Mangle of inequality redivivus

Over at Economists View, there is a post disputing, to an extent, a new study by Michael Bordo and Christopher Meissner that disputes the idea that inequality caused the crisis. I can't resist reprising my mangle of inequality idea, with a few changes from the way I originally formulated it after my friend S.'s wedding.

As the discussion begins as one about cause, and I am all about conditions, I suppose I ought to say something about cause. Cause is difficult. Cause is an impossible quest. And it is made all the more impossible as economists bring a cumbersome machinery to the problem, which is pledged to a model forged from the idea of the market, of equilibrium, and of some kind of surreptitious base/superstructure idea - that is, one finds out the micro-foundations of macro-economic events, and we all go home then, to watch American Idol. I say nay, though, in bloggy thunder.

Rather, I want us to go back and understand what contemporary inequality in the developed countries, and particularly in the U.S., is about. The place to start, of course, is the seventies. After thirty years, we are starting to recognize the form of the shift that began to occur then. And let me be the harpooner that points out the shape of that beast, the main points of which are 1., the crushing of the bargaining power of labor; 2., the de-manufacturing of America – which was partly connected to the fact that manufacturing workers were the most militant, and partly the inevitable effect of the ability of capital to find other, cheaper regions in which to place factories; and 3, the dissolving of traditional constraints on credit.

These events occurred in response to the most serious crisis in capitalism since 1945. Galbraith’s New Industrial state, the liberal Keynesian economy, had created structures that were supposed to resolve such crises. These included the management of aggregate demand by the state, the moderation of labors’ older, utopian demands for a slice of the power in return for a steadily rising paycheck, and management’s movement away from optimizing profits in exchange for lessened volatility. The Keynesian moment unwound for a number of reasons – labour, with increasingly less interest in the political dimension that originally animated unions, became much more vulnerable; the government management of aggregate demand, combined with the government dependence on War, had finally unleashed inflation; and the ROI of the Fortune 500 corporations was finally causing an investor revolt. However, of the three factors I am listing in the shift to the new, Reagonomic paradigm, one and three seem oddly disjoint. How is it possible to diminish the bargaining power of labor – which results in the stagnation of wages – and at the same time dissolve traditional constraints on consumer and other credit?
Of course, from the neo-classical point of view, that makes a lot of sense. Instead of the government actively managing aggregate demand, the private sector, with a freer credit market, can take over. And in fact, even if wages stagnate, household incomes rise. The house itself as an asset appreciates, for one thing; more investment vehicles are made available to the public, for another thing; and finally, there is the great entry of women into the labor market.

Credit, then, is the keystone. It is from this moment on that the financial services sector, which had been relatively unimportant in the Keynesian regime, returns in force. It is what I would call the mangle of inequality – playing on Andrew Pickering’s term, mangle of practice. Contemporary capitalism in America has to effect a straddle – the economy depends on consumption, and yet, the majority of the consumers engross less and less of the productivity gains accrued by the system. Freeing the financial markets had two effects – one was to re-vamp the consumer’s financial horizon. Instead of worrying about making a wage sufficient to live the good life, the consumer worries about making a wage sufficient to have a good credit history – which is the magical key to the world of cars, plasma screen tvs, houses, and all the rest. The other was to make the consumer a shareholder in the system. For simplicity’s sake, call this the 401k world – that stands at the symbolic center of a system by which the ordinary person was hooked into the market. And the market could, consequently, use vast flows of capital to keep easing credit. A virtuous feedback, so to speak.
It had another, symbolically resonant significance. The triumph of the state in the 20th century was in providing for retirement. The state successfully created, within a capitalist economy, a mass ability to finish one’s life without poverty or utter family dependence. It was the template for the structural goods that the state, in a mixed economy, could provide – when the demands of distributive justice could not be aligned with the price creating market in a good or service. Consequently, social security has earned a special hatred from the right. The American system of encouraging private investment was meant, on the surface, to complement social security, but the ultimate aim was always to replace it.

The mangle of inequality, then, was not – as in Marx’s time – a head to head confrontation between classes. It is a more complex machine, in which class interests are blent so that head to head confrontation is systematically differed. The political triumph of the system is that the blending disenfranchised populism, since it became unclear who would really benefit from populist practice.

Given this context, we should be posing different questions about the housing bubble - not the question, what caused it, but the question, why was it necessary? It is not as if the policymakers consciously intended a housing bubble. But they did consciously intend returning the Clintonian surpluses to the investor class. And when the 2000-2001 recession happened, they consciously intended to find a way to respond to it that did not involve the government "interfering" in the economy. Luckily for the policy makers, by this time the neo-liberal program of guiding money from the wage class into financial assets was nearly complete - whether on the individual level of the 401k or on the aggregate level of pensions - and thus the neo-liberal machine could be played like a slot machine - there was plenty of money, the market in secondary mortgages as well as the housing market (two things which intersect, but which are not the same) could now provide a collective speedball, and everybody was happy. Otherwise, policymakers would have to face unpleasant alternatives to the neo-liberal version of capitalism. As we have seen in the O. era, they simply can't do that. The conceptual set seals off all solutions that might put in question the neo-liberal mindset. Hence, the mangle of inequality is both a cause and an effect of the neo-liberal economic paradigm.

Digression: a vitruvian theme

  

The second book of Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture begins by considering the origin of human building. That origin is, it turns out, connected with the origin of human speech, the origin of politics, and the discovery of fire – which form a sort of originary matrix:

“Mankind originally brought forth like the beasts of the field, in woods, dens, and groves, passed their lives in a savage manner, eating the simple food which nature afforded. A tempest, on a certain occasion, having exceedingly agitated the trees in a particular spot, the friction between some of the branches caused them to take fire; this so alarmed those in the neighbourhood of the accident, that they betook themselves to flight. Returning to the spot after the tempest had subsided, and finding the warmth which had thus been created extremely comfortable, they added fuel to the fire excited, in order to preserve the heat, and then went forth to invite others, by signs and gestures, to come and witness the discovery. In the concourse that thus took place, they testified their different opinions and expressions by different inflexions of the voice. From daily association words succeeded to these indefinite modes of speech; and these becoming by degrees the signs of certain objects, they began to join them together, and conversation became general.

 Thus the discovery of fire gave rise to the first assembly of mankind, to their first deliberations, and to their union in a state of society. For association with each other they were more fitted by nature than other animals, from their erect posture, which also gave them the advantage of continually viewing the stars and firmament, no less than from their being able to grasp and lift an object, and turn it about with their hands and fingers. In the assembly, therefore, which thus brought them first together, they were led to the consideration of sheltering themselves from the seasons, some by making arbours with the boughs of trees, some by excavating caves in the mountains, and others in imitation of the nests and habitations of swallows, by making dwellings of twigs interwoven and covered with mud or clay. From observation of and improvement on each others' expedients for sheltering themselves, they soon began to provide a better species of huts.”

As Erwin Panofsky pointed out in a famous and beautiful essay on a series of paintings by Piero Cosimo that were inspired by Vitruvius’ text, the story Vitruvius tells is related to other stories about Vulcan, the God of fire, and Aeolus, the God of the wind, that crop up in many classical texts. Vitruvius introduces no gods – Panofsky attributes this to his Lucretian naturalism. It is the wind that is in action here, not the god of the wind, and the fire that starts in the woods is not started by a god, but by the friction of the branches. The story of the discovery of fire, along Vitruvian lines, has had a long intellectual life, serving both as a model and a limit case of the logic of that vexed pair, discovery and invention. In turn, these terms seem to overlap the discourses of history and social science, in as much as these have to do with social collectives – aggregates – and individuals. The first sentence of Vitruvius’ second paragraph begins like this: “ergo cum propter ignis inventionem conventus initio apud homines et concilium et convictus esset natus…” The first impulse of we moderns is to lead these words back into the great dual categories under which modernity has proceded, nature and culture. However, it turns out that we cannot shoehorn these concepts into those categories without covertly applying the logic of the supplement so expertly defused by Derrida in On Grammatology  – for what nature is borrows on what culture is to be, and vice versa: it is a conman’s checking account. 

Which is not to say that it can’t be drawn on – on the contrary. After showing how the forest fire was seen as the predecessor and model for the first fires of man in the classical and Hellenistic epochs and from thence was lifted into the allegorical key to a series of three paintings about the origin of civilization by Piero di Cosimo, Panofsky writes, beautifully: “The ruling principle of this aboriginal state, namely, the unfamiliarity of man-kind with the use of fire, is conspicuously emphasized by what might be termed the " leitmotiv" of the whole series: the forest fire, which can be seen ravaging the woods and frightening away the animals in all three panels ;2 in two of them it even appears repeatedly. The persistent recurrence of this motif cannot be accounted for by mere pictorial fancy. It is, most evidently, an iconographical attribute rather than a whimsical " concetto,"fo r it is identical with the famous forest fire which had haunted the imaginations of Lucretius, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Vitruvius, and Boccaccio. It appeared regularly in all the illustrations of Vitruvius, and in the Renais-sance it was as characteristic of representations of the Stone Age as the tower of images of St. Barbara.”

I would like to argue that scorch marks from Vitruvius’ fire haunt that fabulous myth, Western man, and his sidekick, homo oeconomicus, long after Cosimo.  The semantic architecture of Vitruvius’ story of the origin of architecture can be traced not only in the way the history of technology is told, but in the way the social sciences have explained themselves – not just explained themselves in the internal dialogues of the disciplines, but explained themselves in collaboration with the ongoing mission of capitalist civilizations, which automatically divided the primitive and the civilized according to a Vitruvian measure – that of technology. That fire is both a natural and an artificial product blurs its definitional import – but the language that springs up from those huddle about the fire seems to take from the fire the decisive force that will, in one form or another, become the dividing line that justifies a global exercise of power. Writing, or, after the printing press, the book, becomes the civilizing technology par excellence, thrusting those ‘without writing’ into not only a different category, but even a different time zone, as though this lack had cut them off from  the zone of simultaneity which traverses and determines the way those who do write make sense of writing.  

  

News from the Zona: Ireland, Negri and Chérèque

I was in Ireland last week. Ireland, surely, is a posterchild and ward of the Zona: rolling in tax evasion wealth in the 2000s, constructing like mad and paying its chief officials, it turns out, like mad too, in 2008 it went off the cliff and has contracted and contracted since, all the while hocking its future to the plutocrats of the financial sphere, and cutting funding for normal life elsewhere. That’s Ireland then. But in Wicklow where I went, and then in Dublin where I went after, there was not a strong sense of disaster in the air. Rather, what was in the air was something more delicate, like the air whistling out of a punctured tire: there was a slumping towards lower expectations. And in fact expectations were well and truly privatized – one probably heard more about politics than is usual – and we did talk to a journalist who had very articulate ideas about politics – but on the whole, there was no sense of a collective project at all.

This is one of the remarkable successes of the neo-liberal era, and perhaps the secret of its apparent ability to spawn a Zona and yet keep its bony hands on the world’s throat. What it has exploited is the dialectic of vulnerability that was forged in the Cold War system, in which the power to destroy the world was granted to the political elites in return for a return on that power that traversed ordinary life – that is, the setting up of the conventions and circumstances of middle class life. I want to avoid assigning the responsibility for that set up to the state or to the private sphere, since it is a delusion that the state and private enterprise are opposed to each other in any essential way. The Cold War system, as I’ve pointed out before, owes a lot to the Hitlerian totalitarianism of the thirties – which, contrary to the ideologists, was anything but an epoch of total mobilization. Rather, it was an epoch of specialized mobilization in which the state did what it could to insulate the individual “authentic” German from any collective project that would require sacrifice on his or her part.

We are the heirs of that thinking. As long as the mass of people are not, individually, vulnerable, as long as no sacrifice is really required for a collective vision, the mass of people are content to operate individually, to think of their fates as having to do with their defects or virtues, their hard work or laziness, their propensity to save or spend – without really having any sense of the systems put in place from the point of view of which they, individually, are simply so many human products, and their tics and life experiences so much  bland margin of error that the models can easily deal with. The power of the masses has been given up without a shot – or, to put it more Adorno-esquely,  every time you turn on the tv set or computer, you surrender a little bit more. 

But you never surrender all the way – the systems of governance that have both produced the Zona and have managed it can’t accommodate complete surrender, although they don’t know it. The human economy, which puts holes and tunnels in even the most rational economic institutions and enterprises, is required for capitalism to exist.

Which brings me to the point of this post, the dialogue between Tony Negri and François Chérèque, the general secretary of the French union, The Democratic French Confederation of Labor, or Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT) in the February issue of Philosophie. The pdf can be found here: http://www.monsyndicatcfdt.fr/content/m-tro-boulot-bobo-echanges-entre-fran-ois-chereque-sg-de-la-cfdt-et-toni-negri-philosophe-it

The dialogue has not been given any attention, as far as I could tell, among the English speaking blogs. Too bad. Chérèque presents an empirical view of the condition of the wage class in France stemming from his interviews with that class. The project of interviewing the class was motivated by the self-immolation of an employee of France Telecom, a militant of the CFDT: why would one’s self-identity be so wrapped up on one’s work?

Negri opposes to Chérèque’s ‘old fashioned” promotion of the word and the concept, worker, his new fashioned notion of ‘immaterial labor’ – what I would call the triumph of the agent of circulation over the agent of production. For Negri, this signals the passing of a ‘figure’, the figure of the proletariat, who emerged in the 1840s and attenuated in social importance after the 1870s. Chérèque, jumps on him about this potted history:

F.C. I don’t wholly share your observation. It is true that the heroic figure of the proletariat concentrated in mass in the great industries has disappeared, but material labor hasn’t disappeared for all that… Firstly with globalisation: the Apple model of Steve Jobs is  “enterprise without factory”: on one side, immateriality, computers and information research, and on the other, the delocalized factory in China with the conditions of production that we know. But this process of dissemination is equally at work in Europe. There is a new segmentation of work with a massive recourse to temps, to the intermediares, to precarious labor to support difficult tasks. The farther you are from the profit center, the more you suffer. Do you know how much a supermarket employee lifts onto the shelves every day? A ton!

To which Negri replies, backtracking: One cannot efface the physical and corporeal dimension of work, you are totally right. Imagine that work can really become immaterial is stupid!”

However, Negri returns to the charge later: “One tends in fact to forget these workers, who, however, furnish out everyday meat. If I persist, however, in naming “immaterial labor”, it is in order to break out of the relation labor/created object and to show that it becomes principally a network, that its fundamental elements consist more and more in knowledge, the capacity to organize a cooperation. It equally becomes more and more affective and liguistic. One of the most important points, it seems to me, which is valid for all workers, is the mobilization  and the active imbrication of the set of knowledges (connaissances – skills) and the living time of the wage earners.”

Negri, here, is playing his strongest suit, for the penetration of labor into the private life is part of the social arrangement that makes the private life everything, and the public object nothing. It is a new form of moralization that destroys a certain cultural success of the 19^th century – the creation of a higher, or more dialectically complex, narrative intelligence, one that links together disparate 19^th century figures like Marx, Simmel, Durkheim, Mill, etc. with the novelists from Balzac through Mann.

It is the dissolution of that narrative skill that has led to the odd dualism between work and entertainment that seems, diabolically, to sit on our lives, and make it hard to utter a peep against the scandalous cretins who rule us.   

4.2 Kafka and Felice

Für mich ist der Sonntag wenigstens seit 1 ½ Monaten ein Wunder, dessen Schein ich schon Montag früh beim Aufwachen sehe. Das Problem bleibt, die Woche bis zum Sonntag hinzuschleppen, die Arbeit über diese Wochentage hinzuziehn und wie ich es auch anstelle, Freitag geht es gewöhnlich nicht mehr weiter. Wenn man so Stunde für Stunde einer Woche verbringt, selbst bei Tag nicht viel weniger aufmerksam als der Schlaflose in der Nacht und wenn man sich so in der unerbittlichen Maschinerie einer solchen Woche umschaut, dann muß man wirklich noch froh sein, dass diese trostlos sich aufbauenden Tage nicht zurückfallen, um von neuem zu beginnen, sondern dass sie glatt vergehn und endlich zum Aufatmen der Abend und die Nacht beginnt. 

[“For me, Sunday, at least for the last one and one half months, has been a miracle, whose light I see shining when I wake up on Monday morning. The problem remains, how to drag through the week until Sunday, pulling the work through these week days and however I arrage it, by Friday, usually, it no longer seems to work. When you go hour by hour through the week, being as attentive by day as the insomniac is at night, and why you look around you in the unrelenting machinery of such a week, you really have to rejoice that these comfortlessly piled up days don’t collapse and begin all over again, but that they smoothly pass and finally you can begin to breathe out in the evening and the night.”]

The piled up days, piled up by the “relentless machinery” of time, are, at one and the same time, the product of the person who is looking around in this machinery and the trap of the eternal return, a trap that is just barely avoided by the fact that the days pass “smoothly”. Kafka, in this passage, has brought together the Bergsonian sense of the infinitely substitutable time of matter – the time that is, theoretically, always repeatable – and the time of the assembly line, the accidents of which form one of the constant sources of his concern for the last three years, ever since he joined the Arbeiter- Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt fur das Konigreich Bohmen and began to investigate claims for workman’s compensation.

The letter is dated the letter of October 27, 1912. It is one of the hundreds sent to Felice Bauer, the woman he met on  August 13, 1912, at his friend Max Brod’s house.  Franz Kafka is thirty years old at this point – although he doesn’t look it. He has been promoted to the post of Concipist at the Anstalt – which means that he, as a lawyer, draws up papers concerning cases of accidents for his firm, pursues employers, and sometimes gives talks or writes articles on the prevention of accidents at the workplace. Felice is also in a fairly modern profession – she works in the gramaphone division of the Carl Lindstrom Company in Berlin as a supervisor, under whom there is a pool of secretaries.

Like coins, people have more than one side. Unlike coins, they often have even more than two sides, although eventually most people can be grasped by the head or the tail. Felice B. seemed to grasp Kafka, in the end, as a man with a white collar job and a part owner of an asbestos factory. However, as the abundant flow of letters show, he was a writer – a writer to his very fingernails. Felice B. is harder to grasp, since we don’t have her letters. And there is something irresistibly symbolic about this, because she was working for a company that was pioneering records and Dictaphones – capturing the oral without the pen or the typewriter. Ideally, that is. Kafka is in fact very inquisitive about the “parlograph” at the same time that he admits that he sees it as an obscure enemy. On  the 13^th, when he meets Felice, he is engaged in his extra-office life, bringing his friend Max Brod, a manuscript for the first of Kafka’s works to be published in his lifefime.

simultaneity 4.1: EWG in Nietzsche and Kafka

When Nietzsche came down from the mountains of Sils Maria in 1882 and wrote the first four books of the Gay Science, he was filled with a rare, unifying vision that had sprung itself upon him and completely turned around his mood. As any moraliste knows, the mood is a cognitive tool  – it is by the mood that one judges certain intangible but real changes in the world. No barometer is complex enough to allow us to judge our historical moment, with its different forms of existence that are set  loose in the quotidian and bump against each other as though in a fair; with its obsessions and routines, its shifting matrixes of exchange, its speeds. Thus, Nietzsche wrote his book with this mood like a muse on his shoulder, and revealed, shyly, like a great secret, in the fourth book, his inspiration and great idea. It was of course the doctrine of the eternal return, announced – as though balancing the lightness of the title of the book – as the heaviest weight, das grösste Schwergewicht.  The dramaturgy here is along the lines of the great philosophical coups de theatres, from Socrates’ death to Descartes’ dream: thus, it includes a demon.

“What if, one day or night, a demon slinks up to you in your loneliest loneliness and says: your life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again, and countless times again; and there will be nothing new in it, and instead, every pain and pleasure and ever thought and sigh and all the unspeakably smallnesses and greatnesses of your life must return to you and everything in the same series and succession – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again – and you with it, dust speck of specks!”  [My translation]

The eternal return of the same enters the literature of the late nineteenth century through many doors. Nietzsche’s is the most famous. In the early twentieth century, it enters with a bit less gravity – in fact, as a slapstick routine, performed by a po faced clown. The clown, here, is not Chaplin but Kafka, the place is in an early letter to Felice Bauer, his future fiancé, but the setting is surely Modern Times, the office version:

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]