. The first regime, truth to nature, or the search for types and ideals, G. and D. date to the eighteenth century – the second regime, objectivity, or representation that strives to eliminate any subjective bias, emerges, in their scheme, in the nineteenth century – and the third regime, trained judgment, which organizes ‘mechanically objective’ representations in terms of trends, thus reintroducing a form of consensus subjectivity, emerges in the twentieth century. Periodization doesn’t imply that this is a history of zero sum games - the rise of one regime doesn’t entail the extinction of a formerly dominant regime. However, it does imply something more interesting: the rise of different techniques of becoming a scientist. One casually speaks of the scientist as an observer, but in fact, observation is a trained act, and the training is structured around what, exactly, it means to see a phenomenon, what one is looking for, how one proves that what one sees connects to a given theory.
Obviously, I will have to refine all of this in the sugar mill of reviewing. In general, though, this is what the book is about.
All of which is an excuse to quote Marcel Schwob.
Marcel Schwob is not a name to conjure with. For the most part, even your most bookish literatus has forgotten Schwob. But he has interesting fans – among them, Borges, Bolano, and Calasso. Which is a lineage as exciting to me as the descent of Bonnie Prince Charles from James II was to your average raving Highland Scot. I’d fight under their colors.
Schwob was a fin de siecle writer. Like Mallarme, he knew English and translated from that language. He was Robert Louis Stevenson’s friend, but he also knew Jarry – Ubu Roi is dedicated to him. Myself, I’d read his name in The Banquet Years, I believe, but had never had the urge to reach for Schwob until I read Calasso’s brief essay about Imaginary Lives. Calasso claims that “the flame of this book is not yet extinguished. Today, when many who read Borges are discovering the subtlest, most vertiginous magical charm of the fantastic and a certain secret mathematics of the story, they will recognize a master in Schwob and a model of this literature in his book. … Marcel Schwob… invented a new genre of adventure literature which sought no immediate contact with reality, but rather took the byways of philology and mystification…
So I searched on the Intertubes, and of course found a site dedicated to Schwob and – hurray! – a decent archive of his texts, including Imaginary Lives. The book consists of a preface on the biographer’s art and twenty two brief lives, from Empedocles to Burke and Hare. Reading the preface, I came upon the following passage that … floored me. There are bits of literature that stick in my brain. They become a sort of third life to me – after my waking life and my dreaming life. And I know exactly when something is destined for that third life.
Here’s the quote:
History books remain silent on these things. In the rude collection of materials that are furnished by testimonies, there are not many singular and inimitable breaks. Ancient biographies in particular are miserly with them. Valuing only the public life or the grammar, they transmit to us the discourses and the titles of the books of great men. It is Aristophones himself who gives us the joy of knowing that he was bald, and if the pug nose of Socrates hadn’t served as a touchstone of literary comparisons, if his habit of walking about barefoot hadn’t been part of his system of philosophy by showing contempt for the body, there would only have been conserved of him for us his moral interrogatories. Suetonius’ gossip’s tales are only hateful polemics. The good genius of Plutarch sometimes made an artist out of him: but he did not know how to understand the essence of his art, snce he imagined ‘parallels’ – as if two men, properly described in all their details, could resemble one another! One is reduced to consulting Athanasius, Aulus Gellus, scoliasts, and Diogenes Laertes, who thought he was composing a kind of history of philosophy.
The sentiment of the individual was more developed in modern times. The work of Boswell would have been perfect if he hadn’t judged it necessary to cite Johnson’s correspondence and his digressions on books. Aubrey’s Eminent Lives are more satisfying. Aubrey had, without a doubt, the instinct of biography. How aggravating that the style of this excellent antiquarian is not on the same level as his conception! His book would have been the eternal recreation of the select few. Aubrey never felt the need to establish a relationship between individual details and general ideas. It was enough for him that others sealed the celebrity of men of whom he took an interest. Most the time, one doesn’t know if one is dealing with a mathematician or a statesman, a poet or a watchmaker. But each of them had his unique trait, which distinguished them forever amongst mankind.
The painter Hokusaï hoped to get to the ideal of his art by the time he was one hundred years old. At this moment, he said, every point, every connecting line traced by his brush would be alive. By alive, we understand him to mean: individual. Nothing is more similar than points and lines: geometry is founded on this postulate. Hokusai’s perfect art required that nothing be more different.”
This story about Hokusaï is ingenious and – as it happens – gives me an angle to look at the story of objectivity as told by Daston and Galison. For it is in the space of that reversal of geometry itself – from a science depending on the similarity of lines and points to the perfect art in which each line and point is alive – that one finds the anguish in the scientific drama of objectivity. For to represent, say, crystallized urinary deposits just as they are seen under the microscope, in their one time only state, is eventually to succeed from the whole purpose of scientific representation. One can’t build a science on the one time only – without regularities the urinary deposit, the snowflake, the species of woodpecker, the star, the canals of Mars, become a hyperclear orgy of distinctness. And in this orgy there is no master of ceremonies – even the stick that would point out the details is an insufferable interference with the phenomenon as it is. Integrity, not aura, is the scientist’s pole star, but integrity, too, falls victim (to its own weird success) in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Monday, December 10, 2007
The Path to Happiness
Well, LI, for one, was glad to see that bipartisanship returned to D.C. this weekend. Democrats and Republicans have coalesced around the torture issue – they like it. They want more of it. It is the kind of thing that Nancy Pelosi would like to have more of, except that she doesn’t remember if she was told of it at all, poor dear. Amnesia is a terrible thing. Maybe she would like to have less of it. She was for it until she was against it.
Of course, at LI, we are so, so proud of our American torturers. The problem, as we see it, is lack of recognition. Why not: an American torturers medal? Rather like the Medal of Freedom, but ballsier.
We’ve been reading That Inferno to get into the torturing mood. Five women who were tortured at the EMSA – the Naval Mechanics school – between 77 and 81 began to get together in the nineties to talk.
Here’s a bit in the introduction that Pelosi would just swoon over. Perhaps, after the voting for the the 200 billion in Iraq that the Dems have pushed through Congress, no strings attached, they could set aside a billion here or there for Blackwater, our national resource when it comes to all things murderous. Imagine how this would fight terrorism!
“There was a door where someone had written “The Path to Happiness”. Behind that door was the torture chamber: electic shock machine, an iron band of a bed connected to a 220 volt machine, an electrode that went from zero to 70 volts, chairs, presses, and all kinds of instruments….
Have you ever been shocked by a refrigerator or another electric appliance? Add a hundred and multiply it by a thousand. That is what a person feels when he is tortured, a person who might be guilty or might not. … I’ll tell you about a case, a seventeen year old girl named Graciela Rossi Estrada. She was a sad looing girl. Because they needed more hands, I was asked to be present. It began with the simple methods of the average villain in a grade B police movie: cigarette butts, poking her, pulling her hair, beatings, pinchings. As they apparently didn’t get what they wanted to hear, they started with the electricity. After a half hour of receiving blows and electric shocks, the girl fainted. THey they took her very delicately by the hair and legs and heaved her into a cell, into a pool of water so she’d swell up. Four or five hourse later she was in terrible shape from swelling and they brought her back to the torture chamber. Then she’d sign anything – that she killed Kennedy or she foght in the Battle of Waterloo. That’s why I saw the facts gotten from torture weren’t real most of the time: they were just used to justify arresing a person…
One of the lively systems [that the camp doctor] invented to torture a pregantn woman was with a spoon. They put a spoon or a metallic into the vagina until it touched the fetus. Then they gave it 220. They shocked the fetus.”
Now, I’m not sure if we could go for shocking the fetus. Only if it doesn’t lead to an abortion – after all, we don’t want the value voter to be turned away! They are crucial to getting a real progressive majority in Congress.
But the electricity that they used in Argentina – trained, often, by experts from the U.S. at the School for the Americas in Columbus, Georgia – does not express the kind of perky, innovative tortures that the CIA and its allies in the Middle East are all about. I interviewed a Lebanese author, Elias Khoury, about his novel, Yalo, a couple of weeks ago. An excellent novel, and one that Democrats might well read so they can suggest new and innovative torture techniques that we need in order to stay free and keep our credit cards going. Here’s a simple but sure way to make sure you get the info you need. You simply strip your man – your inhuman terrorist, a real beast. Now, strap his arms. Usualy this method requires a couple of men. And produce a simple coke bottle. The method is called “sitting on the throne.” Lower your man onto the bottle until his anus is pressed against the top of it. Keep lowering. Hey, we aren’t monsters, of course. The man has a fair chance of surviving if the coke bottle goes into the anus without breaking. Of course, most of the time, alas, all that weight can crack the neck, and so as the coke bottle goes in, there are the rough edges that abrade and tear tissue. But such is life, and I’m sure if this was seen by Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller, they asked many questions to make sure that the torturers did not – and this is very important – use any ethnic slurs while tearing through the anal tissue of the torture ‘victim’ – as some people call obvious terrorists. Because slurring people is unprofessional, and we don’t want to get into hate crime territory, do we? We want our Medal of Torture recipients to be clean living and clean speaking. No jokes about getting it up the butt, even if they are irresistibly funny.
‘I was naked, my eyes were blindfolded, my hands were tied, and no fewer than ten people were yelling at me. “Bitch”! they yelled. “You have to collaborate,” and they asked me about my friend Patricia. Meanwhile, another one stroked my hari, took my hand, and whispered in my ear, “Stay calm, and if you collaborate, nothing will happen to you.” It was a truly demonic scene. There were yells, insults, obscenities. At one point, one of the guys lifted my mask and another one lowered his pants. I was naked and tied up. He brought his penis close to me, while the others threatened, “We’re going to go at you one by one, bitch.” The truth is that I would have preferred an actual rape. I would have taken it as something more human, more comprehensible than the torture. At one pont during the session, the power went off … And I… when the power went off, I laughed.
Elisa: Because they couldn’t use the electric prod on you.
Miriam: The situation struck me as funny. The guys said, “Oh, this is fucked up!” and they brought in a portable, battyer-powered electic prod that I didn’t even know existed. When I screamed, they said, ‘come on, you dumb ass, cut the crap. This is nothing. You got off easy because the power went off.” I don’t know whether the other one was more potent. I was lying on a wooden table, and later they took me somewhere else, where there was an elastic belt and a metal cot, and they also wet me down to help conduct the electricity. And after the electric prod in my womb, in my vagina, in my eyes, on my gums, one of the most vivid memories is of how afraid I was they would torture me again.”
See how it works? After a while, everything you ever imagined comes true. It is the path to happiness, and apparently Congress and the Coup group in the White House went hopping merrily down it. I wonder if we are ever going to come back?
Of course, at LI, we are so, so proud of our American torturers. The problem, as we see it, is lack of recognition. Why not: an American torturers medal? Rather like the Medal of Freedom, but ballsier.
We’ve been reading That Inferno to get into the torturing mood. Five women who were tortured at the EMSA – the Naval Mechanics school – between 77 and 81 began to get together in the nineties to talk.
Here’s a bit in the introduction that Pelosi would just swoon over. Perhaps, after the voting for the the 200 billion in Iraq that the Dems have pushed through Congress, no strings attached, they could set aside a billion here or there for Blackwater, our national resource when it comes to all things murderous. Imagine how this would fight terrorism!
“There was a door where someone had written “The Path to Happiness”. Behind that door was the torture chamber: electic shock machine, an iron band of a bed connected to a 220 volt machine, an electrode that went from zero to 70 volts, chairs, presses, and all kinds of instruments….
Have you ever been shocked by a refrigerator or another electric appliance? Add a hundred and multiply it by a thousand. That is what a person feels when he is tortured, a person who might be guilty or might not. … I’ll tell you about a case, a seventeen year old girl named Graciela Rossi Estrada. She was a sad looing girl. Because they needed more hands, I was asked to be present. It began with the simple methods of the average villain in a grade B police movie: cigarette butts, poking her, pulling her hair, beatings, pinchings. As they apparently didn’t get what they wanted to hear, they started with the electricity. After a half hour of receiving blows and electric shocks, the girl fainted. THey they took her very delicately by the hair and legs and heaved her into a cell, into a pool of water so she’d swell up. Four or five hourse later she was in terrible shape from swelling and they brought her back to the torture chamber. Then she’d sign anything – that she killed Kennedy or she foght in the Battle of Waterloo. That’s why I saw the facts gotten from torture weren’t real most of the time: they were just used to justify arresing a person…
One of the lively systems [that the camp doctor] invented to torture a pregantn woman was with a spoon. They put a spoon or a metallic into the vagina until it touched the fetus. Then they gave it 220. They shocked the fetus.”
Now, I’m not sure if we could go for shocking the fetus. Only if it doesn’t lead to an abortion – after all, we don’t want the value voter to be turned away! They are crucial to getting a real progressive majority in Congress.
But the electricity that they used in Argentina – trained, often, by experts from the U.S. at the School for the Americas in Columbus, Georgia – does not express the kind of perky, innovative tortures that the CIA and its allies in the Middle East are all about. I interviewed a Lebanese author, Elias Khoury, about his novel, Yalo, a couple of weeks ago. An excellent novel, and one that Democrats might well read so they can suggest new and innovative torture techniques that we need in order to stay free and keep our credit cards going. Here’s a simple but sure way to make sure you get the info you need. You simply strip your man – your inhuman terrorist, a real beast. Now, strap his arms. Usualy this method requires a couple of men. And produce a simple coke bottle. The method is called “sitting on the throne.” Lower your man onto the bottle until his anus is pressed against the top of it. Keep lowering. Hey, we aren’t monsters, of course. The man has a fair chance of surviving if the coke bottle goes into the anus without breaking. Of course, most of the time, alas, all that weight can crack the neck, and so as the coke bottle goes in, there are the rough edges that abrade and tear tissue. But such is life, and I’m sure if this was seen by Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller, they asked many questions to make sure that the torturers did not – and this is very important – use any ethnic slurs while tearing through the anal tissue of the torture ‘victim’ – as some people call obvious terrorists. Because slurring people is unprofessional, and we don’t want to get into hate crime territory, do we? We want our Medal of Torture recipients to be clean living and clean speaking. No jokes about getting it up the butt, even if they are irresistibly funny.
‘I was naked, my eyes were blindfolded, my hands were tied, and no fewer than ten people were yelling at me. “Bitch”! they yelled. “You have to collaborate,” and they asked me about my friend Patricia. Meanwhile, another one stroked my hari, took my hand, and whispered in my ear, “Stay calm, and if you collaborate, nothing will happen to you.” It was a truly demonic scene. There were yells, insults, obscenities. At one point, one of the guys lifted my mask and another one lowered his pants. I was naked and tied up. He brought his penis close to me, while the others threatened, “We’re going to go at you one by one, bitch.” The truth is that I would have preferred an actual rape. I would have taken it as something more human, more comprehensible than the torture. At one pont during the session, the power went off … And I… when the power went off, I laughed.
Elisa: Because they couldn’t use the electric prod on you.
Miriam: The situation struck me as funny. The guys said, “Oh, this is fucked up!” and they brought in a portable, battyer-powered electic prod that I didn’t even know existed. When I screamed, they said, ‘come on, you dumb ass, cut the crap. This is nothing. You got off easy because the power went off.” I don’t know whether the other one was more potent. I was lying on a wooden table, and later they took me somewhere else, where there was an elastic belt and a metal cot, and they also wet me down to help conduct the electricity. And after the electric prod in my womb, in my vagina, in my eyes, on my gums, one of the most vivid memories is of how afraid I was they would torture me again.”
See how it works? After a while, everything you ever imagined comes true. It is the path to happiness, and apparently Congress and the Coup group in the White House went hopping merrily down it. I wonder if we are ever going to come back?
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Reaction vs. the System, round one
Walter Benjamin begins his 1931 essay on German fascism with a quote from one of his favorite reactionary writers:
“Léon Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet and himself an important writer, as well as a leader of France’s Royalist party, once gave a report in his Action Française on the Salon d’Automobile – a report that concluded, in perhaps somewhat different words, with the equation: L’automobile, c’est la guerre.”
I’ve looked around for Daudet’s article. I haven’t found it. However, I understand why Benjamin, a collector of lines – of those moments in which thought seems to be utterly transformed into its primal element shock, as though an oracle had spoken – remembered Daudet’s report. It casts a prescient light over the system of which the automobile was as impressive a product as, say, some fossil by which a paleontologist maps, in shorthand, a geological epoch. The creature that left that fossil was at the convergence of conditions both sheerly geological and evolutionary; the automobile was at the convergence of conditions of production, changes wrought by the industrial system in the habits of the citizens of developed economies, and the underlying, subdued violence that existed as the cost for these changes and these lifestyles. Contrast Daudet’s sentence with the lines in Apollinaire’s Zone, which begins:
“À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine
Ici même les automobiles ont l'air d'être anciennes.”
(In the end you are tired of this ancient world
Shepherdess, o Eiffel Tower the troop of bridges bleats this morning
You are finished with living in greek and roman antiquity
Here even the automobiles have an ancient air).
Chasing the pessimistic/reactionary tradition through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century is a rather mixed experience. On the one hand, the reactionary writers are great deliverers of thunderbolts. On the other hand, when they actually make a case for themselves, the eternal return of the ancien regime would require, even in their own eyes, the same kind of massive upheaval of the social order which is exactly their constant accusation against liberalism. In Maistre’s case, the moment of the reactionary revolution is taken care of, in a bizarre way, by Napoleon. Maistre’s opinion that the Bourbons could not re-establish themselves is consistent with seeing Napoleon as fulfilling, unconsciously, the task of creating the social conditions in which the Bourbons can return. But of course, the return of the Bourbons, however sweet was the black terror of the reactionary years from 1815 to 1830, proved in the end to be a disappointment, the gravestone over the ancien regime rather than its glorious resurrection. Even in Maistre, the contrast between mealy mouthed piety and the continuous stream of contempt seems to be doing more than stylistic work – it seems to be a reflection of the politics of resentment, a politics that takes the failure of its goal for granted, and contents itself with an infinite hunt for scapegoats. Leon Daudet was, in a sense, the endpoint of this tradition – marked, more genially, by Chesterton and Belloc in Britain. Daudet’s most famous book, the Stupid Nineteenth Century, begins with a recounting of a quarrel Daudet had with his great friend, the anti-semitic pamphleteer, Dumont, over a slap delivered by a rightwing parliamentarian to the head of the division, as Daudet puts it, of ‘sneaks’ during some session of the Chamber of Deputies. The face that received that slap was in its sixties, and Dumont disapproved – much to Daudet’s chagrin. Daudet was for slaps, for riots, for rallying rightwing collegians to storm surrealist openings and the like. In fact, the mixture of gesture and ink was, spiritually, close to the surrealists themselves, who did like a good riot or a resounding slap.
It is also close in spirit to the transformation of reactionary views into a kind of Punch and Judy show – it drains the politics from them in favor of the political gesture. The frustration of advocating for a total and unlikely change is relieved in a series of ever more violent tantrums. This direction of political action is typical of a reactionary program that existed in contradiction to the technoculture that it could only accept in terms of war. In terms, that is, of a systematic violence that would drain from politics anything but gesture, making politics into an endless series of heroic gestures – which is how the conservative revolutionaries gradually became fascists. It was a collusion of temperaments.
The turn to war counters the insistence, after the French Revolution, on the political goal of happiness, and it begins with Maistre. But why did the reactionary, pessimistic tradition turn to violence in the first place? The secret source of that turn is revealed by another French reactionary, Leon Bloy, who wrote an interesting section on the devil, in one of his baffling books, Le révélateur du globe: Christophe Colomb et sa béatification future. Bloy claims that Satan, the real Satan, doesn’t leer out at us from Dante, or from Faust:
Bloy a couple of pages later accords Satan such power over human history – particularly of the modern era – that the reader is forced to read that Irrevocability back into human history, particularly of the modern era. Unconsciously, the pessimists premises do homage to the scope and scale of the great transformation – the industrial system and the market society become, in this perspective, supernatural events. Or, to a non-Christian eye, natural events – events that have the force that natural things once had – the weather, the fertility of the land, the changes of season, those markers of peasant life, are all radically humanized in the industrial system, where the coordinates of time are defined in terms of business cycles, working days, and the brief ages of technological innovation – the age of steam, the age of the auto, etc.
“Léon Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet and himself an important writer, as well as a leader of France’s Royalist party, once gave a report in his Action Française on the Salon d’Automobile – a report that concluded, in perhaps somewhat different words, with the equation: L’automobile, c’est la guerre.”
I’ve looked around for Daudet’s article. I haven’t found it. However, I understand why Benjamin, a collector of lines – of those moments in which thought seems to be utterly transformed into its primal element shock, as though an oracle had spoken – remembered Daudet’s report. It casts a prescient light over the system of which the automobile was as impressive a product as, say, some fossil by which a paleontologist maps, in shorthand, a geological epoch. The creature that left that fossil was at the convergence of conditions both sheerly geological and evolutionary; the automobile was at the convergence of conditions of production, changes wrought by the industrial system in the habits of the citizens of developed economies, and the underlying, subdued violence that existed as the cost for these changes and these lifestyles. Contrast Daudet’s sentence with the lines in Apollinaire’s Zone, which begins:
“À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine
Ici même les automobiles ont l'air d'être anciennes.”
(In the end you are tired of this ancient world
Shepherdess, o Eiffel Tower the troop of bridges bleats this morning
You are finished with living in greek and roman antiquity
Here even the automobiles have an ancient air).
Chasing the pessimistic/reactionary tradition through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century is a rather mixed experience. On the one hand, the reactionary writers are great deliverers of thunderbolts. On the other hand, when they actually make a case for themselves, the eternal return of the ancien regime would require, even in their own eyes, the same kind of massive upheaval of the social order which is exactly their constant accusation against liberalism. In Maistre’s case, the moment of the reactionary revolution is taken care of, in a bizarre way, by Napoleon. Maistre’s opinion that the Bourbons could not re-establish themselves is consistent with seeing Napoleon as fulfilling, unconsciously, the task of creating the social conditions in which the Bourbons can return. But of course, the return of the Bourbons, however sweet was the black terror of the reactionary years from 1815 to 1830, proved in the end to be a disappointment, the gravestone over the ancien regime rather than its glorious resurrection. Even in Maistre, the contrast between mealy mouthed piety and the continuous stream of contempt seems to be doing more than stylistic work – it seems to be a reflection of the politics of resentment, a politics that takes the failure of its goal for granted, and contents itself with an infinite hunt for scapegoats. Leon Daudet was, in a sense, the endpoint of this tradition – marked, more genially, by Chesterton and Belloc in Britain. Daudet’s most famous book, the Stupid Nineteenth Century, begins with a recounting of a quarrel Daudet had with his great friend, the anti-semitic pamphleteer, Dumont, over a slap delivered by a rightwing parliamentarian to the head of the division, as Daudet puts it, of ‘sneaks’ during some session of the Chamber of Deputies. The face that received that slap was in its sixties, and Dumont disapproved – much to Daudet’s chagrin. Daudet was for slaps, for riots, for rallying rightwing collegians to storm surrealist openings and the like. In fact, the mixture of gesture and ink was, spiritually, close to the surrealists themselves, who did like a good riot or a resounding slap.
It is also close in spirit to the transformation of reactionary views into a kind of Punch and Judy show – it drains the politics from them in favor of the political gesture. The frustration of advocating for a total and unlikely change is relieved in a series of ever more violent tantrums. This direction of political action is typical of a reactionary program that existed in contradiction to the technoculture that it could only accept in terms of war. In terms, that is, of a systematic violence that would drain from politics anything but gesture, making politics into an endless series of heroic gestures – which is how the conservative revolutionaries gradually became fascists. It was a collusion of temperaments.
The turn to war counters the insistence, after the French Revolution, on the political goal of happiness, and it begins with Maistre. But why did the reactionary, pessimistic tradition turn to violence in the first place? The secret source of that turn is revealed by another French reactionary, Leon Bloy, who wrote an interesting section on the devil, in one of his baffling books, Le révélateur du globe: Christophe Colomb et sa béatification future. Bloy claims that Satan, the real Satan, doesn’t leer out at us from Dante, or from Faust:
“The notion of the devil is, of all modern things, the one that most lacks depth from having become literary. Certainly the demon of most poets wouldn’t even frighten children. I only know of one poetic Satan who is truly terrible. It is Baudelaire’s, precisely because he is sacrilege. All the others, including Dante’s, leave our souls tranquil and their threats make us shrug our shoulders, the slightly literary shoulders of the girls of the catechism of perseverance. But the true Satan which one know longer knows, the Satan of theology and of the mystic saints – the antagonist of the Woman and the tempter of Jesus – Christ – he is so monstrous that, if it were permitted to that monster to show himself as he is, in the supernatural nudity of non-love, the human rance and animality entire would scream once and fall dead…
The greatest force of Satan is the Irrevocable. The word fatalism, invented by the pride of so-called philosophers among men, is only an obscure translation of this horrifying attribute of the Prince of the Wicked and the Emperor of the Captives. God gards for himself his Providence, his Justice, his Mercy, and above all, the Right of Grace which is like the seal where his omnipotent Sovereignty is imprinted. He thus keeps as well the Irrevocability of Joy and leaves to Satan the irrevocability of Despair. The terrifying pale gate of the great American poet is opened on the two gulfs offered to our liberty.”
Bloy a couple of pages later accords Satan such power over human history – particularly of the modern era – that the reader is forced to read that Irrevocability back into human history, particularly of the modern era. Unconsciously, the pessimists premises do homage to the scope and scale of the great transformation – the industrial system and the market society become, in this perspective, supernatural events. Or, to a non-Christian eye, natural events – events that have the force that natural things once had – the weather, the fertility of the land, the changes of season, those markers of peasant life, are all radically humanized in the industrial system, where the coordinates of time are defined in terms of business cycles, working days, and the brief ages of technological innovation – the age of steam, the age of the auto, etc.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Take a ch ch ch chance...
Birthday – take a ch-ch-ch-chance!
As in my birthday, today. I’m dedicating the day to myself. Well, in reality, I’m editing a paper on Ottoman feminism to keep the pack of wolves from the door. But I’d like to be chasing some Weimar babe around a futuristic landscape.
Oh well. But it’s a paycheck, Jack.
Although North doesn’t like the lipsynching here, this is still going to be the song for me today.
Everybody dance now!
As in my birthday, today. I’m dedicating the day to myself. Well, in reality, I’m editing a paper on Ottoman feminism to keep the pack of wolves from the door. But I’d like to be chasing some Weimar babe around a futuristic landscape.
Oh well. But it’s a paycheck, Jack.
Although North doesn’t like the lipsynching here, this is still going to be the song for me today.
Everybody dance now!
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
The LOL era and the Iran war rollout
Sometimes, LI thinks we should brag about our foreign policy prescience. Before the invasion of Iraq, we foretold the insurgency, and the expense – although, admittedly, we underestimated the latter. Similarly, since 2004, we have been predicting that … there would be no war between the U.S. and Iran. Although in 2004, we considered it possible that the U.S. would bomb Iran, much as Reagan bombed Libya – a sole sortee, for advertising purposes only – by 2005 it was pretty clear this wasn’t going to happen.
The reason why ties into the domestic reasons for invading Iraq, which should never be forgotten. Bush, on 9/11, was, by all rights, a washed up president. Not only had he been elevated to office in the most bizarre coup since Rutherford Hayes agreed to abandon African Americans and cede the Civil War to the South in 1876, but he had obviously and spectacularly failed to protect the country, and was subject to embarrassing panic attacks. It only got worse as his Defense Department did what it could to help Osama bin Laden escape into Pakistan, practically buying him and his entourage a one way ticket. At the same time, Bush had managed to take the amount of money accumulated from the regressive FICA tax since 1985 and distribute it almost completely to the wealthiest people in the U.S. – a two trillion dollar gift to the upper one percentile. In return for which, the wealthiest staged a nice collapsing bubble as the stock market, which had boomed due to a tissue of fraudulent accounting practices and unregulated flows of hedge money, came back into line with reality.
What was needed was a war like Bush’s Daddy’s war, so the war they wanted when they came in was ginned up a little earlier than I image they were planning – given their overt grossness, I imagine Rove had planned the war for December, 2003, so they could have the victory march sometime in spring and enjoy the spike in the Prez’s popularity. Daddy Warbucks Bush had, after all, not benefited from his war.
Well, they succeeded in getting the second term, and of course it blew up in their faces, since this is a bunch that has never had a more than third rate idea. What they weren’t counting on was the fact that their war, which they wanted to be a little thing, a model war for a bunch of others, turned out to be an extensive, expensive, and ultimately wildly unpopular thing. And while certain aspects of it have, admittedly, succeeded – the price of oil, for instance, is now firmly stationed at three times the price of oil during the Clinton administration, a source of quiet pride to the Petro-Gun Club, Bush’s true milieu – still, there was a small political problem with squeezing the Red State Muzhik for more of his currency. If there is one thing that muzhik likes, it is a big, gas guzzling truck upon which one can affix one’s Bush Cheney sticker. But if the price at the pump shoots up to, say, four dollars a gallon, even the core of Bush believers would begin to melt. The thing that doomed Carter was not his ‘weakness’, as per the right, but the price of things – which are equivalent to Virgil’s the tears of things – they are the sacred signs by which we organize our rituals.
I have thought, for a long time, that this, and this only, was the real restraint on the sweet toothed crowd at the White House. Still, I think the attack on Iran has been a lure for the Bush people. Since we know that they have had the NIE estimate for a year, we can guess that it was repressed in order that the Cheneyites might have their say. The papers have gone along for the ride, with the Post making egregious references to Iran in its reports on Iraq, never missing a chance to blame Iran for IED deaths, and of course never mentioning the role Saudi Arabia played in making sure the Sunni insurgents were armed and manned and out there killing the Yankees, pour encourager les autres. Also, the ride up to ninety nine dollars per barrel was too good to miss. If Exxon doesn’t vote Bush a lifetime sinecure when he finally stumbles out of the white house, well, it will just show a shocking decline in gratitude in the corporate world.
So things have worked out happily enough for the scoundrels who rule us. The Petro Gun club needs, as we creep towards actually appeasement, just like Chamberlain back in 1938, to keep the noise machine going. I was happy to see that the Washington Post pitched in with one of their exemplary editorials, in which one half truth is added to another as part of a proof that half truths add up to big lies: and so of course they read the NIE report as saying that Iran is going to be arming missiles with nuclear tips and firing off like drunk gremlins any day now. More significant, however, is the Kagan op ed piece sending up a white flag. What happens now is anybody’s guess. I suppose the law of incompetence eventually had to strike at the one thing the Bushies do best: the war rollout.
The reason why ties into the domestic reasons for invading Iraq, which should never be forgotten. Bush, on 9/11, was, by all rights, a washed up president. Not only had he been elevated to office in the most bizarre coup since Rutherford Hayes agreed to abandon African Americans and cede the Civil War to the South in 1876, but he had obviously and spectacularly failed to protect the country, and was subject to embarrassing panic attacks. It only got worse as his Defense Department did what it could to help Osama bin Laden escape into Pakistan, practically buying him and his entourage a one way ticket. At the same time, Bush had managed to take the amount of money accumulated from the regressive FICA tax since 1985 and distribute it almost completely to the wealthiest people in the U.S. – a two trillion dollar gift to the upper one percentile. In return for which, the wealthiest staged a nice collapsing bubble as the stock market, which had boomed due to a tissue of fraudulent accounting practices and unregulated flows of hedge money, came back into line with reality.
What was needed was a war like Bush’s Daddy’s war, so the war they wanted when they came in was ginned up a little earlier than I image they were planning – given their overt grossness, I imagine Rove had planned the war for December, 2003, so they could have the victory march sometime in spring and enjoy the spike in the Prez’s popularity. Daddy Warbucks Bush had, after all, not benefited from his war.
Well, they succeeded in getting the second term, and of course it blew up in their faces, since this is a bunch that has never had a more than third rate idea. What they weren’t counting on was the fact that their war, which they wanted to be a little thing, a model war for a bunch of others, turned out to be an extensive, expensive, and ultimately wildly unpopular thing. And while certain aspects of it have, admittedly, succeeded – the price of oil, for instance, is now firmly stationed at three times the price of oil during the Clinton administration, a source of quiet pride to the Petro-Gun Club, Bush’s true milieu – still, there was a small political problem with squeezing the Red State Muzhik for more of his currency. If there is one thing that muzhik likes, it is a big, gas guzzling truck upon which one can affix one’s Bush Cheney sticker. But if the price at the pump shoots up to, say, four dollars a gallon, even the core of Bush believers would begin to melt. The thing that doomed Carter was not his ‘weakness’, as per the right, but the price of things – which are equivalent to Virgil’s the tears of things – they are the sacred signs by which we organize our rituals.
I have thought, for a long time, that this, and this only, was the real restraint on the sweet toothed crowd at the White House. Still, I think the attack on Iran has been a lure for the Bush people. Since we know that they have had the NIE estimate for a year, we can guess that it was repressed in order that the Cheneyites might have their say. The papers have gone along for the ride, with the Post making egregious references to Iran in its reports on Iraq, never missing a chance to blame Iran for IED deaths, and of course never mentioning the role Saudi Arabia played in making sure the Sunni insurgents were armed and manned and out there killing the Yankees, pour encourager les autres. Also, the ride up to ninety nine dollars per barrel was too good to miss. If Exxon doesn’t vote Bush a lifetime sinecure when he finally stumbles out of the white house, well, it will just show a shocking decline in gratitude in the corporate world.
So things have worked out happily enough for the scoundrels who rule us. The Petro Gun club needs, as we creep towards actually appeasement, just like Chamberlain back in 1938, to keep the noise machine going. I was happy to see that the Washington Post pitched in with one of their exemplary editorials, in which one half truth is added to another as part of a proof that half truths add up to big lies: and so of course they read the NIE report as saying that Iran is going to be arming missiles with nuclear tips and firing off like drunk gremlins any day now. More significant, however, is the Kagan op ed piece sending up a white flag. What happens now is anybody’s guess. I suppose the law of incompetence eventually had to strike at the one thing the Bushies do best: the war rollout.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
CAN A MONSTER BE HAPPY?
According to Albert Sorel, Napoleon read Maistre’s Considerations sur France in 1797, when he was in Milan. At this point, Napoleon had already planned his coup against the Directory. As Sorel puts it, “a little book may have already revealed the secret his future.” Although Maistre was a violent anti-Bonapartist – he is probably the source for some of the more pointed remarks in War and Peace, for of course Maistre was serving as the King of Sardinia's ambassador in Moscow when Napoleon attacked Russia - Sorel sees a community of … superstition between Napoleon, the man who said “I depend on events, I wait for everything from their issue” and the writer who wrote, “The Revolution led men more than men led the Revolution”.
Sorel’s idea is that what struck Buonoparte in Milan was a metaphysic that Buonaparte was to embody all the way up to 1815:
“The war made the Republic live, the peace will make it die… The French always succeed in war under a firm government that has the spirit to despise them in praising them and in throwing them on the enemy like shells, all the while promising them epitaphs in the newspapers..” War, besides, is a divine right, it is sacred. ‘There is only violence in the universe.” “The true fruits of human nature, the great enterprises, the high conceptions, the male virtues, all depend on the state of war. All the great men… are born in the midst of political commotions … Blood is the food of that plant that we call genius.”
It is for the celebration of war and execution, for a universe of violence, or – as Maistre says in Evenings in St. Petersburg – a society of punishment, ever more punishment, that Maistre achieved a sort of louche fame. He was the satanic Catholic, at least if we through him through the eyes of Baudelaire, who made as much a cult of him as he did of Sade. And face it, Maistre is the strangest apologist Christianity ever had – the only apologist who tried, as much as he could, to squeeze the love out of the thing as a sort of Protestant heresy. Catholicism has spawned some very wacked defenders – Leon Bloy comes to mind. But Maistre was the first who put together the anti-modernist program of the Church with a notion that is surprisingly close to the Terror – rejecting the social contract for the bonds of a sacred, nation building violence, with the preferred instrument of that violence being a legitimate succession of kings. In place of a creation that is, ultimately, bound together by the force of affection, he put a world under the judgment of a God whose memory of the human crimes is segmented into the very way human societies are laid out. We suffer, we war, we execute because we were born to others who were also born, and somewhere along that line there is a crime which is humanly inexpiable. In that Christianity without love, birth becomes the one undeniable thing a person can be accused of. What can’t be denied is certain, and on certainty we can build a science – but this political science will not be like that of the ideologues of the revolution.
Sainte Beuve, in a famous causerie on Maistre, pointed out that, for all his extremism, Maistre was actually a moderate among the ancien regime exiles, and seemed fascinated by Buonoparte. He saw in Buonoparte what was fatally lacking in the Bourbons – “if the house of Bourbon is decisively proscribed, it is good that government consolidate itself in France… it is good that a new race begins a legitimate succession, this one or that one, it doesn’t matter. I like Bonaparte king more than simply conqueror.”
So, of course, Maistre is not Sade, who might have reversed that last sentence. While Maitre’s God works miracles of violence that one can only wonder at, Maistre retains, at the risk of contradiction, all the old Catholic pieties. This is what gives the Soirees such a strange tone – some of it is just boring and second hand homily, but just as you start to get sleepy Maistre will develop some point until it becomes a monstrosity.
Indeed, the whole thing starts off as a question of monsters. The first pages of the Soirees are weirdly reminiscent of the first pages of Heart of Darkness. Three men are on a sloop, the sun is going down, they are all breathing in the sea and the sunset, they are all men of position and gravity, and one of them chances to make a strange remark – except this remark does not become an extended anecdote, as in Heart of Darkness.
“As our sloop gained a distance from the shore, the song of the rowers and the confused noise of the city insensibly faded. The sun was setting on the horizon; brilliant clouds gave off a soft light, a gilded semi-day that is impossible to paint, and that I have never seen anywhere else. The light and the shadows seemed to mix and extend to form a transparent veil which then covered the countryside.”
Then one of the three men on the sloop expresses the following thought:
‘I wish I could see, on the barque we are standing on, one of those perverse men, born for the misfortune of society; one of those monsters who fatigue this very earth.
‘And what would you do, if you please, if you had him here,’ (his two friends spoke up at once. “I would ask him if this night appeared as beautiful to him as it does to us.”
Quickly the dialogue develops the theme of the happiness of the wicked and the misfortune of the good – but the Count, the man representing de Maistre, who dominates the chapter, turns this question into something exterior – that is, he unconsciously follows in the traces of the Enlightenment philosophes he deplored, and takes happiness to be the description of social arrangements rather than inner psychological states. Later, of course, another Russian in St. Petersburg, Doestoevsky, will question that move.
I’m not, of course, concerned with all of Maistre’s program – it is the happiness of monsters that truly does interest me. But I should say something about Maistre’s effect – I think this is as important as his ideas. That suave but frightful loosening of the bonds of decorum is the predecessor of Baudelaire’s famous shock aesthetic. The line of descent, here, goes through Baudelaire and Barby D’auberville to Leon Bloy, who sums up the aesthetic strategy pretty well when he reflects on his own pretty horrible book, Salvation from the Jews:
This book, conceived in the sense of the oracles of scription, had to go, under pain of nothingness, to the edge of the bottom of things. I thus had to adopt the method recommended by saint Thomas Aquinas, which consists of exhausting the objection, first, before concluding. Excellent method, of a great philosophical faithfulness, but which caused me to be misprisioned (me fit malvenir) by the same people that I was claiming to honor as no Christian has honored them, I believe, for nineteen hundred centuries. One only looked at my premises in neglecting to observe that their violence was calculated to give all its force to my conclusion.”
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