the expulsion of the court alchemists and the ascension of John Law

I'm sorry my posts have been so rare, lately. But not since I was a lad of 20, working the grass game, have I been driven as hard as recently. Surely by the end of this month my work load will have fallen, but at the moment I am sweating it out, like a dumb donkey.

So, a brief scribble...

As Derrida’s séance over Marx raised up the spirits that were in his work, in this, the era of his supposed ‘death’, so too, Marx, in metaphoric and word, raised up the spirits in the classical economists, all of which hover around the fetishism of commodities. It is odd that Derrida seems to be the first to have taken Marx’s gothic streak seriously – he was, after all, a child of German romanticism, and who learned more from Heine’s prose style? … well, perhaps Nietzsche, as Mann points out.

When Marx overlays the transformations of money into commodity and commodity into money with the parodic language of alchemy, he is following a theme that goes back not only to Faust, but to the beginning of the theory of the political economy. About which, Carl Wennerlib has written an essay entitled “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England.” Wennerlib proposes that the 17th century natural philosophers took the alchemical proposal of creating wealth out of nothingness – or the base – quite seriously. And, vice versa, when the Bank of England showed in 1694 how credit-money could function, there was a rapid falloff in the patronage of alchemists…”

Curious phrase, credit-money. We would now simply say money, since it wouldn’t occur to any possessor of same to assume that the material ot of which the money was made was equal in value to the money. You won’t get much for a strip of green paper that doesn’t have the magical symbols of U.S. power on it now, will you? Of course not.

“Credit-money… served as a means of payment and had the capacity to circulate widely. These paper notes were wholly or partially convertible into assets or income streams designated as security. As such, they could fully complete a transaction and serve as a store of value…” In the system of political thinking that held at the time, this was as miraculous as the transmutation of metals promised by the Philosopher’s stone – or so our author claims. It is for this reason that the two things – the bank and the alchemist – were held in the same field, as substitutes one for the other. Or rather, the bank, by the alchemical feat of creating value out of de facto currency, drove out the alchemists, who’d been patronized by the Stuarts. ‘This transition from alchemy to credit was swift and complete, perhaps nowhere more dramatically evidenced than in the Duke of Orleans’s dismissal of his court alchemists in favor of John Law’s land-backed paper currency.”

Wennerlib takes a rapid survey of the literature produced by alchemists and those with suggestions concerning wealth, and finds a mixture of terminology, particularly around money – which a seventeenth century writer compares to “Materia Prima, because, though it serves actually to no use almost, it serves potentially to all uses.”

All of which had to do with England’s problem in the Early Modern Era – a shortage of specie. The solution proposed by some members of the Hartlib circle – the most advanced philosophers in England, including Boyle and William Petty – was to fund experiments to turn tin into gold.

All of which Goethe gets right in Faust, Part 2. It was not that long ago from the time he was writing in that these notions had been floated about. Indeed, for the Gnostic historian, looking for the event that emits the intersigne, surely the expulsion of the alchemists and the entrance of John Law marks a large step towards the great transformation.

Mephistopheles and the image of the limited good

And the devil sings dut, da dut, dut ta dut dut da dut…

In the first act of the second part of Faust, the King opens his court to the complaints of his followers. Complaints, doleances, Goethe’s seen a few. While the second part of Faust is written in the midst of the reactionary years, the years of legitimacy, Goethe is well aware of the weakness of the whole schema of legitimacy, within which the advances of the bourgeoisie were – according to the best laid Burkean plans – to be absorbed into the organic tissue of a society based on tradition, religion, respect. Goethe himself has advanced into the elite of a very small state, and of course his genius – and even his vanity - is large enough to judge how small.

There is a thesis, advanced by Arno Mayer, that claims that the nineteenth century was not, as we sometimes like to think, the time of the Great Transformation – but rather saw only the gradual withering of the ancien regime. Although it may appear that Mayer’s thesis is contradictory to another recent thesis – that of Charles Tilley, which locates the start of capitalist relationships in Europe’s rural regions in the 17th century – both of them are reactions to the periodization advocated by a school going through Adam Smith to Karl Marx, which takes industrialization, and especially advanced heavy industry, to be at the very heart of the nineteenth century. Mayer has the figures: except for England, “agriculture persisted as the single largest and weightiest economic sector until 1914”; (34) furthermore, ‘until 1914 consumer manufacture outweighed capital goods industry in the nonagrarian sector of each national economy”. (35)

One should never take arms against a sea of statistics – because here Marxian ‘materialism’ will find itself well and truly drowned, as anybody who has perused the volume after volume of a certain kind of econometric Marxist history that proceeds with a sort of amnesia that what we are looking for are the relations of preduction, not board feet of pigiron produced in 1900. Mayer, I should say, is not one of those econometricians. I refer to him here in order to set up the tension between the spirit of the time and the time – a tension to which Derrida pays attention, under the rubric of a time out of joint, in the Specters of Marx. Although it is not Hamlet that is in question, here – the vengeance thematic is muted, and – for those who have the eyes to see it – put at the margin, where it becomes the larger thematic of Nemesis, of balance.

But again … the king has called together his councilors, and complaints have been made until the king asks his new fool for his complaints – and the fool – Mephistopheles – responds that he is a blithe spirit just to be here. He then surveys the complaints so far in this speech:


Mephistopheles.
Where in the world is there not a lack of something?
The this, the that – well here it’s money that’s missing.
You aren’t going to pluck it from an ostrich, that’s true
Yet wisdom knows how to bring the deepest depths in view.
In mountain’s veins, under the base of walls we find
Gold that is coined, and the uncoined kind.
And you ask me – who will bring this all to light?
The force of human nature and his spirit’s fine flight.
(Okay, I took some liberties with that last line. So sue me.)

(Wo fehlt’s nicht irgendwo auf dieser Welt?
Dem dieß, dem das, hier aber fehlt das Geld.
Vom Estrich zwar ist es nicht aufzuraffen;
Doch Weisheit weiß das Tiefste herzuschaffen.
In Bergesadern, Mauergründen
Ist Gold gemünzt und ungemünzt zu finden,
Und fragt ihr mich wer es zu Tage schafft:
Begabten Manns Natur- und Geisteskraft.)

It is, as we would expect, man’s nature and spirit that causes the controversy. But let’s linger on the suggestion – which is held within the image of the limited good. For after all, what is the good of gold? Whether found as part of a treasure (under walls) or mined (from the veins of mountains), gold is an oddly medieval product upon which to bring the attention of man’s “spirit”. Although of course there were a number of gold rushes in the nineteenth century – California, Alaska, Australia – yet the gold rush was symbolic of the spirit of the age only in as much as it was a leveling wealth, a wealth that depended on the chance of discovery apart from social position (putting to one side – oh that side! – the indigenous people’s whose streams and land were calmly seized by the white male gold seekers). In an earlier post in which we first recognized the importance of the image of the limited good to explain the rise of the happiness society,- here we discussed German treasure hunting via an article by Johannes Dillinger and Petra Feld, Treasure-Hunting: A Magical Motif in Law, Folklore, and Mentality, Württemberg, 1606 –1770. We will leave that and the subsequent posts that followed it as allusions.

Unsurprisingly, it is at the moment in which the image of the limited good confronts the image of growth that the devil and all the specters pop up. About which more later.

Transmigration of the fool

The Money. The narcissism. The Artificial human.

All these themes, and so little time to go through the woods.

After a preface, we begin, in Act one of the second part of Faust, in the throne room of the Imperial Palace. The king greets his retainers who have come from far and wide, but notices one is missing: where is the fool?

And here a substitution happens which is not simply a routine from stock theater. It is one of those substitutions that will become symbolic for the nineteenth century playbook, one of those gestures in which Mann saw Goethe the wizard. As one secondary character tells another, the old fat fool – Fett-Gewicht – collapsed on the steps, drunk or dead, and was carted away. And on those steps a new fool has appeared – this one dressed richly, and not fat at all – a stave, someone says, to the old fool’s barrel – although this skinny fool is ‘fratzenhaft’ – full of pranks. A skinny fool is a sinister fool. We cycle through the transfigurations from Sancho Panza to Rambeau’s Nephew – which Goethe translated – to this moment.

For as we know as readers – reading the names assigned to the speeches, which the speakers don’t see – know, this is the very devil, Mephistopheles. Come lose from his sage, his Faust. The old rule says that for every sage there is a fool. But the loss of weight and the rich clothes indicate that there has been a change somewhere, there has been a distinct change in class position, in worlds.

That the substitution occurs on that place of transition between the up and the down – the stairs – is no accident. Mephistopheles in this scene will be, as it were, the very spirit of the steps.

Whom does each hear gladly named?
What nears the steps of your throne?
What has exiled itself?

Wen höret jeder gern genannt?
Was naht sich deines Thrones Stufen?
Was hat sich selbst hinweggebannt?

The uncanny, if Freud is right, starts with the ‘who’ becoming a what – the human becoming a female doll, the doll becoming the “who” who reveals her ‘what’ to her addled lover, thus of course driving him mad. The King correctly recognizes that his new fool is speaking in the fool’s chosen idiom of riddles, but not the what propounding the riddles. In any case, he accepts the substitution:

Mein alter Narr ging, fürcht’ ich, weit in’s Weite;
Nimm seinen Platz und komm an meine Seite.

My old fool has gone, I fear, beyond the beyond
Take his place and stand at my side

And as this scene makes its turn towards Geist and Geld, I’m going to make a turn too. First to this quote from Simmel’s Philosophy of Money.

“The division between subject and object is not so radical as the practical scientific world would make us believe about these categories subject otherwise to this completely legitimate division. The soul’s life [seelische Leben] begins rather in a circumstance of indifference, in which the I and its object remain still undivided, satisfying the impressions or ideas of the consciousness without it being the case that the bearer of this content has divided itself from itself. That in the determined, momentary real circumstance he has a subject that is to be distinguished from the content, that he has, that is at first an affair of a secondary consciousness, an afterthought analysis. The development obviously leads pari passu into the fact that the person says I to himself, and that he recognizes independently standing objects outside of this I. If metaphysics so often likes to tell us that the transcendental essence of being was to be absolutely one, beyond the subject-object opposition, its psychological pendant is found in this simple primitive fulfillment [Erfuelltsein] with relation to an idea content, as it is with children that don’t yet speak of themselves as I, and in a rudimentary manner this is to be observed occurring one’s whole life long. This unity, out of which the categories of subject and object first develop in the face of one another in a as yet to be explained process, appears to us subjective only because we encounter it after we’ve developed the concept of objectivity, and because we have no correct expression for that kind of unity, yet are accustomed to naming it after one of the onesided elements the co-effects of which appear in our subsequent analysis.”

And now let’s think a bit about narcissism.

the grimoire of political economics

Damn - in an earlier version of this, I didn't notice that the stuff I wrote didn't copy to the blog. Sorry sorry sorry! The only thing that copied was the translation I made from Marx. Damn. Anyway, this is what the post is supposed to look like.

In the section of the Grundrisse that Marx’s editors – I believe entitled, The Method of Political Economics, Marx asks what it means to look at a nation from the political economic viewpoint.

It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, thus, for example, to begin, in economics, with the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. Yet by a nearer observation this appears to be false. The population is an abstraction if I leave aside the classes of which it consists. These classes are an empty phrase when I don’t know the elements out of which they are made, for instance, wage labor, capital, etc. … For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Therefore, If I begin with the population, it would be a chaotic representation of the whole; and thus I through nearer analysis come upon ever simpler concepts; from this conceptualized concretum towards ever thinner abstractions, until I arrive at the simplest determinations. From there I commence the trip backwards until I finally final arrived at the population again, this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and connections. The first way is that which the economists took historically in the beginning… As soon as these individual moments [R: of value, division of labor, money] were more or less fixed and abstracted, the economic systems began, climbing up from the simple, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the state, the exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the weaving together [Zusammenfassung] of many determinations, hence the unity of the manifold. In thought it appears as the process of the weaving together, as a result, not as a starting point, although it is really a starting point and thus also the starting point for intuition [Anschauung] and idea. In the first way, the full idea volatilizes into abstract determination; in the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.”

The path down and the path back up, the way of pins and the way of needs, the negative identity between forwards and backwards – LI has hammered on these ideas until we are afraid that, like a bad carpenter, we have crooked our nail. But it is a pattern we meet all too often among the nineteenth century aliens, who, looking back, have noted with horror that universal history somehow took a wrong turn. The method of political economy, here, looks – not accidentally – not only like an alchemical process a la Faust, but like exploration - and here, again, the epistemic operator that Foucault, strangely, passes over in silence, ‘discovery’, throws around its historical weight. To the source of tears, to the vital liquids, to the volatilized moment – such is the great work. What I’m calling weaving together might be better called, following this metaphoric, concentration as in the standard translation of the Grundrisse.

In a sense, what Marx did was follow Faust’s path of reversal – in the late thirties, writing his articles on windfallen wood, he started out – much like the beginning in this passage – with the state. The great abstraction of the state. Law and philosophy had taught him to regard the state as the fulcrum of society. What he learns, in the forties, is that the path he is on leads him to levels below the state – which no longer, logically, can be the fulcrum. He sinks down to the underworld of daily activity, of production and reproduction, in which the categories of the surface – for instance, of individuality – have no hold. And then he turns – realizing that this is the turn taken by political economists – and makes his way back to the surface. The philosophical mistake was to confuse the way this unrolls in one’s head – for it can unroll in no other social space – for the force that drives the whole. Invention is the tricky doeppelgaenger of discovery.

Mann's Goethe and Tolstoy

Before I begin, I can't emphasize enough that the blog I've labelled, News from Haiti, has become essential. They are publishing a chronicle of a fairly well known Haitian writer, Lyonel Trouillot. Those who can read French should go to this site. For those who can't, I might translate some of the Trouillot articles on News from the Zona, if I have time.

The one 19th century literary work that leaps most resolutely into the void of the artificial paradise is Goethe’s Faust, which from the very beginning seeks the transition from the medieval world – in which Aristotle and Nostradamus are equally valid routes to secret knowledge – to the modern world – in which there is only one route to all knowledge, and secrecy is simply a matter of encrypting. I’ve been pondering how to approach Faust for a while now, what doddering and crooked approach to make – ruled as I am by the idea that secrets cannot be dismissed so easily, nor universal history affirmed so flatly. How to circle around this monster?
Thus, I’ve been reading Kittler and Thomas Mann, particularly his essay on Goethe and Tolstoi. I’ve already written about Mann’s Doctor Faustus on News from the Zona, and mentioned the Goethe and Tolstoy essay as well. There are two versions of the latter; I have only the first one, the 1922 version, in German. The second version – much expanded and changed – is, I think, the basis for the English translation that I also have, in Essays of Three Decades, a volume published with a curious lack of information about what texts are being translated.
The 1922 version was written after Mann had flung the gauntlet down against ‘civilization’ – by which he meant French dominated Europe – in Non-Political Man. Mann was still traveling that dangerous route. He published the Goethe and Tolstoy essay, which was originally an address, in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1922. And, as we know, Mann was already in retreat from the company he’d been keeping at this point. Mann’s politics, or non-politics, grew directly out of his novelist’s sensibility. By 1922 he had received enough of an impression about where things were going in Germany that his conscience was bothering him. To be fair, that disquiet – in Mann, the dialectic always appears as disquiet – was present in the back and forth about Europe itself. Mann’s interpretation of Nietzsche, for instance, at first plunges towards the right – he forgets the Nietzsche who, at the end of his working life, claimed that it was tragic that he was forced to write in German rather than French, a devastating thing for a writer to say – by claiming Nietzsche as an ally in repelling the democratizing, leveling effect of European culture. But then he makes one of those very Mann-ian twists, and claims that even as Nietzsche assailed European liberalism, he became its strongest advocate by writing in the kind of German that threw off German barbarism, and that resembled nothing so much as the German of Heine, that most Parisian of Germans. Thus, Mann’s conversion to democracy – or rather his progress. under the only instinct he really trusted, that vast, ticklish irony of his, back to civilization, can be traced – for those with the Spursinn - in the second version of the essay.
But let’s talk about the first version of the essay. Rousseau, here, is the stand-in for French Civilization – the Rousseau in whose Confessions, Mann thought, one could discern the clang of the Revolutionary mob. And the Rousseau, too, who had such an impact on both Goethe and Tolstoy – Mann recalls that in Tolstoy, in his autobiography, wrote that when he was a teenager, he replaced the cross that hung from the chain around his neck with a medallion of Rousseau. Ah, fatal exchange!
What did Goethe and Tolstoy take from Rousseau? Two impulses: that of confessing, and that of educating. For Mann these connect, the circuit is completed, in Rousseau’s work, and of course from there it migrates to Goethe’s – from Werther to Dichtung und Wahrheit – and to Tolstoy’s.
Mann writes of this migration of impulses under the influence of the way Nietzsche would construct psychological types, as a sort of teleological shorthand for cultural history – that is, a shorthand in which the culture of an epoch found its sense, its direction - which was of course Burkhardt’s idea as well. And in many ways mine, even if I do not view these psychological types psychologically. One can easily see that Rousseau is figured by Mann in much the same way that Nietzsche figures the Redeemer in The Antichrist.
Mann quotes Merezhovsky’s essay about Tolstoy: “ ‘The artistic works of Tolstoy are fundamentally nothing other than a mighty diary kept up for fifty years, an endless, exhaustive confession.” And this critic adds further: ‘In the literature of all times and places, you will hardly find a second writer who strips his private life, yes, even the most intimate sides of it, with such great hearted sincerity, like Tolstoy.’ Great hearted – I observe that this is a somewhat euphemistic adjective. One could be, one wants to be ugly, and give this sincerity of the famous autobiographers other, coarse adjectives. ; in the sense, for instance, in which Turgenev once ironically labeled ‘mistakes’ that ‘the great writer cannot do without’. Obviously by which is meant the lack of certain inhibitions, of a certain, otherwise demanded feeling of shame, discretion, chasteness, modesty, or to use a politically incorrect turn of phrase, the dominance of a certain demand for love from the world, an unconditional one, in as much as, by self revelation, it is much the same if virtues or vices are revealed: one demands to be known and to be loved, loved, because known, or loved, in spite of being known. That is what I call the unconditional demand for love. It is curious that the world heeds this and does as it is asked.”
Confession and education – Faust, from the very beginning, is the man who has put all his sexual energy into the will to truth – and yet, as Kittler points out, we see him, from the beginning, translating logos – in the beginning was the word – with “Tun” – act – in the beginning was the deed. With that substitution, the thunder speaks.

A sense for traces

I'm going to try to tear my appalled attention away from Haiti, and begin a new thread about Goethe's Faust, book II. As Thomas Mann wrote in his essay, Goethe and Tolstoi, Goethe was a man of the 18th century whose Spuersinn - sense of traces - foresaw the 19th: "the whole social-economic development of the 19th century, the industrialization of the old cultural and agricultural lands, the domination of the machine, the rise of organized labor, the class conflicts, democracy, socialism, Americanism even, along with the sum total of intellectual and educational consequences that organically come out of these changes.” In Mann's Doktor Faustus the narrator, Zeitblum, remarks that it wasn't until the end of World War I that the ancien regime - a way of thinking stretching back to the 14th century - finally collapsed. In this respect, the "Spursinne" for what I'd call the advent of the artificial paradise has to be put in relation to the fact that, for the great mass of people even in the 'advanced' countries like France and Germany, it touched them only at the edges.

To return, for a moment, to the scenes that we can't get out of our head of Haiti - the place that created the sugar and rum wealth of France and, by extension, Europe, the land that received, like a giant maw, hundreds of thousands of black bodies and swallowed them in the 18th century, ate them up, chewed up 500,000 - to see the earthquake knock down the artificial paradise is to see how it adheres to our skin and bones, how we only move within it, even those of us who are on the edge of it, and how, destroyed, it destroys us.

I can't stand it

This is the time
this is the time
This is the time
because there is no time

The NYT hosted a 'debate' today about what "we" should do about Haiti, in which a bunch of Americans exchanged airy views about impossible changes that should be magically implemented in the near future, or a decade from now, etc.

In actuality, the future is fucking now, and what we should be asking is why, if we have ability, as any half assed surfer of the net has, to pinpoint hundreds of situations in Port Au Prince, and we have the equipment - why we aren't taking advantage of that. Why is there not a heavy helicopter traffic over the skies of Port au Prince? Why is it that the incredibly simple tools that are needed aren't being distributed, as the Newspaper gathers tres tres interesting opinions about Haiti's economic future?

From Le Monde:
On the corner of Capois and Cameau streets, the moder bank Unibank building is half collapsed. With naked hands, a group of twenty youths are extracting great blocks of concrete at the base of the edifice.

"There are two persons alive," cries one of them. With the aid of a long plastic tube, the improvisatory rescuers begin to exchange some words with the survivors who ask for water. At the end of two hours of effort, two men are taken out. The first, an employee of the bank, 26, is unharmed; the other can barely stand.

Au coin des rues Capois et Cameau, l'immeuble moderne de la banque Unibank est à moitié effondré. A mains nues, un groupe d'une vingtaine de jeunes dégagent de gros blocs de béton à la base de l'édifice.

" Il y a deux personnes en vie ", s'écrie l'un d'eux. A l'aide d'un long tuyau en plastique, les sauveteurs improvisés parviennent à échanger quelques mots avec les survivants qui demandent de l'eau. Au bout de deux heures d'efforts, deux hommes sont dégagés. Le premier, un employé de la banque, âgé de 26 ans, est indemne, l'autre, un agent de sécurité a du mal à se relever.

These twenty guys seem to have understood more in their lifetimes than the whole of the NYT editorial office if given the power of infinite recycling through time by the compassionate Buddha. I can't stand it.

I, a scrawny nothing in Austin, merely by scanning blogs, facebook, twitter, can find a hundred, two hundred descriptions of what is happening, and where, in Port au Prince. I know exactly who has set up a rescue station in Jacmal. So where the fuck is the U.S. rescue mission? Do they have nobody fucking doing the same thing? Boom, we have a rescue center in Jacmal already, they need tents, medical tents, fly them the fuck in. Information is pouring out into the air, and being absolutely ignored by the powers that be. USE YOUR INFORMATION!