On the hedgehog

In a famous essay, the Fox and the Hedgehog, Isaiah Berlin creates a taxonomy of thinkers based on a line from Archilochus:  ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The thinkers who know one thing are, in Berlin’s view, systematic thinkers. All thought tends to the center, among them, the one big thing that explains the world. The Foxes are anti-systematic. They are essayists, explorers of the intersections of thought and experience, from the scope of which they take it no principle can absorb experience without something stubborn and unabsorbed remaining from that experience – what Thomas Nagel calls the quality of “what it is to be like”…

Now evidently, Berlin is using the hedgehog image as a way into talking about the mindset of certain writers, and in particular, of Tolstoy. Tolstoy has to an extreme degree the fox’s virtue, which is to understand the difference made by experience, by what it is to be like – and he has to an extreme degree the hedgehog’s vice, which is a thirst for the god’s eye view that will not rest until everything has been settled according to some central principle.

However, what gets a little lost here is why Archilochus chose the hedgehog, of all creatures, to represent the systematic viewpoint – if Berlin’s interpretation is right.

There is, perhaps, another way of looking at the hedgehog’s emblematic meaning. In Schlegel’s Fragments – which is, among other thing, a defense of the Fragment as a genre of philosophical knowledge -  the hedgehog, Igel in German, reappears – perhaps in some reference to Archilochus’s line:

“A fragment must be like a tiny artwork, wholly sundered from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a hedgehog.”

What Schlegel’s image proposes is not that the one great thing the hedgehog knows absorbs the world – rather, it separates a tiny, particular experience from the world and completes it. The paradoxical stress, here, is between the fragment and perfect or complete closure [in sich selbst vollendet sein]. While Berlin’s does not begin his essay by asking about what it is, in the hedgehog, that leads to the “one big thing’ he knows, Schlegel – whether consciously referencing Archilochus or not – returns to the ethological, or  perhaps I should say ethnological, base of the comparison. [After I wrote this,  I discovered that Anthony Grafton had been here before me – noticing this echo, too, in an essay on fragments in the classical tradition]

Stephen Gould, writing about Archilochus’s image, quotes Erasmus’s latin translation, which preserved the image in the humanist curicculum:  multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. Gould also, rightly, goes to Pliny for some sense of what the hedgehog meant to the ancients. However, Pliny deserves to be quoted at length, for it is in Pliny that we get a sense of the hedgehog figuring in a certain kind of game or work – that of hunting. This aspect is neglected in Gould’s essay.

“When they perceive one hunting of them, they draw their mouths & feet close togither, with all their belly part, where the skin hath a thin down: & no pricks at all to do harme, and so roll themselves as round as a foot-ball, that neither dog nor man can come by any thing but their sharpe-pointed prickles. So soon as they see themselves past all hope to escape, they let their water go and pisse upon themselves. Now this urine of theirs hath a poisonous qualitie to rot their skin and prickles, for which they know well enough that they be chased and taken. And therefore it is a secret and a special pollicie, not to hunt them before they have let their urine go; and then their skin is verie good, for which chiefly they are hunted: otherwise it is naught ever after and so rotten, that it will not hang togither, but fall in peeces: all the pricks shed off, as being putrified, yea although they should escape away from the dogs and live still: and this is the cause that they never bepisse and drench themselves with this pestilent excrement, but in extremitie and utter despaire: for they cannot abide themselves their own urine, of so venimous a qualitie it is, and so hurtfull to their owne bodie; and doe what they can to spare themselves, attending the utmost time of extremitie, insomuch as they are ready to be taken before they do it.”

This habit of the hedgehog – or at least this trait attributed to the hedgehog – puts us closer to the particular knowledge possessed by the hedgehog, in Archilochus’s verse. It is knowledge in a field – the field of hunting – and the hedgehog, far from being the systematic master, is the victim, the object of the chase.  The domain of hunting seems to be behind the fables that Archilochus uses as his references – fables now obscure to us, although we still know the stock of them labeled with the name of their supposed author, Aesop.

One of the reasons Berlin poses the question of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and how seriously we are to take it is that he is concerned, as one of the premier Cold War intellectuals, with Marx’s philosophy of history. What he wants to know is whether it is possible to get the hedgehog’s view of history outside of the reification of history – that is, outside of an explanation of causes (attributed to “history’’) that is merely an affirmation of effects. The nineteenth century in which he places Tolstoy was hypnotized by the verb, ‘determine’. That x ‘determines’ y seemed to say something more profound about y’s connection to x than to say x causes y. Determine – in German, Bestimmung – announces a power relationship that quickly slides into myth – the myth of the relation between creator, who shapes, and the creature, who lives within the creator’s lines, the creator’s survey plat.

“History alone – the sum of empirically discoverable data – held the key to the mystery of why

what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century.What is to be done? How should one live? Why are we here?What must we be and do? The study of historical connections and the demand for empirical answers to these proklyatye voprosy1 became fused into one in Tolstoy’s mind, as his early diaries and letters show very vividly.”

Berlin is moving his pieces forward in the essay in broad, easy gestures, which has the advantage of making his essay accessible and interesting, and the disadvantage that comes from refusing to nitpick: that is, gliding over certain philosophically important issues. In particular, the junction of empirical and positivist does a lot of work for Berlin in the essay, even as one has to question its self-evidence. Positivism was not simply about the empirical – it was about progress. It was about a pattern in history that is above the empirical, the scatter of facts. Similarly,  the romantic protest against  the great anti-metaphysical writers of the eighteenth century was not, as Berlin actually knew, simply a rejection of science. Schlegel was not rejecting science so much as questioning its universal application – the fragment, in Schlegel’s view, presents a sort of monadic block to the statistical method of science. It doesn’t transcend the empirical – far from it. It dwells in the empirical, it weighs down experience with all its force, it presents its ‘bristles’ to the world like a hedgehog. And it does so in the consciousness that it is being hunted. For science, here, is no neutral social mechanism – it is used with definite aims.

One of those aims, as Berlin sees, is to prop up egotism. Tolstoy is a great deflator of egotism, and in this is the heir of the moralistes – of, especially, Pascal. But Pascal does retain the ego, the hateable “I” – and Tolstoy has his doubts. Perhaps in fact egotism precedes the ego: we have a theory of the I that precedes the I. Schlegel’s fragment and Tolstoy’s rage against the illusions on which are propped further illusions – egotism propping the ego – keep company with each other, in as much as the fragment is about its opposite – a perfect self-enclosure, a perfect completion – and the critique of egotism is about the nourishment of this thing that does not exist, the ego. And yet, and yet … something, something is stuffed into that great dark bag that is Ivan Ivanovich’s last terrifying experience on earth…

Not so happy fourth thoughts. But shoot your firecrackers, you guys and gals!

Fourth of July thoughts

Truly, this is shaping up to be one of the most depressing presidential elections since Harding vs. Cox. I thought the 00s were the worst decade I'd ever seen, but this one is already a complete washout and it isn't four years old. We have a drone em candidate, Obama, and the spend more on the military and cut taxes on the rich candidate, Romney. And we will once more have the insane conversation about 'executive' abilities. If such things really do exist, then we can all save much money by computerizing them, firing en masse the parasitic cadre of CEOs, and putting in their place expert programs. To tell the truth, I think this would work - most CEO 'magic' happens only when the market is rising, and some corporation ekes out a bit more on that rise, usually compensated for when the market is falling and the extra risk taken by the corp bites em in the ass and they lead in the loss column. CEOs have as much to do with job creation as the gargoyles on cathedrals have to do with holding the cathedrals up. It is to laugh...

Bains was a creature of de-regulation, a symptom of speculative rot - no worse than the Carlyle group, perhaps. A good candidate with a populist, anti-corporate program would attack Romney with promises of a real program to curb speculative power. Even some one hundred year suggestions from T. Roosevelt could start us off: a postal bank, capitalized by the Fed, which would operate for households and small businesses the same way the Fed operates for giant casino banks; a complete revamping of laws on incorporation, making it the case that any interstate corporation would have to register with the Commerce department and obey federal law, rather than spreading the law of inshore offshore states (like Delaware) like the measles through the land; a complete revamping of our military 'committments'; a strong state presence in developing new power sources; progressive taxation, starting not by taxing the 99 percent more, but - amazingly - by taxing them much less, and the rich much more; a complete revamping of the guild system in health care, shifting much of the work monopolized by doctors, expensively, to medical tech who could do the work much more cheaply; a new auction system for IP, ending the abuse of the notion of "fair profit", which has become untenable monopoly. If the Bain ads actually generalized to a discussion of the kinds of investment vehicles that the big money was allowed to invest in - the pension and mutual funds, etc. - that would at least be useful. Because the wisest course in reversing the entrenchment of wall street wealth over the rest of us is to dry up the source of that wealth, the huge capital flows that are allowed to land anywhere. We would find a pension fund that bet all its money on roulette tables in Vegas shocking, but we allow such money to get involved in CDO swaps and the most arcane derivative instruments, which is the same thing, except with larger downsides.
I expect to see nothing like this. Rather, the Bains ads will be personal. The thing is, the Bains rot is systemic. And Obama, who has spent his time in office trying to return us to 2006, is as committed to that rot as any bobo. So once again, we will have the equivalent of miserable weather, a presidential election which involves one politician or another peeing down our necks, while the organized media boobs cheer one or another of them on, said boobs being comfortable 1 percenters, every one. I don't expect that Romney would be that much worse than Obama, but still, he would be worse. On the other hand, maybe the system, sloping downhill, needs just the kind of kick that a person rotten enough to devise the Bains strategy would provide.

paper dualism

“It is more difficult to understand how they can write proper names, especially foreign ones, for these are things that they have never seen, nor could they have invented a picture for them. I tried to examine this when I was in Mexico with some Chinese, and I asked them to write this sentence, or something resembling it, in their language: “Jose de Acosta has come from Peru.” The Chinese gentleman thought about it for a long time and at last wrote, and then the others read what sas indeed the same sentence, athought there was some variation in the proper name; for they use the device of taking the proper name and finding something in their language that resembles that thing, and then they write down the picture of it.” – Natural and  Moral History of the Indies, Jose de Acosta (1590)

There was always something philosophically magic about the relationship between the figure and the thing inscribed. There was something entangled about the figure and the thing that held it, for how could the sign or picture exist without the surface upon which it fell? There was something non-entangled about the figure and the thing that held it, for how could one transpose the same figure – or a token of the same figure – onto another holder, another tablet, another scroll, another piece of paper, unless the characters could fly away? They could fly away by being read outloud, true – and here sound became the carrier of sense, and flocks of sounds would carry flocks of sense – but they could also fly away by being copied. So there was always the object written upon and the object of writing, and they were separate things, except the type of the one always came with the type of the other, and this type of thing was perplexing in the life of a person and it was perplexing when one tried to think about it seriously, as a sage.  
At the same time writing systems were ‘invented’ in Mesopotamia, seals and stamps were also being invented. But it took a long time for the technology of the stamp to be transposed to the technology of the writing system in the West – that is, it took a long time to invent the printing press. This puzzles historians of technology. When you have the technology to stamp coins, you have the basis for stamping manuscripts – for printing. Yet the leap was not made by the Greeks. In China, on the other hand, the technology of the stamp was already being transposed to the character in 200 B.C., and woodblocks were used on paper in 800 A.D. It was Pi Sheng, an “unlearned man of the people”, [Otto Fuhrman] who invented a moveable type made of earthware in 1045.
In the always wounded dualism of the scribal cultures,  the design, the character, the figure, the word, the discourse, and even the thought gets divided from the matter, the clay, the stamp, the dead letter, the clay tablet, the screen. The narrative of thought is of bound majesty – the prince among slaves, the spirit fallen into the machine. The nobility of the idea is that it really exists in the world of flight, the world of forms, and the ignobility of matter is proven by the fact that it sticks to the idea, the thought, the word, the symbol. Though it be as light as a leaf of paper, still it is of the world of heaviness and labor, this substratum. 

metaphysics of paper 2

...The heavy mouth, the portable clay – it is here that I want to plant land, survey, plant some stakes.
...
The first stake has to do with the various motions that are in play in inscribing the tablet. The first motion is that of the sign itself, which is entirely the act of a gesture. Of course, the very fact that the gesture is immobilized in the sign signals the potential divide between the sign and the gesture – once the trace is standardized, the gesture recedes before the tool itself: the printing press is prefigured in Enmerkar’s act. Perhaps it is a mark of that mechanical future that Enmerkar does not consult the gods before creating his magic object, if we think of the gods in opposition to tools. There are mythical hints of this in the Eastern Mediterranean myths concerning the human rebellions against the gods. Still, Enmerkar does not act in conscious rebellion against the goddess Inanna, his protector: he simply responds to a particular human incapacity, a heavy jaw.
That first motion is echoed in the second motion, which is the material in which the figure is written. The text is always inscribed on something – some substratum, some hyperkeimenon. This is the orginal sublimated object – it gives itself to its own substitution by existing, on that day, in the moment of inscription, as the inscribed thing. And its movement is subordinate to the figures that are inscribed upon it – they exist above it, so to speak. They fly, like cherubim and seraphim, like bugs and Gods, and land. The substratum travels, too, but dumbly, materially – its flight is to the flight of the figures as the flight  of a thrown pebble is to the flight of a bird. However, the doubleness of its mobility is essentially like that of the figures. As a standardized object, it is immobile enough to bear the inscription. But as a limited object in space,  it also can be sent. And it is here that it intervenes in the social logic of writing – it is here that its sublimation is, and always will be, imperfect. For if the written couldn’t be sent, then the object itself would have a heavy mouth. In limit cases – of heavy blocks – writing and the object slow down. In the imagination, this slowing down has to do with a superhuman memory, or a monument. The block, the marble or granite of the monument bears the fall of the figure into the imperial realm of “eternity”, outlasting the human generations just as the tablet can circulate outside of the community. The flight of the day is frozen into the date of the monument. 
The second stake is in the trick, or trope, the turn, the trope, the magical transformation of object to beast, sound to sense, mark to meaning. Why is this a trick or a trap, however? It will take civilizations of nostalgia to answer that question, but the question seems to be posed, or coiled at least, in the story. The transformation of sound – which can cause a mouth to get heavy – into sense is paralleled by the transformation of the mark into meaning, but going in this direction, we leave behind the hyperkeimenon, we forget it. In the story, the Lord of Aratta is tricked into surrendering by taking the tablet in his hand – it is the tablet itself that has the magical meaning. This trick  is reversed in a more common fairy tale, that of the fatal sealed letter. A prince or troublemaker is given a sealed message to carry to a king. The message states that the king should murder the messanger. Here, the trick is the script, and the matter it must be written on is the veil. Matter eclipses itself – one of its tricks.

metaphysics of paper 1

Every kind of paper is purchased by the "waste-men." One of these dealers said to me: "I've often in my time 'cleared out' a lawyer's office. I've bought old briefs, and other law papers, and 'forms' that weren't the regular forms then, and any d——d thing they had in my line. You'll excuse me, sir, but I couldn't help thinking what a lot of misery was caused, perhaps, by the cwts. of waste I've bought at such places. If my father hadn't got mixed up with law he wouldn't have been ruined, and his children wouldn't have had such a hard fight of it; so I hate law. All that happened when I was a child, and I never understood the rights or the wrongs of it, and don't like to think of people that's so foolish. I gave 1 1/2 d. a pound for all I bought at the lawyers, and done pretty well with it, but very likely that's the only good turn such paper ever did any one—unless it were the lawyers themselves." –Henry Mayhew, Of the street buyers of waste (paper), London Labour
Men no sooner discovered the discovered the admirable art of communicating their ideas by way of figures than it was necessary to chose the material for defining those characters. – Encyclopedie, entry under Papeterie
From the grammatological point of view, few sentences could sum up the logocentric ideology better than this one from Diderot’s  Encyclopedie. It is a history in two steps:  in one of which the “figures” are discovered, and in the other of which they find a substrate, a material upon which they could assume their secondary, visible existence. In this story, the material is already substituted –its existence is laid out under the sign of substitution - or of supplementation, or of sublimation. The true mark, the idea, exists before its fall into the world of paper – or papyrus, or clay tables, or vellum. 
In a Sumerian story, the invention of writing and the material for defining the characters are put in a closer narrative proximity – one in which that matter exists in a series of symbolically important materials that form the basis of what Jean Jacques Glassner calls a “duel”. The ur-form of the story is a competition between two magicians, one of whom transforms common objects into living beings, the other one of whom transforms common objects into superior living beings that eat the first magicians tricks – a stone becomes a snake, for instance, while the leaf of a tree becomes an eagle that eats the snake. A similar story of the duel of matter is told of Enmerkar, the ruler of a powerful state, and the Lord of Aratta, a distant state that Enmerkar wishes to gain tribute. Enmerkar sends messangers threatening Arrata. The first messenger threatens to have the goddess Inanna drown the city. The Lord of Aratta sent back a refusal, and a challenge: could Enmerkar send grain to the city in nets rather than sacks? Enmerkar does so, sending grains that sprout and provide a layer over the holes in the nets. The second time, Enmerkar sends his scepter, and the third time a garment. The forth time Enmerkar does something completely new, and without consulting the gods: he takes a lump of clay and he wrote upon it. The duel, here, comes to an end with the Lord of Aratta having to take hold of the clay tablet in order to read it. As in a children’s game, by touching the object, the Lord of Aratta signals his submission.

But this moment is less the conclusion of a magical  duel than the first unintended result of the letter – for Enmerkar was not originally intending to send a letter. Here’s how the passage is translated by Fabienne Huber Vulliet:
“His speech was substantial,and its contents extensive. The messenger, whose mouth was heavy, was not able to repeat it. Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired,was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under the sun and on that day, it was indeed so. The lord of Kulaba inscribed the massage like a tablet. It was just like that.”
The message and the clay, here, come together in a narrative about tricky objects – about metamorphosis – that is enfolded in another narrative about imperial power. From the point of view of the author of the lord of Kulaba, the signs and the tablet are two sides of one dated event (Now, under the sun and on that day…). There is a triangle here between the figures, the tablet, and the time – for that day is, in a sense, signed and becomes that day, the object of an act of deixis.

Disaster in the zona: hard times a-comin'

How dumb are the economic policies our master’s have loaded on our back? This dumb:

“…the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has downwardly revised potential economic output for 2017 by 6.6 percent since the start of the recession. This may seem trivial, but for a $15 trillion economy, this dip reflects roughly $1.3 trillion in lost future income in a single year, on top of years of cumulative forgone income (already at roughly $3 trillion and counting). The level of potential output projected for 2017 before the recession is now expected to be reached between 2019 and 2020—representing roughly two-and-a-half years of forgone potential income.” – Andrew Fieldhouse

That forgone potential income will not be coming out of the pockets of the plutocrats. If  in the next four years we face another slump, the only group that will get bailed out will be the fat cats, just as the only group bailed out in 2008-2009 were the bankers, boiler room conmen, hedgefunders and offshore men who got the Fed’s Instaloan cure. So we have a rough estimate, at least, of the next step down by the American middle class. They can stare at it, or they can stare at the glassy screen of their tv and pretend that the instruments haven’t flashed the disaster sign.  I think of this as sort of the Dixiefication of the U.S. – every space will eventually look like S.C., with the rich in the stratosphere and the rest happy to get catfish.

The corner stone of the wealth of nations

Marx congratulated Malthus (whose work he otherwise disparaged) for understanding that Smith’s more sophisticated division between productive and unproductive labour was the foundation stone of The Wealth of Nations. The metaphor of the foundation stone is important, here – Say, as Marx knew, had claimed that it was the stone that the builders could reject – although Say did not frame it in that biblical way. Marx, who had a great pool of references whirling in his unconscious, probably fixed on this – he did like troping the biblical Zitat.

But why was it so essential, in Marx’s view? I think it is because the distinction allows one to see that capitalism generates, internally, a socially defined class structure that cannot be separated from its economically defined activity. It is a class structure that is different in kind from the status structures before it, even as the forms of distinction characterizing those status structures heralded the new system, one where the great binary, the spheres of production and circulation, allowed something that seemed impossible in the Malthusian world: untrammeled growth. And thus the great wheel of fortune would be broken. Like Prospero’s gear:

I'le breake my staffe,
Bury it certaine fadomes in the earth,
And deeper then did euer Plummet sound
Ile drowne my booke –

So too would the ancien regime bury itself.

But if the class system of capitalism has done with the former unproductive class, the aristocracy, and industrializes agriculture, thus chasing away the peasant and his moeurs, the dualism of class does not necessarily seem like a dualism. This is largely due to the fact that the sphere of circulation in which the circulation worker moves does not form a homogeneous opposition to production: the workers within it are not capitalists per se. 

In fact, the capitalist remove from nature and from production is accomplished under the cover of the circulation worker, who becomes, increasingly, the ideal character type of modernity.