Merit and dreams

(from here)

I looked, last night, for a passage in Cioran where, as he discusses what he sees as the decline of Europe into bourgeois comfort (he is writing in the fifties), he makes a passing remark that we are all equal in our dreams. I couldn’t find the exact words, but as I remember the passage, he is speaking literally: while our waking lives may be structured by numerous and overwhelming inequalities, there is neither wealth, fame, nor competition in dreaming: we dream alone. And in this sense, radical egalitarianism is not a political credo so much as a natural historical fact about human beings. A good third of our lives, our lives when asleep, are equal.

Cioran does not go any further with this idea; but it seems to me that it deserves more than to die in that undiscoverable passage, another philosophical “crack” that one forgets. Rather, I think it gives us an angle on the strange career of egalitarianism in our time.

I would develop the idea by matching it with a passage from another great essayist, Roberto Calasso. In an essay on Karl Kraus’ war on public opinion, Calasso puts  his finger on another radically equalizing moment in modernity: that of public opinion.

Calasso links the rise of public opinion to the Enlightenment, in line with a recent trend among historians who have found a use for the notion of the public sphere to explain certain traits about the 18^th and 19^th century in Europe and the U.S. Calasso, however, is after a tension between the Enlightenment utopia of the tabula rasa, able to “endure the total abrasion of meaning produced by an all consuming nominalism”, and the emergence of public opinion. If the Republic of the tabula rasa led to a constant reign of virtuous terror, the epistemological search for the tabula rasa led to a contradiction. For in fact, Calasso claims, the public mind is neither blank nor inhabited by Descartes innate ideas – rather it is inhabited by opinions. And of opinions, the opinion is: “One opinion is as good as another: The abyss yawns in this commonplace as in every other.”

That particular abyss has been plumbed extensively by the great pessimists – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Leon Bloy, Kraus - and Calasso himself, who all share the theme first announced in Plato’s dialogues, which is that opinion is a bad epistemological object. However, I have never been convinced by this argument and its arriere pensée, which is a contempt for the people. My impulse, on the contrary, is to take hold of another piece of the great Platonic whale – the idea that doxa, in the chain of being, is halfway between the real – the ideas – and the unreal – their images, or the physical world. That doxa exist only halfway puts them on the same plane as dreams. In this way, public opinions are part of the great public dreamlife. Now, one might object that opinions aren’t the same as dreams, and I’d agree to an extent. The difference is made by waking. However, one should not overestimate waking. In a formal sense, waking is a break with dreaming, but it is so only to the extent that consciousness succeeds in substituting its strong sense of externality for the insulation of dreams. In fact, of course, we carry that insulation about with us in our ordinary life, a depthless pocket that we become uneasily aware of when we drop something in it – the typo, the address we forgot, bad luck and fuckups, a whole day’s worth of silent muttering and inattentions.

It is against this psychological and existential background that one should examine the last instantiation of the Enlightenment utopia, meritocracy. The version current in America is tht disparities of wealth and income should correspond to disparities in merit. Some students did the homework and got As, some didn’t and got Fs.

This, it should be said, is a curiously childish way of seeing the world, and could only have been developed in that Asperger’s paradise of a discipline, economics. To return to Plato again, what this idea does is shift the focus entirely from the thing done to the external reward for doing it. In so doing, the thing done is curiously emptied of all merit on its own, all glory. The perfect meritocracy would be one in which the thing done requires a highly developed amount of skill, and is absolutely pointless. Thus, it should be correspondingly awarded with showers of external reward. This is an exact representation of the current financial services sector, at least in its higher reaches.

But if we reverse the values and forces in play, here, we might find room for both merit and egalitarianism. Or at least that was the dream entertained by the most solitary of men in the forest of Saint Germane in 1753. 

water pistol Juntas

When looking at the story of capitalism and the rise of the European powers, it is striking to see forms of organization appear on the periphery before they migrate to the center. For instance, the work discipline of the factory in 19th century England seems to replicate forms of work discipline created for the sugar 'factories' in the West Indies of the 17th century. In 19th century England, the work discipline was imposed on 'free labor', and in Jamaica, it was imposed on slaves. Yet, if we look away from the changes implied by this transformation of the working agent, we see a continuity of form, or at least the production of an organizational form that can be transposed.  And, unlike serf labor in Central Europe, for instance, this slave labor is relatively free of the codes that define its rights and hedge in the transmission of property and title by the owners.

A similar movement from the periphery to the center seems to be happening in the counter-revolution that is now occuring in all developed countries. What happened to the LDCs in the 80s - the less developed countries - is now being served up to the Developed Countries. It is an interesting mix of fiction and terror.

The eighties are the 'lost decade' in Latin America because they are the decade in which the program of the Washington Consensus, as it came to be know, were imposed on Latin American counties. The weapon by which they were lashed into this madness was debt - combined of course with the military regimes that had been put in place in the sixties and seventies as part of the U.S.'s cold war strategy. And the result of the WC was a major drop in the living standards of the majority of the population, and an end, almost, to growth. While the 50s and the 60s saw tremendous growth in Latin America, and an uneven but perceptible distribution of more wealth to the wage and working class, in the 80s this stopped dead. What emerged in the nineties were 'good countries', like Mexico, that devoted the government to obeying the banks, notably IMF. The IMF model, however, suffered a severe blow when Argentina refused to go along with the usual medicine in 2000, and the U.S. grip on the region began to loosen.

Well, the Washington consensus has migrated, at last, to the developed world. The whole world is now being held up by bankers holding waterpistols to our head. And this threat without a real weapon - for no developed state really needs to obey the bankers, who after all have no police force to arrest it (unlike the Latin American states, where the U.S. could whip up a junta in a heartbeat) - is, to the general amazement of the non-numb among us, being obeyed to the last tittle and jot. 

In the 80s, the police were, in effect, the developed nations. However, beginning, perhaps, with Bush in 2000, the Developed Nations have given birth to the smokeless coup. This coup does not involved armed might - it involves merely taken unelected institutions, such as a court of a central bank, and making them the center of a completely undemocratic seizure of political power, on behalf of the wealthiest people on earth. There aren't, we should remind ourselves, too many wealthy people. And yet the police of every Developed country on earth have been toiling away for wealthy people and locking up demonstrators, cracking down on any demonstration of discontent, and raiding any leaks of information inconvenient to the establishment. The resistence to all of this has been tame beyond reckoning. The self-policing extends all the way up through the discourse - nobody who writes for a major paper or magazine, or who broadcasts, ever couches the new Washington Consensus junta society in terms that would offend your average civics class teacher. 

What would such terms be? Well, for instance, we would start saying: who is all this money owed to? And: can't we simply upset those bankers by taking away their money, one two three, without a by your leave. If sovereign debt is such a problem, we could easily raise the money to pay it by slapping, say, one hundred percent taxes on all bond transactions, and we can use that money to buy the bonds. And absurd solution to an absurd political situation - not an economic one. The question of debt is a question of class. The political class and the financial elite are one, united, and they drive our politics in ways that advantage the financial elite, who use money loaned them, by the governments, to loan money back to the governments. Oh, not directly - rather, by propping up the financial service sector's enterprises, we prop up the places where the bodn dealers work and trade.  

The debt issue is, then, one of those fictions that bear such weight because they serve the interest of a certain power. It isn't that the establishment doesn't believe in its fiction - much as the Aztec priest definitely believed that it was necessary to cut out the heart of a prisoner to appease the gods and continue the course of the world, the elite believe it is necessary to cut out the heart of the middle class to appease the abstract God of Debt, to whom we owe so much. My solution is the radical one of the Lord's prayer - in which we have prettified and made metaphoric the common sense suggestion that we forgive debt every day. Debt. Which is as material as the feeling of the edge of a coin. Forgiving debt is the heart of civilization. And - in this age of the internet, where all that is money has become bytes - it is divinely easy to do it. It is always the sovereign who actually enforces laws to force debters to pay creditors. When the power of the sovereign is calmly and cooly taken from the hands of the people and invested in the hands of ex employees of Goldman Sachs, they switch sides - from being the borrowers for the people, they become the creditors for the banks. 

This is, obviously, going to be a lost decade for the Developed countries. But I'm hopeful that the new Junta order will be, at best, short lived. The arithmatic that counts is not how much debt is owed, but the ratio of the creditor population to the debtor population. I'd keep my eye on the latter, for, given the logic of the counterrevolution we are seeing, the time is approaching when the the banker's water pistol will be jerked out of his hand and turned upon him. And, magically, in that moment it will become a real pistol, with a heft and insistance that will change the power relationship all, all at once.

Jamie Dimon actually thinks he is successful

James Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, said in a speech to stockholders yesterday, "Acting like everyone who's been successful is badand that everyone who is rich is bad,” he said. “I just don't get it."  

It is hard to know what to respond to first: the fact that he is clueless, or the fact that he thinks he is successful.

Rich, yes he is rich. But rich is not the same as successful. Often, rich is the opposite of successful. Rich is the symptom of a system that has allocated its resources illogically, responding to the kind of power differentials that are at the heart of rentseeking and monopoly. On Dimon's scale, Idi Amin was successful. Even in the narrow field of bank management, Dimon has been anything but successful. As the head of JP Morgan Chase in 2008, Dimon's leadership essentially led the bank to the brink of bankruptcy, and it would have gone over if  if the Fed hadn't thoughtfully chosen to 'loan' it emergency money to the amount of 391 billion dollars - at 1 percent interest or below. Here's a nugget from Business Week:

"JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told shareholders in March 2010 that his bank used the Fed's Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn't say that the New York-based bank's total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion came more than a year after the program's creation." 

In other words, if we judge success by an ability to operate as an insider and a parasite on a national scale, he's successful. If we judge success as, well, running a bank that contributes to the wellbeing of society and the creation of wealth, he is the very opposite of successful. He is rust. He is mold. He is the element that creeps and crawls, bores and bites, and turns wealth into dust. As Jeremiah, who had an eye for the Dimon type, put it:  "As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool."

Anyway, let's look into the bones of his comments. He then announced that, according to his calculations – made no doubt with his fingers crossed behind his back -  he is paying 50 percent of his income in income taxes, state and federal. But one has only to look at his Business week profile – which is different from his Forbes profile, such are the 75 ways to see a CEO’s compensation package -- to see that his real income is in stock options. According to Forbes, he has a cool 58,968,234.00 that are currently exercisable. According to Businessweek, he has 31,089,284. The Forbes profile doesn’t include the happy little bonus he got of 5 million dollars, but both sources agree he did make a million dollars in salary. What does this mean? Well, remember that it means, firstly, a tax writeoff for JP Morgan – sweetly enough, Congress has decided that companies can write off the expense of stock options they grant to their execs against their corporate taxes. How convenient! And then it means that when Dimon wants to exercise his options, and he does it after waiting the approved period, 2 years,  he will pay an astonishingly low 15 percent on the amount.  But will he really pay that amount? Or will he exercise his options in such a way that they are run through the increasingly popular tax haven system, so as to avoid hits to the millions and millions for running a bank that exists simply because Lord Bernanke the Lesser looked upon it and decided lo, it was good - and created some money ex nihilo and loaned that money to it.

So mark it down: Dimon, after being bailed out by the government,  is complaining that 3 million dollars (an improbable sum, but lets pretend that his casual remarks correspond to his  accountant’s results) is going to be taken from his six million dollars, and at some date the government will even take 15 percent from his 20 million in stock options, leaving the poor man with a mere 21 million + dollars for 2011. 

One can not call this phenomenon successful, save in the way that freaks and frauds that beguile a gullible audience are successful. Mark the man for what he is: like a partridge that sits on eggs that will not hatch, he is a fool, a deadbeat, a loser with a bonus, another plutocratic mediocrity.

Here's another observation from Jeremiah about the end of systems in which creatures like Dimon experience success:

Because my people hath forgotten me, they have burned incense to vanity, and they have caused them to stumble in their ways from the ancient paths, to walk in paths, in a way not cast up;

16 To make their land desolate, and a perpetual hissing; every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished, and wag his head.

17 I will scatter them as with an east wind before the enemy; I will shew them the back, and not the face, in the day of their calamity.

  

The Forest Books

“All European culture – intellectual not less than material – came out of the woods.” Werner Sombart, Moderne Kapitalismus, Vol. 2


The symbolic key to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of inequality is found in the circumstances of its writing, as Rousseau described them in the Confessions:

“In order to meditate at my ease on this great subject, I made a trip of seven or eight days to Saint-Germain with Therese, and our hostess, who was a good woman, and one of her friends. I count this excursion among the most agreeable ones of my life. The weather was beautiful. The good women took upon themselves the trip’s expenses and organization. Thérèse enjoyed herself with them, and I, without a care, I spent happy hours at mealtime, and for the rest of the day, plunged into the forest, I searched, I discovered there images of the first time, of which I proudly traced the history. I put my hands on the little lies of men, I dared to strip their nature naked, follow the progress of time and things which defigured them, and comparing man with natural man, show them, the true source of their miseries in their so called perfections. My soul, exalted by these sublime contemplations, was elevated to the side of the Divinity; and seeing from there my likenesses, followed, in the blind route of their prejudices, that of their errors, of their sorrows, of their crimes, I cried aloud to them in a feeble voice that they could not hear. Foolish men, who ceaselessly complain about nature, learn that all your woes come from you yourselves!”

The return to the forest makes the Discourse one of the great European forest books. In the vastness of its scale – that of universal history - Rousseau’s book resembles another book that also begins in a forest: “Midway through the journey of life/I found myself in a dark wood/for the straight way had been lost”. Dante’s story encompasses universal history as well, but it is not seen as such – rather, it is seen as a cosmological story, unfolding the great Biblical, classical and Christian events in the afterlife. In Dante’s beginning, the sign that the straight way had been lost is the dark wood; in Rousseau’s, of course, the sign that the straight way had been lost is outside of the forest of Saint German.

In Charles Olson’s reckoning with Moby Dick, he begins by highlighting the material importance of whale hunting to the economy of the United States in Melville’s time. An exhaustively materialist reading of Rousseau’s Discourse could, perhaps, begin by meditating on the importance of forests to the economies of France and other countries in Europe in the 18th century. As Jean Nicolas’ sweeping history of peasant rebellions in that century makes clear, forest rights were no longer the central issue in village jacqueries – but in the 17th century, they clearly had been. Even so, wood, along with clothing and food, stood at the center of European life in Rousseau’s time. Nor was Rousseau the last of the writer’s of forest books. We think of certain classic American writers as creatures of the wood – Cooper, for instance, and, supremely, Thoreau. But as I have pointed out before, Marx, too, begins his real career by entering a forest – or at least entering into the issues that swirled around forest property rights, as he saw them being reshaped in Köln.

Wood theft, according to the two scholars who have studied it in the German context (Blasius and Mooser) was one of the central crimes against property in the 19th century, from the 1830s to the 1860s – over about a generation. Marx’s five articles about the laws concerning wood theft are not, then, about an eccentric issue. And, as much as wood “theft” is an issue in the history of crime, it is also an issue in the creation of property –which is how it opened Marx’s eyes, as much as they were opened in his classes in property law at the University of Berlin. It is here that we find Marx dealing with the kind of enclosures that were central to Polanyi theory of the Great Transformation. Private property was not, on this account, merely guarded by the state – the still reigning liberal myth. Rather, it was through the state that private property was defined. To separate the state from the private sphere is to move from historic fact to ideological myth. Why that myth is important is another matter. What Marx saw happening was important in the way he came to see understand class, rather than remaining with Stand – a word that is hard to translate. Status, station, estate – those are the English equivalents.

In 1858, in the preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economics, Marx wrote: “My major was jurisprudence, that I nonetheless only took up as a subordinate discipline near philosophy and history. In 1842-1843, as the editor of the "Rheinischen Zeitung", I was embarrassed for the first time to have to discuss so called material interests. The Rheinische Landtag’s treatment of Wood theft and the parceling out of land properties, which opened up an official polemic between Herr von Schaper, at that time the president of Rhein province, and the Rheinischen Zeitung over the situation of the grapegrowers, debates finally about free trade and tarrifs, gave me a first occasion to deal with economic questions. On the other hand the good will to go further into this further made up for a lot of special expertise, and a weak philosophically colored echo of French socialism and communism could be heard in the Rheinischen Zeitung.”

I find it significant that these three European writers, setting out to write, on the broadest of scales, the history of human civilization, begin in the forest. Surely this must be an intersigne, an exchange happening in the basement below universal history, where all the dealers in codexes are busy cutting them up and mashing them back together. One way to look at Capital – a bleak way, granted – is that it is the first European book to envision a world completely out of the woods, a human world which has put the woods behind it.

a note on perfection - Foigny, Rousseau

Foigny’s Terre Austral is a utopian Robinsinade before Robinson was conceived. Like Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyage to the Moon, it mixes satire with libertine philosophy – of a kind – in such a way that text continually questions its own register. The narrator, Sadeur, who has the bad fortune to have been born a hermaphrodite in Europe, saves himself from shipwreck and lands in Australia – the land that is the polar opposite of Europe – only to discover a society of hermaphrodites who strangle those children that are born abnormally – that is, with one sex only. Somehow, these hermaphrodites have also perfected a form of parthenogenesis, which has the effect that every member of the society can enjoy a perfect solitude, save for the love they bestow upon their children. All, in this society, are equal. All are also naked.

The narrator is, of course, shocked at these things, and in turn shocks the Australians by wearing clothes. All of which leads to threat to put him to do, and a series of dialogues between him and one of the wisest Australians about society, sexuality, and … perfection.

The perfect has long been meditated in Europe, and assimilated into the Christian religion. As Foigny was writing in Geneva, Leibniz was publishing philosophical texts that used the idea of perfection to explain the order among all possible worlds. Foigny’s text is, in one register, a similar exploration of perfection, and in another register, a satire of it.

Thus, the wise Australian at one point explains the emotional customs of the Australians with reference to their sexual autarky as follows:

“As for us, we are total human beings, and there is none among us who does not show all the parties of our nature with all its perfections: this is the reason we live without these animal ardors one for the other, and we cannot even listen to talk about it. This is the reason, again, that we can live alone, as though having need of nothing. Ultimately, this is the reason that we are happy [contents] and that our loves have nothing charnel about them.”

The two semantic extremes at work here are the animal and the perfect. Human perfection, according to the Australians, is wrapped up in distancing the human in all things from the animal. Which reminds the narrator of Western theology: “I couldn’t hear the worlds of this man without being reminded about what our theology teaches of the production of the second person of the holy trinity, and of all the effects outside of the Divine. I had ceaselessly meditated on the great principles of our philosophy, “that the more perfect a being is, the less it has need to act.” In this case, the less it had need to feel.

The perfection of the Australians is a sort of mirror of the idea of perfection in European philosophy, but what that mirror shows is a society that is the opposite of the European, and that is, for the European reader, horrifying.

I have no evidence that Rousseau read Foigny, but certainly the renegade preacher was known to Bayle. In history, the ludicrous invariably shadows the serious, so it is not really that surprising that as Leibniz built the great baroque structure of the theodyssey, in which perfection is used a kind of cosmological rule to reconcile all possibilities and realizations, in a shabbier intellectual neighborhood, the discourse of perfection was used to discuss sex and shitting among the hermaphrodite Australians.

In the Discourse on Inequality, perfection becomes a verb – to perfect – in the best enlightenment manner. It is one of Rousseau’s chief conceptual instruments for creating his own conjectural history of the foundation of society. But to take the term as a synonym for progress, or to take it as having a wholly favorable meaning, is no doubt a mistake, one that leads inevitably to much exegetical anguish.

Another day, another crisis

According to this NYT article, the OECD is playing its usual neo-liberal role in urging austerity on Europe.

This, of course, is the end game of a long history of reaction going back to the seventies, when policy elites and the generation of 68 turned their back on 'socialism' and began the long work of demoralizing populations and installing financial regimes that deflated wages, raised credit limits to cover their unpopular policies, and inflated the compensation of the investor and managerial class to a Gilded Age level.

Here's the deal: There's no such thing as an unsustainable government debt. The banks, of course, depend on the governments to enforce debt obligations, plus they depend on the governments to either give them money or loan them money at such low interest rates that it is the same (the U.S. 'capitalized" U.S. and foreign banks, hedge funds and the financial centers of corporations to the tune of 16 trillion dollars from 20008 to 2010 without anybody batting an eyelash). So, what army does Goldman have?

It is too bad that we live in a world in which bank debts are paid by practically free loans by governments, and government debts are paid by - crushing the middle class. Eventually, our debt serfs are going to look up and ask: who, exactly, do we owe this money to? The relatively paltry investment class, which includes about a million to two million people world wide? Sorry, I see no reason that countries should go down the hole just so these people can continue to enjoy their three vacation homes and the corporate jet.

If Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece were smart, they'd band together and simply say no. If the EU central bank won't print the money this group needs to fund a bank and buy their own debt - a very easy thing to do - they should do it themselves, make up a Southern Euro. It would immediately deflate, and reverse Germany's export advantage in Europe. I see no reason that they shouldn't do this - except for the fact that the neo-lib colonies among the elites in those Southern countries would be horrified.

the naked and the busy: Rousseau2

In Kleist's essay, On the Marionette Theater, Kleist presents a dialogue between himself and a marionette master concerning theater and the relation of the marionette to the human actor. The master voices the idea that even human actors display their souls not in their voices but in the bodies and their movements.

"Just look at that girl who dances Daphne", he went on. "Pursued by Apollo, she turns to look at him. At this moment her soul appears to be in the small of her back. As she bends, she look as if she's going to break, like a naiad after the school of Bernini. Or take that young fellow who dances Paris when he's standing among the three goddesses and offering the apple to Venus. His soul is in fact located (and it's a frightful thing to see) in his elbow."

These examples are not neutral - they gather and explode in his next passage:

" Misconceptions like this are unavoidable," he said, " now that we've eaten of the tree of knowledge. But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stands behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back."

That methodological circumnavigation, in search of the back door to paradise, is how I intend to pursue this investigation of Rousseau - and in fact, ultimately, all investigations. A paradisial truth that comes by way of the serpent's path, that is what is going on here.

In that spirit, let's take up one of Rousseau's predecessors in the European tradition of imagining the other.

Gabriel Foigny was an underground man of the classical age – a drunk, a lech, an ex-priest. He fled from a monastery in France, where the bonds of chastity were evidently too tight for him, to the Protestant freedom of Geneva, in the 1660s. There he found a job as a teacher – his attempt to go on preaching under the new dispensation was discouraged when he appeared in church drunk – and married a low class slut who proceeded to cheat on him. Being an educated man, he turned his hand to the market for reading matter. First, he created playing cards of a kind, on which there were prayers – or perhaps Tarot signs. Then, in 1676, he published a manuscript he had been ‘given”, La Terre Ausrale. Later on, he admitted that he wrote it himself – by this time he was on the hop again, leaving behind a pregnant maidservant and a set of angry Genevan ministers. The TA is an account of a colonial Sinbad the sailor who ends up, after various adventures in Africa and Portugal, cast up on the Australian shore. Australia, here, is not to be confused with the continent of that name – it was more like More’s Utopia than Van Dieman’s discovery. The account of the naturals of Australia is accompanied by a dialogue between the protagonist and one of their sages. Through this sage, Foigny expressed, as Geoffrey Atkinson put it, his “open and secret revolt against society and its institutions.” [39]

Such a revolt, to be radical, must go back to the very root of society. That, of course, is paradise. Society begins in the annihilation of paradise, as readers of Genesis know. Or I should say, its annihilation for humans – for it is part of the magic of the story that the Garden of Eden is not abolished by the Lord. It exists, but it exists, now, outside of human existence. It is barred. Thus, no sentence in human history has had the effect of Adam’s communication to God that he and Eve are naked. For, as God immediately replies, “who told thee that thou wast naked?” It is one of those moments for which Joyce, in Finnegan’s Wake, devised his long sentence-words, dividing one Viconian epoch from another: “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonneronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr”.

But if we go around the world, as Kleist’s dramaturge suggests, perhaps we can get in the back way. Foigny’s sage-sauvage is, as Atkinson writes, ‘filled with horror at the idea of wearing clothes”. He cannot be persuaded that clothing is an aid to morality – comparing the Europeans to “little children who no longer know an object as soon as it is covered with a veil.” [63] As without, so within. The colonial process – or the civilizing process – puts into relief superstition as its privileged target, while its subjects, the subjected, gaze with disbelief at the superstitions of the civilizers. Ultimately, what was this, for the Europeans, but the rejection of that peculiar moment in Genesis, when God, for once, stops being a politician or a magician – when he makes clothing of skin for his creatures. As he once made Adam of clay, the act of a worldmaker, so he now clothes them, the act of a colonizer – but colonizer in the most intimate sense. There is no more intimate act ever attributed to Yahweh than this: ‘Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them.” As though Adam’s announcement made the seals fall from God’s eyes, too. The intimacy in this act is in its superfluity: after all, having condemned humans to labor – and the sexes to division of labor – there’s no reason that Adam and Eve could not have made their own clothes. What kind of divine necessity is on display, here? What kind of cosmic discomfort? We know that the Gods, other Gods, can be moved by human nakedness – can be stirred to desire. Per Ganymede, per Leda, per Daphne, per every metamorphosis, ever skin that goes on and every skin that comes off.

If we are to understand the world of the primitive man of Rousseau's Discours on Inequality, we have to look through the eye of the needle of the European man that Rousseau saw all around him - a man whose chief economic industry lay in making clothes or textiles. Nudity, which is characteristic of that early man, is also characteristic of a certain kind of leisure. And it is with this symbol that we may as well start.