The book is rejected, and LI is bummed

Well, the agent to whom I sent my proposal letter had one his factotums respond that it wasn’t the type of project for the agent’s “list”. No explanation, but I imagine that the factotum was the one assigned to the task of delicately warding off the cranks. And, admittedly, I am a crank.

Well, fuck it. I was bummed for a bit. But I still think that this small book works – it would be an excellent intro to my larger, more flou happiness book. If – I told myself, awake in the hollows of 3 a.m. as the snow began to really accumulate on the streets of Paris – if I just made a first chapter, some 10,000 word consideration of how, a, we moderns have come to at least accept the myth of homo economicus, and b., how economics, in its policy designs, has tried to impress the character of homo economicus upon capitalist societies.

Unfortunately, the story I want to tell has more than just one linear narrative – because in telling this story of the moderns, I am concerned to show that the moderns do not, contra the intellectual historians and the economists, make up one homogenous mass – that in fact in the everyday life of contemporary societies a number of exchange matrixes are in play – and in fact must be in play for capitalism to be liveable.

From the question and the thesis springs my drama – how HE has been fostered in society, and variously resisted by imagination armed.

So these are the elements I need to put into my first chapter.

Ireland and Pareto

Ireland and Pareto

It is a tale often told by the economist, this one of Pareto optimization. The tale goes that, in the Pareto optimal state, we reach a sort of distributional heaven, in which no person can gain any utility without that gain being made at the expense of somebody else in heaven. But the tale contains a paradox, of the kind associated with Zeno. To advance to this state, we must move through Pareto superior arrangements. These arrangements subtly reverse the terms of the optimum. A Pareto superior arrangement is one in which one party – or shall we say the owners? – may gain utility, but without any other party in our heaven losing it. This, we are assured, improves the entire set – all of heaven rejoices when one sinner is forgiven – or when one of the archangels receives a nice golden parachute and stock options amounting to 400 million dollars.

This, of course, is the neo-liberal heaven on earth, and the dispensation by which our rulers rule us. It is, however, a curious idea. For one thing, the ‘gain’ of utility seems to come ex nihilo – surely we are far removed from the labor theory of value here. Ex nihilo, in bureaucrat-speak, is exterior – it is an exogeneous gain. If it were, after all, endogenous, then we would have to ask about who created it, which would lead us to the question of whether, indeed, the other party wasn’t losing utility here. Which brings us to the other perplexing moment in this paradise. For the assumption, here, seems to be that there is no future - it is all present states. Heaven indeed! We transcend time, in Pareto superior states. For the inequality that must hold between the parties is eternally static.

But if our heaven is not in eternity, but in the sublunar flux of time – if all things in this heaven are mutable – then we see that, indeed, what looks like no skin off the nose of the drudge – what does he care if the boss makes his 400 million, as long as the drudge himself makes enough to buy the entertainment center, the car and the house on easy credit terms of 9 percent per annum (with the creditor holding the right to readjust interest at any time)? – might actually not be such a good deal. Heaven has a flaw. The devil’s disciples, from Machiavelli to Marx, have noticed it. The flaw is called power. In fact, a part of the 400 million dollars might well be used to block the poor drudge’s socially upward mobility, by making the cost of entry into a higher class too expensive – say, by making college tuition too expensive, or dentistry, etc. The boss may use part of the 400 million dollars to make tax loopholes for himself, to be paid for by either closing off social welfare programs that benefited the drudge (who will be scolded for his ‘special interests’ and his unwillingness to “share the sacrifice”). Or – and such are the wrecks of mutability – there may come a time, a horrible time, called a slump. Yes, in heaven on earth, it may be that the business cycle is not abolished, even if the economist angels have announced that God, that is, the free and competitive market, has abolished it.

We are testing the effect of creeping from one Pareto superior position to another in Ireland. Here, indeed, the gains in utility seemed to be exogenous. A low corporate tax brought in companies from outside the country. And then, look at how easy credit terms were offered through banks that were flooded with cash from foreign investors! Why, drudge and millionaire could dance to the pleasing pipes of some Celtic Tiger rock band and lay down, afterwards, in one another’s arms, like the proverbial lion and the lamb.

But it turns out that, while the lamb was asleep, he was being trussed up, and now he wakes up to discover, to his horror, the boiling pot and the butcher’s blade. For it is the drudge, the lamb, the one who was gaining utility in spirit whenever his boss’s board of directors gave the boss another raise, who is going to be sacrificed in the feast. Pareto superior states, it turns out, are heavens for the peculator, and they end in fricassee for the drudge. Who doesn’t understand, and turns to the economist who proclaimed the end of the business cycle. Only to hear that now the business cycle must end by the drudge, a., paying for all his boss’s parties, and b., lowering his wages and paying the debts (the not so easy credit term debts) that the economist, just last week, was telling him was the great reason he was the most fortunate drudge in all of Emerald heaven!

And the poor drudge turns to the right (where the words are the same) and the left (where sympathetic leaders should that the drudge has been mishandled, but (sotto voce) that really, there’s nothing one can do, and we do depend on the boss for all good things in life, don’t we?) and discovers that not only is his credit worthless, but so is his vote!

One of Pareto’s admirers wrote an article – oh, I should find the buckos name – to defend the great man from the accusation he was a fascist. The accusation comes from the fact that, at the end of his life, Pareto embraced Mussolini. The admirer wrote that Pareto was a great lover of liberty – of entrepreneurial freedom! – and thus, the fascist business was all a misunderstanding. But, he also wrote, Pareto also hated democracy.

The love of liberty, the hatred of democracy, stir a little and you get Pinochet. Or Klein’s shock doctrine. Or the current state of Ireland, as the drudges are auctioned off to the bankers.

Harpagon 1

The miser is a figure, a character, who exists, in the ancient world and the early modern world, in terms of comedy and vice. He is usually old. He is usually miserable. In terms of Simmel’s schema of money, he is perverted in a key way: he has forgotten the function of money as a means, and in this way, he has forgotten the ends of life.

“When one wants to grasp human fate in the schema of the relationships between the wish and its object, one must say that money, in relation to the stopping point in the series of ends, is really the most inadequate, as well as the most adequate object of our desire.”

Moliere’s miser, Harpagon, can certainly be seen from this side of things. If we look at the sexual objects of desire in play, here, from the beginning we have two secret love matches - of Harpagon’s daughter and son – that contrast with Harpagon’s own overt desire for his son’s choice, Mariane, a space that has been opened by a fact mentioned in the very first scenes – the mother in this household has died. Elise replies to her brother Cleante’s recital of griefs received from their father, Harpagon:

“It is really true that, every day, he gives us more and more reason to regret the death of our mother, and…”

At which point she is interrupted by Cleante who hears the voice of their father.

The death of the mother/wife is both the occasion of the removal of a certain limit to the existential perversion that now characterizes Harpagon – his avarice – and allows the father, an old man, to reverse the natural order by seeking to marry a young woman, Mariane. I want to make a little more business of this competition between the love match and the old man’s money – but I’ll do that later. At the moment, let’s note that the mythic background, here, of an underground god raping a young woman – Pluto/Persephone – fits with certain features of Harpagon’s character that seem borrowed from Aristonphanes Ploutus – the ragged clothes, for instance. And, in particular, the buried treasure.

Harpagon’s two-fold perversion has one source – forgetting the ends of life. Sexually, the end of life, in the seventeenth century, is reproduction. Ever more life. Similarly, the end of money, as Boisguilbert will show in 1690, is commodities – use values.

Simmel interprets this curious synthesis of sterility and desire as the logical result of making a sort of category mistake – mistaking the absolute means for the absolute end:

“If therefore the mediated character of money has the effect that it emerges as the abstract form of pleasures that one does not yet enjoy, then the valuing of its possession in as much as it is not expended preserves a coloring of objectivity, it costumes itself with that fine charm of resignation, that accompanies al objective end goals, and combines the positivity and negativity of enjoyment in a peculiar unity that words can hardly express.
Both moments achieve in avarice their most extreme tension with each other, because the money has an aspect like an absolute means to unbounded possibilities of enjoyment and at the same time as the absolute means can still be completely untouched in its function as the unexploited possession of pleasure.”

Simmel is touching, here, on the ascetic life style of thrift that Weber will later emphasize – and yet the miser does not seem to be a normal bourgeois, even if his character does enter into all descriptions of the bourgeois up to the twentieth century. And even, among outlier fortunes – for instance, those having to do with suddenly gained primary product wealth, like the Texas oil billionaires of the 19302-1960s - the miser figure pops up again, in all its archaic glory, as does its companion, the spendthrift.

Simmel on money and the devil

In early modern Europe, money was the determining factor in creating the literary and moral character types of the spendthrift and the miser. Characters are not vocations, but vocations can accord with or be in discord with characters – and evidently the miser was the character type drawn to middleman professions, ones in which the circulation of commodities, or money itself, is privileged at the expense of production. Misers are also associated with age – whereas the spendthrift was associated with, on the one hand, disdain for a profession – a sort of aristocratic pretence – and youth. Simmel’s essay on the avaricious, the spendthrift and the poor takes its bearings from the social meaning of money as a medium of exchange – as a means – which is why he also includes the poor, a group “in its purest and most specific appearance” defined by “the measurements of the money economy.”

Simmel comes at the problem from the perspective of philosophical anthropology: man is a purposive – a purpose setting – animal. But in as much as purposes give birth to intermediate stages – in as much as the mechanism that leads to a purpose can, in fact, create a middle ground of steps that have to be taken until the purpose is achieved – man is also an ‘indirect being’, the one who is always struggling with the means to ends, as Laocoon and his sons struggled with the snakes. The snakes, in the story, won – they strangled the prophet. Means, in Simmel’s story, also tend to win, as our social lives become so entangled in them, accommodate the distancing of ends and purposes so much, that ends and purposes become faint, distant, and irrelevant.

I think of Simmel’s essay (Über Geiz, Verschwendung und Armut, which is here), evidently hived off the great mass of Philosophy of Money, as being one kind of interpretation of a phenomenon – the role of the cash nexus as the great modernizing element in the world - that, from another side, was interpreted by Weber as inner worldly asceticism. Of course, in Marx, the penetration of all spheres of private life by exchange value receives another interpretation, for Marx sees the role of the cash nexus as a thing, in modernity, that can’t be understood without bringing it into relation to class differentiation, the division of labor, and the freeing of labor from feudal constraints.

Simmel recognizes that unlike the barter economy (or what he romantically calls the ‘natural’ economy), the money economy is not characterized by simply making money another kind of commodity. Rather, it is a commodity that loses all the sensual and, as it were, hedonistic features of a commodity in order to embody, as it were, substitution itself. He makes an interesting remark about that feature of money in relation to ascetic religions – a remark that foreshadows (and conflicts with) Weber’s thesis. Simmel is explaining the irreplaceability of money for living in a society that is fully monetized even though the gaining of money is only the gaining of a means to the things that make for living:

“It is because of this fact, where in principle only indifference reigns against all external things, that it is easy to slip into hatred against money.
Thus, secondly, the tempting character of money works all the more decisively. Because it is ready in every second to be applied, it is the most terrible trap of the weak hours, and since it seems to serve to create everything, it represents to the soul the most seductive of things; and all of this is such an uncanny danger as money, so long as it simply remains as money in our hands, is the most innocent and indifferent thing in the world.

Thus, for the ascetic sensibility, it becomes the appropriate symbol of the devil, who seduces us in her mask of harmlessness and impartiality; so that against the devil, like money, the only security lies in absolute distance, in the renunciation of any kind of relation, so harmless as it may seem.”
To be continued.

as astronomers to the stars, are economists to the economy.

We can easily imagine DNA replicating itself without molecular biologists, and the planets revolving around the sun without astronomers. But can we imagine capitalism without economists?

On the one hand, we are always identifying proto-forms of capitalism without contemporaries making a formal theory of it. On the other hand, would the kind of capitalism we know, that which appears in the 17th and 18th century in Europe and America, have developed as it did without the appearance, at the same time, of the political economists? And as political economists developed their discourse – as economics began to regard itself as a science – was capitalism merely a parallel development, one that they studied, or was it a development in which they played a role?

Marx, in the Grundrisse, working in the shadow of the disputes in Germany about theory and ‘materialism’, wrote:

daß die einfachre Kategorie herrschende Verhältnisse eines unentwickeltern Ganzen oder untergeordnete Verhältnisse eines entwickeltem Ganzen ausdrücken kann, die historisch schon Existenz hatten, eh das Ganze sich nach der Seite entwickelte, die in einer konkretem Kategorie ausgedrückt ist. Insofern entspräche der Gang des abstrakten Denkens, das vom Einfachsten zum Kombinierten aufsteigt, dem wirk||16|lichen historischen Prozeß…

“…the simpler categories can express the dominant relationships of an undeveloped whole or the subordinate relationships of a developed whole, which historically already exists, before the whole has developed towards the side that is expressed in a concrete category. Just in so far may the course of abstract thought, which ascends from the simplest to the combined, be correspondent to the real historical process.” – Marx, Grundrisse

I take it that the intellectual space, here, is opened up by the uncertain position of the ‘categories’ by which social life is understood vis-à-vis the dominant relationships of the social whole. Marx doesn’t seem to believe that there is a natural tendency within the social whole to move in a given direction – in this way, he does not have a classically liberal view of progress – but instead, given the presence of subordinate and dominate relationships, posits conflicts in which some agent figures.

Boldly, I take the concrete categories to be expressed in character-making. Or as all the boys and girls like to say now, in the construction of the subject. However, for obscure reasons, I prefer the vocabulary of the character to the subject. Maybe I will be able to explain this later.

the miser to the egotist

This morning I am finishing up my query letter on the book. I’m going to blog a lot of my work in progress, naturally. I’ve been thinking, over the last couple weeks, about misers. To this end, I’ve been reading Moliere’s L’avare and watching Louis de Funès version of it – which is quite funny. I was interested in seeing how Funès would make it funny, as, if you go by the play’s critical interpretation, it is a play in which the unfortunate spectator is put in the grip of an unrelievedly horrible monster, the miser Harpagon. Marcel Gutwirth begins his 1961 essay on the play – perhaps the best essay in English – like this:

“L'AVARE is probably Moliere's harshest play. Scheming love suits, openly rebellious chil-dren, an unloving father, a sordid theme hardly leave our sympathies any acceptable resting-place. Harpagon, moreover, is a monster who, unlike Tartuffe, is firmly anchored to the center of the stage. No jail, not even an omniscient King can rid the unhappy family of the man who is its head. His power may wither, as it must for the comedy to end on a note of relief, but his presence cannot be so decisively expunged from the lives of those around him. When Tartuffe is dragged to jail in Orgon's stead, justice is restored in the state, as is solidarity to the once bitterly divided family. Har-pagon leaving the stage to go see his chere cassette is merely shedding his family without another thought, allowing it to find unhoped for reunion under the wing of a new father, Don Thomas d'Alburcy, as generous and loving as the real father had been mean and hateful. “

It is easy to see, from the text, Harpagon’s meanness and lack of family feeling. In the very first scene, Harpagon’s daughter, Élise, mentions to her brother that the family has changed since their mother died – and certainly one feels that the death of the mother sets the mood for the entire play, which, in some ways, plays out an Oedipal struggle between father and son that the mother no doubt suppressed. Yet as Funès’ version shows, what may be monstrous, judged from the viewpoint of bourgeois drama, can be transformed into comedy when we remember how closely comedy is connected to puppetry. Wyndham Lewis remarks, somewhere, that he constructed the characters in his novels as puppets, in order to display both their monstrosity and their inherent ludicrousness. Lewis’s novels have never been popular for that very reason – but on the stage, especially a stage that has just emerged from the people’s plays of the foire, this works very well. Even as a text, it works – a couple of nights ago, reading the scene that plays out between Valere and Harpogon after Harpagon’s treasure has been stolen, I couldn’t stop laughing. Moliere knew how funny misunderstanding is – and – this is the uncanny thing about him as a writer - how it erodes our confidence in understanding.

So my next post will be about the miser. I think I will, firstly, bring into the discussion Simmel’s essay on Geiz – avarice, and then advance to Moliere.

Three stories of invisibility – or Gyges wound and unwound

1. In the first chapter of Marc Shell’s Economics of Literature, The Ring of Gyges, he relates two stories about the King of Lydia, Gyges. Shell is interested in Lydia because, in Greek historiography and legend, Lydia was the birthplace of coinage, and Shell is looking for something like the primal scene of monetization.
What does this have to do with invisibility?
The logic of Shell’s chapter slowly brings together, through Greek texts, the power of the invisible and the power of money, or, more precisely, how money operates to introduce invisibility into society.

This is the context for his analysis of Gyges.

“It is not easy for us, who have used coinage for some twenty-five hundred years, to imagine the impression it made on the minds of those who first used it in their city-states. The introduction of money to Greece has few useful analogies.1° Tales of Gyges associate him with founding a tyranny in Lydia and with a power of being able to transform visibles into invisibles and invisibles into visibles. This power, as we shall see, is associated with new economic and political forms that shattered the previous world and its culture.”

Gyges was the subject of two different histories, Shell points out, in Herodotus and Plato. In Herodotus, the tale goes like this. “Candaules [the King of Lydia] fell in love with his own wife, so much that he supposed her to be by far the fairest woman in the world; and being thus persuaded of this, he raved of her beauty (eidos) to Gyges". In this version of the story, Gyges is a noble at King Candaules’s court. Candaules is so proud of her beauty that he becomes convinced that someone other than himself must witness it – Gyges. He accuses Gyges of not believing him, and thus orders Gyges to spy on the queen, his wife, when she is dressing. Gyges doesn’t want to, for to spy on the naked queen would mean, in his opinion, taking property from the King – for the queen’s eidos – her figure, is the King’s property in the same way that the King’s figure on a coin marks the coin as the King’s property. Of course, in the latter case, the property is alienated and circulates – but at no point in the circulation does the coin change its stamp.

Gyges, in the event, is hidden by the King in the Queen’s chamber, and spies upon her nakedness. However, as Gyges does this and contrives to slip out of the chamber, unbeknownst to him, the Queen spots him. The next day she calls Gyges into her presence and gives him a choice. Either she will have him killed for spying on her, or he will kill the King and rule with her over Lydia. In one way or another, she will have her honor – her aidos – avenged.

The invisibility in this story is all a matter of human invention. It is the invisibility of the person who is hidden. The story is neatly sewn together as the invisible and the visible positions change places. That the Queen’s beauty is invisible to any male gaze except the King’s (we discount, in this story, the Queen’s serving women) is the motive that sets the intrigue in motion, for her beauty is, in a sense, both undervisible and overvisible – it exists as a second visibility. The King’s love is constrained by the fact that this second visibility cannot circulate. Gyges, as the voyeur, is indeed put into a position where he, invisibly, takes possession of that second visibility – but immediately, his position is reversed by the fact that, unbeknownst to him, he is seen by the Queen when he leaves his spot. The voyeur is, in turn, spied upon. A trope we find, incidentally, in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. And finally, of course, the two come together in a plot to overthrow the King. Here, they become conspirators in a secret – a relative of the invisible and the hidden.

Plato’s tale is better known. It is told by Glaucon in The Republic. The personages and terms, here, are rearranged a bit. Gyges is not a noble in this story, but a shepherd. Then one day…

“After a great deluge of rain and an earthquake, the ground opened and a chasm appeared in the place where he was pasturing; and they say that he went down and wandered into the chasm; and the story goes that he beheld other marvels there and a hollow bronze horse with little doors, and that he peeped in and saw a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature, and that there has nothing else (allo men ouden) but a gold ring on its hand, which he took off and went forth.”

This ring, it turns out, has the power to make its possessor invisible and then visible again. "Learning that the ring made him invisible, he immediately contrived to be one of the messengers of the king. When he arrived, he committed adultery with the king's wife and, along with her, set upon the king and killed him. And so he took over the rule".

The fable of Gyges is a limit case meant to throw light on the question of justice. If we have the power to escape the power of justice – the armed power of the state - by becoming invisible, would we continue to be just? Socrates argument is that the cause of behaving justly does not tell us the nature of justice – rather, justice is good in itself. “We have met all the.. . demands of the argument and we have not invoked the rewards and reputes of justice as you said [the poets] do, but we have proved that justice in itself is the best thing for the soul in
itself, and that the soul ought to do justice whether it possess the ring of Gyges or not, or the Helmet of Hades to boot".

Shell’s argument is that we must go back to the terms of the story – the antithesis of the visible and the invisible – to understand how it works textually in the Republic, in which the power of money is at work as an irritant. First, he cites early commentators on Herodotus’ story, which introduce the features that coalesce, later, in Gyges’s ring.

“That the queen could see Gyges in the bedroom indicates that she possessed not only a power to make things invisible but also a corresponding power (as invisible spy) to make visible to herself things that were invisible to other people. Ptolemaeus Chennus writes that the eyes of "the wife of [Clandaules. . . had double pupils, and she was extremely sharp sighted, being the possessor of the dragon-stone. This is how she came to see Gyges as he passed through the door.” The dragonstone has an opposite effect from the magic ring. In one case the talisman makes people invisible; in the other case, it makes people visible: taken together, their power makes things visible or invisible. This is the power of Platonic Gyges. It is also the power of the archetypal tyrant.”

Shell, going back to the notion that the King possesses a property in the appearance of the wife, alludes to the Greek distinction between two forms of transaction.

“ousia phanera is property whose transfer was seen by others, and ousia aphanB is property whose transfer was not seen. (In a visible transfer, the buyer and seller might exchange a symbolic deposit not as part of the purchase price but as a visible sign of their agreement.) The second meaning of the opposition involves money: ousia phanera is a nonmonetary commodity (such as land or "real" estate) andousia aphanēs is money (such as a coin).”

Which brings us to our second history.

2. An Athenian farmer, Chremylus, goes to Apollo’s temple at Delphi to ask advice from the God. Chremylus has been one of Socrates’ kind – he has done good all his life. But all around him, he has seen wealth go to the worst, the cunning, those who are incompetent in everything except plundering; more, he has seen honesty positively punished. Socrates, of course, extolled justice even if it put the just man in danger of losing his life. But this is to put the question on the level of the individual: how about a society in which the just man always loses? Is it just for a man to condemn his children to pain and poverty by teaching them to be just, thus reproducing the social conditions that make for injustice? Chremylus is too good not to be worried about how his son will make out if he follows his father’s path. Thus, he wants to know whether he should raise his son to be unjust, a criminal, and thus spare the boy the pain that the father has known.

The oracle gives him a typically oblique judgment – the first person he meets, returning to Athens, he is to talk to and take into his home.

The man he meets is blind. His clothes are ragged and dirty. Chremylus decides he wants to know the wretch’s story, and even threatens the blind man with his slave, Cario, if he won’t tell it.

“CARIO. If you don't speak, you wretch, I will surely do you an ill turn.
PLUTUS. Friends, take yourselves off and leave me.
CHREMYLUS. That we very certainly shan't.
CARIO. This, master, is the best thing to do. I'll undertake to secure him the most frightful death; I will lead him to the verge of a precipice and then leave him there, so that he'll break his neck when he pitches over.
CHREMYLUS. Well then, I leave him to you, and do the thing quickly.
PLUTUS. Oh, no! Have mercy!
CHREMYLUS. Will you speak then?
PLUTUS. But if you learn who I am, I know well that you will ill-use me and will not let me go again.
CHREMYLUS. I call the gods to witness that you have naught to fear if you will only speak.
PLUTUS. Well then, first unhand me.
CHREMYLUS. There! we set you free.
PLUTUS. Listen then, since I must reveal what I had intended to keep a secret. I am Plutus.”
Chremylus is, of course, skeptical of this story. Plutus is the god of wealth – the man before him looks like the product of the worst poverty. The images seem irreconcilable.
“CHREMYLUS. But tell me, whence come you to be so squalid?
PLUTUS. I have just left Patrocles' house, who has not had a bath since his birth.[740]
CHREMYLUS. But your infirmity; how did that happen? Tell me.
PLUTUS. Zeus inflicted it on me, because of his jealousy of mankind. When I was young, I threatened him that I would only go to the just, the wise, the men of ordered life; to prevent my distinguishing these, he struck me with blindness! so much does he envy the good!
CHREMYLUS. And yet, 'tis only the upright and just who honour him.
PLUTUS. Quite true.
CHREMYLUS. Therefore, if ever you recovered your sight, you would shun the wicked?
PLUTUS. Undoubtedly.
CHREMYLUS. You would visit the good?
PLUTUS. Assuredly. It is a very long time since I saw them.”
As A.M. Bowie has observed, Plutus’ story is paralleled by the story of Prometheus. Just as Prometheus, out of love for mankind, steals fire from the gods – and is punished for it by Zeus – so, too, the god of wealth, when he can see, intends to distribute money only to those who are upright – to, in effect, give money to the just.
Blindness is invisibility reversed – instead of the invisible being present to the seeing eye, the visible is made invisible by being present to the unseeing eye. But eye it still is. Aristophanes story – for this is the storyline of Aristophanes’ last play, Plutus – is a sort of variation on the Gyges story, substituting an immortal for a mortal and blindness – a sightless presence – for invisibility – a presence that can’t be seen. In the course of the play, Plutus’s sight is restored – and initiates a golden age of just deserts. What interests me is that, although Zeus’s treatment binds together the two mythical figures, it is Prometheus who survives, in the collective imagination, as the hero. The romantics, including Marx, were attracted to the Prometheus myth in that it countered Christian meekness and pulled away the veil from the violence of the established order. But the blessings of a seeing Plutus did not inspire the poets. Yet, the attempt to make Plutus see, the dream of the seeing god of wealth, has been the ardent pursuit, the mythic ideal, of liberal society – one that finally, in a dialectical movement, returns the utopian society of the end of Aristophanes play back to the blind god, now in John Rawls’ original position, distributing the goods in society properly, restrained not by Zeus, but by Pareto optimality.
3. And then – another transformation of Gyges story – there is the story of the killing of the Chinese Mandarin.
The story is told in Pére Goriot. Rastignac is tempted by Vautrin to plot for the destruction of the rich brother of Victorine. Victorine would inherit the family wealth if her brother died – an event that Vautrin seeks to arrange through a duel. As Victorine is in love with Rastignac, it would only remain for the latter to marry the former and enjoy her wealth. The day after Vautrin reveals this plan, Rastignac consults a friend, Bianchon:
"'I'm being tortured by evil thoughts,"' Rastignac says, adding: "Have you read Rousseau?" "Yes." "Do you remember that passage in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chi-nese mandarin, without leaving Paris, just by an act of will?" "Yes." "Well then?" "Oh, I'm on my thirty-third mandarin." "Don't joke about it. Come, if it were proved to you that the thing was possible and that all you'd need to do would be nod your head, would you do it?" "Is your mandarin very old? Oh, well, young or old, healthy or paralytic, good Lord ... Oh, the devil! Well, no."
I’m quoting the passage as it appears in Carlo Ginzburg’s essay, “Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance”. This scene in Balzac is, of course, the seed for much that has followed in the novel - for instance, Raskolnikov’s problem in Crime and Punishment falls out along these lines, as Grossman has pointed out in his study of Doestoevsky. As I recall, Czeslaw Milosz devoted an essay to Rastignac’s problem – although I can’t find it now. But Ginzburg’s essay is exceptional in following the trace of the motifs that finally find their place in this mistaken reference to Rousseau. It is rather Diderot, as Ginzburg points out, who is Rastignac’s predecessor here. Diderot presents the problem of distance and conscience first in the Dialogue Between a Father and a Son, and later in Supplement to the Voyage of Bouganville. In the former, the story is told of a hatter who steals the inheritance of his dead wife from her family. The family had the legal right to it; the hatter, however, had taken care of his invalid wife for eighteen years. Finally, the hatter decides to flee with the money to Geneva. At this point, Diderot writes:
"We agreed," Diderot writes, "that perhaps distance in space or time weakened all feelings and all sorts of guilty conscience, even of crime. The assassin, removed to the shores of China, can no longer see the corpse which he left bleeding on the banks of the Seine. Remorse springs perhaps less from horror of oneself than from fear of others; less from shame at what one has done than from the blame and punishment it would bring if it were found out."
And so China, distance and murder come together. But the terms are reversed, of course, in Rastignac’s tale – which may well figure the reverse of the terms of adventure as eighteenth century colonialism, with its slavery and sugar, gives way to nineteenth century imperialism, with its markets and opium.