on to the sovereign consumer II

In 1948, Mary Jean Bowman wrote an article concerning the rise and relative decline of the consumer in economic theory: The Consumer in the History of Economic Doctrine. Phillip Mirowski has shown that the enormous powers of control systems such as were put into operation by U.S. during World War II had left an impress on the economics profession at that time. It was an impress deepened by the merger of mathematical economics and Keynesian ideas about demand management in the Anglosphere in the years after the war. There was never, in that period, any real threat that the private enterprise system would be taken over by the state – but there was enormous confidence in the state’s ability to direct the economy. Against this background, Bowman’s history seems to be an exercise in antiquarianism. For readers who have experienced the collapse of confidence in the state’s ability to direct the economy – at least on the surface of economic thinking – and the dominance of the neo-liberal framework, it is the antiquarianism that is antiquated.

Bowman divides into four the approaches to the consumer in economics. Her third approach is closest to what would be called the idea of the sovereign consumer: “The consumer is viewed as the originative and active agent in determining the allocation of resources. .. Since the late 19^th century the normative stress has been mainly on realizing consumer preferences, but a resource allocation analysis has been applied in other normative contexts…” (1)

For Bowman, Say was “probably the first economist to become an unqualified exponent of the normative postion that the satisfaction of consumer preferences, whatever those preferences might be, was an end in and of itself.”

But in Bowman’s history,  Say was a little to early to have been able to exploit the subjective turn that came about with the marginal utility approach. Furthermore, if Say were to reach for a physics model of the economy, it would have had to have been Laplace – whereas by the late nineteenth century, better statistical tools and and models of physics gave economists a sense that mechnics could be transferred to the matter of exchange. Wicksteed, for Bowman, is the key figure in this history (which, as she admits, is skewed towards England and America):

“Wicksteed was the first of the British economists explicitly to join the utility and cost approaches through opportunity cost. The concept was applied in both the allocution of resources among different uses and the margin of choice between leisure or idleness of resources and income. In the former application consumers’ rule was carried back through the economy by imputation.”

So Bowman’s history stands as a tale of events unfolding in a particular department of knowledge. The motives, here, are generated, or so we are to believe, by the structure of science – although it is already a question of whether this is the science of discovery, or whether the experimental and the empirical are being pre-processed in a gesture of scientific aspiration. The economist’s understanding of themselves as scientists was expressed by Mill, and repeated by Carl Menger, one of the important pioneers of the marginalist school, in his Investigations (1883):

‘The will of men are lead by countless and in part contradictory motives; in this way, any strict law-likeness of human action in general and economic in particular is excluded from the beginning. Only when we think of man in his economic activity as being continually guided by the same motive, i.e. his self-utility, does the mmoment of arbitrariness appear excluded, and every action strictly determined. Only under the above presupposition is accordingly the laws of political economics and even national economics thinkable.” [My translation, 73]

The language of determination leads us into the logic of economic indvidualism, which presents itself firstly as a methodological norm. The individual’s motives may be granted free reign – but as far as the economist is concerned, they must be formally enveloped in a modality that will make them calculable and determinant.

…

Character is never the rubric under which the economist goes about his business. Rather, at the heart of the subjectivist move was an oddly vacuous subject – the ‘individual’, or the consumer.  In mainstream economics, the decisive rupture with the classical school centers on the replacement of the laborer, the producer, by the individual consumer, the preferer. But this change of focus creates an oddly dysymmetric picture of economic activity, as though individuals existed in some series, isolated from one another, the realization of their choices cut off from any interference one with the other.  continually chosing goods and services, an eternal monologue of want. One imagines them as Beckett characters, buried up to their necks in purchases, balancing costs and benefits. Far from being a choice of method, a choice of connection within a network of connections as in Simmel, a choice for salvation that leads to a new life, the choice of believing in the eternal return of the same that leads to the transcendence of the human, the choice of revolution that throws off the yoke of alienation, the choice of the economic agent has a curiously muffled, a passive aggressive nature. It is a choice of, as economists like to put it, one bundle of goods over another, with the world of supply, of production, of creation, absolutely subservient to choice.

The inversion of the economist’s protagonist – from producer to consumer – follows the logic of individualism in as much as it clears a space in which economics can be a social physics, or mechanics. The individual shoppinng is a distinct unit. The individual producing, on the other hand, is a collaborator. The steelworker does not make a fleck of steel distinct from the fleck of steel made by his fellow steelworker. The classical economists made great strides in abstracting to gain a sense of economic objects as produced, by postulating a fully substitutable abstract labor time – the time that is represented in the time card. But Marx revealed that there was an unconscious total social fact following upon this way of analysis: producers were exploited within the class stratified social whole. This would bother few in a world in which the servant/master relationship was assumed, but it did bother a world in which that relationship had to be justified. And yet, of course, in a further paradox, the first world, by depending on non-liberated labor, could never bring about the  industrial and financial system  of capitalism – capitalism must free the laborer if the laborer is to be exploited in a proper capitalist manner.

Moreover, the genesis of value, following the classical route, created insuperable problems of quantification – and could only be approximately quantified from surface indices. That this may just be the way the economy functions was not a good answer for an economics that wanted to be not simply a social science, but the most scientific social science.

Still, the turn in economics from the producer to the consumer, from labor value to marginal utility, was not received in the social sciences or among policy makers without skepticism and outright resistance. Among the paths of that resistance was: the sociology that took as its primary units certain collectives; the path of therapeutic nihilism; and the positive pather of socialism. The first took collectives to be, at least for the purposes of explanation, agents  – crowds, public opinion, class, etc. The second exploded the notion of the unified individual, with his unified consciousness, from within –a move which was variously made by William James, Nietzsche and Freud. This path eventually led, in the twentieth century, to another notion of the person in terms of sovereigny and abjection. And the third path centered upon the idea that the individual’s consciousness of himself was always mediated by class, a state of affairs that could only be changed by revolution.

the sovereign and the sovereign consumer

In 1967, Robert Solow wrote a disparaging review of John Kenneth Galbraith’s New Industrial State, which was a bestseller that year, in the Public Interest, a fairly hot academic journal at the time. In the same issue, Galbraith replied. The quarrel spilled over into the next issue in 1968, with an ideological comrade of Galbraith’s, Robert Marris, pitching in, and Solow finally counter-attacking his two adversaries.

The original review raised the doubt that Galbraith was using a scientific method, instead of an ad hoc method of magisterial observation. Solow felt that Galbraith’s themes were often invalidated by modern economic theory. And, in particular, he did not think that Galbraith could be right about one of the theses that had by that time become associated with his name: that corporate demand management, that is, marketing, shaped both production and the market.

At one point, Solow, in responding to a supporter of the Galbraith view, Marris, wrote: “What I said was: … But I should think a case could be made that much advertising serves only to cancel other advertising, and is therefore merely wasteful.” I should think it obvious that this almost has to be true – i.e., that much advertising merely cancels other advertising – for otherwise there would be nothing to stop both the cigarette industry and the detergent industry from expanding their sales to their hearts’ desire and to the limits of consumers’ capacity to carry debt.”

This was written in 1968, when the consumer’s ability to carry debt was not itself a great matter of advertising. It proved to be so in the 2000s, and as we have seen, mortgages and credit card debts did expand to the hearts’ content of banks and financial service companies – until the limit of the consumers’ ability to pay debts was reached. The ghost of Galbraith is entitled to smile about Solow’s naïve idea that debt itself can’t be commodified, advertised and amplified.  But more here is on display than  Solow’s limited imagination. There is, in Solow’s statements, a classic economist’s blindness to the relationship between goods, and indeed, people – to the novelist’s truth that people live in other people’s lives.

Thus, when Solow writes: “It must be harder to influence the consumer’s choice between purchases of cigarettes and purchases of beer, and much harder still to influence his distribution of expenditures among such broad categories as food, clothing, automobiles, housing…”, he falls into a rather puzzling trap in which the purchase of beer and cigarettes is a one time purchase with no effects on one’s lifestyle. His dissociation of goods and people make it impossible to see the connection of a good like cigarettes and a broad category like housing – a connection that came into view very clearly for the 300,000 some people who died of lung cancer in 1967. Indeed, 1967 marked the high water mark of the increase in cigarette smoking. The next year, the government and private organisations began to feature a massive anti-smoking marketing campaign. And the incidence of smoking started to fall.

Solow’s notion that advertising countered advertising is, indeed, an observation about the content of some advertising – the comparative subgenre. However, it was evident even to Solow that this couldn’t account for all advertising. Nor was he happy with the idea that advertising was simply waste, for if that were the case, the government could happily ban advertising without economic damage –and this was not something Solow’s economic ideology would allow. At the University of Chicago, a school developed that contended that advertising did, indeed, have an economic benefit, by giving consumers – whose preferences were made through the same act of freewill by which sinners in an evangelical church accept Christ as their Lord and Saviour – with information that will help them find their preferred goods and services. Since advertising doesn’t look like it is in the business of providing this kind of information, the Chicago school was reduced to saying that advertising signaled bundles of qualities – such as comfort – even if the information it gave looked more like the rhetoric of persuasion.

Why were economists so eager to dispatch Galbraith’s idea? Or I should, perhaps, say the idea of the marketers themselves – there have been many sociological studies of, say, the internal paper generated by advertisers of tobacco, and it is nothing like the Chicago Economics ideas about what advertising does. There is some support for Solow’s other notion, which is that mostly, advertising produces brand switching, but not a demand for the particular good. Yet it is unclear what this means – especially as a good like cigarettes was indeed used by more and more consumers in the years from the turn of the century up long past the medical evidence that it caused cancer. Is switching a brand ontologically different from switching to a good? And what is really being switched? What goods are really in competition?

Galbraith, in his reply to Solow, pointed out that the reason Solow attempts to dismiss him out of hand is that Solow is protecting a certain ideology, one that is shared among mainstream economists:

“The issue concerns the future of economics in general and of the highly pretigious work with which Professor Solow is associated in particular. That work is within a highly specific frame…

            What is the frame? It is that the best society is the one that best serves the economic needs of the individual. Wants are original with the individual; the more of these that are supplied, the greater the general good. Generally speaking the wants to be supplied are effectively translated by th market to firms maximizing profits therein. If firms maximize profits they respond to the market and ultimately to the sovereign choices of the consumer. Such is the fame and given its acceptance a myriad of scholarly activities can go on within it. Any number of blocks can be designed and fitted together in the knowledge that they are appropriate to – that they fit somewhere in – the larger structure. There can be differences of opinion as to what serves the larger structure. Mathematical theorists and model builders can squabble with thos who insist on empirical measurement. But this is a quarrel among friends.”

Galbraith is here describing the flow sheet of mainstream economics since Walras’s time, a narrative with one monological character – the sovereign consumer. I am going to go back and look at the oddity of this construct, which arose when economics made a subjectivist move at the end of the 19^th century, in marked contrast to the direction of the other social sciences.  

Lamartines (from an old post)

Last night, I went to a lecture about the supposed father of Amer-Indian studies in France. The woman who gave the lecture made one point clear in her first five minutes: Hamy was not and could never be called one of the founders of 'Americaniste" studies in France. It was all a hoax. Not an intended hoax, but one of those hoaxes that arise in the collective unconscious of an institution - in this case, the institutions of anthropology that dominated in fin de siecle France.
In my terminology, she had found a Lamartine.

Lamartines

Alphone de Lamartine, who knew Joseph de Maistre, described him, after he was dead, as being “large [d’une grande taille,], handsome and male of form and face.” Madame Swetchine, who also knew de Maistre, was taken aback by those lines: “M. de Lamartine says that he saw a lot of M. de Maistre. The number of those meetings makes it all the more surprising that his description of the man was misleading to such a degree. Not one touch was precise or faithful to the original. Count de Maistre was of middling size, and his features were irregular. There was nothing incisive in his eye, to which his short sightedness lent something lost in his gaze. This irregular, and not very brilliant face nevertheless had a majestic radiance.”

The witnesses summoned by the historians are all fed their lines by someone, usually the insatiable self, the vulgarian whose dirty fingers are even in our hot tears. Leaving fingerprints. Lamartine is the biggest goose of French literature, with his tedious lyrics and his lukewarm liberal politics. He is the very type of the sots from whom Baudelaire, later, begged in vain for a break to keep him from slipping into the abyss of want and madness. Madame Swetchine, bless her soul, did not reckon that there was a stye in Lamartine’s eye – his ego. The problem with history is that it is packed with Lamartines. The process is fucked, the jury is packed, the judge is limited by his caseload, his languages, his headache, his faulty hardons.

Any good carpenter knows a rotten two by four. Anyone with a nose for it knows a rotten fact. But we have to build with available materials.

anti-Sopa

the nervous character: Zeno 4

The popular stories about the introduction of various forms of using tobacco are always about the military. It is said that the habit of cigarette smoking passed from the Spanish soldiers, who had learned it from Brazilians, to the French in the 1830s. However, there is another story that locates the re-invention of cigarettes in the 1850s wars between Russia and Turkey. A Turkish soldier, whose pipe was destroyed by a bullet, put tobacco in the paper from the envelop of a cartouche, and smoked it. [[Ferland, 2007] And still another claims that it was the French soldiers, arriving with paper and tobacco, who diffused the habit in Russia. These different stories could be sorted out by considering that the Brazilians and Spanish may well have used a corn leaf – which is how cigarettes were described as late as 1864 in G.A. Henrieck’s Du Tabac. There we read that cigarettes are rolled in paper “sans colle”. Indeed, this was the technical difficulty with cigarettes as a commodity: its fragility.

The military is mobile, and at the same time idle, which has some effect on the form of drug that is being used. Tolstoy’s letter to his aunt Tatiana Yergoloskaya in 1851-2, when he was garrisoned in the Cacausus, describe the garrison life very well.  Garrisons were foyers for all the products that kill time, from gambling to smoking to, in recent times, heroin and marijuana. Also for politics and literature.

Here’s Tolstoy as he starts to settle in the garrison life:

 "I was at Stariy Yurt. All the officers who were there did nothing but play and at rather high stakes. As it is impossible for us when living in camp not to see each other often, I have very often taken part in card-playing, and, notwithstanding the importunity I was subject to, I had stood firm for a month, but one day for fun I placed a small stake: I lost. I began again: I again lost. I was in bad luck; the passion for play had awakened, and in two days I had lost all the money I had and that which Nikolay had given me (about 250 rubles), and into the bargain 500 rubles for which I gave a promissory note payable in January, '52.”

Tolstoy, of course, was not a typical officer, and killed time by writing “Childhood” and reflecting on the world around him.  Lucien Leuwen, the hero of Stendhal’s novel, shares some traits with Tolstoy – notably, his wealth and connections and interior life. But Stendhal’s hero is engaged not in suppressing the Turkic speaking mountain people on the Russian frontier, but, or so he feared, the French speaking people on the class frontier in Nancy – as Stendhal sets his story just after the French army had suppressed various worker strikes in Metz. Still, the life of idleness represented by Stendhal – and the contrast with the ambitions of the hero – takes on a very similar tone.

If killing time in the garrison corresponded with the use of drugs, it was a different kind of time that corresponds to the popular image of cigarettes by 1900.  In a sense, this is the same problem of weight and mass that is discussed in the preface to “The Telegraph as a means of commerce” (1857) by Karl Gustav Knies, who compares the ‘commodities’ of things, persons, and “information” – Nachricht. Knies was one of the first economists to recognize that telegrams, by introducing a real time speed into the diffusion of information, had, as it were, given a premium to the light and speedy. To come to this conclusion, Knies had to frame for himself a sense of information that, at the time he wrote, was still lacking. Yet he knew that the Nachricht “is obviously one of the objects in which commerce between people is represented.” Information (or “report”), unlike thought, requires distance – and even if one presumes to have information from oneself, one is at least metaphorically putting oneself at a distance from oneself. More normally, though, communication goes from a sender to a distanced receiver. Knies points out that if we have certain information that seems timeless, or at least doesn’t lose value in being transported from the sender to the receiver, much of what we communicate has only a passing value – just as any other commodity has. In other words, there is a shelf-life for reports. At the same time, there is a double time frame, one in which the immediacy of the need to which information corresponds may not be the same for the sender and the receiver. These things are true about letters and oral communications – but with the telegraph, a whole news temporal order, and a whole shift in the social construction of ‘immediacy”, comes about on the mass scale.

In a word, the lightness and quickness of the telegraphic message presages a different tempo in the life of human beings, which calls out for a drug that is both speedy and that suspends speed. That was the cigarette. It needed, however, to be technically changed. The cigarette becomes the object of certain changes, in manufacture and marketing, that make it an exemplary product of the turn to consumer goods in the later nineteenth century. Famously, the development of the tobacco industry in Russia, in which a skilled group of cigarette rollers were trained to produce cigarettes to serve a mass market, jumpstarted the American cigarette industry, which took its real start when James Duke enticed a number of Eastern European Jewish cigarette rollers to move from New York to North Carolina to train a number of Southern factory workers. Duke could not find an entrance to the cigar industry, so he chose to enter the tobacco industry by enlarging the production and market for cigarettes. America was famously addicted to cigars and chewing tobacco for most of the nineteenth century: cigarettes were suspiciously European. Duke introduced mechanisation, a new packaging method (a hard paper box), and advertising. Although he never was able to take over the cigar industry, which was resistant to the kind of speeded up manufacture that suited cigarettes, he did establish a strangle hold on cigarettes by 1912.

These are all developments that made cigarettes a symbolic accessory for the changes in the tempo of life that was being felt by urban populations in the U.S. and Europe by 1900.

The characterological correlate of this tempo was: the neurotic.

the new non-idle rich!

The NYT, which is caught between a love for the one percent that blooms in its style magazine and its business page and a political atmosphere in which the chummy relationship between liberalism and the one percent is coming apart, unrollsanother of its color pieces about the lifestyles of the rich. It features one Adam Katz in its first paragraph: “Adam Katz is happy to talk to reporters when he is promoting his business, a charter flight company based on Long Island called Talon Air.” So what did the Times reporters ask him?

Well, we are not far into the article when, breezing past the assets – “…an $8 million home, a family real estate company in Manhattan and his passion, 10-year-old Talon Air” … we are assured that, like so many of the 1 percent, Talon is a dynamo, a man who makes your average doublejob mom or dad seem like a slacker:

“”Still, they are not necessarily the idle rich. Mr. Katz, who sometimes commutes by amphibious plane and sometimes carries luggage for Talon Air passengers, likes to say he works “26/9.”

Of course, the NYT – as its Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, recently put it – isn’t in the business of the “truth”. If a presidential candidate or a rich man says something, it is the Times policy to simply print it, and let he who has an hour to kill and Google find out if it is true or not. Such a comforting doctrine! Luckily, I am one of the idle non-rich, and having the time, I goodled Mr. Katz, and found that, in other interviews, Mr. 26/9 gives a different peek at his life. Especially revealing was his interview with OceanHome, which, you will be surprised to hear, does not contain any stories about CEO Katz manfully struggling to manipulate a hundred pound suitcase into his jet’s tight suitcase storage space.  He paints a different view of his time expenditure – for instance, in response to the question about what he did when he bought his current mansion in Nassau County: 

“After purchasing it in 2007, I did a $3.5 million gut renovation, rebuilding it as a six-bedroom smart house, using a Creston system for controlling everything from lighting, sound, and temperature control to operating any of the 20 flat-screen TVs that fold down from the ceilings. I added a movie theater, a solarium with a sunken hot tub, a customized gym, outdoor kitchens and fire pits, Jacuzzis, an infinity-edge pool, radiant heat terraces, and a dock for my 135-foot motoryacht and 47-foot Intrepid speed boat, with Ipe (Brazilian Walnut) steps leading to a private beach.”

You might think that all these accoutrements make it even sadder that he is spending 7 days a week away from home. But don’t cry! It turns out that he sometimes his working time is spent amid the solarium, Jacuzzis and pool: 

What do you love most about waterfront living?
I love the privacy of it all, and the views are always spectacular, particularly when the sun sets across Manhattan. Better yet, I can commute to the city via my speedboat in 15 minutes.
Is one particular room in the house used most?
For me, it’s the 2,000-square-foot master bedroom, mostly because of the water views and the comfort of relaxing near a wood-burning fireplace. And it’s where my home office is. Like I said before, because the house was built in the round, it really feels like you’re sleeping on a ship at sea.

Still, “easy living”, as Ocean Home labels the article on a man who works harder than any four man in the bottom 99 percent, doesn’t always elude our hero. For instance, asked about the worst element in living in a house facing the ocean, Katz said: “Cold temperatures and wind are pretty intolerable during the winter months, which is why we head down to the Bahamas and live and sail around on the yacht.” 

Life, on the whole, is hard for the 1 percent: “They work longer hours, being three times more likely than the 99 percent to work more than 50 hours a week, and are more likely to be self-employed,” according to unreferenced stats in the NYT article. But I like to think that the fifty hours of week does have its softer side. I imagine, for instance, there might even be tax write-offs involved with working and sailing that yacht around the Bahamas. But these are mysteries the 99 percent know not of.

smoke em if you got em: Svevo 3

The closer one comes to a material detail in a text, the more distant appears the division between symbol and fact. Symbol and fact are always found in one another's arms, like lovers, and it is not an easy task to separate one from the other. And the person who does attempt to separate them must put on an anerotic mood, and will always feel a bit like a prude, a busybody or a fool. Besides, just as he pries away the fact, undresses it and preps it for the  table of statistics, let him turn his back for only a moment - and it is irresistable, this turning of your back on the fact - and when he turns back the fact will have simply embraced another symbol, or worse, the same one.

For example, take the historic facts in the case of tobacco...


William Weaver’s translation of Zeno's Conscience begins by looking at Italo Svevo’s name – “(his real name): Ettore Schmitz. The first half is Italian and, significantly, it is the name of a Greek hero, not of a Catholic saint. The surname is German. Then consider the birthplace: Trieste, a city that has had many masters, from ancient Romans to Austrians to Italians. In 1861, when Ettore Schmitz was born there, Trieste was an Austrian city, a vital one, the great empire’s only seaport and a focus of trade between central Europe and the rest of the world.”


The split Weaver points to in Svevo’s very name is, if we look a little at the history of tobacco, echoed in Zeno’s habit.


A few subtending facts, then.


In December, 1847, Italian nationalists in Milan (which, like Venice, Trieste and other parts of Italy, were under Habsburg rule) decided to imitate the American tea party – just as the Americans boycotted tea to protest British rule, they would boycott tobacco to protest Austrian rule. Tobacco was chosen for good reason: the Austrian state exercized a monopoly on the sale of tobacco. Since the habit of smoking tobacco in cigar form had been “brought” into the German sphere by English soldiers during the Napoleonic war (such, at least, was the myth to which German writers on tobacco subscribed), the Austrian state, like the Prussian state, had reacted by regulating its use. But unlike the Prussian state, the Austrian didn’t only ban smoking in public in the capital – they also devised different regulatory regimes for different regions in the Empire. And they promoted the creation of large tobacco estates in Hungary, which became part of one of the largest industries in the Empire, from cultivation to curing to manufacture of snuff, pipe tobacco, and cigars. [See Wickett, Studien ueber das Österreich Tabakmonopol, 1897]


In Dalmatia, state control of tobacco production was relaxed – in accordance with the liberalization of this area of the Empire that had been inaugurated by Joseph II. Trieste was well known as an entry point for the tobacco smuggling trade. In 1830, when Stendhal was the French consul in Trieste, he had remarked upon the openness of the smuggling trade. The tobacco that came in was, most likely, of Egyptian origin.


In Milan, the Austrian state had no rules about smoking in public. The Milanese liberals, voting to boycott smoking, sparked a nationalist feeling in the populace. On the 2nd and the 3rd, there were disturbances in the street, as cigars were plucked from the mouths of passerbys and thrown into the road.


But who were these smoking passerbys? Here, contemporary accounts differ. According to a French history from 1857, the Austrian government, knowing that the boycott was coming, had distributed 30,000 cigars to the Austrian garrison in the city. Thus, the soldiery was ‘armed’ with smokes, and when the crowds attacked, they took this as a provocation to violence and reacted accordingly. According to a contemporary Italian historian (Giusseppi Ricciardi, 1850), the smoking soldiers were joined by smoking criminals, who had been released from the jails and given cigars by the Austrian authorities to add to the confusion. Like a trick cigar, the situation ludicrously exploded, with rioting that spread to other cities in Italy.


But in Berlin and Austria of that year, the public/private meaning of the cigar was reversed. The laws that were put in place after the Vienna congress had banned cigar smoking in public, and thus made cigar smoking a daring act – or at least an act of symbolic resistance. The progressive smoked cigars – “ a democratic symbol for rabble rousers and agitators’ – while the petit bourgeouis smoked pipes. As the revolution spread, in 1848, from Paris to Berlin and Vienna, one of the demands of the liberals was the freedom to smoke in public – shoulder to shoulder with the freedom of the press.


Against this background, there is not only a split in Schmitz’s pseudonym, Italo Svevo, but even in the meaning of the tobacco addiction that provides the connection in Zeno’s account of his life. Freedom, for the Italian patriots, came via giving up tobacco. Freedom for German patriots meant taking up tobacco. And freedom is at the heart of the habit that Zeno describes, the perpetually renewed freedom of giving up the smoking habit:

"I believe the taste of a cigarette is more intense when it’s your last. The others, too, have a special taste of their own, but less intense. The last one gains flavor from the feeling of victory over oneself and the hope of an imminent future of strength and health. The others have their importance because, in lighting them, you are proclaiming your freedom, while the future of strength and health remains, only moving off a bit."

  In Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois’s program for the College of Sociology, they wrote of ‘establishing points of coincidence between the fundamental obsessional tendencies of individual psychology and the directing structures that preside over social organisations and command revolutions.’ Surely we have landed upon one of those points.


And yet – not quite. For what Zeno smokes as a mature man are cigarettes. His brush with cigars, though, was his first brush with tobacco. His father was a cigar smoker (like, it should be remembered, the founder of the psychoanalysis that provides the framework for the story – Freud). His father had a habit of smoking half a cigar, then leaving the butt for later. Zeno had a habit of stealing and smoking those butts.


“My father left some half-smoked Virginia cigars around the house, perched on table edges and armoires. I believed this was how he threw them away, and I believe our old maidservant, Carina, did then fling them out. I carried them off and smoked them in secret. At the very moment I grabbed them I was overcome by a shudder of revulsion, knowing how sick they would make me. Then I smoked them until my brow was drenched in cold sweat and my stomach was in knots. It cannot be said that in my childhood I lacked energy.”


We have not yet reached the moment of the cigarette. However, it is as though Zeno had to wean himself from cigars in order to reach that moment himself.