kill chain nation

In this week’s London Review of Books, by a happy juxtaposition, there is a review, by Thomas Powers, of two books on Joseph Heller, and a review, by Andrew Cockburn, of Obama’s drone wars.

That America spent 2.59 trillion dollars on the military over the last five years, and that the Obama administration, which has long signaled its desire to get tough and cut America’s entitlements (medicare, social security, etc.), proposes that we spend 2.725 trillion dollars on the military over the next five years, exactly defines the place of liberalism in American politics – as a zero. The zero is a crucial number. Perhaps the most crucial number. The zero promises that anything can be quantified, including nothing at all. Similarly, that post-Vietnam liberalism has exerted exactly zero degree of power over American foreign and domestic policy, yet hold the system together by providing a convenient domestic enemy, whose peacemongering and welfare-for-all attitudes can be triumphed over again and again by progressive pundits and policymakers who live “in the real world.” The liberals are the dummies in the elaborate American “kill chain” – a felicitous phrase uttered by the hero of Cockburn’s piece, one former Lieutenant General, David Deptula (who, in a glorious swoosh of the revolving door, is now the chief executive of MAV 6, a “provider of enhanced situational understanding of battlefields”.) MAV 6, we are told, is proud to have recently landed a contract with the Pentagon (for a paltry initial 211 million dollars) to develop “Blue Devil Block 2”, a 350 foot long unmanned aircraft – because if liberty stands for anything, it stands for offshoring the kill chain to unmanned and highly expensive drones. Those drones, in turn, have proven themselves to be very successful machines – although not on the battlefield. In the warzone, the drones are crap, and all the stats show they actually worsen hostility situations, raise the rate of guerilla attacks, and in general create counter-productive havoc. No, the zone in which these drones have proven, without doubt, to be the world’s best weapon is in D.C., where selling drone projects to the Federal piggy bank has raised housing prices (as well as the price of a decent private school) for thousands of employees of the war system, who profit from every scheme swallowed by the Obama Pentagon. This is a kill chain to die for!… As so many human products do in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and other exotic places.

Cockburn’s journalistic trick of tying the Bush-Obama klepto-krieg to the irresistible rise of David Deptula is, perhaps, a bit unfair, but it is good fun. Deptula is always in the background, it seems, when money is shifting to one defense industry vehicle or another, automatizing the hell out of the battlefield. And this, for those who know their Catch – 22, throws us back on one of the prophetic figures in that book: Milo Minderbinder. Milo is the man in Yossarian’s unit who sees the war as what it is – a market interspersed by firefights – and relentlessly privatizes the unit’s supplies, trading them in an increasingly bizarre bizarre for other commodities. The bombing in Catch-22 – irrational and relentless – is the binary partner to Milo’s all too rational quest for profit. The two sides converge in what Tom Powers calls Catch-22’s central scene – the death of Snowden. Snowden, who is the flattest of flat characters – we just know that he is young, perhaps a teenager, and that he is a tailgunner – is hit by flak when Yossarian’s plane is on a bombing mission. Yossarian proceeds back through the fuselage to patch him up. He finds that Snowden has a large wound on his thigh, the size of a football. Snowden is conscious and keeps telling Yossarian he is cold. So Yossarian opens the first aid kit: “The twelve syrettes of morphine had been stolen from the case and replaced by a cleanly lettered note that said: ‘What’s good for M. and M. enterprises is good for the country. Milo Minderbinder.”

As it turns out, Snowden wouldn’t have been helped anyway. In a scene that is probably being correlated in Afghanistan even as I type this, deep in the comfort of the war on terror cocoon, Yossarian finds that repairing the leg wound hasn’t helped: “Yossarian bent forward to peer and saw a strangely colored stain seeping through the coveralls just above the armhole of Snowden’s  flak jacket. Yossarian felt his heart stop, then pound so violently he found it difficult to breathe. Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yosarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden’s flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out.”

            And the beat goes on. Kill chains – every link is lovingly handcrafted by the men you can trust! Be a realistic, and remember - dronification is a small price to pay for the liberty we all enjoy so much.

Murdoch and the security entertainment complex

I’m amused by this article on Murdoch's cowtowing to Maggie Thatcher in order to get his greasy paws on the Times.

I'm amused, that is, that the current scandals in England are going back so far.

The major things afoot in the gimcrack world of the Great Moderation, constructed out of “free” trade (a curious beast, which was hatched when the standard elite policy of lowering taxes on businessmen suddenly generated metaphysical wings), the worldwide exchange of democracy for mucho security against the high improbability of terrorist mugging, and the other trade of all things on heaven and earth (including the future composition of the atmosphere) for a little comfort in the present overshadow the comical Murdoch scandals. Still, the timing shows that God, or Nemesis, really is the greatest stand up comedian.  What better con-fuckup than this one, involving the heavily bribed police, celebrities, and the lizard like fourth estate?

During the twentieth century, the penetration of the media into the private sphere was seen by a few illuminés in world historic terms – I’m pointing at you,  Joseph Goebbels and J. Edgar Hoover. 

During the great period of the capitalist transformation in the nineteenth century, the police forces were reformed and re-distributed, and attracted reforms in turn: such as the enumeration of houses in cities, which, in France, was first adopted as a military measure in garrison towns, and then, under Fouche, Napoleon’s minister of security, began to be imposed on Paris (and reached other cities later – in the 1840s, Lyon still did not have a strong address system). Wherever Napoleon’s armies went, police were sure to follow – and as Napoleon’s armies pulled back and Napoleon was defeated, the police – at least as a structure – stayed. In England, the creation of a modern police force followed in the 1820s. The bourgeoisie, of course, loved their police – but the masses still loved their legendary robbers, and still fought the police daily in the street, where police work was largely directed towards disciplining the mass of drunks, whiners, perverts, whores, and anarchists that constituted the class laborieuse et dangereuse.

The rise of the police force not only as the quotidian tool of social repression, but as a form of entertainment that allowed us all to enjoy social repression, may have been prehended in the nineteenth century, but its existence is one of the striking features of the twentieth century. The folkloric rival of the Sheriff of Nottingham hasn’t had a chance. Social repression comes with the contract, of course. If you aren’t going to have revolution and whatever comes next – every example of which, in the twentieth century, created monster police – then the contract of capital in its neo-liberal phase (Section 4., line 10a) specifies that you will have entertainment police, a police force that oscillates between radio show (and then tv show) and the SWAT team. A police force that seizes the attention of those whose own livelihoods radically decrease in entertainment value the more life is wholly oriented towards them.  Ultimately, police are just extremely inefficient regulators – regulators of the last resort – and the paradox is that, in a culture in which regulation has become a bad word and the regulator treated as a menace to all the good things that would flow if we just let the capitalist genius of the entrepreneur flourish, the most inefficient regulators have been given carte blanche not only by the governing elite (who has a contempt for the police that emerges every time the police union negotiates salaries), but by the middle class that identifies with them. And even if they don’t identify with them, they cannot get enough entertainment value from them. In the security-entertainment complex, this comes to the same thing.

The security-entertainment complex doesn’t, of course, just run through tv. As prison replaced apartheid in the U.S., the last redoubt against the Sheriff of Sherwood Forest became hip-hop, which absorbed the  flyting and bragging songs of traditional culture in a kind of parody of resistance – a parody because it was a resistance connected to no political force whatsoever, for the political force had been vacuumed up neatly by the security-entertainment complex. Within the vacuum, the counter-force that emerges knows itself through the entertainment that leads it on a merry eternal return of the same, from money to prison and back, endlessly.

It is funny to watch the tabloids and the police in the UK bump into each other, as one of the tools of the glorious Bush-Blair-Berlusconi era comes as undone as the former two’s hopeless war on terrorism. Not that the war won’t continue to roll on – and not that anti-democratic cretinization, now in its baroque stage, won’t also continue to roll on. Popular demand, you know. The slogan under which the democracies, where the massive self-destructive machine is switched to on, is still as pertinent as when James Chance and the Contortions first posed it in the Reagan era: “Take out all the garbage that's in your brain ... Why don't you try being stupid instead of smart?”       

Rumor 1

Rumor

If in one direction, pheme/kleos moves towards the universal knowledge vested within the people – towards common sense – in another direction, it moves towards rumor, the “angel of ruin”, the fama of Virgil’s Aeneid, the beast perched on the gates of the city:   “Furth she quicklye gallons, with wingflight swallolyke hastning,/A foule fog pack paunch: what feathers plumye she heareth,/so manye squint eyeballs shee keeps (a relation uncoth)/So manye tongues clapper, with her ears and lip labor eevened./ In the dead of nighttime to the skyes shee flickereth, howling/Through the earth shade skipping, her sight from slumber amooving./Whilst the sun is shying the baggage close lodgeth in housroofs,/or tops of turrets, with feare towns loftye she frighteth,/As readye forged fittons, as true tales vayneley toe twattle.” [101, Translation by Richard Stanyhurst, ed. 1895 by Edward Arber, p.101] Such an image could as well be applied to the kind of “rumor panics” in Borneo in 1979, as reported by anthropologist Richard Allan Drake. In the longhouse of the village of Sungai Mulae, he was told that the government was building a bridge nearby, and that of course, they would send out kidnappers to snatch somebody and sacrifice them to the bridge. The village was, ostensibly, Christianized, yet rumors like these “flew” about often; in fact, Drake establishes that the form of this rumor was recurrent in Borneo. It was recorded on the North coast of Borneo as early as 1910; it was recorded in Sandong River region in 1949; and in 1981, it was recorded in the Meratus mountains. In fact, if we extend our search from Borneo to other regions of the world, we find that, for instance, in pre-Revolutionary France, there were rumors about the kidnapping of children and women by the government of King Louis XV; and there was the persistent rumor in Czarist Russia of Jews kidnapping Christian children to use their blood.

Although the circumstances and meanings of these rumors are different, their reappearence puts them in the category of “Tauchgerüchte”, diver rumors – they dive up and they dive down – that was so named by L.A. Bysow, a Russian sociologist who wrote a seminal analysis of rumors that appeared in the twenties, and then disappears from sociological literature. Like many one article authors, Bysow’s position in the construction of the sociology of rumor suffers, itself, from odd distortions – for instance, he is often quoted as D.A. Brysow (for instance, by Curtis Macdougall in his book, Understanding Public Opinion (1952). Bysow borrows the late nineteenth century notion of contagion to model rumors according to an epidemiology, thus continuing a very old analogy between logos and seed. The invisible microbe that replaced the miasma model fit comfortably with the word as organic – and indeed, the word is the product of an organism. In fact, the analogy between sickness and rumor is encoded even in Virgil’s image, for this monstrous bird of ill or true fame conveys the word from mouth to ear in the city bears a visible likeness to the winged demons who shoot the arrows of sickness in the city. Both sickness and rumor “fly”. And both are mass phenomena, often leading to panic. And, in a quiet division between true fame and false, rumors have, over time, been associated exclusively with distortion. The rumor is often treated by the sociologist as though, by definition, it must be false. As often happens, the sociologist is simply following the cop, here – for the justification of using police action against rumor is precisely that it falsifies, as though there were some connection between hegemonic power and the truth

Rumor is the illegitimate sibling – at least mythopoetically – of public opinion. Drake connects rumor in Borneo is connected to the dominance of the “oral” in Borneo society. The logic of evidence here feeds on itself – unlike the written, which requires a process of mediation that engages the body as scriptor, the medium as the object inscribed, and the eye as reader, rumor, like the word itself, springs directly from the tongue and flies to the ear. Bysow speaks of its chain-like characteristic – depending on face to face communication, it creates a public of a sort out of haptic space – the kind of public that Gabriel Tarde, writing in the late nineteenth century, classified as essentially the primitive form of the public: the crowd.

In the early modern period in France, as Arlette Farge shows in Dire et Mal Dire, the word on the street was as much a vehicle of news as any official chronicle. Indeed, news was subdivided between the official histories, the private journals, and the gazetins of the police – police reports composed from the reports of the mouchards, the spies, that the police planted in the population. Louis XV enjoyed having these gazetins read to him. The relation of those in power to those underneath is mediated by a concern, on the part of both parties, with what is thought by the other – a concern in which the police can act as brokers. In World War II, there devolved upon some sub-officers the duty of filling out rumor reports – for officers and the upper management of the security apparatus were obsessed with the damage rumor could do. It was during the war that Allport and Postman studied rumors through a series of experiments, in which an image, seen by some subject, was then described by that subject to someone who couldn’t see the image. Then a chain of accounts is produced as the second person tells a third person (who also can’t see the image) about it, and so on. The sadistic element in the experiment (for psychology experiments almost always contain some element that displays the gratuituous power of the experimenter) is that these accounts are made in front of an audience that can see the slide on the screen, while those describing the image have to keep their backs turned to the screen.

Notice two things about Allport and Postman’s experiments. The first is the idea, which forms the whole basis of the experiment, that the story communicated by the rumor is – in contradiction to that reported by, say, the experimenter – essentially distorted. The distortion here is given to us in the frame of the report – although we who read the report cannot ourselves examine the slides, we are told, without any shadow of a doubt, what they depict by the researchers. In fact, of course, these descriptions often carry with them descriptors that are not “contained” in the images. In an experiment made in Britain following Allport’s line after the war, for instance, we are told that one slide is of “students throwing eggs” – which depends for its truth value on, among other things, describing the thrower as a student. But can true and false fama be so easily separated? Does distortion really mean untruth? Whose protocols are in play, here?

The second thing to notice about the Allport/Postman experiments is that they impose an identity on the group of subjects by giving them certain functions, in opposition to another group. Allport and Postman were not concerned with the function of rumor in maintaining the group so much as they were concerned with the transmission of rumor, which meant studying how a distortion generates a story pattern. A distortion like mistaking L.A. Bysow’s name, on the other hand, does not generate a story, although it occurs in the literature of rumor. Indeed, it would be petty to pick at it. However, we are again led to question the provenance of these assumptions. The atmosphere in which Allport and Postman worked reflected the war. As identity was imposed on the mass of draftees and volunteers in forces around the world as a topdown matter, the powers in place in armies and government bureaucracies became obsessed with information control – and thus, with fighting rumors. 

It is worth asking, then, whether rumors can be, among other things, attempts to wrest away that identity power by those upon whom it has been imposed. It is one of the surprises of literature it is shown such respect by the powers that be that they are continually trying to police rumor, or in other words, stories, narratives. The history of the policing of rumor shows a surprising sensitivity by those in power to the view of the ordinary outcasts and non-entities over whom they rule.

The mouchards of the Ancien Regime lead us, etymologically – that science that tracks the rumor of sound and sense behind the current word – to a sort of totemic animal who presides over the contagious rumor: the fly. According to an etymological dictionary of 1856 (Noel, Carpentier), the word mouchard “is not an old one in our language, [it] … derives from the word mouche [housefly], flies going out to search their food everywhere, changing places in the wink of an eye; and what appears to confirm this opinion is that one said and one says still moucher for spy, mouche for a spy. “It is useless, says M. Ch. Nodier, to search there (in the name of the father of Mouchy) this etymology, which presents itself naturally in musca, which had the same figurative acceptation in Latin, as one can see often in Plautus and in Petronius.” [374]

However, there is another story about the word in question here – for the housefly is not, according to Greenburg and Kunich, at the root of musca. Musca derives from the Sanskrit, mukshika, which describes something more like a gnat – the eye fly, musca sorbens, which feeds on secretions of the eye. The fly is shown in lists kept in Mesopotamia, and the gods are compared to flies when they gather around a sacrifice, or fly through the streets. In Lucian’s Praise of the Fly, the connection between the fly and gossip is made part of an origin story:

“Legend tells how Myia (the fly's ancient name) was once10 a maiden, exceeding fair, but over-given to talk and chatter and song, Selene's rival for the love of Endymion. When the young man slept, she was for ever waking him with her gossip and tunes and merriment, till he lost patience, and Selene in wrath turned her to what she now is. And therefore it is that she still, in memory of Endymion, grudges all sleepers their rest, and most of all the young and tender. Her very bite and blood-thirst tell not of savagery, but of love and human kindness; she is but enjoying mankind as she may, and sipping beauty.”
In Steve Connor’s Fly, there is a wealth of associations culled from literature and life – the life, for instance, that is recorded in the trials of witches - between the fly and devils. The fly as a familiar possesses a number of qualities – its metamorphosis from the worm, its feeding on excrement, its omnipresence as a camp follower of human habitations, its quickness, its flight, its prominent eyes, its buzz – that go into the notion of Fama as well. Oddly, Connor doesn’t touch on the subject of the spy as fly, perhaps because the spy in English is free from the fly’s taint that finds expression in  French. 
Rumor, the reporters of rumor, and the makers of rumor are three faces of the myth of what sociologist Shibutani calls “improvised news”. Shibutani proposed a quantitative model in which a certain demand for information is not met by “official channels”. Rumor, in this view, is a kind of overflow of the demand for news. Thus, Shibutani does not identify rumor with distortion, but instead, with an enduring will to truth – in as much as the demand for news is taken as a will to truth. But is it? Is the news about portraying the world? And does this realistic view of the  news work any better than realism in any of the arts?
The social time of rumor is, ideally, simultaneous.  Rumors connect those who spread them, and create among those who are “in the know“ a sense of the ‘latest’. Because rumors are primarily oral, however, their simultaneity is limited. Observers are surprised by it – surprised by how fast rumors spread. Partly this is because rumors fall on the side of the pre-industrial and the oral. In the early modern period and enlightenment, rumor coexisted with print as the literate coexisted with the illiterate, and as the ideology of progress coexisted with the dying gasps of the image of the limited good – the ideology of Nemesis, of the wheel of fortune. But this period, we can see, looking back, is premonitory of the industrial experience even if it is separate from it. One might say that symbolically, from the moment that Fontenelle noted the ingenuity of Paris’ artisans and Defoe noted the accounting methods of English traders, literature filled with intersignes and prophecies of the industrial future. The great novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century – Balzac, Stendhal, Dickens, Gogol, etc., are all unconsciously prophetic, for in the monumental spasms of negative capability they absorbed, in the experiences they diversely lived, the intersignes lying about, cast up to the surface of society by the great capitalist transformation at work underneath.

The T.E.

Shamefully, I’ve been in Paris now almost two years and I hadn’t paid my full respects to the Tour Eiffel. So A. and I went with our friend Miruna and her two children by metro to the Trocadero, and there I finally looked the thing in the eyes.

It is still surprising:  to be confronted with it in all of its gigantic intricacy, like experiencing some gloriously detailed and incomprehensible dream. The thing that strikes one most is its evident, its monstrous, its impossible uselessness. Nineteenth century architecture, whether of the railroad station or the factory, inclined towards wrapping massive ornament around some central utility – for use was the codeword of the century. Utilitarianism leveled the very planet to the question of use and exchange value, and conceived of human society globally as a vast cluster of users. We – living in the age of petrochemicals and entertainment – have followed in those footsteps, and simply added a horror movie dimension. But if one of those railroad stations or factories got up and kicked a jig, it would provoke the same kind of astonishment that the T.E. provokes – all that engineering, that crosshatching of intentionality writ large and in metal, those well laid stresses and balances, the netting, the internal busywork, to produce a thing like no other. Underneath the familiarity of it, the hundreds of millions of reproductions, there is still the fact that it adds itself to our vocabulary of things as itself alone – not as another skyscraper, or pyramid, or obelisk.

Donald Norman, in the Design of Everyday things, claims that the average person in America has a vocabulary of around 30,000 ‘readily descriminable objects’. He takes the end-user’s perception of the object to be determined by three design categories – affordances, mappings and constraints. Scissors, for example, present us with holes attached to blades, and the holes ‘call out to’ our fingers – they map onto our fingers – while the size and number of them operate as constraints, and the result of the mapping and constraint gives us an affordance – the aspect of use that separates the scissors from the butterknife, say.

The T.E., however, is beautifully alien: there are no holes to slip our fingers through here. We can go up it. We can go down it. And we can make use of it – we can send radio signals from it, we can make it into a tourist destination. But these are uses we cast over it, not uses that its structure calls for. We can domesticate it, but we can’t claim any native right over its heart.

So: down the steps and out of the Trocadero, and out to the Champs Mars, where we met some more friends and had a picnic. Afterwards, I went with the kids, Julien and Constanza, up to the second platform, leaving the adults below. I have the same view of high buildings as Jimmy Stewart has in Vertigo – which made this a bit of an ordeal. The kids clambered, jumped and in general pointed to things far below us, and I told myself that the stairs, guard rails and fences were not going to suddenly give way. The truth is that there is something also a little trippy about acrophobia. It is a hair’s breadth from being stoned. And it certainly helps you understand the menace that the massive steelwork represses. I knew that I would feel like this before I took the first step, but I also wanted to test myself. And I was right proud to be on the second platform. However, I would have to have very strong opiates administered to me before I’d even think of taking the elevator to the top. So, to Julien and Constanza’s disappointment, we did not go any higher.

High enough, though. You know, the gods don’t just demand respect – they desire that little token of fear. I gave it. Thus, the gods and I are even for one day. 

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.