some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen

In the new Feudalism, we have to have a set of new euphemisms. So when a government agency simply abandons the law of the land – otherwise known as breaking the law – we have to find a gentle, doe eyed way of describing it. And who is better at the task than our faithful scribes and minions, the same people who transformed the Great Fly’s war of aggression in Iraq into a crusade for democracy? Who can put the human face on predator capitalism better than the NYT? Thus we get explanations like this one, about the use of taxpayer money to support private peculators:

“Until this week, it would have been unthinkable for the Federal Reserve to bail out an insurance company, and A.I.G.’s request for help from the Fed of just a few days ago was rebuffed.

But with the prospect of a giant bankruptcy looming — one with unpredictable consequences for the world financial system — the Fed abandoned precedent and agreed to let the money flow.”

Abandoned precedent. Let the money flow. Such beautiful terms! It makes for a whole new way of describing things. For instance, on one could say that on November 9, 1932, Clyde Barrow abandoned precedent in Lagrange, Texas, and let the money flow from the Carmen State Bank. Doesn’t that sound nice? Clyde prompted the money with the use of a pistol. We are more civilized now. Bernanke used a pen. We don’t use vulgar words of language.

Which reminds me of this Woody Guthrie song.

orderliness

Since last August, economic policy in the U.S. has advanced under the banner of orderliness. The Fed, the Treasury, and all of the Great Fly’s horses and all of the Great Fly’s men are making sure that the unwinding is orderly. What does this mean? Well, it means that the New Deal is inversed. The old New Deal was about spending money to employ the unemployed. The New New Deal is about transferring money to plutocrats. Now, yesterday we had one outcome – an easily foreseen outcome – of what an “orderly” unwinding means: bankruptcies of the banks, freezing up of credit for consumers, inflation on all fronts, a steady increase in unemployment (which is, as we all know, grossly undercounted) – and money, massive amounts of money, for the rich. As you can see, that outcome is much to be preferred to a disorderly unwinding. The latter would involve bankruptcies of banks, freezing up of credit for consumers, inflation on all fronts, a steady increase in unemployment – and no extra money for the rich! That would be terrible.

What amazes LI is how inefficient the new feudalism is. I have a small but, I think, moneysaving suggestion to make to our masters in D.C.: we can cut the time and distance money has to travel between being collected by the IRS and landing in the pockets of bankers by setting up an office that directly assigns revenues to the wealthy. Thus, for instance, the Republican head of Merril Lynch, John A. Thain, who apparently earned a truly pitiable sum (25 million dollars) for presiding over the ruin of that bank for ten months, ould simply be assigned all the revenue collected from, say, Kentucky. Because we are a fiery Republic, Dedicated to Liberty and Opportunity, we should not knight him. No, we should scorn to ennoble him. Although our population is a spineless, servile, bullying, infantile, and media lobotomized bunch of hicks, still, we are too proud to allow our masters to assume titles like Earl of Hampton. But we can call them things like Super Entrepreneur of Hampton. This will warm our country hearts, and he could be interviewed on tv, or, as we like to say, reality land, dispensing wisdom that we can all sway to in our huts.

It looked, at one point, like the Dems – leaning towards their communistic roots – might have even suggested that instead of an orderly unwinding, we try the disorderly variety, in which you actually shove the Federal money at the masses. Imagine! The disorder of that would make our news storytellers on tv wring their toupees and bouffants. They would be so sad! It would be sheer demagogy! And against the free market and everything! Luckily, that moment has well passed, and we can all get behind the orderly unwinding. Of course, the Dems may be communists, but luckily they aren’t so communistic as to suggest that maybe, the government, instead of loaning banks 30 billion dollars here and 100 billion dollars there at 2 percent interest so that they can loan the money back to the U.S. at 2.5 percent interest, should just loan to the population at large at 2 percent interest, because, as we can easily see, that would be disorderly. We must be orderly. And at the end of this happy, happy time, there might be some money to, well, I don’t know, build another war or something. We do so love a war!

through the implosion, tv set by tv set

LI is back. We come back minus one tooth (about which, more on another post) from a trip that consisted mostly of following my friend M. around Mexico City and playing circus with her daughter and protect the castle with her son – although protect the castle is a complicated game of which the rules change to the extent that it isn’t clear what the castle is, as J. decides which miniature bowling pin stands for the king or the queen, which pile of books, toys, and odds and ends makes up the battlements, and how to deal with the collateral damage that ensues when he dances around the room, jumps on the bed, yells yippee, and generally makes a ruckus when the silver ball I toss at the castle misses the king, the queen, and all nine knights. Let it not be said that we lacked for intellectual content, down there in DEF. Plus we read a lot of Proust and took notes, all for The Human Limit, which we so hope our few remaining readers have not totally forgotten. Oh, and in our own little person, we proved that the global war on terrorism is a hoax. Maybe that will be in another post too. Suffice it to say, we spent some time at the U.S. embassy to Mexico, being gaped at by various embassy employees.

And David Foster Wallace hung himself.

We came back through the implosion. We knew, even in D.E.F, that the implosion was coming last week, when we read in the NYT about Lehman’s flood of red ink. Although of course – and this is the beauty of a blog! – we have been writing off and on since the Fed first fatally sought to shore up, of all things, the equity markets back in August, that the implosion was coming closer, with tremendous strides, like some personified sin in Pigrim’s Progress. In the Mexico City airport, we picked up the Financial Times to get the score, so to speak, for the day’s gladiatorial contest. In Dallas, we watched CNN. CNN is like a video i.v. of pure gibberish. It is like mindmelding with an overflowing garbage can. The lies and factoids pouring out of the tv were rather astonishing. We especially liked it that – of all people – Alan Greenspan was reverently quoted for his opinion of the implosion. For in the CNN universe, the characters of the celebrities are unchanging archetypes, and Alan Greenspan is still the maestro, instead of the Ayn Rand's revenge on American capitalism.

There were also clips of Obama and McCain, and not one word about what this is. It isn’t a credit crisis. It isn’t a liquidity crisis. This is an inequality crisis. The massive increase in the inequality between the wealth of the working and middle class and the upper class is the sole perpetrator of today’s implosion, and of tomorrow’s implosion too. You can’t run a consumer economy on extended credit and frozen wages. You can’t trade the residual. You can’t make the financial sector, of all sectors, the engine of the economy – unless your economy is as small as Holland’s. As the government transfers appalling hundreds of billions to the plutocrats and assures the CNN viewing audience that it is for the good of all, the spectator must wonder if the servility of the general population, its inertia, its ignorance, its general incapacity to chew gum and walk, will allow this, too, to pass. So far, it does look like the hugest robbery in history will proceed without a hitch, and with no suspense, even. Why dress all in black and map out the sensors that guard the vault of Fort Knox when the treasury secretary gives you a key and your own gilded wheelbarrow?

the newest fade

Lenin claimed that the state would fade away in a society that achieved true communism. LI can’t say that we’ve achieved true communism, yet, but we are fading away – at least for a week or two. Fading to Mexico, through the storms we ride. So you will have to untie the intricate knots of the eighteenth century without me! My last posts, heavy with heaviness, like my Mozart posts, light with lightness, are the endpoints of the campaign. And I so wanted to get to external and internal voices, privacy, love, and the language of cats!

Well, you will just have to figure that out without me.

Lights out.

Weekend: the week in politics!

Of course, LI is getting tons of emails about our relative silence vis a vis the late breaking political developments. The convention. The crucial question of leadership and experience. The whole gender thing.

We are speaking, of course, of the PS conference at La Rochelle, and whether Ségolène Royal or the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, take over the spot of first secretary of the party. Our heart is with Delanoë. We like the idea of confrontation, of getting in the face of the reactionaries in power. We dislike Royal’s idea that the PS has to extend peace feelers to the MoDem, of all feeble front organizations for a toothfairy solution to social problems. The dream of the Third Way should, by this time, have revealed itself clearly as the same old nightmare from which we are all trying to wake up. On the other hand, I like Royal as the face of the party. She did resurrect the corpse, which was shot by Jospin and his Blairing around ways. So, at the moment, I think Delanoë’s confrontational strategy will work better in an election year than as a 24/7 offyear theme. In fact, what I’d like to see is an agreement between the two – Delanoë agreeing to serve as party secretary, in return for supporting Royal for one more try at the presidential. As for the perpetual bickering of the party elite – well, it is an old story, and for reasons that escape me, the journalists always cover it as though it were some kind of disaster.

“A trois semaines de la date-limite pour le dépôt des motions [at the congress of Rheims], qui départageront les prétendants à la succession de François Hollande, l'heure était aux grandes manoeuvres pour Ségolène Royal, Bertrand Delanoë, Martine Aubry ou Pierre Moscovici. Objectif: constituer une majorité dans un parti balkanisé. Au sortir de l'université d'été, la situation n'est pas plus claire. Aucun des prétendants ne paraît pour l'instant en mesure de réunir plus du quart du parti lors du vote sur les motions.
A ce petit jeu, Ségolène Royal se sera montrée la plus discrète. La finaliste de l'élection présidentielle de 2007, qui mise tout sur son aura parmi les militants, s'est contentée d'une apparition le premier jour, marquée par un appel quasi-mystique à "l'amour" entre socialistes et une rapide réunion de ses partisans. Samedi et dimanche, elle a préféré à La Rochelle la fête du Parti démocrate italien.”


Then, of course, there is the most popular socialist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with his pion, Moscovi. The French love to express their preference for the Colbert type in polls – not the comedian, the treasurer – but they vote for Louis xiv types.

Okay, so that is the roundup. Amie will no doubt have to correct me if this is a misanalysis. Oh, and ... I hear that something is happening in the U.S.A. too. I haven’t been paying attention. Who are the candidates again?

the privilege of turn 3

I’ve already commented once on Ginzburg’s essay, Making it strange: the prehistory of a literary device. Ginzburg traces the connection between the Stoic practices recorded by Marcus Aurelius and, link by link, the formalist notion of “making strange”, that formula which was so important to Victor Shklovsky. Ginzburg does not mention Shaftesbury in his essay; yet his explanation of the Stoic method can easily be applied to Shaftesbury's Philosophical Regimen:

“Epictetus, the philosopher-slave whose ideas profoundly influenced Marcus Aurelius, maintained that this striking out or rearsure of imaginary representations was a necessary step in the quest for an exact perception of things. This is how Marcus Aurelius describes the successive stages:

“Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse that is drawing you like a puppet. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour.”

Each of these injunctions required the adoption of a specific moral technique aimed at acquiring mastery over the passions...”

Shaftesbury’s method and madness converge on an operating table in which the writer is both surgeon and patient. One notices that the direction of the Stoic move – of wiping away impressions – is the opposite of the direction of the Lockean idea – which builds outwards from a presumed tabula rasa. For Shaftesbury, the Lockean notion that in our minds we build the world anew (an implication that finds its political expression in Tom Paine) can’t possibly be true. The world is the more certain fact, and its impingement upon the mind comes in the form of impressions that are distorting – rather than the sole hermeneutical resource with which we make our uncertain way through the world. In the PR, Shaftesbury’s exercises literally apply Marcus Aurelius’s suggestions, and reference the idea of viewing things “as from a height.” The aftershocks of the clash between Locke's experience (which, for Shaftesbury, is a false kind of innocence) and the Stoic dissection of experience can be felt in the question marks that swarm all over Shaftesbury’s text. They seem like so many jabs into the simulacra of the philosopher patient, the wax doll upon which he intends to operate in order to effect a ritual cleansing. Here’s a passage from the notes on “Deity”. It comes just after a passage comparing the Deists and the Epicureans – “Atoms and void. A plain negative to the Deity, fair and honest. To Deism, still no pretence. So the sceptic....

“From whence then this other pretence? Who are these Deists? How assume the name? By what title or pretence? The world, the world? say what? how? A modified lump? matter? motion? – What is all this? Substance what? Who knows? why these evasions? subterfuges with words? definitions of things never to be defined? structures or no foundations? Come to what is plain. Be plain. For the idea itself is plain; the question plain; and such as everyone has invariably some answer to which it is decisive. Mind? or not mind? If mind, a providence, the idea perfect: a God. If not mind, what in the place? For whatever it be, it cannot without absurdity be called God or Deity; nor the opinion without absurdity be called Deism.” (38-39)

While we recognize both Marcus Aurelius's exercise and the grammatical echoes of the great Carolinean preachers - Donne, Taylor - the effect of this continually interrupted movement, this play of thought that tears at itself, over pages, is of a sort of self-cutting. One can’t help but wonder whether the voices at play, here, don’t include Locke's voice from the nursery. A voice which we know from Locke's work on education, which was confessedly based on his experience teaching the Shaftesbury children. This is Locke:

“Familiarity of discourse, if it can become a father to his son, may much more be condescended to by a tutor to his pupil. All their time together should not be spent in reading of lectures, and magisterially dictating to him what he is to observe and follow. Hearing him in his turn, and using him to reason about what is propos’d, will make the rules go down the easier and sink the deeper, and will give him a liking to study and instruction: And he will then begin to value knowledge, when he sees that it enables him to discourse, and he finds the pleasure and credit of bearing a part in the conversation, and of having his reasons sometimes approv’d and hearken’d to; particularly in morality, prudence, and breeding, cases should be put to him, and his judgment ask’d. This opens the understanding better than maxims, how well soever explain’d, and settles the rules better in the memory for practice. This way lets things into the mind which stick there, and retain their evidence with them; whereas words at best are faint representations, being not so much as the true shadows of things, and are much sooner forgotten. He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos’d, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor’s lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.”

Wit and false colours. Which, of course, are just what is defended in Shaftesbury's Sensus Communis. One might wonder how one gets from the severities of the stoic operating table to the epigrams of the drawing room - this has puzzled Shaftesbury's commentators, at least. The key is to follow not the thread of that truth which is discovered by a process of corresponding idea to object, according to the narrow procedures of proof, but to take a broader, more social sense of proof into account. Wit is a trial. A trial is a different thing than the amassing of proofs, which is the sort of activity done by the police or prosecutor before a trial. Trials are about guilt and innocence, which is the context in which truth gains its social footing. Thus, trials are dramas about character and circumstances. Trials are part of the world as theater. And the world is a place of infinite and not so converging impressions. Here is the gap, the little peephole, into souls, and for souls, truth alone is not enough. Truth won't give us seriousness. Which is why we need other methods more appropriate to our theatrical world. Which is why we need wit. The test of opinion is in the struggle between the serious and the absurd. This is a point to which Shaftesbury returns time and again in defending wit as the kind of thing that is consistent with common sense: ridicule drives an opinion to the point at which it becomes ridiculous, or extravagant. It drives it outside the bounds of common sense. It makes it a scapegoat. It expels it.

Yet Shaftesbury is careful not to confuse absurdity with falsity. An opinion doesn’t have to be untrue to be absurd. In the infinitesimal separation, there lodges an infinite meaning, because it presents another dimension of reason, one in which the terms concern the serious and the absurd. It is in that dimension that LI sees the glimmer of what Durkheim called the sacred. The spirits at work in the festival of mockery are the spirits of the sacred and the profane, and the shock of mocking opinion, especially one’s own, is derived from the sense of profanation, of de-consecration.

The trial of opinion by wit is parallel to the trial of the mind by the body, as this is laid out in the Philosophical Regimen. “Nature has joined thee to such a body, such as it is. The supreme mind would have it that this should be the trial and exercis of inferior minds. It has given thee thine; not just at hand, or as when they say into one’s mouth; not just in the way so as to be stumbled on by good luck; not so easily either, but so as thou mayst reach it; so as within thy power, within command. See! Here are the incumbrances. This is the condition, the bargain, terms. Is the prize worth contending for? or what will become of me if I do not contend? How if the stream carries me down? how if wholly plunged in this gulf? What will be my condition then? what, when given up to body, when all body, and not a motion, not a thought, not one generous consideration or sentiment besides?” That gulf, as Shaftesbury points out at the beginning of the section on the body, is one composed of shit. The body is an excrement in potentia

“And as from the parts of the body, so also abstract it from the whole body itself, an excrement in seed, already half being, half putrefaction, half corruption. Thus be persuaded of this: that I (the real I) am not a certain figure, nor mass, nor hair, nor nails, nor flesh, nor limbs, nor body; but mind, thought, intellect, reason; what remains but that I should say to this body and all the pompous funeral, nuptial, festival (or whatever other) rites attending it, “This is body. These are the body only. The body gives life to them, exalts them, gives them their vigour, force, power and very being.”

The trial of the mind proposed here will follow a body’s logic, which is the logic of juxtapositions. Throughout the Regimen, the thought of the simultaneous and the all – that gaze down from the height – operates to create a world wide absurdity, a feeling of disgust, of a crowd of potential excrement increasing at every moment:

“Consider the number of animals that live and draw their breath, and to whom belongs that which we call life, for which we are so much concerned; beasts, insects, the swarm of mankind sticking to this earth, the number of males and females in copulation, the number of females in delivery, and the number of both sexes in this one and the same instant expiring and at their last gasp’ the shrieks, cries, voices of pleasure, shoutings, groans nd the mixed noise of all of these together. Think of the number of those tht died before thou wert or since; how many of those that came into the world at the same time and since; and of those now alive, what alteration. Consider the faces of those of thye acquaintance as thou sawest them some years since; how changed since then! how macerated and decayed! All is corruption and rottenness; nothing at a stay, but continued changes; and changes renew the face of the world.” (257)

And as always, Shaftesbury’s move is to put these notions in a scene, sketched rapidly.

Life is as those that live it. What are those? What are we? Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati. Tolerable carrion; fit to be let live. Honest poor rascals not so bad as when they say “scarce worth the hanging.” Life-worthy persons, if a bare liveable life. But say, what are we? What do we make of ourselves? How esteem ourselves? Warm flesh, with feelings, aches, and appetites. The puppet – play of fancies. O the solemn, the grave, the ponderous business. – Complex ideas, dreams, hobby-horses, houses of cards, steeples and cupolas. – The serious play of life. – Shows, spectacles, rites, formalities, processions; children playing at bugbears, frighting one another through masks. The heard, priests, cryer. The trump of fame; the squeaking trumpet and cat-call; the gowns! habits! robes! How underneath? How in the nightcaps, between the curtains and sleeps? How anon in the family with wife, servants, children, o where even none of these must see? Private pleasures, other privacies? the closet and bed-chamber, parlours, dining-rooms, dressing-rooms, and other rooms. In sickness, the lazy hours, in wines, in lecher? taking in, letting out- O the august assembly; each of you, such as you are apart!” (258-259)

The wit of Sensus Communis and the reductions and division of the Philosophical Regimen are attempts not only to find a place for profanation, but – in as much as absurdity is a proxy for the profane – to come back to the serious as a form of the sacred. LI would love, at this point, to refer to Marcel Mauss’ book on Prayer – but we have no more time for this.

privilege of turn 2

Second Part

Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis essay is, as he puts it, an earnest attempt to defend raillery. This is a very odd way to begin an essay on common sense, which is the kind of phrase that Shaftesbury’s tutor Locke was getting at with his notion that we receive our ideas from experience:

“But perhaps you may still be in the same humour of not believing me in earnest. You may continue to tell me, I affect to be paradoxical, in commending a Conversation as advantageous to Reason, which ended in such a total Uncertainty of what Reason had seemingly so well established.”

From the very beginning, then, Shaftesbury is presenting an explicit break between form and content. The form of the essay is, as Shaftesbury would know from Montaigne, the place of opinion, doxis, and is not a treatise. It deals with becoming – the characteristicks of men – rather than being – the universal forms. It is Shaftesbury’s piece of fun to defend mockery – his object – with a piece of reasoning. And that he labels this an essay on common sense calls attention to the difference between common sense and rationality. Shaftesbury is explicit enough about the nature of wit. It is paradoxical. It is extravagant. Moreover, it seems to affect a certain disconnect between the speaker and the opinion the speaker gives. In fact, at first glance, if we take common sense to be a secondary kind of rationality, it would seem that the freedom of wit and humor is a freedom from common sense in as much as common sense assigns beliefs to people, so that each self possesses a belief. On the other hand, it is a form of the commons, of shared possession. And there are many forms the commons takes – it isn’t all pasturing the village’s sheep. It is also the life of the common, in fairs, everyday talk, rituals. If we extend this sense of the common to common sense, then we are less shocked that wit, that thief who unlocks the chain binding a man to his opinion, should be part of the commons. On the other hand, as we know from Don Quixote, the impulse to unlock chains and free prisoners, while a noble one, can have dubious results.

Shaftesbury, puts the essay in terms of an argument with an unnamed friend who doesn’t see wit’s right to operate in the commons. Like the puritans casting out the punch and judy shows and the bear baitings, this friend can’t see the point of mockery, and can see, very well, the vice of it.

“I HAVE been considering (my Friend!) what your Fancy was, to express such a surprize as you did the other day, when I happen’d to speak to you in commendation of Raillery. Was it possible you shou’d suppose me so grave a Man, as to dislike all Conversation of[60] this kind? Or were you afraid I shou’d not stand the trial, if you put me to it, by making the experiment in my own Case?

I must confess, you had reason enough for your Caution; if you cou’d imagine me at the bottom so true a Zealot, as not to bear the least Raillery on my own Opinions. ’Tis the Case, I know, with many. Whatever they think grave or solemn, they suppose must never be treated out of a grave and solemn way: Tho what Another thinks so, they can be contented to treat otherwise; and are forward to try the Edge of Ridicule against any Opinions besides their own.

The Question is, Whether this be fair or no? and, Whether it be not just and reasonable, to make as free with our own Opinions, as with those of other People?”

I want to linger on this trial of opinion by wit. Which will be the subject of my next post.