obama day!

For Obama day, some music links:

Invasion so succexy – Metric

Did you ever think about suicide? – Hanin Elias, War

This is a message to persons unknown
Persons in hiding. Persons unknown
Survival in silence
Isn't good enough no more
Keeping your mouth shut head in the sand
Terrorists and saboteurs
Each and every one of us
Hiding in shadows persons unknown – Poison Girls

I got a letter from the government the other day – Tricky, Black Steel

Monsieur le president/ou est mon argent? – Vive la fete,

Je suis un ouvrier/ expulsez moi – Tetes raides

Monsieur le president – il faut que je vous dira - Le deserteur, Joan Baez


We had a communist in the family/ I had to wear a mask – Forest Families, the Knife

I swear to god I want to slit my wrists and end this bullshit – Suicidal Thoughts, Biggie Smalls

Ağladıkça – Ahmet Kaya

Keskin Biçak - Sezen Aksu

News from the Zona

An excellent article in the NYT on the little worldwide web woven within the Greenspan system that is now going down a stitch here, down a stitch there – you in the corner can’t have your retirement, and you in the other corner can’t have your education. The vast game of tag in which you, my friends, my friends, are It – now, try to run for cover!

The article takes up a move by a Wisconsin school district to take advantage of what it was assured was easy money in the highflying world of international finance:

“Mr. Noack told the Whitefish Bay board that investing in the global economy carried few risks, according to the tape.

“What’s the best investment? It’s called a collateralized debt obligation,” or a C.D.O., Mr. Noack said. He described it as a collection of bonds from 105 of the most reputable companies that would pay the school board a small return every quarter.

“We’re being very conservative,” Mr. Noack told the board, composed of lawyers, salesmen and a homemaker who lived in the affluent Milwaukee suburb.

Soon, Whitefish Bay and the four other districts borrowed $165 million from Depfa and contributed $35 million of their own money to purchase three C.D.O.’s sold by the Royal Bank of Canada, which had a relationship with Mr. Noack’s company.
But Mr. Noack’s explanation of a C.D.O. was very wrong. Mr. Noack, who through his lawyer declined to comment, had attended only a two-hour training session on C.D.O.’s, he told a friend.”

It is a lovely story, full of the pathos that will tug at your heartstrings or at least make you violently ill. It is a story that will replace our celebrity breakdown stories in the next year, assuredly. The word, lately – amongst all the financial columnists – has been “bottom”. A Melvillian word, a word from the infantile word, a word from sex games – bottom bottom bottom. Has the stock market bottomed? Is the bottom coming up? It turns out that a little word like that can land like a giant flyswatter in the country that elected the Giant Fly as Pres, oh so many years ago it seems, and much crushing will be involved.
Well, last word I’ll leave to the article:

“In Mrs. Velvikis’s classroom at Grewenow Elementary in Kenosha, students have recently completed a lesson in which each first grader contributed a vegetable to a common vat of “stone soup.” The project — based on a children’s book — teaches the benefits of working together. The schools have learned that when everyone works together, they can also all starve.”

PS - And I should link to myself, right? This is my review of a recent book on Iran. Many will jump down my throat about it.

Writing the Book of Love in Red Ink

“It took the Devil, that ancient ally of woman, her confidant from Paradise, it took the sorceress, this monster who does everything backwards, inversing the sacred world, to be occupied with woman, to crush under her feet their [the church’s] practices, and to care for her in spite of herself. The poor creature thought so little of herself! … She recoiled, blushed, meant to say nothing. The sorceress, adroit and malign, guessed and penetrated. At last she figured out how to make her speak, pulled her little secret out, vanquished her refusal, her hesitations of modesty and humility. Rather than submit to such a thing, she would have liked better almost to die. The barbarous sorceress made her live.”



Marguerite Duras once expressed, in an interview, her admiration for Michelet’s The Sorceress:

“Do you know the thesis by Michelet about witches? It's admirable. (By the way, I think, and many people
think, on the basis of letters and journals, that Michelet did not have a normal sex life-which is certainly in his favor.) He says that in the Middle Ages, when the lords went off to war or on the Crusades, when the women stayed alone for months at a time on the farms, in the middle of the fields, hungry and lonely, then
they simply started talking. To whatever was around them: trees, animals, forests, rivers. . . . Perhaps to break the boredom, to forget the hunger and the loneliness. The men burned them. That's how witches came into being. Men said, "They're in collusion with nature," and they burned them. That's how the reign of
witches began. I add, personally, that what they did, in effect, was punish those women because they turned a little away from them and became less available to them.”

LI is thinking about Michelet today because, as we are about to plunge into the topic of love, Michelet is a name which comes up – after all, Michelet wrote the book of Love (which has never been as popular as Stendhal’s) as part of his vast, Hugolian effort to combine human and natural history. For Michelet, the key link was woman –which, to feminists of another stripe than Duras, might not exactly be a thesis in his favor. Still, as opposed to Goethe’s eternal feminine, Michelet presented an image that was, at the base, quite startling – for Michelet, woman is supremely cyclical, just as history is, and just as nature is. In part, of course, Michelet meant cyclical in an abstract way – but in part, he was referring to menstruation. In a fascinating article, “Blood on: Michelet and Female blood”, Therese Moreau tried to show that there is a thin thread of menstrual blood running all through Michelet’s work. LI will discuss this in the next post.

coming attractions

LI is finished, for the moment, with the Nemesis thread. We are planning on a love and suicide thread next, starting with the Sorrows of Young Werther.

...

We’ve been slowly preparing an index of the posts that constitute our Human Limit thematalooza. When I finish it, I think I’ll download it to my geocities site and put a link to it – for those interested in the Great Work. Going back to 2006, I can see how certain threads silently converged, enter into the thing itself, spirits called out to, spirits that came, spirits that didn’t. It is back then that I stumbled upon what is still my methodological principle, my version of dialectical materialism, my very own Wicca Marxism: “Comment y arriva-t-on. Sans doute par l’effet si simple du grand principe satanique que tout doit se faire à rebours, exactement à l’envers de ce que fait le monde sacré.” From Michelet’s mouth to my ear. There are two great elaborations of this principle – one, Jehovah’s version, is that we see now as in a glass, darkly – and we know its avatars, up to Bloy and Kraus; the other is Lucifer’s version, or Little Red Riding Hood’s – for that was the wisdom she collected in the woods, that if you go down the path of pins, you will come back by the path of needles. Negative identity, don’t ya know. The satanic history of happiness begins with the inspiration that back and forth are hints that the path is not the same – and not because it is some fuckin’ river you can’t cross twice, but because twiceness is its disease, its spell. My abracadabra against the irresistible motion of history.

All the money in the world

Bubbles are not, contrary to the new CW in the zona, all bad. Law’s system, some think, actually liquidated the immense debts left by Louis XIV and gave a massive impetus to the restructuring of French agriculture and artisanal industry.

But the Greenspan system seems to have expanded so fast and gotten to such size that it might well engulf all the gains made along the way and then some. A sign of this: the sinking of AIG. Here is a company that is burning its way through 120 billion dollars in 3 weeks time. In three weeks time, he repeated, trying to sound like the George Segal character in To Die For. From today’s story in the NYT:

“These accounting questions [that is, how much of a hole AIG was in because of its position as a counterparty] are of interest not only because taxpayers are footing the bill at A.I.G. but also because the post-mortems may point to a fundamental flaw in the Fed bailout: the money is buoying an insurer — and its trading partners — whose cash needs could easily exceed the existing government backstop if the housing sector continues to deteriorate.

Edward M. Liddy, the insurance executive brought in by the government to restructure A.I.G., has already said that although he does not want to seek more money from the Fed, he may have to do so.”

As I said in my vulture of doom post about the bailout, there is not enough money in all the world to successfully bail out the system. The managers of the great Popping sound (the sound of 100,000 hedge funder penises exploding all at once) have established a nice rhythm for the deathfuck: they come up with a solution and for a month, a relative calm prevails, and then another shoe drops. From last week to this week, the new idea is that the worst is behind us. So the markets go happily upward. But do we have any reason whatsoever to think that counterparties are now protected from the almost sure consequence of housing prices dipping another ten percent? I don’t think so. The write downs have been so many stabs in the dark. Meanwhile, every developed nation has put its government money on the line – a unique event! – to stop the oncoming tide of losing bets. All the money in the world, in other words, is on the line, because more than all the money in the world has been bet. Eventually, many of those bets will simply have to be canceled. Sorry charlie! And as the players don't even know they made the bets - charming megachurch x in San Diego, the school system in Xville, Minnesota, the Icelandic Tuna Fisherman's pension fund, and so on - this will not be happy. As every fan of cheap sadomasochistic entertainment knows, surrender is a long process, but game by game one gets to that final, liquid moment of mutual pain and cumming. It isn’t Wall Street, among the cheesy films of the eighties, that describes the current situation. It is 9 ½ weeks.

“Through spring and summer, the company said it was still gathering information about the swaps and tucked references of widening losses into the footnotes of its financial statements: $11.4 billion at the end of 2007, $20.6 billion at the end of March, $26 billion at the end of June. The company stressed that the losses were theoretical: no cash had actually gone out the door.

“If these aren’t cash losses, why are you having to put up collateral to the counterparties?” Mr. Vickrey asked in a recent interview. The fact that the insurer had to post collateral suggests that the counterparties thought A.I.G.’s swaps losses were greater than disclosed, he said. By midyear, the insurer had been forced to post collateral of $16.5 billion on the swaps.

Though the company has not disclosed how much collateral it has posted since then, its $447 billion portfolio of credit-default swaps could require far more if the economy continues to weaken. More federal assistance would then essentially flow through A.I.G. to counterparties.”

Answers to All Your Election Questions

LI has found the leftist reaction (for instance, here ) to Obama this election season a little… puzzling.

LI has no qualms about wanting Obama to be president than John McCain. If I made a checklist that included Iraq, Iran, unemployment benefits, dealing with the recession, health care, the environment, Obama would score a 100 against McCain. Hell, if I made the same checklist and contrasted Palin and McCain, Palin would score well above her erstwhile partner. Palin’s lack of experience – that is, her non-processing by the DC factory of conventional wisdom, is a point in her favor. Right, she does wear hick resentment like a uniform, but when she is on her own, making a choice, often her common sense wins out over her talking points. For instance, there’s the cute mistake she made a week ago, in denouncing Obama’s stated policy to talk with Iran without preconditions, when she explained herself by confusing “preconditions’ with “preparations” – coming out solidly against meeting Ahmadinejad without the latter. This was just used to laugh at her ignorance; but I laugh that she naturally locates herself in the Obama camp.

So, the uninteresting political question at the moment is who to vote for. The more interesting question is asking: how can one operate on the conditions of reality at the moment when reality takes a left turn?

Here, it is revealing to contrast the scene that will await Obama’s presidency with that which awaited Clinton’s. Clinton, too, was elected during a recession. But, in distinction from the recession of 2008-, the recession of 1991-1993 did not fundamentally alter the structure of neo-liberal hegemony. Quite the contrary. Stage two of that hegemony was launching at that very moment – the true explosion of the financial sector. Plus, there was the tech bubble – which came about due to the convergence of two things: the socialistic largesse that had allowed a generation of Americans to get relatively cheap secondary schooling at public colleges and universities in the seventies and, partly, in the eighties – and the Reagonomics that had made the U.S. the primary target for foreign investment among the nations of the world.

Given these two factors, Clinton, during the course of his administration, came to think that there was a space for a “left” Reagonomics, a progressive neo-liberalism.

I don’t think that is the situation at present. I am guessing that neo-liberalism has no more cards up its sleeves. And that means that the very structure of it is under assault at the moment.

As I pointed out in my mangle of equality post, neo-liberalism became the dominant policy paradigm in tandem with the expansion of the financial services sector because the latter allowed it political viability.

If I were to pinpoint the launch point for neo-liberalism, it would be 1974. Duncan Campbell-Smith’s review of a book on the history of mutual funds says it well:

The massive switch from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution pensions based on private plans, fully launched by 1974, helped turn mutuals into a household word: they accounted by 2006 for about half of all assets in individual retirement accounts.

This is a shift that should loom symbolically large in any account of the shift from the Keynesian golden years to the years of Reagan and Thatcher. There is a sad little myth that floats around lefty circles that explains the rightward tendency of voters who are working and middle class to be all about cultural, as opposed to economic, values. It is all, we are told, a trick of GOP smoke and mirrors, and if these folks knew their real interests (which are, absurdly, supposed to be separate from their cultural interests), they would never have voted for the nasty Republicans. As we said in the mangle of equality post, this explanation doesn’t hold water. There, we emphasized the free rider aspect of Republican voting. If I vote for x, who wants to lower taxes and gut medicare, I can be pretty sure that lowering taxes will happen, and gutting medicare won’t. Thus, I get to luxuriate in a symbolic vote against big government while continuing to enjoy the benefits of big government. And I get a tax break. However, free riding isn’t the whole story.

The whole story begins with the familiar basics – the crushing of labor’s bargaining power, the decline of household incomes, the extrusion of a second earner into the labor pool, etc. But into this story comes the financial sector, in two ways: first, of course, is the extension of credit as it has never been extended before. But the other part of the story is a story of investment. And here, there is a slight paradox. Let’s say x company does its best to curb the benefits going to its workforce: truckers, middle managers, secretaries, whatever. And let’s say this increases its return on investment, sending its stock price higher. Now, it is possible that the workforce so effected, being pretty much forced to invest and – as is usually the case – settling for investing in the company, benefit from that increase in stock price. Think of it as a sort of mad bet on your own impoverishment. If the bet is such that the margin you gain from the bet exceeds the margin of your immiseration, you’ve gained from the bet.

The system of such bets was, in fact, what made coddling investors a politically advantageous position. It made households accept a world in which, relative to the wealthy, they were falling behind.

The crazy logic of this – borrowing on the one hand, investing on the other – has been dealt a double blow by the zona. One should never bet that the neo-liberal order doesn’t have another trick up its sleeve, but LI is going to boldly suppose that it doesn’t. What does that mean?

We see two options. Either, households will have to rely on that rustiest of tools – organized labor bargaining power – to wrest a fairer share of productivity gains from the investors – or they are going to have to cheapen their living costs. The first option, although it dances like a sugarplum dressed like Vladimir Lenin in my head, is I think a no-go. The second option, however, would entail unimaginable social democratic gestures by the government, from taking over health care costs to lowering the costs of secondary education to getting involved in improving American infrastructure.

This, then, is how I see the conditions for liberal politics at the moment.

The Less-than-Perfect Shame Machine

LI has been meditating on Ruwen Ogien’s article on “diffuse sanctions” for the past couple days. We have seen more and more in this article. Perhaps we should translate the entire thing. Maybe we should write to Ogien. Maybe he has been translated.

Ruwen’s comments on the “informal moral sphere”, which he uses interchangeably with the “domain of interaction”, helps us a great deal in thinking about one of the great puzzles of happiness – how did happiness ever become a collective passion? How did it happen that, in the eighteenth century, men and women started to dream of the happy community? And how could they ignore a social fact that stared them in the face every day – that often, the happiness of one person is the direct cause of the unhappiness of another person?

To get back to Ogien – Ogien begins with Durkheim’s notion that “sanctions” form a continuum. Whether the sanction is informal, such as being laughed at, or formal, such as being imprisoned, what (negative) sanctions necessarily entail is punishment. This isn’t to say that every legal breach is punished – only that, in theory, the state has to punish criminals. That is involved in the very notion of crime. A crime that encoded no punishment would not be a crime. A criminal could, on the other hand, be pardoned – but the pardon wouldn’t separate crime from punishment in general, but would plead some special instance. In other words, there is a necessary bond between crime and punishment.

Ogien, rather brilliantly, suggests that this is where Durkheim went wrong. Because the legal sanction includes this necessary relation, Durkheim assumes – as he must, if sanctions are simply a continuum – that informal moral sanctions also contain this necessary tie.

Ogien contends that they don’t. Rather, informal moral sanctions are synthetic. If the victim of some shamemaking gesture does not feel shame, does not manufacture within him or herself the appropriate sentiment, the informal sanction fails. Notice, this isn’t true of a crime – the punishment of the crime does not depend on the manufacture of any particular sentiment on the part of the criminal. There is an informal dimension to punishment – the notion that the criminal should repent. But this is separate from the punishment inherent in being judged a criminal.

Ogien casts a wider net for sanctions, which can include positive sanctions in the domain of interaction – praise, for instance.

Now, this is the thing about the informal moral sphere – the sanctions are always synthetic, and thus depend on a certain sentimental education. And that education can go awry – in fact, as nineteenth century psychology and twentieth century psychoanalysis teaches, possibly, it always goes awry. It is more than possible that praise, for instance, can bring up shame in the person so praised. Dostoevsky might have called this whim, Freud neurosis. And Herder would see, here, the ambiguous passage of Nemesis.

Ogien extends his point with an image: the difference between the state’s punishment machines and shame machines. I’ll end here, with an extensive quote from Ogien:

The blamer can count on the fact that this sarcasm will impose itself, but he will never be entirely certain of that. And this incertitude is not a matter of his lack of imagination, nor of the feebleness of the means he possesses. The best organized of police can’t ever guarantee the execution of a punishment if that punishment is shame. And the most satanic pedagogue would have a great deal of trouble to invent a machine to make shame or a dispositif capable of producing it with certainty.

Of course, we can’t say we are lacking in fertile imaginations that have conjured up modes (dispositifs) of diabolical punishments. Lichtenberg, Kafka, Foucault (among others) have given us frightening illustrations of our capacity for imagining the worst for our neighbors: but one shouldn’t think that this is a question of anything other than some horrible utopias. None of these modes could guarantee the effect produced, and this is rather happy.

It is precisely this incertitude in the relation between blame and punishment which gives diffuse sanctions their non-necessary character – synthetic, or casual. Between blame and diffuse punishment (all together: sarcastic remarks, laughs of the audience, shame of the victim, for instance), the relationship is only probable.

However, nothing forbids us from going further in the dissociation, and affirming that the relation between blame and diffuse punishment escapes all regularity and by the same way all possibility of causal analysis. If one wants to be convinced of this, it is sufficient to return to what Kant says of laughter and the difficulty of discovering means to excite it among rational men: “Voltaire said that heaven has given us two means to counterbalance the multiple pains of life: hope and sleep. He might have added laughter, if the means to excite it among reasonable people were easy to discover.”

The enigma of the causality of laughter is as deep as that of the causality of shame (or of every other form of moral sentiment – humiliation, indignation). And it is as difficult, it seems to me, to conceive of a good shame-making machine as one that is efficiently laugh-making. (600)