a history of rat races

The search for the origin is, to borrow the title of a Gerald Genette book, a  voyage to Cratylie, that is, to the mythical moment in which the powers over things and thoughts first emerged from chaos and commenced their scheming. Of course, we’ve come a long way from Cratylus, baby – or so all the scientists say. Still, what is more fun, and what gives one more a sense of peaking into some secret corner of the public consciousness, than tracking down the origin of great catchphrases? To do this properly is not simply a matter of dredging up some obscure reference from the world’s archives, although I am sure that is how they do it at the OED, and quite right too. But to make the voyage interesting, one has to go beyond the obscured fact. The mystery here concerns something with a total social meaning – with all that implies of the acids of psychosis, the collective ecstasy, the secret runs of dopamine in the individual’s Piranesian brain  that were  encoded in the word choice. It is the panorama of world history in the form of a fully formed phrase that we want. A phrase that comes prethought. The mere discoverer of facts here may insist all he wants to on the dated instance, plucked out of some corpus, and all respect to his nose and industry -  but his etymology will always fall short of the glory of the phrase's repetition and the unconscious connotative power that spreads it over the principalities and powers.

And so it is, not unexpectedly, with “rat race”. I admit that I’ve daydreamed about the voyage of this phrase through the time and space of the twentieth century, so American, so epic. Or perhaps lyric?  No, epic, in as much as the phrase summons up and muses over the great shift from agriculture and industry to service and circulation that is associated with American capitalism by the bonds of holy Hollywood – and whose spasmodic end we are, perhaps, witnessing now. It is a word etched in cinemascope rather than handheld video recorder.

The “rat race” is part of Karl Kraus’s ‘technoromantic adventure’ of the twentieth century. Kraus was referring, in 1919, to the juxtaposition of the propaganda for world war I, with its antiquated rhetoric of chivalry and honor, and the reality of the battlefield, with its cutting edge poison gas and its warriors masked like monsters out of the middle ages. Life in the developed economies, writers knew by 1950, was a rat race – it was what those developed economies produced, just as the undeveloped ones produced disease, an overemphasis on the agricultural sector, and the ferocious recycling of the developed economies’ waste materials – its odd old plastic bottles, its thrown away treated woods, its strips of corrugated aluminum.

Okay, so much for the mood music. There are two paths that lead, according to the most reliable experts, to the ‘rat race.” And there is also a third, according to myself. Happily, there is something synergistic about these paths, something that makes the origin and diffusion of the phrase ‘rat race’ highly symbolic of the cultural specialties for which the U.S.A. is known.

 The first birth of ‘rat race’ was, appropriately, in the popular culture of music. In the 1930s, there is a record of a dance in Louisville, Kentucky called the “rat race”; the observer who noted the term in the journal of American speech called it a “low dance”. According to John Kleber’s Encyclopedia of Louisville, the dance was peculiarly associated with Kentucky’s only big city. “Some say the Rat Race got its start in the Portland area. Although the origin of the name is obscure, old-timersnote that rats were once so numerous in Portland that people had to invent innovative ways to exterminate them. At night one could see the rats running everywhere, as the residents formed what they called a Rat Chase.”

Kleber claims that the dance was a “sort of slide and glide” step seen more often in barrooms than ballrooms. At this point, note, the human is chasing the rat – the human remains the subject, the rat the object.

The next appearance of rat race is in a military context. The OED gives a quotation from a 1931 story in the New York Times: “They did the snake dance, or rat race as it is sometimes called, and they ended with their four-direction bombing attack” Apparently, just as the sliding and gliding male in the dance kept pursuing the ever retreating and gliding female, one  fighter plane would dog and tailgate another fighter plane, trying to drive it off course or rattle the pilot. American Speech, in 1941, records it as a “mounted review in armor force” – presumably, a defile of tanks. The “race” here is distinguished from a straight race, in which the runners keep to their tracks – instead, the race involves interfering with the other racers. By 1944, the “rat race” was, informally, the race to occupy Germany. Note, here, that the human chasing the rat has disappeared: all are rats, all are racing as rats. The lowest animal, vermin, is made equivalent to the soldier in a ritual that begins with humiliation and ends with an inverted prestige – the rat lords it over the human in a world in which murder is a duty and sparing life is a fault. The technoromantic adventure is rats business.  

The course of the phrase as I have depicted it so far is supported by the best authorities in the phrase and fable field, as well as Louisville antiquarians and WWII groupies. Underneath the surface shift from human to rat and from dance to death, one spots the grander outlines of two of the great 20^th century American industries, entertainment and war, as they cross one with the other and form an enduring complex with multiple effects – from the rise of the FX blockbuster to the great burst of highway building (done as a defense initiative) that started in the 1950s, from war video games to the use of defense industries and military camps to develop the economically backwards American South in the pre-Civil Rights era.

But I think I can also discern a third source for the phrase. At least, I’ve always had an instinct that the phrase has connotations that certainly resonate with this other, characteristically American source, which takes us back to the 1890s when, at Clark University, and then at the University of Chicago, and at the Worcester Hospital for the Insane, certain psychologists –most notably Adolf Meyer, a Swiss immigrant to the U.S. who worked at the Worcester Hospital and Henry Donaldson, a neurologist at the University of Chicago – began to promote the gospel of the albino rat. It was Meyer who began to breed the rats (imagine the scene! The cages in the basement under the flickering electric light, the creaking of the floor above as the mad shuffled about, and our inventor with his family of vermin), and the albino was perfected by Donaldson in the twenties with the Wister rat, which became the standardized lab rat. After  the 1920s, no large American university lacked its wing housing cage after cage of rats. Meanwhile, at Clark, a psychologist names E.C. Sanford and his students, Lucas Kline and Willard Small, were customers of Meyer’s. In Kline’s memoir he recalled talking to Sanford about the natural history of rats, such as he knew it from his childhood in Virginia: “… runways I had observed… made by large feral rats to their nests under the porch of an aold cabin on my father’s farm in Virginia. These runways were from three to six inches below the surface of the ground and when exposed during excavation resembled a veritable maze.”

The maze idea was taken up by Willard Small, who wrote the first great American rat paper, Mental Processes in Rats, in 1900 (and by what lexical drift did the name Willard emerge in the seventies in a popular horror movie about armies of rats?) and introduced the maze – in the center of which the psychologist placed a reward, food. In 1900, behavioralism had not yet erased scandalous mentalese and mental processes from out of the life of rats and humans. Small’s inferences of mental processes fell into oblivion, but his maze, and other laboratory equipment (the problem box, the activity wheel) spread from one underground of cages to another. In 1910, it surfaced in the popular press in an article about animal behavior under expriment by John Watson, the pioneer of behavioralist psychology:

“By such experiments we have established the fact that when animals learn to open doors, run mazes, etc. by their own unaided efforts, they achieve the first success in nearly all cases by some happy accident. If a rat is hungry and is confined in a large cage with a small box containing food which it can get access to only by raising a latchi, it begins its task by the display of a repertoire of instinctive acts, common to every member of the rat race. It runs around and over the box, gnawing the wires, pushing into every mesh of the wire with its nose, clawing, etc. This random instinctive exercise of energy results early in the knowledge of the fact that the door of the box is  the only movable portion. The rat’s activity becomes centered here. Since the latch is attached to the small door, the chance has rapidly become better that some movement of the rat, such as butting or clawing, may raise the latch from the socket. In a period of time which may vary from to minutes to twenty, or even longer, this happy accident will occur, the door will then fall open, and the rat get the foot. Will the animal on the second trial run immediately to the latch and raise it?”

On such questions corporate, military and organizational behavior rose and fell, at least in the command and control America that followed World War II.  Although the running of the rats did not involve racing them, I find this cockeyed etymological meander too satisfying not to want it to be true. Watson, of course, only mentions the rat race as an indication of the race of rats, while rats running do not try to block each other from the food in the maze. But here one does spot, at least the turn from the human chasing the rat to the human becoming one – from old barbarous rat-catching to species-being, Gattungswesen, as Ludwig Feuerbach might have put it. And the problem boxes, mazes and cages by a thousand transformations reappeared as offices, compensation systems, psychological personality quizzes and the interstate highway system.    

In 1932, E.C. Tolman wrote: “I believe that everything important in psychology (except perhaps such matters as the building up of a super-ego, that is, everything save such matters as involve society and words) can be investigated in essence through the continued experimental and theoretical analysis of the determiners of rat behavior at a choice-point in a maze.”

Who can doubt that such truths were inscribed deeply in the American subconscious? The problem is the super-ego; but erect mazes that lead the animal by easy steps to from the choice-point to the reward or punishment you’ve left for him, and you set your mind at rest. . It is all a question of building the mazes – the tv maze, the car maze, the job maze, the education maze – and pushing the American beast through them.

It is this third path to the phrase that fascinates me, the beast that I am, standing at a choice point and peering near-sightedly down dark passages, stirred obscurely by the thought of my positive reinforcement (to be gobbled up rapidly, spilling crumbs) at some impossible center.

How the new got detached from the future

In “Accélération du temps, crise du futur, crise de la politique” (2011), Carmen Leccardi spelled out the paradox that infests the supposed age of acceleration in which we, a certain we, live: while logistics and information in the global market now travel at speeds that approach that dream of Capital as outlined by Marx (where circulation time is reduced to zero), the future as a collectively envisioned social time becomes ever less imaginable, except under the sign of fear. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, of course, the future weighed heavily on the popular consciousness, and influenced every social movement and every political utterance. But the collapse of  any serious alternative to the world market, which has been coeterminous with the ‘accelerated’ rate at which we (the middling we, the symbol pushers, the agents of circulation, the educated, the numbed child) receive and process information, has undermined the credibility of the notion that the future could offer some vast change for the better. What has happened is that one of the great termporal forms of modernity – the new – has detached itself both from the past and the future.  The new is the same old same old, held in the thrall of the simultaneous – the realtime we all serve. The alternative is simply catastrophe; the future looms over the new as the catastrophe that we lack the confidence to understand or confront. 

“More precisely, the acceleration of temporal rhythms brings about a constellation of secondary effects, all prejudicial to the development of political thought and action. It is enough to thing, for example, of the contraction of temporal horizons and the predominance of the short term; of the veritable hegemony of the dealine, elaborated as a principle of action; of the discredit of perspectives based on the idea of one time for all (the idea of irreversibility); of the diffusion of a culture with a provisional character; of the growing difficulty of the construction of projects. In their collectivity, these factors have a negative incidence on the relation with politics.”

Within this timescape (one in which speed dominates to the degree that it is able to be  detached from any greater destination) , Leccardi draws a number of conclusions about politics. One of the most important, I think, is the inversion of the time politics of the left and the right.

The last paradox that the transformation of the temporality of politics produces in the context of the high-speed society is probably the most important. For the first time,in our epoch, the privileged tie cultivated by both the conservative and progressive coalitions with social mutation and its speed has reversed itself. Thus, if it is true that the former coalition has traditionally always been associated with the tendency to ‘slow down’ the mutation and the second with speeding it up, today the positions seem to be reversed. The progressive front supports deceleration – in putting its emphasis on local production, on the political control of the economy, and on the protection of the environment – while the conservative front defends an acceleration of mutations (for example, in defending the rapidity of the markets, in exalting new technologies, and in minimizing the environmental pollution of a certain model of development). The privileged relation between deceleration and the new forms of progressivism could constitute, I think, a good terrain for reflecting about the horizons of politics in the epoch of social acceleration.”

Leccardi’s analysis here is a bit askew, since it is detached from the dynamic of class interests that govern these ‘coalitions.’ That the left has always wanted politics to control economics is evident from even a glance at modern political history; it has long been the conservative claim that the state should not interfere with the private enterprise. Of course, underneath that claim was a practice that enrolled the state systematically on the side of Capital and against labor. But it is true that Marx’s heady encomium of the bourgeois revolution, dissolving the stationary and retarded pockets of rural idiocy and local backwardness everywhere and, on its way to  forming the world market, becoming a vehicle for the world wide revolution of the proletariat, evokes a less optimistic response by the left today, which sees no unity at all, of any kind, arising out of the formal likeness of the circumstances in which the proletariat labor in all global locales. That form of simultaneity – the temporal correlate of solidarity – lies smashed under the media form of simultaneity, the deadline time of our current social mutation. Given that smashup, the progressive coalition does well to question whether deceleration could form an alternative to the mad rush of the Davos swine from one crisis to another, in each of them finding overwhelming reason to sacrifice every advance in social welfare formed by the coalition of the state and the wage class over the past sixty years.

false consciousness - recycled

A post I am recycling from 2007

We all know that false consciousness can be manufactured by the yard, like ribbon. We have merely to pick up a newspaper or see a movie to confirm this belief. In fact, the most popular story about false consciousness, Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’ New Clothes, uses thread as the emblem of false consciousness – for in its essence, false consciousness is that nothing at all for which someone gets paid. And haven’t we seen them sewing the invisible thread? What was Tarp, what was the Iraq war, but the work of the tailors? Who wove justifications through which it was quite easy to see – it was quite easy to see that Iraq, a country that had been crippled by ten years of sanctions, couldn’t even properly attack its breakaway Northern half, much less threaten a power that spends more on the military each year than the rest of the world spends in five years. Just as it was quite easy to see that the middle and working class, hit by a business cycle that had been put in motion by the financial sector, were going to pay the people, pay them richly, who had caused the disaster, all in the name of an essential function that they had not performed in years, and have no plans to perform in the future: moving capital into venues productive of the social good.

 11,000 14,000

The problem is that false consciousness implies true consciousness, but who manufactures it? Or are we to assume that it isn’t manufactured at all? The Anderson tale indicates this problem as well, but only on a more subtle level.  In the second paragraph of the story we read:

“In the great city where he [the Emperor] lived, life was always gay. Every day many strangers came to town, and among them one day came two swindlers. They let it be known they were weavers, and they said they could weave the most magnificent fabrics imaginable. Not only were their colors and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid. “

The term “swindlers” is the tell. True consciousness has already been woven into the cloth of the story – we, the reader and the author, have a wonderful way of seeing the tailors for swindlers, and the empty looms for empty looms. Thus, when the little boy proclaims that the emperor is naked, he is saying something that we already knew.

“Small Zaches”, has never achieved the popularity of Anderson’s tale. It is not one of the E.T.A. Hoffman stories that has entered the vocabulary of all mankind, or at least the part of it that occasionally goes to the opera. But it tackles a more difficult matter than Andersen’s story: what if we tell the story of false consciousness by putting the ‘tell’ in doubt?

The plot of the story concerns a dwarf. The dwarf is Small Zaches. He is a snarling, barely civilized creature. He does possess an unusual gift, however. He projects upon the people around him the impression that he is another thing altogether – named Zinnobar. Zinnobar is not simply a projection – rather, it is a projection collector. If a man at the table with Small Zaches reads a beautiful poem, the poem is attributed by those at the table to the dwarf, not the poet. Meanwhile, the dwarf’s habits- say, of sticking his face into his plate and licking up the food on it -  will be attributed to the poet. The shifts produce the humor in the tale: Zinnober is introduced to the Furst, but merely mumbles and growls at him while smearing food over himself. The Furst congratulates the little monster on a memo he has received. A courtier comes forward and claims that he has written the memo – and we know he has, because the authorial p.o.v. makes us know that he has.But the Furst gets angry at the courtier not only for his false claim to authorship, but for eating like a pig, smearing food on himself, and dropping a piece of melted butter on the Furst’s uniform.  Like children, we laugh at this – or at least I laugh at this – because I know that the true version of events is the one told to me by the author. He, at least – this anonymous, organizing voice – has a true consciousness of the events that are unfolding in the tale.

Yet this same author calmly describes magical metamorphoses in other parts of the tale, with the same sense that this material happened as it is described. Meanwhile, in one of those strokes of mad genius to which Hoffmann is heir, even his hero, Balthazar, who sees through Zinnober to the Small Zaches inside, has moments of doubt – while Zinnober’s most ardent defender, the advocate of enlightenment, and the man whose daughter wants to marry him, Professor  Mosch Terpin, experiences moments when his eyes deceive him – that is, moments when he sees clearly: “ It is true that it often seems inconceivable even to me that a girl like Candida could be so foolishly fond (vernarrt sein) of the little man. Otherwise, women mostly are looking for a handsome exterior, than for particular intellectual gifts, and when I look at the special little man for a while, it begins to seem to me as if he were not at all pretty, but even a humpy… st …. St…be still, the walls have ears. He is the favorite of the Furst, always climbing higher. Higher, and he is my future son-in-law.”

But it is Balthasar, who makes the most uncanny confession. Balthasar is one of our anchoring characters, whose perspective, vis a vis the truth about the special little man, is the author’s own. He hates the special small man precisely because Candida loves him (and it is here that Balthasar and the author part ways, so to speak – Balthasar’s  love for Candida, it is made abundantly clear, is itself based on a fundamental delusion in which he confuses his sexual excitement about her for some merit she herself possesses – when we can see she is vain and rather empty). But there he is, sitting in the forest (which represents the anti-entlightenment by its very existence – and yet also represents the place where projection is neutralized) at the beginning of chapter four,  making a confession:

No, he cried out as he sprang from his perch and with glowing glances looked into the distance, “no, all hope has not yet vanished! – it is only too certain that some dark secret, some evil magic has broken into my life, but I will break this magic, even if it kills me! – as I finally fled, overcome by the feeling that my breast would explode unless I confessed my love to gracious, sweet Candida, didn’t I read in her look, feel by the press of her hand, my blessedness? But when that damned mishmash was seen, it was to him that all the love flowed. On you, execrable misbirth, hung Candida’s eyes, and longing sighs flew from her breast, when the clumsy boy came near her or touched her hand. … Isn’t it fantastic, that everyone mocks and laughs at the completely helpless, misshapen little man, and then again, when the small man slips in between, cry him up as the most intelligent, learned, even handsome Studioso among us?   – What am I saying? Doesn’t it come over me in the same way, as if Zinnobar were clever and pretty? Only in Candida’s presence  does the magic have no power over me: then is and remains Mr. Zinnober a dumb, dreadful mandrake!”

Who does not feel these terrible moments of surrender to the sly devil’s voice of the consensus omnium? And must projection drive out projection and so on, without end?

On the prison industry

In the Utopia of Userers, Chesterton, that curious mixture of Catholic anti-semite reactionary and anti-capitalist critic, launched an all out assault on the “small-minded cynicism of our

plutocracy, its secrecy, its gambling spirit, its contempt of conscience…”

But even Chesterton could not have dreamt of the extension of the Utopia to prison itself. Only in the U.S., where we have joined together peanut butter and chocolate, and coca cola and rum, would it occur to anybody to join together the two great tastes of libertarianism and the Gulag. But so it happened! Here’s the story from the very downloadable Justice Policy Institute report, Gaming the System:

“A prime example of the influence underscoring the private prison industry is the development of

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). CCA cofounder, Tom Beasley, then-chairman of the

Tennessee Republican Party, had served on a committee tasked with choosing a new state corrections officer.28 Beasley‟s research uncovered a system plagued by overcrowding, tight budgets and high turnover, convincing him that with a few simple applications of business practices the corrections system could be transformed from an inefficient bureaucracy to a profitable business.29 Joined by two friends, Doctor Crants, a lawyer and MBA Harvard graduate and Don Hutto, who at the time was the president of the American Correctional Association, CCA entered the market by attempting to take over the entire Tennessee prison system.30 The combination of Beasley‟s political connections, Crants‟ business savvy, and Hutto‟s correctional credentials allowed for easy access to the necessary contacts and investors to launch America‟s first private prison company.”

This is the conservative version of American capitalism in its most naked – extolling the benefits of the private sphere whilst depending utterly on the flow of tax dollars to fatten the salaries of its investors and upper management. As an added conceptual plus, liberty, here, is used to deprive more and more people of liberty. So, in an era in which, according to police statistics, the crime rate in America has dropped to a level not seen since the early sixties, we are using the prison system to essentially replace the social welfare system. In 1960, there were, in all, 333,000 people in jail, approximately. In 2010, there were 2,266,800, plus another 4,933,667 on parole. More than any other country. But…

You can see the problem. CCA has a wonderful gig now, but how about growth opportunities? 

According toGaming the System:

“Since 2000, private prisons have increased their share of the ‚market‛ substantially: the number of people held in private federal facilities increased approximately 120 percent, while the number

held in private state facilities increased approximately 33 percent. During this same period, the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent. Meanwhile, spending on corrections has increased 72 percent since 1997, to $74 billion in 2007.3 The two largest private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, combined

had over  $2.9 billion in revenue in 2010.”

As Chesterton wrote: “This Capitalist is an ingenious person, and has many polished characteristics; but I think the most singular thing about him is his staggering lack of shame. Neither the hour of death nor the day of reckoning, neither the tent of exile nor the house of mourning, neither chivalry nor patriotism, neither womanhood nor widowhood, is safe at this supreme moment from his dirty little expedient of dieting the slave. As similar bullies, when they collect the slum rents, put a foot in the open door, these are always ready to push in a muddy wedge wherever there is a slit in a sundered household or a crack in a broken heart.” This may seem like mere invective to you, who are a patsy – to  GEO and CCA, it represents a business plan. This is from the Sun Sentinal, concerning the recent Florida scam:

“According to [The National Institute on Money in State Politics], the private prison industry has gave nearly $1 million in campaign contributions during the 2010 election cycle, the most the industry has given over the last decade, with the donations largely coming from five companies: GeoGroup, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), Global Tel* Link, Armor Correctional Health Services, and LCS Corrections Services, Inc.
The full Senate this week will take up a plan to privatize 29 prisons in South Florida, which Senate budget chairman JD Alexander has predicted could save the state up to $45 million. The move is opposed by correctional workers though, who have turned out in large numbers at committee hearings to protest the proposal.
An identical proposal was approved by the Legislature last year, but shot down by the courts on technical grounds because the plan was written into the budget, rather than debated and passed in separate legislation.
Florida is home to the nation’s third-largest penal system, a fact likely not lost on the state’s lawmakers when they finalized the state’s $69.7 billion budget last May. Taking aim at $4 billion in government spending, last year’s budget included a plan to privatize prisons in the southern third of the state that would have nearly quadrupled the number of Florida prisons run by private firms.”

The figures are, as always, astonishing. One of the advantages of democracy, it turns out, is that it can be bought for rock bottom prices. You can easily whip up an ideological mood and buy a baker’s dozen of legislators for less money than Jamie Dimon spent to remodel his office at JP Morgan Chase. The big money in a declining empire has, traditionally,  been in pilfering the Imperial centers, as the peasants are exhausted, the tribute is killing them, and the great plantations are creating less and less. So it is with the States. The abdication of public responsibility in tandem with an aggressive peculation that clothes itself in the virtues of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has created a very happy shift towards the one percent, where innumerable capillaries direct money from the state directly into the pockets of the corporation. The prison corporations are pursuing much the same method that has made, say, Bain Corporation such heady bucks: the latter  would clear out a company and, using bankruptcy law and the orders of a compliant court, thrust pension expenses on the government to achieve the  magical mystery ROI and then move on, leaving a downsized ruin behind it. There’s similar money to be made privatizing everything government and creating a lower level life style for everyone outside the gated community. Since 3.1 percent of all adults in America are either in jail or on parole, we are talking of a very strong market, here, the equivalent of the junk bond market – call it the market in junk people. We can imprison this scum, deny them the right to vote,  and variously cheat them through the traditional legalized money lending practices without a single respectable person protesting. But, problematically, it is hard to wring money out of them. That’s why imprisoning them is such a wonderful trick – valueless in themselves, each of those bodies is backed up by bucks as soon as you bumrush them through the courts and behind bars.

At one time, there might even have existed one or two politicos or public figures to whine about this state of affairs. But that time ended in 1968, and since then the gated community and the private prison have gone hand in hand, dividing up the American landscape. We can be sure that this year, as in 2008, 2004, 2000, 1996, 1992, 1988, 1984, 1980, and on and on, not a single question will be asked about the astonishing amount of adults circulated through the incarceration  industry; and if it were asked, we can be sure that Romney I and Romney II, our parity product presidential candidates, would answer with pretty much the same tough on crime boilerplate; and we can also be sure that neither one will lose a single supporter for not noticing the Gulag.

But if we cannot have the power to chose, we can at least luxuriate in the impotence of knowing.  Which is why you, reader, should definitely hasten to the report, Gaming the System, for a fun half hour of Sunday reading. Then forget it. Nothing is going to happen to make the situation better; everything is set up to make it much worse.

Notes on the French election

In the campaign of 2006, Nicholas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal were both asked, by Jean-Jacques Bourdin, about the capabilities of the French nuclear submarine fleet. Royal said that there were 7 nuclear armed submarines. Sarkozy said there were 6. And the interviewer said there were 5. As Royal points out in her account of the campaign, Ma plus belle histoire c’est vous, that all three numbers were wrong did not mean that all three respondents were treated equally. Rather, while Bourdin, the intereviewer, received no flack for asking a question the answer to which he did not know, and while Sarkozy was treated as having a sort of minimal knowledge of the fleet – given a C, so to speak – Royal’s answer was supposed to reveal a fundamental and disqualifying ignorance:

« I haven’t forgotten the UMP communiqué which gave the angle that the commentators were supposed to make about me: “It is not a question of pilling on the candidate. [feminine in the French]. But still, we need to remember that she aspires to article 5 of our constitution, to wit, becoming chief of the armed services with the responsibility over nuclear weapons engagement. Such a  error over the fundamentals of our defense is more than disquieting” On the howler of the candidate [masculine – Sarkozy] – one says the minimum, very quickly, and passes to other things.”

This passage was taken up by a sociolinguist, Ruth Amossy, as an example of argumentation in political discourse, partly because it is an instance of analysing a discourse while making an argument within the discourse. Amossy uses it to argue that one cannot separate some pure logical core – the logos – from the rhetorical form in which it is expressed – the side of pathos –in practical argument.  If two people make the same mistake, and one is blamed for it and the other  is not, than we have to seek some motivation for the inequality of the distribution of blame (and the distribution of blame always leads us back to justice, however instituted).

I bring this up because, last night, at dinner, I was asked by a friend of ours who I’d vote for, if I could vote in the French election, and I said Melenchon. Our friend, who supports Eva Joli, replied that she disliked Melenchon’s macho style. And that made me want to say, what does style have to do with it? Because I do have a certain strategic notion that the pathos of lefty demagoguery, which does tend to the masculinist gesture, results in programs that are much more advantageous to women than not. That  is, if we take into account women in the working class, where the majority of women are, as well as women in middle management and middle class.

But on the other hand, Royal’s anecdote is telling. Style’s power consists in being able to shift the topic. As our friend pointed out, Melenchon was certainly in the socialist cenacle in which DSK flourished, but he, too, seems to have been an enabler. And from this point of view, Joli’s intransigent contempt for corruption and the cult of entitlement is stylistically and logically preferable to the Quixotic invocation of working movements past. I suppose what I’d like is a qualitative leap that connected the two – the unbending problems of  class and gender –and from this perspective, neither Melenchon nor Joli will do.

That said,  I think Joli has been a pretty bad candidate. I’ve been unhappy that a year after Fukishima, and two years after the Gulf Oil Spill, and well into the era of global warming, she has not figured out how to synthesize enviro and economic concerns to create a viable and unavoidable front. Environmental issues have never been so low down on the set of priorities in a presidential race, but in reality, they have never been more important. The financial crisis in Europe is a crisis of rich wankers. The rich wankers are using the moment to take down fifty years of social democracy. Nobody has called them out on it. But there will be a muddle through,  one way or another. There’s not an environmental muddle through – things have to change. This is good news, actually – an enviro-economy within the social democratic framework is the natural, and better, alternative to the neo-liberal management of expectations as the middle class gives up its healthcare, education, and culture in return for superb entertainment-security surround media and longer work hours.  Why Eva Joli has not taken this and burned it into the hide of this phlegmatic campaign is a question I can’t answer, but there it is. This is, like it or not, a failure – it is a failure of style. And a politician without style is, more properly, an appointee - the person who advises the politician, not the figure on the hustings. If you are on the hustings, go for it.  

The new and no-future: a story of waste

In “Old Newspapers”, an essay written in 1920, Kurt Tucholsky went back and read some newspapers from 1910. The essay begins by taking the paper as a physical object – a text with a destination.

“The editor sent me a sausage  wrapped in an old newspaper that, like the sausage, came from the now bypassed era of peace.”  This makes Tucholsky think of – a topic to write about: newspapers.

The topic soon grows wings.

Old newspapers are funny. 1910, 1911 – God send us such cares, such Liliputan concerns. “The social democratic court report”. “The resignation of Crown Prince Hohenlohe from the Presidium of the Reichstag.” (The Reichstage had nothing to say, its Presidium had nothing to say, thus what did it have to say, when…?) “The Battle against Hermann Nissen.” Oh yes, it was a gay, a harmless, a good old small time.

Old papers are funny. But how is it that, when one reads them, one soon becomes sad?

Because one sees, how badly they have done their task. Because one sees, how little foresight they had, how they didn’t know the world, how they didn’t even fulfill the role of presenting good reports, informing the inhabitants of earth objectively and meticulously about one another. How they substituted, through lyricism and sentiment, what escaped them in precision and information.

Because so it was at that time that most newspapers worked against their own time, whose heartbeat they, perhaps, heard, but did not want to hear.

1910 – today, one wants to scream: For God’s sake! Four more years! Do something! It is flickering! Pour water on it! You happy souls, you still have time!   But then: “the struggle against Hermann Nissen.” And the picture even becomes grotesque, when one leafs through the newspapers from July, 1914. As for eight days previous not a single headline slinger recognized a single thing about the ‘great age” that was breaking over them, just as there was no advertising editor, , no picture editor, no chief of a bureau, no politician even who saw the collapse of a culture at all, that was standing close before them, and coming closer,always closer… On the second of August they were all very well informed and they were all wading into blood and phrases.”

            The defender of the newspaper might reply that Tucholsky was looking for prophecy, not news reporting. But I believe Tucholsky puts his finger, here, on a peculiarity of the “new” that constitutes the news: the new seems cut off from the future.

            Dominique Kalifa has shown how, during the Belle Epoque, Parisian newspapers reported more and more crimes. Crime went from being a matter of the police report that was relegated to the fourth page to a matter of interest that was popping up, even in the newspapers that were intended for a high bourgeois audience. Why do crimes and accidents so perfectly fall into the net of the news?

            It is because they are perfectly new. They only possess a past. As newspaper time was transformed by radio,tv and internet time, it is true that sometimes, the crime is captured as it occurs. In this sense, it has a certain future, tends towards a certain outcome. But it is not the indeterminate future of the shaking of a culture, of the collapse of norms, of the emergence or submergence of a class, of all the constituents of history. At most, accident and crime are destined for the trial – a retrospective future. When Tucholsky asks why the newspapers of 1910 give no indication of what is coming –and, on the contrary, disseminate a vulnerability and complacency that smooths the way for the invisible future-disaster – he is approaching the mystery of the new in the news, the limit that defines the news consciousness.

            The paradox of the news is this: because the accident and crime pose no epistemological threat to the news – since they are  the new in its purest form - -they tend to take over the news to the extent that they become the great determinants of what the newspapers don’t report on. Alchemically, accident becomes essence in the newspaper. The future that the newspapers can’t image is imagined in the news. 

            In revenge, or perhaps as an unconscious correlate of a text that has no future, the critic of the news, and its consumers, take the news, ultimately, as waste – a waste of time, a waste of paper. Time, after all, that is cut off from the future is waste time. Tucholsky begins with an old sausage and an old newspaper, and he ends his essay with – producing more copy: “And now I’m finished with the sausage, and naturally I ball up the old newspapers and put them under the left leg of my typewriter table, which is unbalanced, and finally their existence serves,  once and for all, a rational purpose.”

studium -study

“… the new visual era, opened by the photograph, is still seen through the enchanted screen of the ‘graphosphere’. The exposition, however positivist, guards the aura that fiction and classical culture gives unmistakeably to the object to which they apply themselves. The cultural doubleness is not only characteristic of the 19^th century; it extends its influence well beyond and continues to haunt, like a fantome, the most recent discourse, in saturating La Chambre clair with latin and greek terms (the punctum, the studium, the spectrum, the noeme, etc.) Roland Barthes himself has recourse to this screen, as if the abandonment of the concept ‘of writing’, up to then central in his work, to the benefit of the imprint and the Referent, can only be done in maintaining,in extremis,a lexicon issue from the classical and rhetorical culture with which photography, and more generally, visual industries, strongly break.” [Philippe Ortel, 1999]

The ruptures are always followed, it seems, with fantoms, and the more modern the new break is, the more it changes everything, the more ghosts there seem to be who don’t get it, who haven’t received the word that they should think themselves into extinction.

I would put Ortel’s critique of Barthes’ terminology in Camera Lucida on the opposite pole from my own ‘enchantment’  with these terms, which seem, contra Ortel, to express well the state of the rupture – for far from being in the visual era, we are in, unmistakeably in, sunk up to our necks in, the era of the mashup, the era of the caption, the era of blogging, commenting, uploading, vids and texting.

A week ago I wrote an earlier post about my dissatisfaction with the phrase, “reading a picture”, “reading an image”, “reading a film”, etc. Like the rather dirty dog I am, I don’t want to remove that bone from my mouth quite yet. I want to drool on it some more, make it slick.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes proposes a dynamic of the photograph – or of the experience of the photograph – that employs two terms, studium and punctum, which are not exactly opposites and aren’t exactly in tandem. Barthes disgards, here, the operator’s point of view – he is writing as the spectator. “What I feel for these photos [which he has been commenting on] arises from a mid-range [moyen]  effect, almost a training. I don’t see, in French, the word that expresses simply this sort of human interest. But in Latin, I believe, this word exists; it is studium”, Barthes writes, “which does not mean, at least right off, ‘the study’, but the application to a thing, the taste for someone, a sort of general investment, eager, certain, but without any particular acuity.”

That word, study, does exist in just this sense in English – but not in any English. In American English, and especially American English in the South. One of Flannery O’Connor’s greatest and most mysterious stories, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, is keyed to the verb “study”. In it, a retarded young woman is married to a traveling man named (unbelievably, and all too believably) Shiflet. The young woman is the “baby girl” of an old woman who happens to own an out of order car, which is what Mr. Shiflet really wants. The first time we see Shiflet, he is spotted by the old woman, who lives in a desolate spot, coming down her  road with a box, which he sets down just outside her fence. His face is described in that devastatingly cartoonish way that O’Connor uses to conjure the countryfried tribes of the South, ending with this sentence: “He seemed to be a young man but he had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.” This young man comes up on the porch and introduces himself to the old woman and the daughter, who introduces herself in turn ("I'm pleased to meet you," the old woman said. "Name Lucynell Crater and daughter Lucynell Crater. What you doing around here, Mr. Shiftlet?"), and then the young man tells her a thing that introduces the verb study into the story for the first time:

"Lady," he said, and turned and gave her his full attention, "lemme tell you something. There's one of these doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife and cut the human heart—the human heart," he repeated, leaning forward, "out of a man's chest and held it in his hand," and he held his hand out, palm up, as if it were slightly weighted with the human heart, "and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady," he said, allowing a long significant pause in which his head slid forward and his clay-colored eyes brightened, "he don't know no more about it than you or me."

This version of study, which is connected to “the study of”, or what Barthes calls “l’etude”, falls short of the power and glory of God and the devil. But Mr.Shiflet, who ranges between the latter two, is a man who also studies – in this second sense:

“He reached into his pocket and brought out a sack of tobacco and a package of cigarette papers and rolled himself a cigarette, expertly with one hand, and attached it in a hanging position to his upper lip. Then he took a box of wooden matches from his pocket and struck one on his shoe. He held the burning match as if he were studying the mystery of flame while it traveled dangerously toward his skin. The daughter began to make loud noises and to point to his hand and shake her finger at him, but when the flame was just before touching him, he leaned down with his hand cupped over it as if he were going to set fire to his nose and lit the cigarette.”

“Studying’, here, possesses that blunt approach to the object, that near acuity, that is the twin of  studium as Barthes uses it. Barthes, reaching into the inexhaustible magician’s hat  of rhetoric – the tricks of which served him right well, better than Ortel gives them credit for – has found a word that does more than describe a cognitive attitude towards the photograph: it also describes a cognitive attitude towards the newspaper, and towards much of the internet as well. 

We don’t exactly read a photograph, and we don’t exactly look at one. We don’t have, for photographs, some limited range of symbols and components – something equivalent to letters or signs or ideograms – that we have for a text, and that we even have, for most of Western history, for painting – or for tattoos. And we don’t exactly look either – or at least, what we look at (even if we looked, as operators, to take the photograph) is what has been looked at. Our look is always a second look. Studium, or study, covers this ground well, since it doesn’t exclude reading or looking, but points to an attitude, to a sort of preliminary intentness, that fills our head when in relation with the photo or texts like a newspaper, which is designed to be like a book or encyclopedia but, also, unlike – from the headlines to the placement of the photos to the continuation of columns in the paper.

When we study the paper, we don’t study it with the sense that we will keep it. Like Shiftlet’s match, the newspaper is ultimately, classically, in the days of paper, for tossing away. The physical fate of the newspaper always hung over it, and was often brought up in popular culture – such as in films about journalists, who were almost always rather seedy and amoral men. Sometimes,however, things were cut out of the paper to be saved – or a paper itself was saved for  some reason. When man landed on the moon, my parents saved the Atlanta Journal that headlined the event. Years later, when my Mom died, I was going through her things and found a yellowed copy of that paper. It seemed extremely sad, and to my too literary mind, too much like a detail out of some story Joyce might have written – a Dubliners detail, an unbearable punctum – to use Barthes term. Indeed, the punctum leads Barthes to the death of his own mother, which is the subtending story in Camera Lucida – the story of finding photographs of his mother in her house, after she died.

The association between the newspaper and the photograph upon which I am insisting, here, is helpful  in understanding the newspaper effect, in modernity. The great critics of the newspaper – Kraus, Tucholsky, Bloy, Orwell – all understood its “black magic”, to use Kraus’ term, as an enfeeblement of language that served to replace reading by what I am calling, following Barthes, study. Karl Kraus, who wrote that the real freedom of the press is freedom from the press – our natural and best freedom – gave this criticism a monstrous obsessiveness over forty years by ‘cutting’ out quotations from Viennese papers and applying to them the acid of his Sprach-kritik with such effect that that they always yielded, in the end, the same result: an untenable bêtise, an underlying stupidity that was like some chemical ingredient which surreptitiously cretinized the consumer. The consumers in this case were Austrians who happily engaged, in those forty years, in one frenzy of mass murder – World War I – and were preparing themselves for another one – World War II – when Kraus died, in 1937.

Kraus’ underlying premise, his critical vocabulary, his rage against the cruelty and unintelligence of the dominance of study over reading or looking, was, in its broad outlines, predicted by Baudelaire’s reaction to photography in the Salon of 1859 – which I’ll end with. Baudelaire, in spite of being on good terms with one of the greatest of photographers, Nadar, diagnoses the rage for daguerreotypes as the introduction of industry into art – and, in consequence, the end of art. He grasped the fact that the industrial experience was becoming the norm, not the exception. Nature, as he saw it, was being replaced by precision. Of course, the natural philosophers, since Boyle, had dismissed nature as a hopelessly misbegotten patch of a concept that had no causal power in science – and once it lost that causal power, it could only decay into myth. But Baudelaire understood that poetry lived in that uneasy marginal space. The photograph, symptomatically, satisfied both the mythical (the likeness to “nature”) and the scientific/industrial (“precision”) in a way that no art could compete with. It was Mickey Mouse from here on out, so to speak.

These are, of course, reactionary positions – that is, they are positions with nowhere to go – instead of revolutionary ones. But they contain, in all their disgust and self-undermining industry – their appalled and compulsive study of study – moments that any revolutionary – any upsetter of our present order – must understand. I’m tempted to end here, to splurge, with a long quote from the  end of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, however hokey the convergence of my theme and example may be. Shiflet, as those who know this story, does finally get the old woman’s car running – his whole intent, apparently – after ‘studying’ the engine, and he negotiates with the old woman over his marriage to her retarded girl until he gets to take off in the car for a honeymoon, and some dollars to spend.

“Occasionally he stopped his thoughts long enough to look at Lucynell in the seat beside him. She had eaten the lunch as soon as they were out of the yard and now she was pulling the cherries off the hat one by one and throwing them out the window. He became depressed in spite of the car. He had driven about a hundred miles when he decided that she must be hungry again and at the next small town they came to, he stopped in front of an aluminum-painted eating place called The Hot Spot and took her in and ordered her a plate of ham and grits. The ride had made her sleepy and as soon as she got up on the stool, she rested her head on the counter and shut her eyes. There was no one in The Hot Spot but Mr. Shiftlet and the boy behind the counter, a pale youth with a greasy rag hung over his shoulder. Before he could dish up the food, she was snoring gently.

"Give it to her when she wakes up," Mr. Shiftlet said. "I'll pay for it now."

The boy bent over her and stared at the long pink-gold hair and the half-shut sleeping eyes. Then he looked up and stared at Mr. Shiftlet. "She looks like an angel of Gawd," he murmured.

"Hitch-hiker," Mr. Shiftlet explained. "I can't wait. I got to make Tuscaloosa."

The boy bent over again and very carefully touched his finger to a strand of the golden hair and Mr. Shiftlet left.”