cars

I was obviously born generations too early. I lost my interest in cars somewhere after my father bought a Ford LTD. In high school, I had many arguments with my poor parents about getting a driver's license - I didn't want one. And failed my first driver's licence test. But then I was forced to go to driver school, so I surrendered, and on the next test, I correctly identified what the stop sign was for, and all the rest of it. After that, I had a friendly enough relationship with an old Galaxy 500,  one motorcycle, and a Chevette. The Chevette took me to Santa Fe, and then gave up the ghost. It was replaced by the most disastrous purchase I ever made, a AMC matador. That AMC was long bankrupt and that the used car dealer who sold it to me was practically wearing a sign around his neck saying "crook" did not deter me from buying this folly. However, its engine block soon cracked and that did it between me and cars. Since 1993, I've not owned a car and haven't really felt the loss. In fact, in Austin, I began to feel that you could see more of what was going on when you rode a bike - I mean, you had a sort of x ray vision of the ersatz wealth that was going into pathetically big vehicles and all the accoutrements of the out of whack credit economy. I had ecstatic visions of imperial overthrow everytime a SUV blasted its horn at me and wooshed past, spilling insults from the driver's window. I knew exactly how Jeremiah must have felt meeting the up and coming Baal businessmen on the way back from athe Fellowship Dinner and Infant Sacrifice night, hogging the chariot path into Judea.

the kind of JOBS bill that only a crook or a legislator could love

In Paducah, the beauty parlor operator and the kitcat café owner are besides themselves. In Louisville, they talk about it on sidewalk corners and at bus stops. In Lexington, the subject of horse races has been dropped, and it is the theme of knitting circles and barroom conversations.

I’m talking, of course, of the ardent desire of millions of Kentuckians to see IPO law changed to remove regulation, transparency, and accounting standards that impede the simple pleasure of rentseeking and fraud.

The man with his hand on the pulse of Kentucky is Kentucky senator Mitch Mcconnell. Many doubt that Paduchians, for instance, are more fascinated by the possibility that the less than one percent of ‘small” businesses – the American governing class loves the word “small” as much as Starbucks loves the word “tall”, and applies it to all things bright and beautiful – who actually do have an IPO than they are by the fact that, for instance, a prominent Middle School principle was recently arrested for rape and unlawful imprisonment. But those doubters were corrected yesterday by Mitch, who is quoted in the NYT:

“Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, urged members of both parties to approve the bill as it was to avoid further delays. “This bill is exactly the kind of thing Americans have been asking for — greater freedom and flexibility. And that’s one of the reasons it’s had such overwhelming bipartisan support,” Mr. McConnell said.”

And what is that flexibility and freedom about, when we look under the hood? As Simon Johnson and Bill Black have pointed out, a bill that damages transparency and accounting requirements will in all likelihood be very good – for bucket shops and Wall Street investment banks that like to bet against their clients. It will be very bad for “small” businesses. Yves Smithquotes John Coates on the issue: 

“While the various proposals being considered have been characterized as promoting jobs and economic growth by reducing regulatory burdens and costs, it is better to understand them as changing, in similar ways, the balance that existing securities laws and regulations have struck between the transaction costs of raising capital, on the one hand, and the combined costs of fraud risk and asymmetric and unverifiable information, on the other hand.”

What Mr. McConnell is really saying, I think, is: there’s a sucker born every minute. We live in a nation of suckers. And are represented by a circus of suckees. For the thing that American lobbyists have been asking – and the thing that is so sweet to the legislators, who have toiled long and arduously to reach the summit that puts all the cornucopia of legal bribery within their bipartisan reach – is for a jobs bill that will employ more and more unscrupulous stock salesmen in bucket shop operations. And that is just what they are getting.

Once again with the Nagelian voter

The East coast political pundit is a reliable product. Every four years, when the presidential candidates do their greyhound around the track thing, their is sure to be a section in the stands where they moan and gibber for moderates. This year is no different. The punditocracy is viewing the GOP race through moist eyes, because obviously with such extremism, it is the end of the GOP and all things bright and beautiful. This is the tenor of Ryan Liazza’s recent piece in the New Yorker, which surfs the poli sci lit for explanations of how extremists capture parties. In the case of the GOP, the extremists that lead the GOP to that massive 2010 defeat in Congress seem to be in control… or, er, wasn’t that a massive GOP victory?

A good pundit, however, has a tough hide, and can ignore counter-evidence if it gets in the way of the narrative. Joan Didion uses the nice phrase, the  “self-created and self-referring” class, for the administrators of public opinion who take it upon themselves to treat politics much the way Phil Spector treated Beatles songs on the Let it Be album: taking out the unprofessional bits and adding the expected continuity. That continuity is what Didion called the “narrative”: 

“When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life. “I didn’t realize you were a political junkie,” Marty Kaplan, the former Washington Post reporter and Mondale speechwriter who is now married to Susan Estrich, the manager of the Dukakis campaign, said when I mentioned that I planned to write about the campaign; the assumption here, that the narrative should be not just written only by its own specialists but also legible only to its own specialists.”

The insularity continues to be ever more insular, quickly absorbing the insurgent energies of the political blogger scene of the early 2000s as those bloggers self-identified as “political junkies” and happily cycled the process. Those of us within the rez, upon whose head the process is merrily played, with all its wars, its plutocracy, its merciless jails, are supposed to be good sports: the horrendous people who emerge like fabulous locusts to darken the airwaves on election years  (often as a step to what they really want – the excellent lobbying job) are there to administer to the great need they presume we still possess to pretend to be connected, by all the democratic ties, to what they are going to do to us anyway. The quickest route to courage, for the pundit class, is to propose something “unpopular” that will damage the lives of most of the 99 percent in some way, but that will deal with one or another politically created crisis: the debt crisis (caused by chronic undertaxing of the wealthy, and the neo-liberal penchant to find ever more ways to shuffle money from the wage class into securities funds that will ultimately fail to fund retirement, healthcare or education, but will make the rentseeking class wealthy); the foreign policy crisis (caused by the huge gravitational pulls of the Pentagon and the defense industry that lead America by the nose from one act of aggression to another); and the war crisis (ditto).

Myself, I long to be the raven from Poe’s poem, perching on the head of east coast pundits and cawing, nevermore, and gently shitting down the back of their necks.

Liazza’s piece did make me think about my own little contribution to poli sci: using Thomas Nagel’s model, in what is it like to be a bat, to ask the question: what is it like to be a voter?  

The presumption of the pundit class is that the ‘process’ is most aptly run by those with an intelligent grasp of the issues. The issues, of course, are created by those with the intelligent grasp of them, so there is something nice, solid and incestuous about the whole thing.

However, I don’t think election based democracy is about those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, at least if that grasp is defined in terms of having informed opinions about policy. In my opinion, a philosophical defense of democracy has to begin with a better description of how voting functions in a democracy in the first place. What kind of feed back is voting? This is where Thomas Nagel’s essay, What is it like to be a bat? Proves to be handy.

Now of course Nagel’s essay doesn’t seem like it is about politics at all. It is about the narrow set of questions that are posed by the cog sci school to frame the problem of consciousness. And, famously, Nagel suggests that these questions do not pose the central problem of consciousness at all : “…the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”

’What it is like’ questions grab hold of subjectivity, rather than deductive activity:

“We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.3 I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.”

The defense of the participation of the people in the government has traditionally been couched in terms of their education and their information about the policy issues. The Kantian dictum about enlightenment -- that it is the people treated as adults, or grown into their adulthood -- is often taken to be about the people educated, who are then ready to take up, in a Lockian manner, the reins of governance.  Relieved of their superstitions by some suitable immersion in the bath of facts, they can go out and find representation. However, to me the "adulthood" does not stand for a list of facts known. It stands for a complicated system of controls on behavior, for the capacity for a range of emotions, for imagination, for empathy, etc., etc. In the same way, defining the voters participation in the government in terms of checking things off the list of things known is much like defining the consciousness solely in terms of deductive or inductive mechanisms. Or, at a stretch, in terms of intentionality.

The picture I am against is like this: your educated voter looks up candidate x’s view on the issue of lowering or raising tariffs on the import of bananas, and looks up candidate y’s view of same, and – deciding which view accords with his own intelligent view of banana importation – votes accordingly. Votes, in fact, can be reduced to a digital function: for/not for.

I think this is a bare and distorted view of what voting is about, and how it functions in a democracy. The voter, on this account, merely confirms or disconfirms views represented by x and y. On this basis, we think, democracy has no real strength that would explain not only its survival, but also its survival in competition with its rivals of all sorts. It would simply be a system with a lag in the decision making process, called an election, as opposed to say tyranny, where the lags are unpredictable, and correspond to the mental life of the ruler. Since it is unlikely that any voter has the amount of knowledge to make a competent judgment about not only the banana import issue, but, say, subsidies to the ethanol industry and car safety standards and the proper foreign policy to assume towards Gabon, if election based democracies depended on a set of voters with competent listable knowledge alone, I wouldn't give it much chance of survival.

The question of success, here, is often obscured by the rhetoric of morality. Democracies are supposed to possess some moral superiority. I have my doubts about this. Any time a political system becomes dominant, you find intellectuals busy justifying the system as morally superior. So far, the most long lasting governmental arrangement known to man involved the ruler marrying his sister and being acclaimed, at some point or another, a god, before his dead body was embalmed and interred under a certain tonnage of rock. In my opinion, this doesn’t sound like the height of morality, although it makes for very impressive postcards. I think that the success of democracy, given the success of other governmental arrangements in the past, probably does not have to do with its moral status, and probably has more to do with structural qualities it possesses.

This is the reason I don't think voting is well described by the Lockean model. I don’t think voters are like that. I prefer the Nagel voter. The Nagel voter votes, of course, in the for/against mode. But the Nagel voter votes from what it is like to be him or her. This is why the motives of the Nagel voter aren't simply confirming or disconfirming, and why the appeal to him or her is going to be about the emotions around the issues, or the issues as passions. And why the idea that is sometimes bruited about by liberal commentators about injecting ideas into a race and the scandal of not doing so is wrong – not wrong morally, but wrong organizationally. When, for instance, the Swift boat veterans threw mud at Kerry, it was a perfectly legitimate ploy, and has precedents going all the way back to our first presidential elections – mud is part of the process. It is a good part of the process. The swiftboating of Kerry revealed something crucial about Kerry – not that he was a coward under fire on the battlefield, but that he’d become a coward long after that fire was over in denying what made him different from any other grunt: the courage he had to organize to end the war. This, the whole reason he was in politics, disappeared almost entirely from his bio, along with the pics with Jane Fonda and other hippies. This was a huge character flaw that was not unrelated to his huge political flaw – his belief in the “process.” It was a belief that betrayed his Nagelian knowledge that what it was like to fight in Vietnam was a horror show that the process started and was unwilling to stop. Or even stop and repent.   This isn't to say the better man was elected. The man who was elected was George Bush, who is perhaps the epitome of the non-better man, the worse man of all. It is to say that politics is about electing politicians, not better men, and the system's success is peculiarly linked to what makes politicians successful.

Of course, polls are not sensitive to these things: polls ask questions about itemized issues, in a pre-digested sentiential form. There are, of course, millions of Lockean voters out there, and they are variously scandalized by the lack of intellectual content in American political campaigns. And LI has sympathy for that indignation. In fact, my indignation is easily aroused about what I see as gross stupidity on the part of politicians. I dislike their lies, their riches, their easy way with the plutocrats, the stuntedness of their life experiences, and their power to fuck up and fuck me up personally. Just as I don’t want to throw deduction out as the enemy of consciousness, we don't want to entirely junk the image of the well informed voter. But eventually, the voting input is about what it is like to be an Irish ex-cop in New York city, or what it is like to be a embittered ex writer and insane blogger from Austin, Texas, etc., etc.

I will round this off with three paragraphs from Nagel’s essay that give us a sense of how the Lockean defense of democracy differs from a Nagel-like defense of it. The Lockean, remember, is one who, like the reductionist, believes the way to understand the functioning of a government is to find the elementary parts and their combinations. And who thus is comfortable with administering the “narrative’ and the “process”, loves “grand bargains” and “moderation”, and views the dissidence, anger and riotousness that has pushed forward, time and time again, radical ideas that, once adopted, become the conservative furniture of everyday life – as something unusual and that happens, best scenario, in a foreign country, telegenically with young people waving flags at the end of it. For the Lockean, the last sentence of the third paragraph in this quote contains an idea too shocking not to be wrong, since it seems to make it impossible to perfectly combine rationality and government. And, after all, if government is simply decision-making – with its past being a series of decisions made, and its future a series of decisions to be made - then the Lockean has to be right. But if what Nagel is calling experience is not a decision – if it is a style, a set of attitudes, unpredictable variations among language games – and if experience is what democracy depends on, then the pundit view of the administered election, the process, the narrative, and all of that stuff, should be flushed down the toilet, as it ignores or oppresses the expertiential core of democracy:

“In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat? But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes which were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?10

... This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have the phenomenal point of view.

Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things. Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.”

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.