I left the following rather mild comment on an economics site about “WHAT SHOULD BE DONE”, thee Chernyshevsky caps included : “Hike the capital gains tax to 39 percent, Start separate tax categories for the individuals making more than 400 thou and more than a million thou per year and bring their marginal rates back to pre-Reagan levels. Remember, spending is great. It is what the gov. should do. And it should do it without the keynesian mumbo jumbo, which is a political stupidity. Instead of a stimulus, a patchwork of government spending justified, each piece, by the product or service it will bring. This is where economists, who live in a world of aggregates, have no psychological feel for the way the voter thinks at all. To call it a stimulus was from the beginning an idiocy. But spending on infrastructure, spending on research, taking over some banks and backing massive, trillion dollar loans to the middle class - that is an idea whose time is still here.”
In reply, I was told, as I often am told, that I am a socialist. I have no business experience. I am one of those people who have the attitude of all take and no give. I am one of those people who say about our massive deficit that it should be paid by “anyone but me.”
This rather charmed me. Anyone but me is an excellent guide to our current crisis. Firstly, of course, one should refute the nonsense that businesses live on the Responsible Me principle. In fact, capitalist enterprise in our epoch is founded wholly on anyone but me. This is standard practice - one always tries to offload costs. Ask the oil companies who cleans up after they cut canals through bayou country and the swamps start to salinize. Anyone but me. Ask the power companies who should pay for the enormous costs of nuclear accidents. Anyone but me. Ask the banks who should pay for trillion dollar mistakes in trick investing involving useless financial instruments. Anyone but me. Anyone but me is the principle of the top 1 percent income bracket.
Luckily, that bracket makes enough that whacking them with taxes will not diminish their life styles in any noticeable way. Their healthcare will be excellent, their vacations will be primo, their children will go to the best schools, etc. Money, at a certain point, is all about power. And power is there to ensure that the anyone but me ideology works every time there is an oopsy moment. It is, in other words, insurance against the supposed 'Darwinism' of capitalism.
After the GAO report on the 16 trillion - trillion - dollars in 'emergency loans', at emergency interest rates of less than one percent, hat floated the entire investor class over the last three years, I would think that there'd be a certain shame about pretending that us 'socialists' know nothing about business. We do - we just don't know how to do socialism. The wealthy, however, have perfected that art. It is time to learn from them.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
why american liberalism has the attractiveness of a dripping faucet
The debt ceiling crisis was comedy relief of a high order. Afficianados of American Plutocracy slapstick appreciated the fact that as we were assured that "terrorists" were holding America, or at least Obama, 'hostage', the GAO released its audit of the Fed's very beautiful and efficient welfare system for the rich. It turns out that the Fed loaned out 16 trillion dollars at below 1 percent interest to anyone who owned a Rolls or a hedgefund, making life for the upper crust - squeezed as they were by the pesky recession - so, so much better. It is reported that Citicorps bosses were able, finally, to get dental work and dairy products - poor things were suffering on the street. They were also able to get homes in the Hamptons, yachts, Van Goghs and other perks that keep them mentally agile. We are so lucky.
But I am most amused by the general liberal indignation that the Republican congressmen, elected on the pledge to radically cut federal spending, actually did cut federal spending. It was the vileness of this approach to politics that was especially scorned by NYT editorialists and Dem fluffers. Paul Waldman, the D.C. Dem apparatchik who writes at TAPPED, put it best when comparing Dems to Republicans:
"Let’s say that Mitt Romney is the next president. Are congressional Republicans going to threaten to torpedo the economy if their demands aren’t met? Of course not. First, because their priorities will be basically the same as his, and more important, because they know that undermining the economy is bad for the ruling party. But would Democrats do the same thing Republicans just did? Refuse to raise the ceiling unless they extract all kinds of concessions to move policy more in their preferred direction?
It’s hard to see it. That’s not because Democrats are incapable of playing hardball, it’s just that when they do, it tends to be on a smaller scale. Holding a gun to the economy’s head is something that requires a high tolerance for risk, an indifference to the suffering of ordinary people, and confidence that your opponents will cave before you will. Republicans have more of all three. So what we’re likely to see is that when there’s a Republican president, the debt ceiling will be raised, with some half-hearted attempts by progressive Democrats to get something in return, but when there’s a Democratic president, we go through this whole ugly process again and again."
Holding a gun to the economy's head! So ungenteel. As ideology has lost its savor and importance in the D.C. world, what has become ultraimportant is gentility - good manners. Maturity. The American economy, for instance, obviously needed a transfusion of trillions of dollars into banks and the financial sector so that we could "avoid a depression" - and such is the maturity of the Dems that they did not bother discussing it with the people. Similarly, elected on the promise, in 2006, to end the war, did the dems put a gun to Bush's head, or the head of the American military? No! Because of their love of ordinary people. Ordinary people who elected them on promises that they no ordinary people understand must be compromised by 'political reality".
That the Reps just proved that political reality is a fiction, and that you actually can, radically, use the levers of power to put in place what you promised is something so outre, for the Dem punditocrats, that they can hardly get over it. It makes them all jittery about 'governance'. Governance, of course, is when you elect people on the premise that a campaign is a sort of magic trick - fun for the whole family, but you don't really expect people to be able to draw rabbits out of hats, do you? Similarly, the Dems ineffectuality has been promoted, by these pundits - of which there are many - as an actual virtue. The Dems would never put a gun to anybody's head. They would never put a salad fork to anybody's head. How could they with all the compassion flowing from their heart towards ordinary people?
I thought, two years ago, that the age of the Great Fly, Bush, was drawing to a close. I was wrong. Bush apparently is now the baseline for Obama, who is the very spirit of gentility. We are still very much in the Bush era. And there is no opposition. Stick a salad fork in the belly of American liberalism, cause it is dead!
But I am most amused by the general liberal indignation that the Republican congressmen, elected on the pledge to radically cut federal spending, actually did cut federal spending. It was the vileness of this approach to politics that was especially scorned by NYT editorialists and Dem fluffers. Paul Waldman, the D.C. Dem apparatchik who writes at TAPPED, put it best when comparing Dems to Republicans:
"Let’s say that Mitt Romney is the next president. Are congressional Republicans going to threaten to torpedo the economy if their demands aren’t met? Of course not. First, because their priorities will be basically the same as his, and more important, because they know that undermining the economy is bad for the ruling party. But would Democrats do the same thing Republicans just did? Refuse to raise the ceiling unless they extract all kinds of concessions to move policy more in their preferred direction?
It’s hard to see it. That’s not because Democrats are incapable of playing hardball, it’s just that when they do, it tends to be on a smaller scale. Holding a gun to the economy’s head is something that requires a high tolerance for risk, an indifference to the suffering of ordinary people, and confidence that your opponents will cave before you will. Republicans have more of all three. So what we’re likely to see is that when there’s a Republican president, the debt ceiling will be raised, with some half-hearted attempts by progressive Democrats to get something in return, but when there’s a Democratic president, we go through this whole ugly process again and again."
Holding a gun to the economy's head! So ungenteel. As ideology has lost its savor and importance in the D.C. world, what has become ultraimportant is gentility - good manners. Maturity. The American economy, for instance, obviously needed a transfusion of trillions of dollars into banks and the financial sector so that we could "avoid a depression" - and such is the maturity of the Dems that they did not bother discussing it with the people. Similarly, elected on the promise, in 2006, to end the war, did the dems put a gun to Bush's head, or the head of the American military? No! Because of their love of ordinary people. Ordinary people who elected them on promises that they no ordinary people understand must be compromised by 'political reality".
That the Reps just proved that political reality is a fiction, and that you actually can, radically, use the levers of power to put in place what you promised is something so outre, for the Dem punditocrats, that they can hardly get over it. It makes them all jittery about 'governance'. Governance, of course, is when you elect people on the premise that a campaign is a sort of magic trick - fun for the whole family, but you don't really expect people to be able to draw rabbits out of hats, do you? Similarly, the Dems ineffectuality has been promoted, by these pundits - of which there are many - as an actual virtue. The Dems would never put a gun to anybody's head. They would never put a salad fork to anybody's head. How could they with all the compassion flowing from their heart towards ordinary people?
I thought, two years ago, that the age of the Great Fly, Bush, was drawing to a close. I was wrong. Bush apparently is now the baseline for Obama, who is the very spirit of gentility. We are still very much in the Bush era. And there is no opposition. Stick a salad fork in the belly of American liberalism, cause it is dead!
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Explosion, revolution, the third life
Almost the entirety of Juri Lotman’s life was spent in the Soviet Union. As Nataliia S. Avtonomova has pointed out in an overview of the L. & W., this distinguished him from other of the great 20th century Russian critics: Bakhtine, Jakobson, and Skhlovsky. Like these critics, Lotman was what was once called, in Wilhelmine Germany, a ‘cultural philosopher” – which meant a freelance sociologist, historian, critic, and psychologist. Freud used the phrase ‘wild analysis” to speak of a certain use of psychoanalysis – and indeed, although attached to culture and the life of reading to an extraordinary extent, the cultural philosopher did operate in the institutional wilds. Nietzsche, Simmel, Spengler form a certain geneology in this respect. Certain novelists – Mann, Musil, Broch, Canetti – were also wild analysts.
Of course, Lotman did have a university position and a recognized status, but his aim was broader than that of, say, enfolding semantics in a larger semiotics, Greimas’ project, or discovering the motifs of folktales – his aim, like Barthes, was to understand, stuffed to the gills with texts, the cultural currents of universal history in its modern phase under the distancing and clarifying guise of a demasker of myth – a mythographer’s evil twin.
At the end of his life, he toyed with the notion of explosion. The end of his life was the endtime for the battered Soviet hulk. It was definitely not a time of ‘revolution’ – or rather, revolution was directed against those powers which, in the twentieth century, grounded themselves in revolution. I think it is fair to say that Lotman’s ‘explosion’ was a response to the discrediting of revolution, which brought in its train the discrediting of the massive association between inspiration, new ways of living, opposition to routine, and the social space of adventure.
The paradox of Leninist revolution is that it codified and hardened the all encircling institutions – law, money, education – instead of leading to that blessed moment when all the mouse escape all the traps and we blow them up. Instead, blowing things up became what capitalism itself started to pride itself on doing – at the same time revolution was discredited, one began to hear Schumpeter’s phrase, creative destruction, used unthinkingly to praise the new and supposedly eternal order of capitalism dominated by a financial sector that engaged, at last, in the task of laying up its treasures – its derivatives – in the cybersphere to the tune of some 600 trillion dollars. A sum that approaches, in its dreadful fictitiousness, the beasts of the apocalypse.
Lotman was well aware that explosions – or ruptures, to use Foucault’s term – seem to imply a leap in place, a moment of absolute change, which indeed implies that revolution is possible. Foucault of course annuls the gesture by flattening history, separating it from progress, and thus making rupture merely part of a historical strip, which makes it, formally, a chronological movement forward, but takes away its hopefulness. The strip doesn’t really move towards closure, and the cardinal points of the episteme are merely reshuffled, like cards redistributed for each round of a card game.
Explosion, as Lotman uses the term, is connected to but not identified with creation. Or inspiration: Lotman, at a certain moment, quotes a passage in Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights that lays bare the relation between rupture and the ordinary as a kind of nonsense:
“He was a poet nevertheless, and his passion for poetry was indomitable; when he felt this nonsense approach (that was what he called inspiration), he locked himself in his study and wrote from morning till late night. He confessed to his genuine friends that he knew true
happiness only at such times. The rest of the time he led his dissipated life, put on airs, dissembled, and perpetually heard the famous question, “Have you
written a new little something?””
The nonsense is connected to happiness, and happiness is the unquestioned dominant, the total social fact, which frames modernity. More precisely, explosion is the force that connects and disconnects semantic spaces. And this is where I borrow the term, where I check it out of Lotman’s work and put it in my own. It is in this sense that we can, perhaps, think of the spread of the third life over the space of the imperial powers from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 20th century. The third life is the life of reading, of writing, and of its visual and aural counterparts that altogether saturated the natural world with the artificial world – to use highly tendentious categories – and by degrees made it impossible for populations to exist outside of the media sphere. To travel, to work, to eat, to remain in a room in a house or in a public space, all of these things have been flooded by the third life, the life that is neither sleeping nor simply waking but, instead, consists of reading or its counterparts – watching images, hearing music, etc.
Of course, Lotman did have a university position and a recognized status, but his aim was broader than that of, say, enfolding semantics in a larger semiotics, Greimas’ project, or discovering the motifs of folktales – his aim, like Barthes, was to understand, stuffed to the gills with texts, the cultural currents of universal history in its modern phase under the distancing and clarifying guise of a demasker of myth – a mythographer’s evil twin.
At the end of his life, he toyed with the notion of explosion. The end of his life was the endtime for the battered Soviet hulk. It was definitely not a time of ‘revolution’ – or rather, revolution was directed against those powers which, in the twentieth century, grounded themselves in revolution. I think it is fair to say that Lotman’s ‘explosion’ was a response to the discrediting of revolution, which brought in its train the discrediting of the massive association between inspiration, new ways of living, opposition to routine, and the social space of adventure.
The paradox of Leninist revolution is that it codified and hardened the all encircling institutions – law, money, education – instead of leading to that blessed moment when all the mouse escape all the traps and we blow them up. Instead, blowing things up became what capitalism itself started to pride itself on doing – at the same time revolution was discredited, one began to hear Schumpeter’s phrase, creative destruction, used unthinkingly to praise the new and supposedly eternal order of capitalism dominated by a financial sector that engaged, at last, in the task of laying up its treasures – its derivatives – in the cybersphere to the tune of some 600 trillion dollars. A sum that approaches, in its dreadful fictitiousness, the beasts of the apocalypse.
Lotman was well aware that explosions – or ruptures, to use Foucault’s term – seem to imply a leap in place, a moment of absolute change, which indeed implies that revolution is possible. Foucault of course annuls the gesture by flattening history, separating it from progress, and thus making rupture merely part of a historical strip, which makes it, formally, a chronological movement forward, but takes away its hopefulness. The strip doesn’t really move towards closure, and the cardinal points of the episteme are merely reshuffled, like cards redistributed for each round of a card game.
Explosion, as Lotman uses the term, is connected to but not identified with creation. Or inspiration: Lotman, at a certain moment, quotes a passage in Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights that lays bare the relation between rupture and the ordinary as a kind of nonsense:
“He was a poet nevertheless, and his passion for poetry was indomitable; when he felt this nonsense approach (that was what he called inspiration), he locked himself in his study and wrote from morning till late night. He confessed to his genuine friends that he knew true
happiness only at such times. The rest of the time he led his dissipated life, put on airs, dissembled, and perpetually heard the famous question, “Have you
written a new little something?””
The nonsense is connected to happiness, and happiness is the unquestioned dominant, the total social fact, which frames modernity. More precisely, explosion is the force that connects and disconnects semantic spaces. And this is where I borrow the term, where I check it out of Lotman’s work and put it in my own. It is in this sense that we can, perhaps, think of the spread of the third life over the space of the imperial powers from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 20th century. The third life is the life of reading, of writing, and of its visual and aural counterparts that altogether saturated the natural world with the artificial world – to use highly tendentious categories – and by degrees made it impossible for populations to exist outside of the media sphere. To travel, to work, to eat, to remain in a room in a house or in a public space, all of these things have been flooded by the third life, the life that is neither sleeping nor simply waking but, instead, consists of reading or its counterparts – watching images, hearing music, etc.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Lost
A French schoolmaster and statistician, Louis Maggiolo, proposed, in the 1870s, to track the rise of literacy in France using, as an index, the signature on marriage documents. Signatures by the married couple or by their representatives were required from the 1670s, when Colbert, under Louis XIV, reformed the state administration of civil affairs – births, marriages, deaths. Now, there are many problems, as various historians have acknowledged, with using the signature as an index of literacy. For instance, we are projecting schooling that joins together reading and writing onto a period in which it wasn’t necessarily the case that they were taught in conjunction – it was for instance not uncommon for women to know how to read, but not how to write. And a signature can also be learned as a gesture, or a drawing, without the performer knowing how the letter signs really connect up. However, the very requirement tells us something about the changing relation between the state and its subjects. Literacy, on one level, was imposed by the state as an instrument of order and control. I’m less concerned about the rich uncles of the marriage certificate – the poem, the novel, the essay – than I am about the gradual awakening of the third life – the life of media, of reading, of visual, aural and print culture. Not as a rarity, but as an intrusion into both the private and public spheres (if we can use those terms to designate spaces in semi-literate societies).
I’m thinking of the everyday encounter with signs that label parts of the world. Imagine: once, the world for the vast majority of Europeans was criss-crossed by songlines; gradually, that world becomes shadowed by real signs, images, arrows, text.
I think about this a lot in Atlanta. I drive a lot in Atlanta. And as I just got married in Rockdale County, Georgia, in the presence of fifty witnesses, I have done a load of driving and a load of getting lost – the two have sort of merged in my experience – and I want to purge this storm of roads and directions and misdirections, to drain it from my blood.
Metro Atlanta is folded, spindled and mutilated among hillsides, obscure creeks, and mucho forestry. From the side of Stone Mountain, the bald granite peak that juts up a thousand or so feet in Dekalb county, you can see Atlanta skyscrapers rise apparently from a jungle on the horizon, so deep and extensive is the arboreal cover. But the trees cover the houses, shopping centers, roads, and business of a couple million people. The sheer mass of the people is a key to Atlanta’s chief business, which, for a long time, was growth itself – selling cheap houses to in-coming, and developing subdivisions out of farm and wasteland. And when you develop farm and wasteland, you have to have roads, plenty of roads. Because the in-comers have to incomes, which means they have to drive to work, such is the tear-bent nature of things in this part of the world, and they have to drive home. And because they have to drive, they have cars, and because they have cars, stores, pawn shops, Army-Navy stores, Chinese restaurants and a million Waffle houses spring up about five to ten miles from wherever you sit yourself down.
Literacy and transportation go hand in hand. For the roads, which are dumped on the landscape like God’s own spoiled spaghetti, clumping here and there and everywhere among the sea of trees, must be labeled somehow.
The first labels honored the developers, the only honor they would ever experience in their fishy lives, and various real or imagined flora, fauna, or sites. Then the old name streets are broken up by new developments that want to gloss off the old names and thus produce variations on them – here a Rockbridge Road, NE, there a Rockbridge Drive, NE, there a N. Rockbridge road, NE, there a S, Rockbridge Road, NE, ad infinitum. Then the state comes in and dubs certain of these roads parts of the greater Georgia Highway system, giving them numbers. Then the locals persist in hanging names on streets that have long shucked those names and assumed other ones. And finally, in the age of the GPS, the nautical grid of directions, all the southeasts and northwests, become ever more important in driving and hence in the way directions are disseminated, while left and right as cues become subordinate or quaint.
Into this soup there came a man – me – fresh from the streets and signage of Paris. Signage that was set up to lead a million tourists to a thousand monuments. Signage that forms its own dense culture, signage that sings of obscure histories, what with a plaque on every other building. This man, faced with a dark night in Lawrenceville, lost all sense of whether he was traveling east or west, north or south. On some days, he would miss every turn, and spend a good fifteen minutes going back and forth on a road, looking for the key to get into some parking lot.
Plus, I had the songline of my family – a family who has existed in this part of the world for a long time, now, and done many deeds, and had many adventures –singing in his consciousness, and sometimes on the phone, when I called up my brothers or sister and asked for directions. My friend Dave thought this was funny, and then he thought it was exasperating – to hear me, utterly lost, take a cell phone (a cell phone! So much have I become embourgeoisified since landing in the New World!) in hand and call my brother and hear him sing me across the private monuments of Stone Mountain to the arthritic flow of traffic on I 20.
But surely the impulse to sing the lines of family force across the landscape is merely buried under maps and GPS-es. And under those family lines, there is the great dying, and the Conquista, and our history – that is, the things that have exploded like big joke cigars in the face of humanity – as a planetary culture.
I’m thinking of the everyday encounter with signs that label parts of the world. Imagine: once, the world for the vast majority of Europeans was criss-crossed by songlines; gradually, that world becomes shadowed by real signs, images, arrows, text.
I think about this a lot in Atlanta. I drive a lot in Atlanta. And as I just got married in Rockdale County, Georgia, in the presence of fifty witnesses, I have done a load of driving and a load of getting lost – the two have sort of merged in my experience – and I want to purge this storm of roads and directions and misdirections, to drain it from my blood.
Metro Atlanta is folded, spindled and mutilated among hillsides, obscure creeks, and mucho forestry. From the side of Stone Mountain, the bald granite peak that juts up a thousand or so feet in Dekalb county, you can see Atlanta skyscrapers rise apparently from a jungle on the horizon, so deep and extensive is the arboreal cover. But the trees cover the houses, shopping centers, roads, and business of a couple million people. The sheer mass of the people is a key to Atlanta’s chief business, which, for a long time, was growth itself – selling cheap houses to in-coming, and developing subdivisions out of farm and wasteland. And when you develop farm and wasteland, you have to have roads, plenty of roads. Because the in-comers have to incomes, which means they have to drive to work, such is the tear-bent nature of things in this part of the world, and they have to drive home. And because they have to drive, they have cars, and because they have cars, stores, pawn shops, Army-Navy stores, Chinese restaurants and a million Waffle houses spring up about five to ten miles from wherever you sit yourself down.
Literacy and transportation go hand in hand. For the roads, which are dumped on the landscape like God’s own spoiled spaghetti, clumping here and there and everywhere among the sea of trees, must be labeled somehow.
The first labels honored the developers, the only honor they would ever experience in their fishy lives, and various real or imagined flora, fauna, or sites. Then the old name streets are broken up by new developments that want to gloss off the old names and thus produce variations on them – here a Rockbridge Road, NE, there a Rockbridge Drive, NE, there a N. Rockbridge road, NE, there a S, Rockbridge Road, NE, ad infinitum. Then the state comes in and dubs certain of these roads parts of the greater Georgia Highway system, giving them numbers. Then the locals persist in hanging names on streets that have long shucked those names and assumed other ones. And finally, in the age of the GPS, the nautical grid of directions, all the southeasts and northwests, become ever more important in driving and hence in the way directions are disseminated, while left and right as cues become subordinate or quaint.
Into this soup there came a man – me – fresh from the streets and signage of Paris. Signage that was set up to lead a million tourists to a thousand monuments. Signage that forms its own dense culture, signage that sings of obscure histories, what with a plaque on every other building. This man, faced with a dark night in Lawrenceville, lost all sense of whether he was traveling east or west, north or south. On some days, he would miss every turn, and spend a good fifteen minutes going back and forth on a road, looking for the key to get into some parking lot.
Plus, I had the songline of my family – a family who has existed in this part of the world for a long time, now, and done many deeds, and had many adventures –singing in his consciousness, and sometimes on the phone, when I called up my brothers or sister and asked for directions. My friend Dave thought this was funny, and then he thought it was exasperating – to hear me, utterly lost, take a cell phone (a cell phone! So much have I become embourgeoisified since landing in the New World!) in hand and call my brother and hear him sing me across the private monuments of Stone Mountain to the arthritic flow of traffic on I 20.
But surely the impulse to sing the lines of family force across the landscape is merely buried under maps and GPS-es. And under those family lines, there is the great dying, and the Conquista, and our history – that is, the things that have exploded like big joke cigars in the face of humanity – as a planetary culture.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
narcissism of the learned
The narcissism of humankind
In his Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud noted:
‘Mankind had to endure two injuries to its self love brought about by science in the course of time. The first was when it learned that the earth was not the center of the universe, but a tiny little corner in an unimaginably vast universe. This is attached to the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian science had already expressed something similar. Then came the second, when biological research denied man’s supposed creaturely privilege, showing that he was descended from the animal kingdom and was ineradicably of an animal nature. This transvaluation occurred in our time under the influence of Charles Darwin, Wallace and their successors, but not without the strongest resistance of contemporaries. The third and most sensible wound to the human quest for grandeur has been experienced through today’s psychological research, which shows the ego that it is not even the master in its own house, but merely depends on messages from what occurs in unconsciously in the mental life.”
Freud recurs in other passages in his work to this historical insight, which, by a ruse that he understood well, posits a monumental injury to the narcissism of mankind whiles at the same time aggrandizing the narcissism of the scientist, and especially, in this case, of that ‘psychological’ investigator named Freud. The gesture that both maims and names is, in fact, always monumental: narcissism is an affair of compromised erections of just this sort.
The trope, it must be said, is certainly not original with Freud. In fact, it was already part of the repertory of early modern natural philosophy. Pascal’s thinking reed has been bent by the wind that blows from the infinite spaces upon this all too cornerpocket world; and in Fontenelle’s Dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds, the moral derived from both Copernicus and Colombus’s discovery of whole worlds unknown to Europeans (for Freud’s “mankind” is eminently European) is neatly presented to Fontenelle’s student, the Marquise – who at first rejects it with the charming hauteur (more charming, perhaps, in a dialogue such as this than when she ordered about the servants, as Marguerite de la Mésangêre no doubt did) of one who lives in full possession of her ancien regime rank and privileges.
On the fifth evening, however, infinity enters the drama, for it is on this evening that Fontenelle explains the system of vortices that are grossly presented by solar systems without measure, and planets and hypothetically inhabitants of planets without measure, until the Marquise feels the world shrinking under her, under the pleasant night sky of Normandy. The dialogue at this point does something interesting. “But, she took it up again, here we have made the universe so large that I lose myself in it, I don’t know where I am, I am no longer anything. What! Everything is divided into vortices, thrown confusedly one among the other? Each star would be the center of a vortices perhaps as great as that where we are?” As the Marquise expresses it, Fontenelle’s vision gives her a ‘perspective’ that is ‘so long that vision cannot make out the end of it”. Such a vision of infinity reduces all her ambitions and sense of herself, while providing her with an excellent excuse to be lazy: “I imagine that my laziness will profit from my new lights, and when someone reproaches my indolence, I will respond, oh, but if you only knew about the fixed stars!”
Fontenelle, however, sees this infinitely as freeing:
“As for me, I said, all this puts me at my ease. When the heaven was only this blue vault, where the stars were nailed, the universe seemed to me to be small and narrow. I felt something like an oppression. Now that we have given infinitely more extension and depth to that vault, in dividing it up among thousand and thousands of vortices, it seems to me that I breath with more liberty, and that I am entered into a more extensive atmosphere; and assuredly the universe has a completely other magnificence.”
And yet, what does this freedom amount to? To the Marquise’s jest, Fontenelle replies that the problem isn’t about human glory: rather, “for myself, … I am frustrated that I can’t derive any use from the knowledge that I have.”
There is a music here – a counterpoint between the meditation on vanity that runs through the moralist tradition and the new idea of utility that is beginning to run through the Enlightened order as people like Fontenelle conceived it. We can here, under the banter in Fontenelle’s dialogue, the rustle of a whole new, but as yet unborn, system. That order requires the abasement of the ego of the old order. Sooner or later the Marquise must be stripped of her superstitions in order to be clothed with the cold glory of philosophy – which, in Fontenelle’s sense, applies both to the method of discovery and the development of the instruments that make it possible. This is more than the displacement of the ancients – by making the world small and the mind large, a certain social perspective opens up: one in which science, commerce and politics will emerge as the inevitable institutions of ordinary life.
In his Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud noted:
‘Mankind had to endure two injuries to its self love brought about by science in the course of time. The first was when it learned that the earth was not the center of the universe, but a tiny little corner in an unimaginably vast universe. This is attached to the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian science had already expressed something similar. Then came the second, when biological research denied man’s supposed creaturely privilege, showing that he was descended from the animal kingdom and was ineradicably of an animal nature. This transvaluation occurred in our time under the influence of Charles Darwin, Wallace and their successors, but not without the strongest resistance of contemporaries. The third and most sensible wound to the human quest for grandeur has been experienced through today’s psychological research, which shows the ego that it is not even the master in its own house, but merely depends on messages from what occurs in unconsciously in the mental life.”
Freud recurs in other passages in his work to this historical insight, which, by a ruse that he understood well, posits a monumental injury to the narcissism of mankind whiles at the same time aggrandizing the narcissism of the scientist, and especially, in this case, of that ‘psychological’ investigator named Freud. The gesture that both maims and names is, in fact, always monumental: narcissism is an affair of compromised erections of just this sort.
The trope, it must be said, is certainly not original with Freud. In fact, it was already part of the repertory of early modern natural philosophy. Pascal’s thinking reed has been bent by the wind that blows from the infinite spaces upon this all too cornerpocket world; and in Fontenelle’s Dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds, the moral derived from both Copernicus and Colombus’s discovery of whole worlds unknown to Europeans (for Freud’s “mankind” is eminently European) is neatly presented to Fontenelle’s student, the Marquise – who at first rejects it with the charming hauteur (more charming, perhaps, in a dialogue such as this than when she ordered about the servants, as Marguerite de la Mésangêre no doubt did) of one who lives in full possession of her ancien regime rank and privileges.
On the fifth evening, however, infinity enters the drama, for it is on this evening that Fontenelle explains the system of vortices that are grossly presented by solar systems without measure, and planets and hypothetically inhabitants of planets without measure, until the Marquise feels the world shrinking under her, under the pleasant night sky of Normandy. The dialogue at this point does something interesting. “But, she took it up again, here we have made the universe so large that I lose myself in it, I don’t know where I am, I am no longer anything. What! Everything is divided into vortices, thrown confusedly one among the other? Each star would be the center of a vortices perhaps as great as that where we are?” As the Marquise expresses it, Fontenelle’s vision gives her a ‘perspective’ that is ‘so long that vision cannot make out the end of it”. Such a vision of infinity reduces all her ambitions and sense of herself, while providing her with an excellent excuse to be lazy: “I imagine that my laziness will profit from my new lights, and when someone reproaches my indolence, I will respond, oh, but if you only knew about the fixed stars!”
Fontenelle, however, sees this infinitely as freeing:
“As for me, I said, all this puts me at my ease. When the heaven was only this blue vault, where the stars were nailed, the universe seemed to me to be small and narrow. I felt something like an oppression. Now that we have given infinitely more extension and depth to that vault, in dividing it up among thousand and thousands of vortices, it seems to me that I breath with more liberty, and that I am entered into a more extensive atmosphere; and assuredly the universe has a completely other magnificence.”
And yet, what does this freedom amount to? To the Marquise’s jest, Fontenelle replies that the problem isn’t about human glory: rather, “for myself, … I am frustrated that I can’t derive any use from the knowledge that I have.”
There is a music here – a counterpoint between the meditation on vanity that runs through the moralist tradition and the new idea of utility that is beginning to run through the Enlightened order as people like Fontenelle conceived it. We can here, under the banter in Fontenelle’s dialogue, the rustle of a whole new, but as yet unborn, system. That order requires the abasement of the ego of the old order. Sooner or later the Marquise must be stripped of her superstitions in order to be clothed with the cold glory of philosophy – which, in Fontenelle’s sense, applies both to the method of discovery and the development of the instruments that make it possible. This is more than the displacement of the ancients – by making the world small and the mind large, a certain social perspective opens up: one in which science, commerce and politics will emerge as the inevitable institutions of ordinary life.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
the rich are the welfare class (reminder)
With the talk of cutting this deficit, this big bellied government, forswearing the candy bars, etc., I find it screamingly funny that big government's most astonishing expression of scale was the frenzied welfare program that went by various acronyms like TALF. It was managed by the Federal Reserve, in conjunction with the policies of the Department of Treasury. Here's a bloomberg story from last year, which picked at the surface of big government action:
.
But that story didn't really include other programs, your little one day or 21 day loans, that pumped the lending of the Fed towards the 9 trillion limit. Of course we have since learned that the details were even more astonishing - that is, if we take extraordinary care and shift through the news reports. For instance, on July 6, 2011, we learn all about the sweetness showered upon Goldman Sachs (which is inexplicable, as GS has consistently maintained they were just fine in 2008).
"Goldman Sachs & Co., a unit of the most profitable bank in Wall Street history, took $15 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve on Dec. 9, 2008, the biggest single loan from a lending program whose details have been secret until today.
The program, which peaked at $80 billion in loans outstanding, was known as the Fed’s single-tranche open-market operations, or ST OMO. It made 28-day loans to units of 19 banks between March 7, 2008, and Dec. 30, 2008. Bloomberg reported on ST OMO in May, after the Fed released incomplete records on the program. In response to a subsequent Freedom of Information Act request for details, the central bank disclosed borrower names, amounts borrowed and interest rates.
ST OMO is the last known Fed crisis lending program to have its details made public. The central bank resisted previous FOIA requests on emergency lending for more than two years, disclosing details in March of its oldest loan facility, the discount window, only after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it had to. When Congress mandated the December 2010 release of data on special initiatives the Fed created in its unprecedented $3.5 trillion response to the 2007-2009 collapse in credit markets, ST OMO -- an expansion of a longstanding program -- wasn’t included.
“The Fed has come a long way over a long period of time as far as transparency,” said Raymond W. Stone, managing director and economist with Stone & McCarthy Research Associates in Princeton, New Jersey. “They thought counterparties might be harmed, but now so much time has passed that the information is not as sensitive anymore.”
Primary Dealers
The 19 borrowers from the program are known as primary dealers, which are designated to trade government securities directly with Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They bid at auctions for ST OMO’s cash. While the rates they paid generally tracked the federal funds rate, the rate for some dipped as low as 0.01 percent in December 2008."
It is funny that we note that union members drive foreign cars and go na na na, and yet we never ever note that the private sector, and especially big banks, hedgefunds and other financial institutions, are the biggest welfare leeches in history, and continue to be, even as they decry 'big government." But how many people read the Bloomburg dispatch to understand what happened in 2008? I would guess maybe a couple thousand. Delay long enough, and you can make history disappear into a memory hole even when you become 'transparent" with your records.
What happened in the 2007-2010 period was a pilfering of government resources on an unprecedented scale by the predatory class. They are are now demanding cuts in the services that support the non-predatory class, or else they will pout. We can easily see through the comedy of this. And we can make it known. But who has any interest in doing so? Not the Dems. Not the Republicans. Not the media. Not the Fed. Not private enterprise. Not the 'neo-liberal' bloggers. Only cranks, simps, and the misbegotten. My people.
.
But that story didn't really include other programs, your little one day or 21 day loans, that pumped the lending of the Fed towards the 9 trillion limit. Of course we have since learned that the details were even more astonishing - that is, if we take extraordinary care and shift through the news reports. For instance, on July 6, 2011, we learn all about the sweetness showered upon Goldman Sachs (which is inexplicable, as GS has consistently maintained they were just fine in 2008).
"Goldman Sachs & Co., a unit of the most profitable bank in Wall Street history, took $15 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve on Dec. 9, 2008, the biggest single loan from a lending program whose details have been secret until today.
The program, which peaked at $80 billion in loans outstanding, was known as the Fed’s single-tranche open-market operations, or ST OMO. It made 28-day loans to units of 19 banks between March 7, 2008, and Dec. 30, 2008. Bloomberg reported on ST OMO in May, after the Fed released incomplete records on the program. In response to a subsequent Freedom of Information Act request for details, the central bank disclosed borrower names, amounts borrowed and interest rates.
ST OMO is the last known Fed crisis lending program to have its details made public. The central bank resisted previous FOIA requests on emergency lending for more than two years, disclosing details in March of its oldest loan facility, the discount window, only after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it had to. When Congress mandated the December 2010 release of data on special initiatives the Fed created in its unprecedented $3.5 trillion response to the 2007-2009 collapse in credit markets, ST OMO -- an expansion of a longstanding program -- wasn’t included.
“The Fed has come a long way over a long period of time as far as transparency,” said Raymond W. Stone, managing director and economist with Stone & McCarthy Research Associates in Princeton, New Jersey. “They thought counterparties might be harmed, but now so much time has passed that the information is not as sensitive anymore.”
Primary Dealers
The 19 borrowers from the program are known as primary dealers, which are designated to trade government securities directly with Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They bid at auctions for ST OMO’s cash. While the rates they paid generally tracked the federal funds rate, the rate for some dipped as low as 0.01 percent in December 2008."
It is funny that we note that union members drive foreign cars and go na na na, and yet we never ever note that the private sector, and especially big banks, hedgefunds and other financial institutions, are the biggest welfare leeches in history, and continue to be, even as they decry 'big government." But how many people read the Bloomburg dispatch to understand what happened in 2008? I would guess maybe a couple thousand. Delay long enough, and you can make history disappear into a memory hole even when you become 'transparent" with your records.
What happened in the 2007-2010 period was a pilfering of government resources on an unprecedented scale by the predatory class. They are are now demanding cuts in the services that support the non-predatory class, or else they will pout. We can easily see through the comedy of this. And we can make it known. But who has any interest in doing so? Not the Dems. Not the Republicans. Not the media. Not the Fed. Not private enterprise. Not the 'neo-liberal' bloggers. Only cranks, simps, and the misbegotten. My people.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
literacy: shall we eat the book?
"Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel.
So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.
And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.
And he said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them."
Louis Maggiolo was a French schoolmaster who headed an inquiry, in the 1870s, into the history of schooling and literacy in France. Literacy is a hard item to mold into a statistic: what is it? How do you prove you have it? Maggiolo ended up using the signature as an index of literacy. From the statistical point of view, then, one seeks out documents that have been signed. Testaments. Births. Deaths. And especially marriages. In this inquiry, less attention is paid to an equally interesting sociological fact: the increase in the occasions for signing. Maggiolo plotted the rise of literacy in France using 1686 as a base, when the laws concerning marriage were changed to require that the spouses either sign or have someone sign for them the official marriage documents. Maggiolo did not ask himself why, suddenly, the state needed this process. When Maggiolo’s work was, to an extent, rediscovered in the 1970s by Annales historians – Vovelle, Furet and Ozouf, etc. – it was used to make some broad generalizations about the rise of literate culture. Furet and Ozouf, neo-liberal historians who were in revolt against Marxist historiography, used Maggiolo’s work to claim that the Revolution was a great step backwards in the rise of literacy, and that, further, it was not state schools which cultivated literacy, but …. Well, here they become vague as to just how people learn to read and write. Vovelle used the Maggiolo ‘line’ – dividing the more literate Northern France from the less literate Southern – to explore Southern lagging. The signatures have been used, as well, to picture the gender differences in literacy. As one would expect, men become literate first before women – with the difference in the ratio of literate men to women being larger in the country than the city.
Beneath the statistics, however, one finds a number of ethnographic ambiguities. Signatures, after all, as all agree, aren’t really a sign of literacy. In fact, as Lawrence Stone pointed out in 1969, our contemporary conception of writing and reading as being a unified skill set does not reflect the state of education in the pre-modern and early modern era. There were many woman who read but could not write. There were many men who had learned to write a few things – who had learned a writing routine – but could neither write beyond it, nor read.
The controversies over the ethnography of literacy that took place in the 70s seemed to have little effect on the historiography of literacy, even as historiography was, supposedly, awakening to the ordinary life of the people. That controversy involved the opposition of two theses: on the one hand, a thesis going back to Plato and revived by Jack Goody, which was that writing is a technology that creates vast social changes – for instance, by creating tools to enforce a hierarchical order – versus a pragmatic school that claimed that writing has no predictable cultural effect – rather, as it is embedded in different situations, it produces different changes, or none at all. Maurice Bloch wrote a study of a particular writing system in Madagascar that made this point: Astrology and Writing in Madagascar, which he reprinted in How we think they think – a beautifully Austinian title for a book.
The writing system Bloch explores is derived from the Arabic traders who once had posts along the Madagascar coast. These traders were driven from the island in a long campaign by the Portugese in the 16th century, but their cultural legacy survived, at least in terms of Islam and an Arabic writing system that was jimmied into Malagasay, the language of the Antairnoro and Antambahaoka groups who lived on the Southeastern part of the Island. Oddly, the writing system remained there, instead of in the North, where the Arabic trading posts had been.
However, Bloch’s description of the use and spread of this writing system makes it clear that – from his viewpoint – writing did not mark a sociological rupture with orality. If it is a technique, as Goody claims, it is not a technique that creates a whole new social order.
Bloch, it seems to me, is actually modifying, not annihilating Goody’s point. For one thing, literacy – as we have pointed out – is a multiple skill set. For another thing, like all techniques, it is a set of affordances. To say that it is a technology really is to say that it provides opportunities for this or that kind of technical practice. Bloch points out that the Antairnoro Islamic community was not centered around the Qu’ran. In fact, it was not a religion of the book, but a religion in which writing flows into charms, spells and forecasts.
“The Qur'an is replaced by a series of sacred manuscripts called Sorabe, or "great writings". This is a series of books kept and copied by the scribe aristocracy of the Antaimoro and Antambahaoka.
These books have often been described (Julien 1929 and 1933; Deschamps and Manes 1959). Some are old, although their precise date is uncertain; others are more recent. There are two kinds of works. First are contemporary chronicles and historical works dealing with the mythical origins of "Arabic" peoples of the south-east. It is these Sorabe which have been studied most often (eg, Ferrand 1891; Julien 1929 and 1933). Second, and equally common, are works on the related subjects of medicine, geomancy, divination
and asrtrology. These latter are of particular significance here because these sciences are what gave the possessors of writing such prestige in all pre-colonial Madagascar.”
One notices that Bloch uses the word “book” rather imprecisely. What makes these things physically books? What makes a book a book? For instance, Western books are surrounded with taboos concerning their reproduction that have grown up since the early modern era. Those taboos do not suppose that the reproduction changes the meaning – on the contrary, they suppose that the meaning is held in the copy, which makes it a product that is both reproducible and subject to an extension of the laws of property having to do with goods in which the use value adheres to the uniqueness of the good. Is the same set of properties attributed to the material of the book, or does the meaning change in being copied?
Goody’s thesis, I think, can be modified to accommodate different senses of how writing operates – and in fact he modified it to accommodate what he called “restricted literacy’, in which a certain class or sex is given control of the reading/writing technique.
However, besides books there are other forms of writing and reading. Bloch grants them a major role in the formation of the Imerina kingdom in Madagascar:
There is sufficient evidence to say that before the coming of the British missionaries and the introduction of European script, a certain amount of the business of government was carried out in writing in Arabic script, either by administrators who were themselves literate, or by the ones who used Antaimoro scribes. These scribes had the dual roles of diviner-astrologers and secretaries. The importance of these Antaimoros should not be ignored in understanding how the Merina were able to hold together and administer a kingdom considerably larger than the British Isles."
Yet Bloch’s essay turns away from this point to argue against Goody, for in the end the basic cognitive tools of the Merina were, he argues, unchanged in the transition from orality to literacy – or, rather, orality and literacy were intertwined so that it is a mistake to categorically separate out one from the other. Bloch’s argument rests on a notion of seriousness: how serious is a belief? What is the index of its seriousness? He claims that the beliefs that would have been derived from writing as a technique – for instance, an organization and ordering of spatial and cosmological norms represented in writing – are, in ordinary life, felt otherwise. In fact, the astrology that was organized via a writing system is so modified in its application to everyday life by oral sources that, in essence, it has not changed the order of ordinary life. Or as Bloch sums it up in another essay in his book: “I show how the introduction of literacy into Madagascar has merely meant that a new and better tool became available, but that it was used to do the same things as oratory and other specialized language uses had done before.” [152]
And yet, is this what Bloch really showed?
So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.
And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.
And he said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them."
Louis Maggiolo was a French schoolmaster who headed an inquiry, in the 1870s, into the history of schooling and literacy in France. Literacy is a hard item to mold into a statistic: what is it? How do you prove you have it? Maggiolo ended up using the signature as an index of literacy. From the statistical point of view, then, one seeks out documents that have been signed. Testaments. Births. Deaths. And especially marriages. In this inquiry, less attention is paid to an equally interesting sociological fact: the increase in the occasions for signing. Maggiolo plotted the rise of literacy in France using 1686 as a base, when the laws concerning marriage were changed to require that the spouses either sign or have someone sign for them the official marriage documents. Maggiolo did not ask himself why, suddenly, the state needed this process. When Maggiolo’s work was, to an extent, rediscovered in the 1970s by Annales historians – Vovelle, Furet and Ozouf, etc. – it was used to make some broad generalizations about the rise of literate culture. Furet and Ozouf, neo-liberal historians who were in revolt against Marxist historiography, used Maggiolo’s work to claim that the Revolution was a great step backwards in the rise of literacy, and that, further, it was not state schools which cultivated literacy, but …. Well, here they become vague as to just how people learn to read and write. Vovelle used the Maggiolo ‘line’ – dividing the more literate Northern France from the less literate Southern – to explore Southern lagging. The signatures have been used, as well, to picture the gender differences in literacy. As one would expect, men become literate first before women – with the difference in the ratio of literate men to women being larger in the country than the city.
Beneath the statistics, however, one finds a number of ethnographic ambiguities. Signatures, after all, as all agree, aren’t really a sign of literacy. In fact, as Lawrence Stone pointed out in 1969, our contemporary conception of writing and reading as being a unified skill set does not reflect the state of education in the pre-modern and early modern era. There were many woman who read but could not write. There were many men who had learned to write a few things – who had learned a writing routine – but could neither write beyond it, nor read.
The controversies over the ethnography of literacy that took place in the 70s seemed to have little effect on the historiography of literacy, even as historiography was, supposedly, awakening to the ordinary life of the people. That controversy involved the opposition of two theses: on the one hand, a thesis going back to Plato and revived by Jack Goody, which was that writing is a technology that creates vast social changes – for instance, by creating tools to enforce a hierarchical order – versus a pragmatic school that claimed that writing has no predictable cultural effect – rather, as it is embedded in different situations, it produces different changes, or none at all. Maurice Bloch wrote a study of a particular writing system in Madagascar that made this point: Astrology and Writing in Madagascar, which he reprinted in How we think they think – a beautifully Austinian title for a book.
The writing system Bloch explores is derived from the Arabic traders who once had posts along the Madagascar coast. These traders were driven from the island in a long campaign by the Portugese in the 16th century, but their cultural legacy survived, at least in terms of Islam and an Arabic writing system that was jimmied into Malagasay, the language of the Antairnoro and Antambahaoka groups who lived on the Southeastern part of the Island. Oddly, the writing system remained there, instead of in the North, where the Arabic trading posts had been.
However, Bloch’s description of the use and spread of this writing system makes it clear that – from his viewpoint – writing did not mark a sociological rupture with orality. If it is a technique, as Goody claims, it is not a technique that creates a whole new social order.
Bloch, it seems to me, is actually modifying, not annihilating Goody’s point. For one thing, literacy – as we have pointed out – is a multiple skill set. For another thing, like all techniques, it is a set of affordances. To say that it is a technology really is to say that it provides opportunities for this or that kind of technical practice. Bloch points out that the Antairnoro Islamic community was not centered around the Qu’ran. In fact, it was not a religion of the book, but a religion in which writing flows into charms, spells and forecasts.
“The Qur'an is replaced by a series of sacred manuscripts called Sorabe, or "great writings". This is a series of books kept and copied by the scribe aristocracy of the Antaimoro and Antambahaoka.
These books have often been described (Julien 1929 and 1933; Deschamps and Manes 1959). Some are old, although their precise date is uncertain; others are more recent. There are two kinds of works. First are contemporary chronicles and historical works dealing with the mythical origins of "Arabic" peoples of the south-east. It is these Sorabe which have been studied most often (eg, Ferrand 1891; Julien 1929 and 1933). Second, and equally common, are works on the related subjects of medicine, geomancy, divination
and asrtrology. These latter are of particular significance here because these sciences are what gave the possessors of writing such prestige in all pre-colonial Madagascar.”
One notices that Bloch uses the word “book” rather imprecisely. What makes these things physically books? What makes a book a book? For instance, Western books are surrounded with taboos concerning their reproduction that have grown up since the early modern era. Those taboos do not suppose that the reproduction changes the meaning – on the contrary, they suppose that the meaning is held in the copy, which makes it a product that is both reproducible and subject to an extension of the laws of property having to do with goods in which the use value adheres to the uniqueness of the good. Is the same set of properties attributed to the material of the book, or does the meaning change in being copied?
Goody’s thesis, I think, can be modified to accommodate different senses of how writing operates – and in fact he modified it to accommodate what he called “restricted literacy’, in which a certain class or sex is given control of the reading/writing technique.
However, besides books there are other forms of writing and reading. Bloch grants them a major role in the formation of the Imerina kingdom in Madagascar:
There is sufficient evidence to say that before the coming of the British missionaries and the introduction of European script, a certain amount of the business of government was carried out in writing in Arabic script, either by administrators who were themselves literate, or by the ones who used Antaimoro scribes. These scribes had the dual roles of diviner-astrologers and secretaries. The importance of these Antaimoros should not be ignored in understanding how the Merina were able to hold together and administer a kingdom considerably larger than the British Isles."
Yet Bloch’s essay turns away from this point to argue against Goody, for in the end the basic cognitive tools of the Merina were, he argues, unchanged in the transition from orality to literacy – or, rather, orality and literacy were intertwined so that it is a mistake to categorically separate out one from the other. Bloch’s argument rests on a notion of seriousness: how serious is a belief? What is the index of its seriousness? He claims that the beliefs that would have been derived from writing as a technique – for instance, an organization and ordering of spatial and cosmological norms represented in writing – are, in ordinary life, felt otherwise. In fact, the astrology that was organized via a writing system is so modified in its application to everyday life by oral sources that, in essence, it has not changed the order of ordinary life. Or as Bloch sums it up in another essay in his book: “I show how the introduction of literacy into Madagascar has merely meant that a new and better tool became available, but that it was used to do the same things as oratory and other specialized language uses had done before.” [152]
And yet, is this what Bloch really showed?
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