They say that I'm a clown making too much dirty sound

Every monkey like to be
in my place instead of me
cause I'm the king of bongo baby I'm the king of bongo

Karl Bücher is a not very well remembered economist. His ghost comes up, faintly, in the literature about Karl Polanyi. He was an economist of the ‘historical school’ back in the early twentieth century. The ‘historical school’ and the marginalists were pitted against each other, and each also pitted itself against Marx. Institutional economics owes the historical school – although it is commonly thought that the historicists were creamed when the marginalists began to produce groovy, mathematical models.

Bücher’s ghost also sometimes haunts … musicology. Of all things. This is because of a little book entitled Work and Rhythm. We all know about Taylor, and the making of work efficiency. Bücher, in 1894, worked along other lines. He listened to labor with that German metaphysician’s ear. He listened to the sound made by the shovel going into a sandpile. He listened to the smith hammering out hot iron. He listened to carpenters hammering, noticing how, if two carpenters are nailing near each other, they fall into a syncopated rhythm – the one striking a blow while the other’s hammer is raised to the midpoint, and then coming down and striking a blow. He noticed that a loom makes a sound. He thought about the muscular movements of non-skilled labor, and how they set up a sort of systole-diastole pattern.

Bücher thought that the spirit of music did not arise out of Dionysian ecstasy, but out of the tedium and rhythm of milling, hoeing, reaping. Although to speak of a ‘rising out of’ here is a bit of a mistake. Rather, the rhythms were intrinsic to the labor. If they were made into music, that music was not detached from work.

LI has been worried – is worried – that our contrast of the sweetness of life with the happiness culture is too nostalgic. But we need to highlight the reasons that alienation has stalked the happiness culture from the very beginning. One of those break points, we think, is the increasing disjunction between labor and rhythm. It has long been in my mind that I need to do a series of tremendous and tremendously boring posts about Marx, and how a millennial liberal such as myself, can read him, can still use him. At the center of our distorted picture of Marx is our translation of what Marx says about commodities into Weber-speak: commodities, for us, equals bundles of routines. There are advantages and disadvantages to our variation of Marx – one advantage, which we are willing to give up a lot for, is that the idea of routinization being at the center of industrial societies puts alienation back in the center of the critical study of capitalism. It is impossible to understand changes in the emotional customs wrought by modernization without having some good notion of alienation, not as an abstract thing, but operating to, for instance, create noisy work – in which all rhythms get muddied and shredded - and silent work – which has a sound profile we all know all too well. It is the clicking of many keys. I’m doing it now.

Blue Whale World

LI is looking at today’s NYT headlines – the Morgan Stanley losses, the recent EU Central bank decision to socialize the red ink of the wealthiest by throwing half a trillion dollars into the solvency crisis, the inevitable leak that the Bush White House, of course, had its hands all over the destruction of the CIA’s personal snuff n torture films – and we are trying and failing to see the big picture. We know, or we ought to know, that torture, bankruptcy, moral hazard as a governing style, and ill formed lies are what we should expect in societies that opt for transformative increases of inequality. It is no accident that the NSS-es of Latin America, when inequality had become intolerable in the 70s, became labs of death squads and jimmied up concentration camps – Argentina’s junta operating a torture chamber in a bank was not only another of Kafka’s nightmares from the Trial made real, but showed, once again, that the base of society is essentially poetic, made of symbols that are made of matter that are made of symbols...

I am, of course, on a perpetual hunt for the transmutations of matter and symbol in the newspaper. As I wrote in a post last week, unsustainable growth is a function of unsustainable inequality – the only way to keep the mass of people, who grow absolutely poorer if power over the limited amount of goods and services goes disproportionately to a small group of people, is to make sure there is a margin that would keep the mass relatively stable. That’s pretty much been our political life since the mid 80s in the U.S. The question has always been – when are we going to run into a wall? People like myself, who can’t stand the falsity, ugliness, injustice and claustrophobia of the money order are all too prone to see walls – for instance, the wall that seemed to loom up in 2002, as the tech bubble burst. One of the good things about Gregory Clark’s book, Farewell to Alms, is that he does make clear that we live in a Malthusian world – no matter what the new growth people think, you cannot, by taking thought, grow a cubit. That doesn’t mean that the earth cannot accommodate a lot of people – that doesn’t even mean that growth is bad – but it does mean that no system that we know of will allow human beings, who average less than two hundred pound each, to use up as much energy in a year as blue whales, who average 238,000 pounds each. At the moment, of course, Americans do – in effect, on today’s earth, there are around 300 million blue whales in the U.S. – about 500 million in Europe – maybe 50 million in China, etc., etc. I can’t imagine that the world is going to support 10 billion blue whales. Perhaps my mind isn’t sci fi enough.

Martin Wolf, the conservative economics columnist at the Financial Times, seems to be suffering through such a crisis of nerves, do to the distant sound of collapsing ponzi scheme in the financosphere, that he is becoming all Al Gore like. Or maybe he has been reading Gregory Clark, too:

“What is less widely understood is that they have also transformed politics. A zero-sum economy leads, inevitably, to repression at home and plunder abroad. In traditional agrarian societies the surpluses extracted from the vast majority of peasants supported the relatively luxurious lifestyles of military, bureaucratic and noble elites. The only way to increase the prosperity of an entire people was to steal from another one. Some peoples made almost a business out of such plunder: the Roman republic was one example; the nomads of the Eurasian steppes, who reached their apogee of success under Genghis Khan and his successors, were another. The European conquerors of the 16th to 18th centuries were, arguably, a third. In a world of stagnant living standards the gains of one group came at the expense of equal, if not still bigger, losses for others. This, then, was a world of savage repression and brutal predation.

The move to the positive-sum economy transformed all this fundamentally, albeit far more slowly than it might have done. It just took time for people to realise how much had changed. Democratic politics became increasingly workable because it was feasible for everybody to become steadily better off. People fight to keep what they have more fiercely than to obtain what they do not have. This is the “endowment effect”. So, in the new positive-sum world, elites were willing to tolerate the enfranchisement of the masses. The fact that they no longer depended on forced labour made this shift easier still. Consensual politics, and so democracy, became the political norm.”

And:

“The age of the plunderer is past. Or is it? The biggest point about debates on climate change and energy supply is that they bring back the question of limits. If, for example, the entire planet emitted CO2 at the rate the US does today, global emissions would be almost five times greater. The same, roughly speaking, is true of energy use per head. This is why climate change and energy security are such geopolitically significant issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge – indeed, they are already emerging – within and among countries.”

Indeed – to quote Omar from The Wire. Socialist democracy might not be dead, after all, in spite of its End of History gravediggers.

the bloody tree, the invisible hand

LI has been having trouble with this post, and in general with our posts on the pessimists. The reason is this: though the brunt of the pessimistic attack on the liberal system was, essentially, that the system made an unjustified and unjustifiable projection of a human mood – happiness – upon intentionally constructed social circumstances (in essence, what we have labeled the hedonic fallacy), the pessimists were by nature averse to system, and prone to launch into poetic arias about mythological pasts. Yet the nostalgia of the first counter-revolutionary generation – the generation that had actually existed under the ancien regime – is… not for the conditions of that existence. Maistre seems to long for the seventeenth century – or the sixteenth. Or the Spanish inquisition. Nietzsche sometimes seems to long for an Aryan never never epoch. I want to extract from this tradition one thing – the critique of the hedonic fallacy – but, as happens when you deal with literature, theme comes wrapped in the tentacles of connotation, and those tentacles wrap around the hardy interpreter. And the hardy interpreter begins to drown.

So that’s my complaint. This is what my post looks like so far.
…

In the beginning of 1789, Georg Lichtenberg noted down in his sketchbook the following thought: “Writing is splendid for awakening the sleeping system that is in every man, and each person who writes thus becomes healthier, for writing always awakens something that one didn’t clearly know beforehand, even if it lay within us.”

It turned out to be a good year for the sleeping system that lay within every man. Or systems – for the systems had been awakening for some time. If we were to take a crazy, Borgesian view of history as, primarily, the carrier of images, then we could shape this post, about Maistre, to a new view of the French revolution – as a sort of complicated delivery system that gets two Enlightenment images together – the invisible hand and the bloody tree. The tree of liberty that needs, according to Jefferson, to be watered with blood – the tree of liberty that was danced around by the revolutionaries – is appropriated, in 1797, by the counterrevolution, in the form of Considerations on France, Joseph de Maistre’s book. And another image, the image of the invisible hand, which is the presiding oneiric presence in Adam Smith’s work (see Emma Rothschild’s exemplary investigation of the invisible hand here as well as a number of posts at Praxis) migrates here, too. It comes together in the third chapter on the Violent Destruction of the human race (the dream we all dream of, pace Prince), the chapter, that is, on war and its place in a holy cosmos. The sleeping system that is in every man, at the time, was furnished with visions such as these:

“There is room to doubt that, besides, that violent destruction is, in general, as great an evil as is generally believed. At least, it is one of those evils that enters into the order of things where all is violent and against nature, and which produces compensations. Firstly, when the human soul has lost its ingenuity by its softness, incredulity and the gangrenous vices that follow the excess of civilization, it can only be re-tempered by blood. It is not easy, precisely, to explain why war produces different effects following different circumstances. What one sees clearly enough is that the human race can be considered like a tree that an invisible hand trims without stopping, and which often is all the better for this operation. In truth, if one touches the trunk, or chops off the head of the poplar, the tree can perish. But who knows what limits constrain the human tree?”

This image is enough to make me pause for a long time. It is easy to forget how the human tree is trimmed, so I’m going to put a picture her of one such trimming:



Maistre is such an odd and decisive writer – as Saint Breuve said, an inverse Voltaire – who seems, at time, to open himself up to a daemon of some kind. By all accounts, he was a kindly man who wrote lovingly to his daughter, and chatted to his friends, and tried to keep the King of Sardinia, who he served, from committing outrageous acts of petty tyranny. At the same time, he was penning books praising the Spanish inquisition, or praising the Pope to an extent that made even the pope uneasy enough to think Maistre might be sneaking a heresy by the Holy Seat.

The Considerations, as a whole, seems to operate on a sort of inversion principle. If Rousseau, in one of the holy texts of the revolution, said that everywhere men are born free, and yet everywhere men are in chains – Maistre begins the book by extolling the fact that men are in chains, and the end of the chain is held, at last, by the Lord. For the tree of libery, we have the tree of the human species, trimmed by an invisible hand. For the rights of man, we have Maitre claiming that man doesn’t exist – individual men exist. And yet this nominalist claim is never made to cohere with what one might call the prophetic dimension of Maistre’s work – that dimension that sees events, and not the men enmeshed in them, as the ultimate controllers of history. These events are miraculous – as Maistre says in the first chapter

That in the heart of winter, a man commands a tree, in front of a thousand witnesses, to bear fruit, and that the tree obeys – all the world will cry that this is a miracle, and bow before the magician. But the French revolution, and everything happening in Europe at this moment, is as miraculous, in its kind, as the instantaneous fructification of a tree in the month of January – yet, instead of admiring, men look away, or they engage in bad reasoning about it.”

Maistre’s theory of the miracle is tied to his theory of the event – a theory that precedes Hegel, but that forecasts some of the sheer grandeur of the Absolute spirit. Although the absolute spirit works with signs, not wonders – whereas Maistre’s divinity works with wonders and despises signs.

It is perhaps because history is a wonderworking phenomenon, outside of the scope of science, that Maistre always prefaces his most bold and bloody passages with a prognostic symbol – a decisive reference to an extra-European saying. LCC, in a comment a week ago on one of the posts in this series, pointed out that Maistre, as a Free Mason, looked partly to the Orient, or at least the Orient as it was codified in the Enlightenment, the Orient of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and William Jones’ translations from the Sanskit. To leap ahead: the most striking thing about the St. Petersberg Evenings is Maistre’s theory of the supernatural function of the executioner – the framing story to which is a long quote from William Jones translation of the Book of Manu. That Hindoo scripture had a sort of privileged place for European intellectuals before there were good translations of the Vedas or of Buddhist texts. As is well known, Nietzsche praises it – although Nietzsche, apparently, never read it. But before Nietzsche, Maistre praised it and actually read it. The conclusion he draws from it is awe inspiring and repulsive: that we live in an order of universal punishment, and any effort to overturn those punishments is an effort to overturn that order, and must be ruthlessly crushed. In the case that it isn’t ruthlessly crushed, by a supernatural law, the new, merciful order will blindly make its way back to punishments, and install even worse ones, even more arbitrary ones, before it is done.

As I’ve pointed out in previous post, the third chapter begins with a reported saying of the King of Dahomey that the world is made for war Certainly Maistre thinks that the world is eminently and transcendentally made – and in this, he senses, correctly, that he has already been surpassed by the philosophes.

…

Pollan Today

Michael Pollan is the best writer at the moment working for the NYT. It is with a mixture of amazement and jealousy that I trip through Pollan’s articles – like the one in the Mag today. Who else moves so calmly and clearly from Confucius and Marx to the honey bee and the hog?

Fingering the Rope

In Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, under the entry on suicide, Voltaire writes:

“I will make but very few reflections on the murder of oneself here; I will not examine if the late M. Chreech was right to write on the margin of his Lucretius: “n.b., when I have finished my book on Lucretius, I must kill myself”, and if he had done well to execute that resolution. I don’t want to pluck out the motives of my old prefect, P. Biennasses, a Jesuit, who told us farewell one evening, and the next moring, after having said mass and sealed some letters, three himself from the third story. Each has his own reasons in his conduct.”

I’m intrigued by this Bartleby like M. Chreech. I occasionally used stickem notes to remind myself to perform some task, but the note to remember to commit suicide is, well, a pretty cold blooded note. Voltaire’s works themselves were the occasion of a famous suicide in Russia. In 1793, a landowner, Ivan Opochinin, decided to kill himself. On the night before he did so, he spent his time translating Voltaire. In his note he wrote:

‘There is nothing after death!
Corresponding to the most truthful principle, this just argument… made me take a pistol into my hands. I had no reason for putting an end to my existence. Because of my position, the future presented me with a self-willed, pleasant existence. But the future would pass forthwith: in the end my aversion for Russian life was the incentive that compelled me to decide my fate in an act of self-will.
Oh, if only all unfortunate men had the courage to use sound reason…” [from Irena Papperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia]

Indeed. While I have been following up the traces of pessimism in the last couple of weeks, I have rather bracketed the frame of reference under which this work is being done, i.e. my triumph of happiness project. A reader of this blog asked me, a few days ago, what exactly the opposite of this pessimism is. This question abruptly brought me back to the whole point of my study. Traditionally, there is a link between a utopian ideal and the critical work of exposing a total social phenomenon. If that link is severed, then, like Opochinin, perhaps one is only left with a suicide note that appeals to all unfortunate men to use the courage of their sound reason. In a sense, Opanochin died of a disease that was well documented by the great Russian writers: the disease of rural idiocy. Stranded in the sticks, Opanochin had nobody to talk to. In his note, he asks for his library to be given to the flames. One suicide wasn’t enough for him – his isolation required at least two suicides:

‘Books, my beloved books! I do not know to whom I should leave them; I am sure no one needs them in this country. I humbly ask my heirs to consign them to the flames. They were my first treasure, they alone sustained me in life; but for them, my life would have been an uninterrupted affliction, and I would long since have abandoned this world with contempt.” [Kliuchevsky, A course in Russian History]

Ah, the third life, the one that sustains the other two! Voltaire’s mention of Chreech piqued my curiosity. It turns out to be a reference to Thomas Creech, about whom there is a macabre anecdote in Macdonald and Murphy’s book on suicide in early modern England: ‘One rumor going around was that before his suicide Creech had red Biathanotos [Donne’s book on suicide], fingering a rope as he turned the pages.”

Now, that’s the true philosophical spirit. And an inspiration to book reviewers everywhere. As I have pointed out at length, elsewhere, the early moderns were prone to talk about volupte, a concept they believed they got from Epicurus, and not happiness per se. Volupte has its risks, and one of them is that it can bring you face to face with your material self. Opanochin in his note called his body a ‘machine’ – shades of Le Mettrie – and willed it to the anatomists.

But the pessimists did not call on people to kill themselves – indeed, these philosophic suicides are all in the progressive line, materialists who, according to the pessimists, simply came to the logical conclusion of materialism.

This short note will lead us to the next round of posts on Maistre.

IT's new post

I don't know
Why you've gotta be so undemanding...




IT has continued her series on porno. You can also see the beginning of this series here and another post here and her piece about pornographic classifications here. There’s also a sexpol piece here which I think may be the best in the whole series.

Here are some comments:

Since I am trying to write a review of a book that distinguishes three regimes of seeing in science, I am, perhaps, hypersensitive to issues of representation and the ‘training’ of the people who represent and the audiences they represent to. The technique of the self, as Foucault calls it.

There is a pattern I’ve noticed on theory blogs of taking films or music – usually not novels, poetry or paintings – and subjecting them to theoretical glosses with an entire and easy assumption of the epistemological superiority of the theorist. It is as if the theorist’s position is not only self explanatory, but that the theorist knows better than the work of art itself. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is why pop cultural products of a certain kind are so popular among the blogs. It is easy to present oneself as superior in every way to, say, 300 – much harder to do that when analyzing, say, Proust.

Myself, I think even the lowliest work of art – a student film, Anal Cheerleaders 5 – retains a certain autonomy. In practical terms, that means that the thing retains the power to touch. The moment of touching can be a moment of sheer disgust. It can be a moment of rapture. But its distinguishing characteristic is that it is not in the hands of the spectator. For a fleeting instant, the audience is not superior to the work. How to explain this? There’s a famous anecdote about Lenin, recorded by Gorki. Gorki had taken Lenin to hear a performance of music. Lenin said, afterwards, that he would like to listen to Beethoven’s Apassionata every day, since it made him ‘think with pride – perhaps it is naïve of me – what marvelous things us humans can do – but then, according to Gorki, “screwing up his eyes and smiling, he [Lenin] added, rather sadly: But I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, make you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke any one’s head – you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against any one. Hm, Hm, our duty is infernally hard!”

Lenin had a very sharp sense for moments of surrender.

I think IT is more aware of the resistance of the artwork than other theory bloggers. And, by chosing to write about film porno, she has chosen to comment about a genre that implicates the spectator to an obvious and structurally expected extent. Just as you go to cook books to cook, not to marvel at the recipes - or most of us do - you go to porn to jack off, or as part of some foreplay ritual. So if you go as a critic, you have to self reflect a bit, have to explain your epistemological position a bit, have to discard the easy assumption of the theorist’s superiority. Like advertising, porno exploits the aesthetic moment of touch – exploits it like a pickpocket – and forces the critic to acknowledge it.

Anyway, there’s a theme in IT’s work, as she compares vintage porn to contemporary stuff, that goes back to her first posts. Her latest post puts it this way: “Contemporary porn is infinitely segregated. The atomisation of the 1950s filters through to a kind of obsession with taxonomy. The sheer hard work of contemporary porn, and its obsession with taxonomy, informs you that, without delusion, sex is just like everything else – grinding, relentless, boring (albeit multiply boring).”

It is the tie, here, between sex, work and boredom where I feel that the nature of porno as representation – as a work of art – is forgotten. Boredom floats, here, between the spectator and the actors. Is it that the porno actors are bored? Is it that the spectator finds them boring? I think that the line being blurred for someone as sharp as IT clues us into porn as a popular art. Popular arts are intimate like this, they work towards that blurring of the line. Few people, watching MacBeth, say, are thinking well, that is not how I would do it if I wanted to be King of Scotland. But if you watch a tv soap – if you’ve watched people watching a tv soap – you might actually talk back to the tube. “Don’t do it!’ “Oh, she’s going to be in trouble now.” “Oh oh, here comes X.” The idea that these are actors slips away, and with it Diderot’s Paradox of the Actor. Or, rather, one of the choices in Diderot’s essay – the actor as an instrument of spontaneity – is made, is systematically made, in the most unspontaneous of art forms, film.

I think this says something about the development of porn that forms the major theme in IT’s post. Although tv, film, music of a certain sort are parts of ‘popular culture’, I think they present themselves as intimate culture – and here I’ll just wildly speculate for a moment. When, in the seventies, the adult movie industry took off, porn was shown on the movie screen, in the heroic proportions that are natural to all things shown on the movie screen. But that posed the problem that Gulliver confronted in Brobdignag:

“That which gave me most Uneasiness among these Maids of Honour, when my Nurse carried me to visit them, was to see them use me without any manner of Ceremony, like a Creature who had no sort of Consequence. For, they would strip themselves to the Skin, and put on their Smocks in my Presence, while I was placed on their Toylet directly before their naked Bodies, which, I am sure, to me was very far from being a tempting Sight, or from giving me any other emotions than those of Horror and Disgust. Their Skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw them near, with a Mole here and there as broad as a Trencher, and Hairs hanging from it thicker than Pack-threads, to say nothing further concerning the rest of their Persons. Neither did they at all scruple, while I was by to discharge what they had drunk, to the Quantity of at least two Hogsheads, in a Vessel that held above three Tuns. The handsomest among these Maids of Honour, a pleasant frolicksome Girl of Sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her Nipples, with many other Tricks, wherein the Reader will excuse me for not being over particular.”

The audience in the adult theater was composed of people who were a bit bigger than a Splacknuck – which was Gulliver’s size – but they were still gazing at men with dicks the length of a man’s arm, approaching pussies as tall and broad as toasters. Porn (to continue my wild speculation) can’t stand this magnification. The more natural home for the stuff is the video, the tv or computer screen (although with tv screens getting bigger and bigger, who knows how this will upset the collective sensorium). I would be surprised if IT had actually ever seen a porno on the full screen – you have to be at least my age to have had that access, when adult theaters were springing up all over. Brobdignagian porn is mostly a thing of the past. As T.S. Eliot might have said, Splacknucks can’t bear too much hyper-reality. If my speculation is in the ballpark of reality, it would also help explain why, as porno shrank and became more commonplace, it also evoked less heated attempts to suppress it. The violence of gangbangs is rather magnified when the gangbangers are fifteen feet tall - and in fact the violent choreography of almost all sex is brought out at that range. Whereas porn among the lilliputians, which is what we have now, has to use intense close up to get the same sensorial effects.

I'll have more thoughts about boredom as an initiatory effect later.

News from the Imbecile Republic

And soft, what light breaks through yonder moronic inferno! Although weep, children, we should weep for a kingdom that is overthrown, here, a true Caliban's paradise of private penitentiaries, a newe way and discoverie of cleaning up foul poverty by painlessly tricking poor people through the strategic placement of vicious FBI footpads until lo, they’ve gathered into their nets a quantity of em, all saying good things about Al Qabaedola, asking for shriner hats and submachine guns, and assuring their faithful contacts and secret Judases that whatever that city is that the Sears building is located in, they will be creeping in it like the biggest hardon, blowing up this and blowing up that.

Oh, but I can’t fool myself. LI admits to being such a Islamofascista that I would like to see the FBI agents who contrived this fired and tried themselves, and on up until we catch some of the Scooters in the Justice department. But this is a dream for another time and another nation.