Simultaneity 3: the accident

It is a very bad career, but only a bad career gives the world the light that a not perfect, but still good writer wishes to produce, although unfortunately at any cost. Naturally, too, such people, observed from the outside, seem to wander everywhere, I could tell you about some of them, me of course included, but they are not in the least remarkable than through the work of illumination in rather good novels. One could say, that these are people that emerged a bit slowly from out of the previous generation, one can’t demand that everybody should follow the regular leaps of the times with the same regular leaps. But if one once gets behind in one’s march,  one will never catch up with the march of the crowd, obviously, yet even if the step left behind soon begins to look like one could bet that it was not a human step, one would lose. Imagine the view from a running horse in a track, if one could keep your eyes on it, the look of a horse springing over the hurdles, which surely shows one the most external, actual, wholly true nature of the race. The unity of the stands, the unity of the living public, the unity of the surrounding region in a specific time, etc., but even the last waltz of the orchestra and how one loves to play it nowadays. But if my horse turns around and doesn’t want to jump and goes around the hurdles or even breaks out and becomes spirited inside the arena or throws me off, naturally in appearance the collective view has won. There are gaps in the public that some fly over, and some fall in, hands wave here and there as by every possible wind, a rain of fleeting relations falls on me and it is easily possible, that some onlooker feels  it and is sympathetic to me, while I lie on the grass like a worm.

- Kafka, letter to Director Eisner, 1909

On June 6, 1885, F.R., a railroad conductor, was involved in a train accident in which the train derailed. The walls of the baggage car that he was in at the time caved in, and he was barely able to escape, after which he lost consciousness. However, when he regained consciousness he discovered that not much time had elapsed, and he was able to help drive the train to the next station. After that incident, however, he suffered “pains in the left thorax and back, flickering and colors in his vision. Also intervals of weakness of memory, fear and a racing heart.” These effects occurred when he was working, and he even once lost consciousness. He went to an eye clinic, but there was found no pathological damage to the eye.

J.R., a clothcutter in a factory, was involved in an accident in March, 1885, when he accidentally grasped a driver belt (which turned 80 times per minute and was carried by it up to the area between the belt and the ceiling, where he pressed his hands and head firmly against the ceiling to resist being sucked in by the belt and crushed. A worker held onto his legs while another worker rushed to turn off the machine. J.R.’s clothing was torn off, he suffered burns all over his body, and he experienced immediate shock. After a week he began to feel a hammering in his temples, his eyes would film up, and he had dizzy spells. He also began to forget things and to say “nonsensical things’.

R.V. was working in a wood finishing factory. On  June 18, 1886, his sleeve was caught by a bladed rotating machine used for planing wood. The rotating maching went at a speed of 2000 to 3000 rotations a minute. His right arm was twisted around it, but he was balk to use his free left arm to grasp an iron cart. The rotating machine ripped the shirt from his chest and shoulders, but this allowed him to free his arm. He saw that he was uninjured, but he felt fear to the extent that his entire body shook. Two days later his arm showed marks of being severely scraped up and swollen, with blood red, painful bruises. He worked six more months, essentially using only his left arm, while he took to medicating himself for the pain he felt in the right through alcohol.

All of these cases – and some thirty nine more – appeared in Hermann Oppenheim’s book, Traumatic Neuroses, which was a salvo in the long battle concerning medicine and politics that was the result of the accident insurance legislation that had been passed by the German parliament. Bismark publicly expressed his fear of the gains being made by the socialists, and to counter them, he began a process of reforming industrial relations, a key piece of which was workman’s compensation insurance.

Germany was soon followed by Austria. In the meantime, these matters were being debated in the United States and Britain. Wherever they were debated, the question of what to do about injurious effects that seem disproportionate to their causes. And thus, nosology was pulled by the nose into the class war.

In the United States, this war was fought, firstly, around the railroads. Eric Michael Caplan’s article about ‘Railroad sprain” – the symptoms that arose from the trauma of railroad accidents – follows the trajectory of the report of these injuries from their first description in John Eric Erichsen’s On Railway and other injuries, in 1866. The politics of the industrial accident in the U.S. followed a typically bifurcated path: while the courts generally found against claims made by workmen for injuries, they were much more sympathetic to passengers – for of course passengers were more likely to belong to the respectable class. They could even be judges. Thus, a diagnostic war was waged over whether ‘railroad spine” – whiplash – and other seemingly psychogenic illnesses were real or not. Real diseases are those with physiological causes, while those traumas that were psychogenic – well, courts and doctors tended to put them to the margins, close to overt fakes and malingerings.

Herbert Page,  a surgeon who worked for the London and Northwest Railroad, produced the most interesting theory. Page took up the idea of neuromimesis, first articulated by the French psychologist, Paget, to suggest that “fright itself… was capable of eliciting neuromimetic symptoms by way of some willful hypnotic state.” [396]  And, slyly, Page suggested that there was evidence for the neuromimetic hypothesis:  “The existence of a certain amount of control is shown moreover by the disappearance of the mimicries, when all cause for their representation is removed. The matter of compensation as we have seen, exerts in many cases a very favorable influence on the symptoms of nervous shock.”

This is an argument that continues to break out on various fronts to this day. Certainly the railroad companies, at the time, were losing in courts – juries tended to believe accounts of injuries from people like themselves, so that surveys showed plaintiffs winning 70 percent of the time. This became a chronic source of irritation to the stockholders of railroad companies. 

Railroad spine and other “traumatic neuroses” were caught in a set of rather confusing forces. For one thing, while  it might be very well to say that the injured were actually under hynpnotic suggestion, what this meant, in effect, was extending hysteria from women to men.  At the same time, there was a general suspicion of any explanation that relied on psychological factors – it went against the materialism of the times. The pressure from the population through the courts was one of the pressures that made industries reluctantly adopt state regulations for injury, in fact, as the costs could be controlled and predicted, then.

Because the way the sides are marked does not correspond to a clear battle between the ‘progressive” and the “regressive”, it is easy to misunderstand the context here. Hermann Oppenheim’s career is a good example of the casualties to which a ‘regressive’ materialism is heir.

Oppenheim is now a semi-forgotten figure. Although he was one of the founders of neurology as an independent discipline in Germany, he ran into a solid wall of hostility in World War I from neurologists, many of whom had been his students, when he maintained that that soldiers traumatized at the front were suffering a real material injury that was signaled in post-traumatic symptoms. The neurologists, seeking ways of sending traumatized soldiers back to the front as quickly as possible, were invested in the psychogenic explanation. Like the Railroad surgeons, these neurologists represented, from one point of view, the progressive side of according reality to psychological factors – but they came to that point of view for the most regressive of reasons: money in the one case, nationalism in the other.

Andreas Killen has pointed out that Oppenheim’s career as a neurologist, which began in the 1880s, coincided with the new importance of interpreting seemingly unaccountable pains and symptoms: ‘Arguably the most important factor in this disease picture was the accident insurance law itself. The law compensated work related neuroses within strictly defined limits. Entitlement to benefits was made contingent upon proof of direct causal connection to an accident.”

Oppenheim re-asserted the importance of material cause – that is, the material displacement of neurons – against the French school of suggestion, led by Charcot.  The shaking experienced by truck drivers, firemen, steelworkers, textile mill roller operators and the like had unexpected effects not because there was variances in the degree of suggestibility of different people, but because there were different degrees of material stress that were put upon the neural system.  That system was hooked into the emotions felt.

On the basis of the comparative analysis of his “observations”, Oppenheim presented as their common symptom the fact that the initiatory accident or injury always “had to produce a strong psychic emotiom or lead to them.” Oppenheim expressly refered to the fact that the symptoms of the traumatic neurosis occurred independently after the event, even though the patient laid claim to compensation,  grounding this forensically important affirmation with his unilorm clinical experience.  Oppenheim described a central problem of all the victims as ‘disquiet, excitement, fear and terror”, and more, a “hypochrondrial-melancholic mood, anxiety and finally an “abnormal sensitiveness” (Oppenheim, 1889) The anxieties mostly manifested themselves as panic attacks with agoraphobia, through which obsessive petty fears and compulsions can manifest. On the basis of their ‘intensified sensibitivity” the patience are extremely inclined to “pull back from society into solitude.”

Oppenheim was never clear about how, if the basis of these neuroses was changes in the microscopic configuration of the cerebellum – his guess – they could, as symptoms, feed back into the disease. This is an ontological paradox that didn’t worry Oppenheim, but in the end, it left him behind – having no place in his etiology for the psyche, he, in a sense, failed to explain the evolution of these disorders.

The industrialized experience of accident is one of the great social symptoms of the felt divide between organic time and vehicular time. Heidegger, in the 20s, speaks of how a background comes into view when there is a break in the routine – he uses the example of a missing or misplaced tool. The example that comes into view in the late nineteenth century when the tools were the toolusers – and what is embodied is something missing, filled in by pain. If in fact neuromimesis was happening, what was being imitated? For Page, fear was imitating real organic diseases, diseases that occurred in organic time. The accidents, however, shook the unconscious frame of the users of the industrial system – their assimilation of the eternal return of the same. That eternal return of the same is the metaphysical heart of the simultaneous, considered as a form of social time. Its poet is Kafka, an industrial accident insurance man. 

Simultaneity 2: Bergson and the industrialized experience

In the first chapter of Creative Evolution (1907), Henri Bergson takes up one of his most celebrated themes, durée, and refines it in response to his further thought on the matter since he had first exposed his idea in données immédiates de la conscience, in 1888.  In reading Bergson now, one can’t help but be struck by the metaphors of unwinding, unreeling, and tracking that go through his discourse on time. That metaphoric is usually associated with film, and it is with good reason that Deleuze turned to Bergson in writing his two books about cinema. However,  I’d like to make the case  that it goes back to what Schivelbusch has named the industrialized experience – the experience of speed on the railroad – and that underneath the surface of Bergson’s philosophy of time we have an image of the dualism between the vehicle and the driver or passenger, which is part of a larger dualism between industrial automatism and the worker.

That sense of the vehicularity of matter in which the organism is placed begins with a description of the continual changes we as consciousnesses are subject to. “This is to say tht there is not an essential difference between passing from one state to another and persisting in the same state… precisely because we close our eyes to the incessant variation at ech psychological state, we are obliged, when the variation becomes so considerable that it imposes itself on our attention, to speak as if a new state were juxtaposed to a prceding one. The latter is supposed to remain invariable in its turn, and thus so on, indefinitely. The apparent discontinuity of psychological life thus depends on the fact that our attention is fixed upon it by a series of discontinuous acts; where there is only a gentle slope, we believe that we perceive, in following the broken line of our attention, the steps of a stairs.” [2-3 – my translation]

Compare this to the analysis in chapter 3 of Schivelbusch’s The Railroad Journey. For Schivelbusch, the exemplary industrialized experience was riding on a train, since even the first, primitive trains could achieve speeds that were more than three times that of stagecoaches. In other words, railroads introduced a completely inorganic mode of travel on a mass scale, and in doing so accustomed people to an inorganic form of speed. Schivelbusch quotes authors from the 1830-1850 period who were quite aware of what was happening, putting it in terms of ‘shrinking space” or, paradoxically, of expanding the individual’s capacity to reach distant spaces. This was put in contrast with the fact that the shrinking and expanding did not affect the actuality of things. “Yet by a sort of miracle,” says the Quarterly Review article [from 1839, which Schivelbusch is citing], after describing the shrinking process, “every man’s field is found not only where it was, but as large as ever it was.”[35] Indeed, after reading Schivelbusch’s abundant citing of articles of this type, one understands why Einstein’s popular essay on relativity used the example of the railroad train, as the trope was already long in the popular consciousness.

If we consider that Bergson’s theme of durée was also colored by the industrialized experience, then we can see further into the metaphor and metaphysics that grounds it. Evidently, from the first, Bergson draws a line between organic time – which is irreversible – and artificial time – the time of matter – which is reversible. These are not accidental results of the duality between the two, but go to the heart of their different temporal regimes:

“From the survival of the past [for the self] results the impossibility for a consciousness to traverse the same state two times. However much the circumstances may be the same, it is not on the same person that they operate… … This is why durée is irreversible. We cannot re-live a single bit, for it would be necessary to efface the memory of all that followed.” [6]

Bergson’s framing of organic time results in his re-discovery of the new: “But an intelligence, even a superhuman one, could not foresee the simple, indivisible form which gives these abstract elements their concrete organisation. For to foresee is to project into the future what one has perceived in the past, or to have represented for a new assembly later, in a new order, already perceived elements. But what has never been perceived, and is at the same time simple, is necessarily unforeseeable.”

Contrast this regime of the irreversible and the truly new with the regime of the material, which is how sameness enters the world:

“Now, we say that the composite object changes by the displacement of its parts. But when a part has quit its position nothing stops it from retaking it. A group of elements which has passed a state can thus always return, if not by itself, at least by the effect of an exterior cause which puts everything back into place. This is the same as saying that a state of the group can repeat itself as often as one wants and that, in consequence, the group never grows old. It has no history.”

An aging without growing old is the fate to which the mechanical, the artificial, composite matter, is consigned – whereas growing old and having the property of novelty is the seemingly contradictory state imposed upon the organism. True novelty and true age are properties of the ‘passenger’ within the vehicle of matter. The vehicle can reverse, but the passenger, inherently, cannot.  And so the two move together, but move in different worlds. As Schivelbusch puts it about the train passenger:

‘What was experienced as annihilated was the traditional time-space continuum, which characterized the old transport technology. Organically embedded in nature as it was, that technology, in its mimetic relationship to the space traversed, permitted the travellor to perceive that space as a living entity. What Bergson called the durée (duration of time spent getting from one place to another on the road)  is not an objective mathematical unit, but a subjective perception of time-space.” [36]

Schivelbusch, I think, wrongfoots himself by putting the matter in terms of the broad subject/object theme – rather, the irreversibility, or entropy, of durée points to a certain deep reversal of our expectations: for the illusion is all on the side of the vehicle, in that it seems from the vehicle’s standpoint that the eternal return of the same is the law and the prophets. On the other hand, the illusion of reversibility becomes, in the industrial experience, the tempo of human life. The ideal of non-aging, the ideal of the assembly line, the ideal of the vehicle, the ideal of interchangeable parts, all are imposed on the human: human novelty is supplanted by artificial news.  This is one of the great characteristics of the simultaneity principle behind Tarde’s publics.

‘… the railroad did not appear embedded in the space of the landscape, the way coach and highway are, but seemed to strike across it.” [37]

a form of social time - simultaneity

In the twentieth century, sociologists and marketers gave Tarde’s publics a variety of names: sub-cultures, worlds, demographics, constituents, etc.

However, the important thing is that the public and these publics form out of the same principle – the subordination of haptic space to another kind and degree of proximity, which is mediated by a social mode of temporality – simultaneity – that Tarde mentions in connection with the news. News, in French, is actualité. Between the English and the French word, an important movement is captured. Tarde speaks of the newspapers giving their readers a ‘sense of simultaneity.”  He does not, unfortunately, disinter the phenomenon of simultaneity, instead  vaguely pressing on the idea of “at the same time”. But ordinary simultaneousness is transformed in the social mode of simultaneity. We speaking of catching up with, keeping up with, or following the news, or fashions, or tv, or books, or sports. It is in this sense that we are not simply conscious of being simultaneous with, but as well, and more strongly, that the simultaneous is moving ahead of us even as we are part of it, like a front.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the term allochrony to speak of the peculiar way in which Europeans, starting in the seventeenth century, started to divide up the contemporary world into different cultural time zones. Europe, of course, appropriated the modern to itself. Other contemporary cultures were backward, savage, stone age, traditional – they were literally behind their own time. Modernity exists under that baptism and curse. But Fabian’s concern for cultures exogenous to Europe blinded him to the effect of modernity within Europe, and America, where we witness another allochronic effect having to do with the new. Simultaneity is the horizon for a temporal competition – one in which the new, the young, the latest compete against the old, the laggard, the out of touch.

When Lyotard, in the Postmodern condition, speaks of the collapse of the meta-narrative that has sustained modernity, the master narratives of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, he is really signaling the triumph of this particular social form of time – simultaneity – over other forms – notably, that of history and cyclical time. The news, one could say, destroyed history and the forms of memory associated with it. But far from being a new phenomenon, post-modernity has always been the threat inside modernity – it is a pole in the latter’s dialectic. Simultaneity, embodied in the effect of the sphere of circulation upon those of its agents that branched off to produce the media industry, has long been the construction principle that drives newspapers and magazines, and drives the internet and the social network.

 

the crowd and the public

In Antonine Albalet’s Souvenirs de la vie Littéraire there’s a portrait of Gabriel Tarde from his Paris years. Tarde arrived in Paris late – he was 51 when he found a post at the Ministry of Justice and moved there. By this time he had become famous in the world of criminology, even though he did not have institutional backing; rather, he’d become famous for his ideas while still living in the provinces – in Sarlat, in Dordogne. Albalet’s portrait captures Tarde in around 1895, when he was becoming celebrated in the broader circle of Paris intellectuals who were associated with certain magazines and coteries. Tarde was now on the course that would take him to the Chair of Philosophy at the College de France, when he was chosen over Bergson in 1900. However,  he died shortly thereafter - in 1904 - and thus never did leave his footprint on any particular institution. He didn't have successors, or Tardians, the way Bergson had Bergsonians.

Tarde spent his fifties in the Paris that Proust writes about, the Paris of Salons and the uneasy mixtures that came about when various aristocracies – Bonapartist, Orleanist, traditional – came into contact with rich bourgeois professionals. As it happens, both Proust and Tarde were fascinated by the formation of “circles” and of conversation. Albalet catches that aspect of Tarde in his portrait. He first met Tarde through Henri Mazel, a social psychologist, who frequented the circle of the symbolists around Jean Moréas, who included, at the time, André Gide.

“It is through Mazel that I knew the philosopher Gabriel Tarde. They often came to the Café Vachette together [This café was where the symbolists met. It was located on Rue St-Michel, on the left bank], Mazel with his air of a smiling joker, Tarde with the silhouette of the conductor of a gypsy orchestra: large, thin, an artistic air, long dark hair in a weeping willow cut, a small moustache and sparkling eyes bying his spectacles. This philosopher had passed almost all his existence in Sarlat, the Perigordian town where he was born, where he married, and where he exercised, time out of mind, the office of a juge d’instruction. The descendent of an old family, Gabriel Tarde counted among his ancestors a canon who played a role in the Renaissance Papal court, upon whom he had published a pamphlet which he always listed in his works, while he suppressed a book of stories and poems. Tarde, in fact, was only a stranger in sociology; professional psychologists never figured in his world than at a secondary level. Above all, he loved beautiful poetry. He had written a lot of French and Perogordian verse. A feebleness of vision obliged him to restrict his reading. Tarde only read good authors. A phrase of Taine’s had led him to discover Cournet, who oriented his ideas towards social philosophy. As for his habits, Tarde remained young at heart; he loved balls, dinners, cicles, the theater and the cafes. A charming conversationalist, he didn’t hesitate to take the floor and to deliver himself of all kinds of fantasies of the most ticklish improvisation.” [174]

Tarde’s journey from the provinces to Paris in his life has been symbolically reenacted in his afterlife, where he seems to be perennially forgotten and rediscovered. The last two big rediscoveries were in the sixties, when Deleuze mentioned him in Difference and Repetition (claiming that he was a great disciple of Leibniz and a philosopher of difference)  and in the 1990s, when Bruno Latour saw in him an ancestor of actor network theory.

I am not so much concerned with Tarde's view of difference, or his theory of imitation, except in as much as it surfaces in his book, Opinion and the Crowd, which appeared in 1901. The consists mainly of three large essays which had first been published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and Revue de Paris – which were not specialized sociological journals, but signalled Tarde's niche in the larger world of Parisian intellectuals, not in the world of academia. However, as these works are connected to the great theme that is at the heart of all of his work – the theme of imitation, and they also take on board themes that traverse Tarde’s work in criminology, a word is in order.  Tarde figured  among a group of criminologists – perhaps the best know of which, today, is Lombroso – who were applying certain notions having to do with disease and psychology – the notions of contagion, epidemic, hypnotic suggestion, in Tarde’s case – to the phenomenon of crime. There was a perception that Europe was undergoing a crime wave – and an uneasiness that there was a whole criminal class that existed just below the surface of bourgeois life.

Tarde didn’t embrace pseudo-Darwinian theories of degeneration, but he did find, in crime, an exaggerated instance of social dynamics that he believed operated throughout society. Crime, by being outside of the norm, gave us a certain laboratory insight into what the norms, submerged in our daily life, were about. When we turn to Tarde on crowds and the public, we find some of the same themes reworked. In particular, the metaphor of contagion helps him separate crowds from publics, and leads him to certain characteristic insights.

The crowd, according to Tarde, is centrally dependent on physical proximity, or haptic space. For Tarde, proximity is not a contingent fact about individuals in a crowd, but rather the fact that roots these individuals in a larger natural history. Physical proximity in a crowd tends to dissolve the historic human quality of the individual, and release his animal nature.  Unlike Canetti, who in Crowds and Power confounds, to an extent, publics and crowds (under the notion of the invisible crowd), for Tarde the crowd is a natural event and the public is a social one:

In the lowest animal societies, association consists principally in a material aggregate. As one ascends the tree of life, the social relation becomes more spiritual. But if individuals are distanced to the point that they cannot see each other, of if they remain apart for a certain very short time, they cease to be associated… Thus, the crowd here presents something animal. Isn’t it a bundle of psychic categories essentially produced by physical contact?  [9]

The spiritual or intellectual portion of association  comes about in the play of proximity  that, while still operating under Hesiod’s “talk”, individuates the sense of belonging. Tarde, in the 1890s, naturally turned to newspapers and ‘circles’ for his examples, fished among celebrities, fashionmakers, writers and politicians.

“When we submit, all unawares, to that invisible contagion of the public of which we form a part, we tend to explain it by the simple prestige of actuality. If today’s newspaper interests us to this point, it is because it only tells us the latest facts, and it would be the proximity of those facts, and not at all the simultaneity of their knowledge by us and others that impassions us by the report.  But analyse this sensation of actuality that is so strange, the growing passion for which is one of the refined circumstances of civilized life. What is reputed to be the “news”: is it only what is taking place? No, it is everything that inspires a general interest in current events, even if it is an old fact. Everything about Napoleon has been in the news these last few years; everything fashionable is news.”

Tarde, here, approaches the moment that we saw figured in Works and Days: the source of talk is, mysteriously, based in itself. What marks the famous or the infamous is not, firstly, the deed, but the talk about the deed.  News, as Tarde points out, makes new what it reports, even if it is old.

Tarde did not have, as Marx and Simmel did, a firm and, as it were, external sense of modernity. He was, as Deleuze puts it, a pioneer in the exploration of ‘micro-sociology.’ It is this that helps him see that the public – this self-identifying crowd form that forms around abstracted physical proximity and identifies with a certain form of social time – the new, which authenticates itself as a simultaneous experience – required tools that would coordinate that experience. Thus, until the appearance of the printing press in the West, Tarde claims, there was no real public or publics. And thus no real public or public opinion.

The public, in Tarde’s view, is a sort of phylogenetic extension of public opinion, and thus, the different publics are different phylogenetic extensions In the 1890s, conversation in Paris was being tracked not just by Proust, but by Tarde, both of them trying to understand the diffusion of commonplaces and opinions – but in Tarde’s case, his background was a small town, Sarlat, in which the voice of the public was much more easily tracked and fixed. For what was said among the town’s visible elite soon made the rounds – a social fact that was picked up and used by the great realist novels, as for instance in Lucien Leuwen, or in many of Balzac’s studies of the ‘provinces’. Here the circle – half crowd, half public – was more visibly at work, and more visibly stratified – between the receptions given at the house of the bourgeois rich, the circles of the Catholic pious, or the cafes that had their clienteles and newspapers – one for the military officers, one for the liberals, one for the royalists, etc. How opinion became ambient, in these cases, was easier to visualize, took on a human face.

 

public opinion - a prehistory

P.S. is a 42-year-old man who has been affected by

paranoid schizophrenia since the age of 20. At the

onset of his psychosis, he was trying in various ways to

compensate for his difficulties in getting in touch with

other people. He had no secure ground to interpret the

others' intentions. He lacked the structure of the rules

of social life and systematically set about searching for

a well-grounded and natural style of behavior. For

instance, he was busy with an ethological study of the

"biological" (i.e., not artificial) foundation of others'

behaviors through a double observation of animal and

human habits. The former was done through television

documentaries, the latter via analyses of human interactions

in public parks. An atrophy in his knowledge of

the "rules of the game" led him to engage in intellectual

investigations and to establish his own "know-how" for

social interactions in a reflective way. – Giovanni Stranghellini, At issue: vulnerability to schizophrenia and lack of common sense (2000)

Consensus omnium, common sense and public opinion all exist as separate tracks through the intellectual history of the West – and each trail can be superimposed upon the other.

Early on, in Klaus Oehler’s definitive essay, Der Consensus Ominium als Kriterium der Wahrheit in der antiken Philosophie (1963), there is a quotation from Hesiod. The line quoted comes from the section of the poem devoted to “Days”, with its sometimes obscure reference to work, luck, gods and the days of the seasons.  The line, 760, goes: … and avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but it is hard to undo it. Talk is never completely lost, which has been in the mouths of the many. For talk is itself a God.” Talk, here, is not logos, but pheme – which, as Jenny Strauss Clay points out in Hesiod’s Cosmos, is the antithesis of kleos, that is to say, fame: kleos is to be heard about, pheme is to be talked about.’ This enduring couple still presides, in all their debased divinity, over the newspaper and the news and entertainment channels. They are structured by what is likely, or plausible.

The plausible concerns the heart of Oehler’s theme. As he points out, Plato’s antipathetic stance regarding opinion – endoxe – is countered by Aristotle’s respect for it. “The positive value of generial opinion is, as well, the ground for Aristotle’s preference for commonplaces [Stichwoerter]. It is said that in the peripatetic school, under his direction, a wideranding collection of commonplaces was made.” Furthermore: “… This preference of Aristotle … rested on the materr of fact that in commonplaces the infinitely rich experience of many races was documented in a unique way in brief and trenchant formulas, which is the way the Consensus omnium expressed itself.” [106]

If the pair pheme/kleos presides over the objects of the news, the commonplace presides over the form. It is the style of the cliché, the proverb, the wisdom of mankind – the conventional wisdom of the moment. The duality of fame and infamy, expressed in cliché, is precisely the form of ‘betise’ that a certain school of modernist writers – Flaubert, Bloy, Peguy, Kraus, Tucholsky, Mencken, Orwell – took as their ultimate enemy, even if for some, the wisdom of mankind was what was traduced in the press, rather than simply represented there.

In Oehler’s account, it was not Aristotle, however, but Cicero who transformed the semiotic of ‘talk”. Before Augustine, Cicero interiorized the commonplace as common sense – equating ‘the agreement of the people” with “a law of nature.” After Cicero, the idea of the universal consent of the people moves into the political order as a legitimizing technique – ironically, according to Oehler, Augustus, who ordered Cicero’s murder, took up his idea of the ‘universal consent of the people’ and made it one of the properties of the emperor.  

America's guild culture

One of the odder things about class stratification in the U.S. is that, on the one hand, you have an enormous number of people hollering to keep the government out of the economy, bemoaning statist health care and just aching and shaking for that moment when government finally becomes small enough that we are all as free as butterflies - and on the other hand, when one looks at how these people make money, a majority of them, one can reliably hypothesize, rely on Government poking its nose into our business and licencing and regulating. The doctor who, on the one hand, bitches about socialized health care is, on the other hand, apt at the drop of a hat to argue that doctors must be licenced, because, uh, the state, uh, has an interest in the healthcare, uh, of its citizens. Of course, the mind in contradiction to itself is has long been noted as one of the banal wonders of modern politics; but it still provides chuckles for the off line critic, watching the train wreck of the plutocracy whilst gobbling popcorn.

In fact, the State has been so successfully lobbied by professions to raise bars to entry by the encouragement of guilds has now become a much bigger phenomenon in the U.S. than unions. Doctors, dentists and lawyers owe much of their fortune to their guild privileges. But the bar to entry extends from HVAC work to accounting to nursing, etc., and always not, not and never, never and not, like the bad old unions, to raise the perks and plump up the wallets of the privileged professional, but for the public good.
Now myself I do think the public good is served when the state interferes with our healthcare. I am, here, a consistent statist. But the class nature of the libertarian act in America is such that few anti-unionists have ever considered the guild system at all. They aren’t alone. The literature on America’s Zunft-kultur is very very small. The classic paper is by Kleiner and Krueger, "Analyzing the Extent and Influence of Occupational Licensing on the Labor Market".  http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/working_papers.html Here’s a graf:

"The toughest form of regulation is licensure; this form of regulation is often referred to as “the right to practice.” Under licensure laws, working in an occupation for compensation without first meeting government standards is illegal. In 2003 the Council of State Governments estimated that more than 800 occupations were licensed in at least one state, and more than 1,100 occupations were licensed, certified or registered (CLEAR, 2004)." The authors also estimate that 30 percent of the American work force falls into this category.

In Indiana, Mitch Daniels, the governor, has just signed right to work legislation to put as large a hole as he can in the unions. In private, of course, Mitch Daniels has a law degree, which means he belongs to the lawyer’s guild. Somehow, he has not passed legislation eliminating that guild, and allowing anybody who wants to set him or herself up as a lawyer. Nor has he, to my knowledge, abolished the state boards that licence doctors and dentists and nurses and such.

Huh. It is as if the state can, well, interfere in the commerce between private citizens. This is so sad I would cry crocodile libertarian tears about it. But I wouldn’t cry to many, because the right will move against the successful progressive program of licencing professionals only when hell freezes over.

Because freedom ain’t free.

Back to the pin factory!

With bows to some earlier posts...

“A savage admires a nail and he is right to do so. It is in Paris that the observant man sees how much art has required combination, experiment and caretaking. Thirty hands and thirty tools are necessary for the formation of a pin, and you can have a thousand for a dozen sous.”

Sebastian Mercier is writing a decade after Adam Smith made the pin factory emblematic of the efficiencies produced by the division of labor. Smith, in turn, probably took his example from the Encyclopedia. Mercier, however, adds the gawking savage, to seal the deal: the new European economy will have, as an audience (and victim), the bystanding non-European. Who admires the very craft that is being turned against him.

I have referenced the pin before, being one of those fascinated by its riddles, its magic power.  How many economists dance upon the head of a pin? You know the answer – all of them.

Ho ho. In the 1760s, there was a controversy in Britain about a supposed Scots epic, Ossian, which had been “found” by a poet and published. Ossian was a forgery. Meanwhile, the real Scots epic was a-forging – that is, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Smith provided the Homeric theology to this thing we be callin’ capitalism. So, unsurprisingly, small academic industries have grown up around his famous images. The invisible hand is the most famous of these; a small group has worked on the famous pin factory.

The Wealth of Nations begins like this:

“The greatest improvement*17 in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.
The effects of the division of labour, in the general business of society, will be more easily understood, by considering in what manner it operates in some particular manufactures. It is commonly supposed to be carried furthest in some very trifling ones; not perhaps that it really is carried further in them than in others of more importance: but in those trifling manufactures which are destined to supply the small wants of but a small number of people, the whole number of workmen must necessarily be small; and those employed in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse, and placed at once under the view of the spectator. In those great manufactures, on the contrary, which are destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of the work employs so great a number of workmen, that it is impossible to collect them all into the same workhouse. We can seldom see more, at one time, than those employed in one single branch. Though in such manufactures,*18 therefore, the work may really be divided into a much greater number of parts, than in those of a more trifling nature, the division is not near so obvious, and has accordingly been much less observed.

To take an example, therefore,*19 from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade),*20 nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.*21 I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.”

Few books give you the main course right away like this. Smith was rightly proud of the phrase, division of labor. In one stroke, it divided an old way of looking at labor as a particular social function from looking as labor as one abstract thing. It was the discovery of a universal, accompanying the universal-to-be of the capitalist system itself.

Such a vast discovery, such a trifling object. Smith taught rhetoric, and knew all the magic tricks. It is as if Columbus had set sail with the Owl and the Pussycat in a pea green boat. The pin! The very emblem of smallness, a sort of atom of social matter – associated, too, with frivolity. Jesus had already used the needle as a (miraculous) stick with which to beat the wealthy – and here the wealthy fire back with pins. Then of course there is Little Red Riding Hood – let me quote from the classic interpretation by Teasley and Chase:

“As the original tale opens, a dominant concern is the path to be chosen:
Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going. "To grandmother's house," she replied. "Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?" "The path of the needles." So the wolf took the path of the pins and arrived first at the house.
Although Darnton usually investigated the meaning behind puzzling elements, he has dismissed the reference to the paths of the pins and the needles as nonsense. Yet, here is the first example of a symmetry that provides a clue to the tale's meaning.[6]
Each character's selection of one of the paths reveals a destiny. Red Riding Hood's choice of the path of the needles is synonymous with her decision to become a prostitute. The meaning of the line is revealed in an obscure nineteenth-century history that explains that among "women of doubtful virtue . . . bargains were struck on the basis of a package of bodkins or lace-needles, or aiguillettes, which they normally carried as a distinctive badge upon the shoulder, a custom surviving to Rabelais' day."[7]
The meaning of the wolf's choice of the path of the pins is found in the term bzou, which was used interchangeably with loup in the original French version. Although loup is the common French word for wolf, the definition of bzou is more obscure. Paul Delarue, the editor who has compiled thirty-five versions of the folktale, found that bzou was always used in the story for brou or garou, which in the Nivernais was loup-brou or loup-garou. All these are variations on the French word for werewolf, a supernatural being associated with witchcraft. Early modern Europeans held that Satan had the power to take the form of a wolf.[8]
Sixteenth-century French society believed that the presence of a devil's mark on a witch's body proved her allegiance to Satan. Since the mark was a blemish on the skin that was insensitive, the discovery of the mark through the use of pin pricks became a standard feature of witch hunting. Just as Red Riding Hood revealed her true identity through her selection of the path of the needles, so the wolf revealed his identity as a witch by choosing the path of the pins.”

Indeed, the shapeshifting wolf was knocking at the door in 1776.

Wolves were things of the past in Scotland when Smith made his (non) outing to the pin factory. How far past is another affair wrapped up in some controversy. According to some accounts, the last wolf in Scotland was shot by a hunter named McQueen, who tracked the beast to his lair in Findhorn after the beast had attacked and eaten a woman and a child crossing a nearby moor. Shapeshifting, as would be expected by those who know something of the path of pins, has infected every part of this story. Did the wolf really attack the pair and eat them? The last wolf? What was the sex of it? The size? Or was the last wolf slain by Sir Ewen Cameron in 1680? Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in 1904, devoted an article to the last wolf in Scotland. According to the writer, many Scottish districts lay claim to the be scene of the shooting of the last wolf. However, Blackwood’s goes with the shooting in the “wild valley of Findhorn” in 1743, since there are detailed accounts. The area was the home of the last wild pack. Here’s the Blackwood’s story:

“The most active carnach in their destruction was MacQueen of Pall a’ chrocain, an immense duine uasail who stood 6 feet 7 inches in his brogues. To this worthy, one winter day in 1743, came word from MacIntosh that a great black beast had come down to the low country and carried off a couple of children near Cawdor, and that a tainchel or hunting-drive was to meet a Figiuthas, where MacQeen was summoned to attend according to an act of Parliament.

Next morning in the cold dawn the hunters were assembled: but where was MacQueen? He was not wont to be ‘langsome’ on such an occasion, and his hounds, nto to mention himself, were almost indispensable to the chase. MacIntosh watied impatiently as the day wore on, and when at last MacQueen was seen coming liesurely along, the chief spoke sharply to him, rebuking him for wasting the best hours for hunting.

“Ciod e a’ chabhag?” (What’s the hurry?”) was the cool reply, which sent an indignant murmur through the shivering sportsmen. MacIntosh uttered an angry threat.

“Sin e dhiabh! (“There you are then!”) said MacQueen, and throwing back his plaid, flung the grey head of the wolf upon the heather. The company had lost thier sport, but they forgave Pall-a’-chrocain, whose renown stood higher than ever as a hunter, and Macintosh “gave him the land called Sean-achan for meat to his dogs.”



Surely I am showing my bent for irrelevance and the scaring of all rational like beasties, going so langsome into the thickets of Smith’s prose with a cock n bull hunting tale about a fairy wolf, for Jesus’ sake! Man, where’s your models, your references to the fine theorists, and all that train! But as the disappearance of the wolf seems, to us, magically connected with the appearance of the pin factory, we thought it might be a fine thing, worthy of a carnach from Cawdor (you remember the Thane of Cawdor?), to clear the area so that we could travel across it all safe and sound and snug. And in our search for pin factories, we might just find that, in spite of Smith’s celebration of the division of labor – upon which rock is built so much – that in fact, the celebrated pin factory in L’aigle, Normandy, from which – although it is murky – the encyclopedists might have drawn their information about the pin industry, was still governed by a mass of laws concerning master pinners, and who was allowed to work on pins, and problems with the weight of pins in each envelop of pins, so that the social function of pinmaker, and the needs of the state, and regulation from the state, might have had as much to do with the division of labor as the fabulous productivity of the pin factory, which can only be exampled by ... well, by Rapunzel of course, spinning straw into gold.

MacQueen told more of the story of the hunt than was reprised in Blackwoods. Here’s how he told the tale:

As I came through the slochk (i.e., ravine) I foregathered wi' the beast. My long dog there turned him. I buckled wi' him, and dirkit him, and syne whuttled his craig (i.e., cut his throat), and brought awa' his countenance for fear he might come alive again, for they are very precarious creatures.

Very precarious creatures indeed.

Economists, however, get the shivers when fairy tales are mentioned, being the wolf’s dumbest children for the most part. A true disappointment to the Loup-Garou, that’s for sure. While the wind howls outside and the stormclouds gather, they soothe themselves with more technical and standard questions.

The point of this shaggy dog’s tale is that the savage that stands outside of the factory in Mercier’s passage is not so different from the European savage, working within. As we enter the pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, which inaugurates the science of economics, we are entering a fairy tale haunted place. The path of pins leads to Grandmother’s house.

About which, one more comment, or diversion.

Pins are also an integral part of the economy of spinning, as Jack Zipes, the Marxist hermeneut of all things Grimm, makes clear in “Rumpelstiltskin in Fairy Tale as Myth”. As he also makes clear, the patriarchal readings of Rumpelstiltskin – a tale classified under the motif of Helper’s Name in the Aarne-Thompson index – are, to say the least, misleading. Helper is the wrong name for Rumpelstiltskin – “he is obviously a blackmailer and an oppressor,” according to Zipes. Well, “obviously” is a strong word to use about any character in a fairy tale: he could be seen, as obviously, as the accursed share, rejected by the ennobled Miller’s Daughter who is seeking, above all else, to elevate her child above the status she was raised in, all the while keeping that status system intact to gain the benefits of it. Much like the American CEO, usually the product of student loans and state funded colleges, seeking to ensure the radical diminishment of public investment so that others are much more burdened down by student loans in less funded universities competing with the Ivies where the CEOs send their own children.

Still, Zipes is right to draw attention to the woman in the story. The Grimm Brother’s version of the tale is something of a disappointment in comparison to the version published by Madame L’heritier in the Cabinet des fees, Ricdin-Ricdon, since the character of the Miller’s daughter is not very developed in the former, while this character, Rosanie, the daughter of a peasant in L’heritier, is an acute psychological portrait of upward social ambition.

Zipes claims that the spinning motif in the Grimm Brother’s tales is, in a sense, a valedictory to the enormous injury done to women in the 18th and 19th century as their cottage industry of spinning and weaving was wrested from them and centralized in male managed factories.

The very first literary form of Rumpelstiltskin, Mademoiselle L’Heritier’s Ricdin-Ricdon, demonstrates that spinning was cherished by the aristocracy at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. The queen is most eager to employ Rosanie as a spinner and cherishes all the articles that Rosanie magically produces. We know that numerous French courts had constructed spinning rooms for women to produce much needed cloth, and there was a great demand for gifted spinners at the time that Mademoiselle L’heritier wrote her tale. Interestingly, her model spinner, Rosanie, takes possession of the devil’s magic wand (i.e., phallus) to create an image that satisfies if not exceeds society’s expectations. She does not spin straw into gold but rather flax into yarn and thread. ...

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I think Zipes is correct to front the spinning in this tale as at least equivalent to the story of the name of the “helper” – but to make this a tale of spinning as an affectionately perceived craft is a bit of a distortion. He writes: “Throughout the entire tale, spinning and female creativity remain the central concern and are upheld as societal values that need support, especially male support.” This is a reading that fails to capture the irony in Rosanie’s story – to say the least. In L’Héritier’s tale, Rosanie has one abiding characteristic: a total abhorrence of spinning. When she is first spotted by Prince Prud’homme (and surely these bourgeois names for the royals – Prud’homme and Queen Laborieuse – are meant to ironically), she is being dragged around the back yard by her evil hag of a mother, who demands that her daughter spin more. In a crafty move that reproduces the comic gesture from Moliere’s Medecin malgre lui, when the hag is interrupted by Prince Prud’homme – who is taken by Rosanie’s looks and wants to know why she is being mistreated by the hag –she tells him a lie, a neat inversion of the truth – that she is punishing her daughter for spinning too much. Thus, under false pretences, Prince P. takes Rosanie back to the court, where his mother is delighted to receive a top flight spinner. Rosanie, horrified by what her mother has done but unable to face being expelled from the court if she confesses the truth, is going through the park to cast herself off a pavilion set on a cliff and end her life – so much does she hate spinning - when she meets the strange man – a big man, in the tale, with a dark face, but oddly amused face – to whom she tells her tale.

We are still telling that tale, over and over, pretending that the fairy tale and the economic model exist in two different worlds. This is a narrative wound that continues to produce such sores and disturbances in the social body that we might all die, fairy tale like, from its mistelling.