Back to zero

Back to the zero

The golden age of psychometrics extended from the first measurements of current in the nerves, effected by Helmholtz, and the first attempt to measure the time of sensation, which was performed by Helmholtz’s student, Sigmund Exner, up to the Pavlovian era of the conditioned reflex in the 20s. It was a mad scramble of different instruments all employed to make psychology a science of the smallest interval – the measure of the thought, the nerve impulse, the present of seeing, hearing, and touching. He who says science says measurement – such was the law and the prophets in the 19^th century – and under this law, psychology seemed, by its very object, to be excluded – since psychological states seem preeminently qualitative. But instrument by instrument (the myrograph! the Weber compass! The kymograph!), a physiological route to psychological states was carved out. If the object of psychology was not the qualitative state, but the quantitative reflex arc, then psychology could finally be legitimated as something more than a mishmash of post-humoral speculations, for it would have found its total material correlate.

By the 1860s, some advances had been made in the instrumentation and measurement of current in the nerves in relation to stimulus. Helmholtz had determined, through the use of a galvonometer, calculating the distance between the nerve end to be stimulated and the muscular contraction that was observed, the time measuring the traversal of the nerve current. He found that the impulse took between 0.0014 and 0.0020 seconds, which meant that the speed of the conduction was between 25 and 43 meters per second. As in frogs, so in man. If shock were collision, if stimulus could be reduced to mechanical motion, then we could set up our speeds for the present.

But was shock collision?

It was at this point that we can locate as an event in both science and literature an essay written by a Russian physiologist, Ivan Sechenov, entitled Reflex Actions of the Brain (1863). It was an essay that drew conclusions from clinical and laboratory work to evoke a certain paradigm for working with the mental.  They key was the reflex:

“Thus all the exterior manifestations of cerebral activity are reduced to muscular movements. This very much simplifies the question. In fact, an almost infinite multitude of phenomena are reduced to the combined play of some tens of muscles… Furthermore, the reader may immediately perceive that all qualities appertaining to exterior manifestations of cerebral activity: animation, passion, mockery, sadness, joy, etc. are of a mechanical origin. The most rigid spiritualist is obliged to agree. Besides, could it be otherwise when we know that the stone comes to life under the hand of the sculptor and that that of the musician pulls out from an inert instrument sounds that are full of life and passion? Thus the hand of these artists being only apt to produce purely mechanical movements, how could it in turn introduce in the sounds and forms a passionate expression, if it were not in its turn a purely mechanical act? After what we have said, do you not feel, dear reader, that a moment must come when we can analyse the exterior manifestations of cerebral activity as easily as the physician today analyses a musical accord or the phenomena given by a falling body?” [My translation of the French translation]

It was this address to the reader that strained the Russian censor’s tolerance. The essay in which Sechenev was not originally meant to be published in a medical journal. It was meant to be published in a literary one, The Contemporary, edited by one of the famous names in Russia’s politico-literary history: Chernyshevsky. 

By the time The Contemporary was banned, Chernyshevsky was already in prison. It was in prison that Chernyshevsky wrote What is to be Done, featuring a materialist physiologist based on Sechenov. And in one of those reflex arcs that are called “response” or “influence” in literary criticism and intellectual history, Chernyshevsky’s book called forth another book, Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Mousehole.

It is hard to read Sechenov’s essay without seeing the shadow retrospectively cast across it by Dostoevsky. For instance, this is how Sechenov makes the point that what we call habit is a matter of muscular movement:

“Fearing to multiply examples, I will limit myself to asking my readers: is there anything in the world that is so repugnant, so horrible, that man cannot get used to it? Each will doubtlessly respond that there isn’t. And yet each knows that, in order to get used to many things, one needs to make long and painful efforts. To get used to odious or repugnant things isn’t about supporting them without effort (to claim this would be absurd), it is about directing one’s effort skillfully.” (19)

Yet, this flash of the real vileness of life has a scientific purpose. Sechenov was, if not the sole discoverer, the great purveyor of the idea of inhibition. In this sense, Sechenov closes out a period in which shock, whether as something vital or as mechanical motion, had a simple relationship to the body electric of man.

“Twenty years ago, physiologists still believed that the excitation of every nerve attached to a muscle led infallibly to a contraction of the latter. And then Eduard Weber demonstrated, by the aid of irrefutable experiments, that the excitation of the nerve wave which, by certain of its ramifications, arrives at the heart not only does not augment the activity of the latter organ, but even paralyzes it.”

After listing other discoveries in this vein, Sechenov writes a sentence that is heavy with the future: “In the presence of these facts, the idea has gained, little by little, credit with  contemporary physiologists that nervous influences can exist in the animal body having for result to moderate or even arrest involuntary movements.”

In other words, there exists inhibition. The shadow side of shock, numbness, has a physiological correlate. And it is from numbness, from inhibition, that we can build out, precariously, the spiritual world beyond the muscle:

“Knowing all these facts, can contemporary physiologists refuse to admit in the human body –and notably in the brain, since the will only operates by the intermediary of that organ –the existence of mechanisms that arrest reflex movement?” (22)

The complexity added by inhibition to the reflex picture is then compounded with another feature of animal life: the natural exaggeration to which the animal is carried by sudden circumstances, emergencies, fears. Sechenov lists them, including stories of the sudden incredible strength of the weak in emergencies, the fleetfootedness of asthmatics in panic, and various Plinian stories of animal feats. All of which does not bring us outside the mechanical – one can devise machines that also perform non-linearly. However, it does bring us outside the predictable. To find a place for inhibition and exaggeration in our animal life, Sechenov considers that there is such a thing as unconscious reflex action.  

“Thus, the operations which produce an accumulation of the final energy of reflex action take place in the cerebral hemispheres. There is two ways to explain the fact: the mechanism in question could itself be organized on the plan of the reflector, and thus its central partmust serve as a point of junction between sensitive and motor nerves; or one could consider it as an appendix to the reflector, producing unconscious reflex actions. This second conjecture is infinitely more probable than the first…”

Shock leads us here, to a point where numbness, inhibition, and the unconscious meet. The experimental data for this will come not simply from the beheaded frogs and trepanned cats of the laboratory, but from men and women – in train wrecks, entangled in factory machinery, under bombardment. The shocks produced by the industrial experience will carry the unconscious reflex action into the court room, make it a matter for insurance adjustors as well as doctors, lawyers as well as researchers, and create a massive trace that will be felt by the agents of circulation as well as the working class.  

Benjamin's shock

“The intentional correlate of living experience has not remained the same. In the nineteenth century it as “the adventure”.In our days it appears as Fate. In fate is hidden the concept of the ‘total living experience’ that is completely mortal. War is its unsurpassed prefiguration. (That I was born German, then I must die for it – the trauma of birth contains already the shock that is mortal. This coincidence defines Fate.”

“That which is “always the same thing” is not the event, but what is new in it, the shock that pertains to it.”

“Empathy comes about through a declic, a kind of gear shift. With it, the interior life erects a pendent to the shock of sense perception. (Empathy is alignment in the intimate sense).” [My own translations]

I take these three comments about shock from Benjamin’s Arcades book. Like so many of Benjamin’s sentences and phrases, they carry a systematic hint, although the system into which they would fit was never constructed. To that extent, they also carry a certain glamour, the glamour of fragments that indicate some fuller but lost revelation. Like the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers, one wants to remove the eclipse, find the complete transcript, read the denser text out of which they were seemingly scooped. But in Benjamin’s case, the fragment reproves the desire that everything can be told, that there be some total confession that correlates to the total systems that were in play as he wrote, that the denser text is anything other than an excuse fit for conformists by which is lulled to sleep our sense of an ongoing emergency. As we know, one of those total systems drove him to suicide. Which is another way of eternalizing the fragment.

The Arcades work does not develop the notion of shock the way it develops other themes, such as fashion. Yet, in a sense, it was at the center of these themes, for at the center of the project was Baudelaire, who, Benjamin claimed, based his aesthetic practice on shock. Or based his modernity, his modernism, on shock, and in so doing incorporated it into the genetic structure of modernism. That, as we have pointed out, shock comes up in different disciplines, and constitutes an image in different ways in modernity was to an extent oddly neglected in the Arcades work, which otherwise has a very shrewd dialectical-materialist take on lighting, clothing, urban planning, etc., all passages to the burrow, or rather, passages that make up the burrow of the poetry. 

In as much as Benjamin’s view of shock encodes an inability to decide between mechanical movement and animal stimulus, it bears the impress of a certain pre-modern disposition. That is, it bears the element of the invasion of haptic space by the first mass medias. It reflects the Productivist regime of the first half of the 19th, when life crossed with electricity and the crowd was the physical infrastructure of industry and the revolution. But if we take our cue from Tarde, shock, in the second half of the nineteenth century, is a second degree phenomenon. The crowd becomes merely one extension of the larger public (it is remembered as a sort of phantom limb), and that public receives its shock through the ever more penetrating environment of the visual and press medias. Shock emerges from mechanical collision into the regime of stimulus, which is the way it forms the modern moment, or present.  Shock was not only a poetic tool, but a tabloid style. The speed graphic camera of the 1930s, the blinding flare of which became an icon for the sensational story, the shocking event, is an exteriorization of the kind of shock that joined together the animal crowd and the sensation ‘seeking’ public (which is actually sought out, rather than seeking – this is the trick of the media), haptic space and the wired in multitude:

 “The flash does far more than merely aid in exposing the negative. Intruding into the cover provided by night or darkness, its scorching light transforms both the space and figures trapped in its glare. Subject matter is vignetted and figures and ground are flattened and abstracted. While flashed compositions have the stark look of a woodcut, it is the faces of the photographer’s subjects that are most affected by the bulb’s blaze. With skin flashed to white as if powdered, mouths locked into grimaces and eyes both black as troughs and glinting like glass, subjects suffer a loss of humanity: faces freeze into crystal masks and individuals metamorphose into freakish ghouls.” [Hauptman, 1998]

Weegee’s flashbulb is the equivalent of the rapid sketching, or caricature, in which Baudelaire saw the lineaments of heroism in modern life. Speed frozen – such is the temporal coordinate towards which the simultaneity of life under capitalism directed itself.

a little manifesto, maestro, if you please

It is a bright day out. The remodeling of our apartment is almost finished - thank God! And as I gaze about, I am thinking: isn't it time I issue a manifesto?
A man must occasionally issue a manifesto. Johnny Cash said that.
Or at least he might have. But he was too cool to say it out loud.
So  here it is:

It is a sure bet that the last thing a socialist government will do, coming into power, is institute socialism.
In the neo-liberal era, we have gotten used to socialism meaning a conservative defense of the social welfare system as it was constructed in the heroic post-war era. Partly this is due to the historic experience of the vast failure of actually existing socialism, as it actually rotted, in the Eastern Block and in China. In the end, the only optimistic and efficient economic organization in the Soviet Union was the informal world of thieves, and they naturally took over the corpse once Yeltsin pulled the trigger and put the system out of its misery.

In 1980, when socialism was more of a real option in the world (in one year, Mitterand would be elected on the promise to break with the logic of capitalism), Iring Fetscher, a German political philosopher, wrote an assessment of socialism’s learning curve, The Changing Goals of Socialism in the Twentieth Century, for  Social Research. In it, he proposed seven errors into which socialism had fallen in said century: total state control of the economy, humanist universalism, uncritical egalitarianism, scientific technical progressism, dogmatism in the philosophy of history, the truncated view of man, and the industrial proletariat as the only agent of social transformation – a good deskpounding list. In fact, each of those errors was to be infinitely explored by socialism’s undertakers in the next thirty some years. And give or take a jot here and there, it is hard to disagree with Fetscher on this.

However, the time for self-cutting socialism may be drawing to a close. Here at least are two suggestions to make a better socialism.

The first one is obvious. The idea of a central bank, a government run bank for bankers, has run into the stunning problem we all know – when inequality is growing, it adds to inequality; when credit bubbles are blowing, it adds to credit bubbles; when the economy is depressed, it adds to the depression.

This is not to say that there is no good function for a central bank. It is to say that there should certainly be two state run banks: one for the banks, one for the people. The latter needs to be set up on the largest scale. It needs to allow people, the 99 percent, to create accounts that are not immediately skimmed and dummied in the financial markets – tax free accounts for retirement, healthcare,  and education. And it needs to lend money. It needs to lend money at a rate 3 to 4 points below the rate set by the banks. The money that the state just flooded the upper 1 percent with is, frankly, evil money. The money that a state bank could continually set in motion among the 99 percent would be good money. It would immediately lower the debt burden that now comes with the consumer lifestyle in a radical way. In other words, it would produce an enormous social good.

The second suggestion is less orthodox, but does set a reasonable goal. Capitalism as it is presently constituted is, largely, corporate capitalism. For all the talk of free markets and such, what we are really dealing with in the world are large organisations that have accrued incredible “private” power – the equivalent of an aristocratic class.

However, these large organisations (and the militarized state) have generated the kind of telecommunications and logistics system that render them technically obsolete. Socialists should push to make that obsolescence a social reality by pushing for laws limiting the scale and scope of any for-profit private organisation. Myself, I think the metric should be employees. And I think the largest allowable private for profit organisation should be of about a thousand employees.

A change in scale of that sort would immediately change the economic picture. For one thing, this explosion of private companies would finally bring to the fore a reality about the corporation world, which is that sectors are formed as much by collaboration as by competition. It would be impossible to produce output at all, given the small scale of the private organisations, unless they formed alliances. Your average factory, or service organisation, would become a myriad of small organisations. While the pay structure wouldn’t be equal, the inequalities in position and compensation that would emerge with these small organisations would bump into the limit on scale and be modified without any state interference in the matter. The death of the corporation would also lead to the death of the convergence of investment and  speculation, which is the way that the financial markets work at present.

Of course, it is easy to imagine abuses and problems with scaling down the agents in the economic mix while retaining the same system of circulation – the same process by which commodities metamorphose into money and then back into commodities. Socialism would not have overturned capitalism, in this view, but would have achieve certain long term socialist goals without moving towards a vast, dangerous state bureaucracy.

Which would be sweet. And that should be the socialist goal: a sweeter world.  


  

Singing the body electric

How does animal stimulus and mechanical motion hook up? The exploration of this question formed a good deal of the research program of nineteenth century psychology. The mediating element was electricity,  which operated as a discursive image more than as a physical object up until the neurological advances of the early twentieth century.

In a sense, what happened in the early Enlightenment was a kind of coincidence of programs in the sciences. As electricity and the physics of shock, or collision, became clearer, so, too, did at least one element in physiology: there were no animal spirits. The entire two thousand year old structure of humors and animal spirits collapsed in the 18^th century, a Götterdämmerung not unlike the end of paganism – or, perhaps, a codicil to the end of paganism. The wood and river spirits that were exorcised by Christianity were followed by the spirits of the liver, the heart, and the lungs exorcised by physiology. The interior forest was vacated. Now, these spirits had done the work of explaining feeling not only for the learned, but for the peasant and the townsman as well. The history of this moment is an oddly foreshortened thing. It isn’t only a minor episode in the history of physiology and psychology. It is a history in the emotional customs of the West. The twilight of the animal spirits created a hole in the way people described, or thought about, feeling.

That such holes can happen is a controversial topic in the anthropology of emotions. Robert Levy, who did his fieldwork in Tahiti, wrote a series of essays and a book about Tahitian emotional customs that introduced the idea of hypocognition: “I have suggested that some sets of feelings are relatively "hypercognized," controlled, so to speak, by discrimination, whereas others are "hypercognized" and controlled by cultural invisibility or at least by difficulty of access to communication.” This rather confusing use hypercognized to indicate two forms of control is clarified by calling the latter hypocognition – that is, a non-alignment between the discursive resources of a culture and the raw feeling that individuals in the culture encounter in their circumstances – encounter as reactions, so to speak, to stimulus. In the case of Tahitians, Levy, famously, thought that sadness was underconceptualized in the Tahitian schema of feelings. Sadness was rather taken as a marker of illness. Interestingly, that Tahitian conception is increasingly paralleled with the contemporary, post-Prozac idea, among Americans, that sadness is always a form of ‘depression’. The emergence of ‘depression’ as a widespread synonym for sadness in the American emotional vocabulary seems to indicate some deeper change in the emotional conceptual schema. And it is especially noteworthy for indicating the porousness between ‘educated’ or ‘scientific’ feeling terms and concepts and folk psychology.

Levy’s work is often taken up in the battle between those who maintain that emotions are universal and those who maintain that they are cultural. However, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that emotions are cultural – rather, it indicates that raw feelings are represented in the emotional customs of a culture in ways that differ among cultures, and that can also change within a culture. Its salience as to the feelings themselves derives from the notion that knowing a feeling is a crucial part of the experience of feeling. It is crucial to the person who ‘has’ the feeling, and it operates, as well, on the feeling,  in as much as it can change the laters relations to other feelings the person has, or the person’s longer term judgments about his or her life.

The importance of mediating images and theories of feeling within a society is, then, obvious. To understand how electricity was first discovered, and understood, in physiological and psychological terms, we have to understand the hypocognitive moment of the early modern era. To do that would require an enormous data set of all references, in whatever genre (from doctor’s report to trial transcript to poem to letter) in which feelings are referenced. And one would also expect to find the co-existence of different schemas of emotional sense-making –  humoral psychology did not collapse evenly and among all social levels, but was retained and used and comes up again and again in ordinary folk psychology and (increasingly) dissident, or alternative (or crackpot) medicine.

Surrounded as I am by the universal artificial paradise, the isle of Synthetica, with a lifestyle founded on zero and one, plug and play, voltage and plastic, I have to make a truly stoic effort to wipe away the impressions of my environment in order to reach back to the moment –the genealogical instance – in which shock, electricity and animal magnetism came into play in Europe and America – in which, for certain groups, these became concepts-in-practice. It is against this background that one can go forward and ask questions about shock.

I sing the body electric – but is this Franklin’s electricity, or Mesmer’s magnetic fluid, generated in the nerves? Has it come from the laboratory, the theater, or the old woman who runs a surreptitious business as the street’s healer, fortune teller and abortionist? 

the no alternative crowd: more ludicrous than ever!

There is something comic about a politican standing up before God and man and free will and mouthing the phrase “no alternative”. Except in the case of Moses and the ten commandments (and even then the first draft was broken on the way down from the peak of Mount Sinai), no politician in history has ever mouthed anything, ever represented anything, except an alternative. No politician has ever produced the inevitable.  And so it is with the wrecking crew of Austerians in Europe.

            The no alternative line goes back to the end of history line in the nineties. In those days, with the wall down (which made Iggy Pop want to sing Louie Louie), oil prices low,and shock therapy turning a totalitarian communist state into a funloving mafia state, specializing in exporting prostitutes and oil, neoliberalism was celebrating its springtime. Its pamphleteer and poet,  Tom Friedman, came up with one of an image struck out of the poetry of the business inspirational racket (which is the only poetry acceptable under neo-liberalism): the golden straightjacket. Friedman was quite enthused about the triumph of democracy everywhere, as long as democracy didn’t go overboard and put power in the hands of the people. To prevent this, God gave us central bankers and Milton Friedman. Neo-liberalism, back then, advertised itself as so realistic that we all had to eat it every day and every night and never ever dream we had a choice. It dreamed of a world in which there was infinitely increasing returns on investment (oh, what joy to live in the Information age!) and the business cycle was road kill.  But road kill reanimated and pissed all over the New Economy in 2001. Still, for six years the pretense held that a credit system that endebted a population that engrossed none of the increase in productivity that they actually created could replace what used to be called, quaintly, a “raise”. Until the house turned out to be bankrupt, and the elites had to scurry about in 2008-2010, doing what they do: using the power of the government to prop up the power of capital. Or, in populist terms, the state chose to simply give the upper .01 percent throughout the developed world hundreds of billions of dollars. They did not chose to give the 99 percent money – no, the 99 percent were assured that they were making distant money, since their pension funds and other investments (which represented a pathetic substitute for the retirement that social democracy used to hold out)  would eke their way across the bleak landscape, as long as we could foreclose on the losers, lower those labor costs even more, and hike up the price of social goods.

Somehow, though, the no alternative world is looking shabbier every day. We owe so much money! In fact, tons of fake money are owed all the way around. But in this time of little faith, people are beginning to ask who they owe  the money to, and why. That is, why did the elite which led us into the no alternative cul de sac make the choices it did; and why the choices, when they all went to shit, had no effect on… the elite.

So Europe is still being forced to obey the policies designed by the leaders of the Free Democrats, the tres minority rightwing party in Germany, and the editorialists and columnists in FAZ, Der Welt, Le Monde, the Financial Times, the Economist, the New York Times, etc.,worry that the people are not reading correctly the bills from good old Mr.Moneybags. Aren’t they supposed to tug their forelocks or something?

But as the Golden straightjacket turns leaden, maybe it is time for the elites to look at other periods when the classical liberals said there was no alternative. 1848. 1870.  1917.

There are alternatives. Not only that, there are alternatives to our elites, God bless em. A point that, I hope, doesn’t have to be  reinforced through the historically repetitive means of peppering their butts with buckshot. 

collision versus shock

The afterlife of Robert Whytt is a comparatively muted thing. In James Buchan’s recent history of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, for instance, he is mentioned only in passing as the Professor of the Theory of Physic at Edinburgh’s University. Whytt does figure in more  specialized histories – for instance, Kurt Danziger devotes quite a bit of space to him in an article on the “pre-history’ of the notion of stimulated motion in animals. This is because Whytt branched off from the physiology that was dominated by Descartes’ idea of dualism, without adhering to the 18^th century school of materialism. Danziger has corrected the notion, floated in the nineteenth century by T.H. Huxley, that the behavioralist school of psychology owes its rise to reducing Descartes two forms of behavior – one actuated by reason, the other by sheer mechanics – to the latter alone. Whytt, according to Danziger, did not want to make the rational soul responsible for what Descartes had called mechanical motions, but he did not want to return to Descartes’ simple dualism. Rather, Whytt wanted to carve out a third kind of thing – a living thing:

“The necessity which, for Whytt, governed the operation of the sentient principle, involved the preservation of the life and organic unity of the animal body. It was impossible to predict the effects of stimuli on organic response for mechanical, or for that matter, chemical considerations, becauseinterposed between the stimulus and the response was the sentient principle which ensured that the response was such as to preserve the integrity of the living system. The old dualism had recognized only two kinds of actions in the world: voluntary action, governed by reason, and physical action, governed by mechanism. Whytt now argued for the existence of a third kind, fundamentally distinct, type of actions represented by “motion from a stimulus”. To the rational and the mechanical determinants of action there was now added a third  set of determinants derived from the self-regulation of the living body.” (1983)

           

Philosophers, who are never happier than when working the aisles of the dictionary, may be tempted to call this vitalism. It is a large question in the philosophy of sciences whether, in fact, the third set of determinants in Whytt’s schema can be reduced to the second set. As well as whether the first set is not, really, an articulation of the third set.

            The problematic concerns me mainly because it gives us a sense of the confusions that will haunt the interpretation of “shock” as the three determinants lour in the background, sometimes merging, sometimes distinguished one from the other. Most commonly, collision and shock are often taken to refer exactly to the same thing, even as, in the entangled tale of shock, the total discourse in which the later category plays its role makes it impossible to identify shock and collision strictly. Shock as a thing felt, a human thing, operates as a category that traverses sociology, aesthetics and psychology, and is implicated in the two great psychological schools of the twentieth century – psychoanalysis and behavioralism. Both schools, of course, have lost their sway as psychology was annexed by the pharmaceutical companies, but both beat, still, within not only the folk psychology they so permeated, but also within a psychological literature that refuses to die, finding its place in pockets in academy, or outside the great neo-liberal sphere.

           

   

on the election of Hollande, 1

Nietzsche took a satiric pleasure in quoting one of the Church fathers, Tertullian, whose idea of the cosmos built by the God of Love included box seats in heaven for the saints to look down and savor the screams and tortures of the damned in hell. However, Tertullian had a point: as he might well have replied to Nietzsche, who can resist so holy a temptation?

The pale inheritors of the cosmos planned for love are surely the socialists. As a sometimes member of the flock of the left, I, like Tertullian, take delight in the screams of the vanquished when I can. Those screams have shifted venues from the abode of eternal darkness to the comments columns under news stories and opinion pieces. You can tell a pleasure that is corrupted by temptation from one that isn’t by the fact that the former is never pure: yes, you go to hear the screams of the vanquished partisans of the right, and before you know it you are getting angry, scandalized, and not at all in the mood of savoring a triumph . Because just as the damned are still damned, the rightwinger is still a rightwinger in defeat. I know this, but such is the folly of fallen human nature that I still went, this morning, to the comments section under the Guardians comment piece – What do you Think of the French Election?

At the moment, the abiding Rightwing yelp seems to be that socialism is for cretins. Real men know that reality is about realism, and realism is about European populations realizing they can’t borrow any more. They owe so much! So the only thing to do is to retire later in life, for less of a pension, while working for less. And of course giving up healthcare and education, or paying immensely more for it.

This is a curious kind of realism. It is a sort of gluesniffing realism. It consists of thinking that the height of unrealism is paying a factory worker more than 10 euros per hour, or paying a hedgefund manager less than a thousand euros per hour. It is the realism of fools – to parody a famous phrase.

Realism begins by looking at what is real in the world and asking how it got there and how it can continue. When one looks at a shadow financial system that has accumulated a nominal 400 trillion dollars in derivatives and options, one sees an affair that can’t continue. When one looks at an investing class that was literally flooded with money by world governments for two years, through loans that were pure gifts as well as pure gifts (worldwide, the amount is well over 16 trillion dollars), you see a structure that was righted at great cost, to benefit the few – which also can’t continue. And when you see a wealth hierarchy in which those who contribute, socially, little (upper management) in response to those who contribute, socially, nothing (investors), engross almost all, while those who contribute nearly all (workers) are rudely asked to live much worse lives – because they ‘owe’ the people the state broke its back bailing out – you are looking at one of those power machines that are doomed by a very simple reality that keeps emerging again and again in the last two hundred years. It is this: a majority can only be lead to denude itself of its stuff, its privileges, its rights, when it is tricked into thinking that some enemy lies in wait, victory over which requires that sacrifice.

Otherwise, to pluck the 99 percent, you need a con, you need the old three card monte.  That was the trick of the neo-liberal order – substitute expanded credit limits for expanded pay packages, and plug the assets of the wage class into investment modalities, thus weakening their sense of self interest. It was a good trick, but it has turned rotten.

The realism of the right at the moment is the old boy’s club realism. The natives may be restless, but give em a good drubbing and they will calm down. It wouldn’t be realistic to predict the date of the end of the old boy’s club. But it would be less realistic still to predict that it won’t end, sooner or later.