Romney and Locke

Romney’s video – which is now as famous as Paris Hilton’s sex video, and like P.H.’s, shows what the rich do when they are naked – actually plays on the strings of national memory, going all the way back to our beloved John Locke. Locke, as we all know, was very important to the founders. In his own life, actually, he was very concerned with America, for he was, as Robin Blackburn points out in his history of New World slavery, a member of the Board of Trade, which dealt with matters from the colony. Incidentally, one of those matters was  slave conspiracy. Locke had an excellent opportunity, whilst attending such meetings, to put into policy terms his notion that slavery was a natural consequence of the state of war between “a lawful Conquerer and a Captive.” As Blackburn notes, during Locke’s time on the Board, it vetted many documents coming from the colonies, including the Act for Suppressing of Outlying Slaves, in which we read this:

“WHEREAS many times negroes, mulattoes, and other slaves unlawfully absent themselves from their masters and mistresses service, and lie hid and lurk in obscure places killing hoggs and committing other injuries to the inhabitants of this dominion, for remedy whereof for the future, Be it enacted by their majesties lieutenant governour, councell and burgesses of this present general assembly, and the authoritie thereof, and it is hereby enacted, that in all such cases upon intelligence of any such negroes, mulattoes, or other slaves lying out, two of their majesties justices of the peace of that county, whereof one to be of the quorum, where such negroes, mulattoes or other slave shall be, shall be impowered and commanded, and are hereby impowered and commanded to issue out their warrants directed to the sherrife of the same county to apprehend such negroes, mulattoes, and other slaves, which said sherriffe is hereby likewise required upon all such occasions to raise such and soe many forces from time to time as he shall think convenient and necessary for the effectual apprehending such negroes, mulattoes and other slaves, and in case any negroes, mulattoes or other slaves or slaves lying out as aforesaid shall resist, runaway, or refuse to deliver and surrender him or themselves to any person or persons that shall be by lawfull authority employed to apprehend and take such negroes, mulattoes or other slaves that in such cases it shall and may be lawfull for such person and persons to kill and distroy such negroes, mulattoes, and other slave or slaves by gunn or any otherwaise whatsoever.”
Or as us Continental Philosophe types say: Martin Heidegger, eat your heart out.
But besides countenancing genocide, Locke was also on the cutting edge of freedom. Freedom, in the Anglosphere tradition, takes a rather bizarre turn from its old theological and philosophical uses. It becomes attached more and more to property. The freedom to own becomes, in this tradition, the very soul of freedom, its breath, its majesty. Tacitly, the more you own, the free-er you are – which is of course reflected in a legal system tilted massively against the poor and towards the wealthy, which we keep like a beloved pet barracuda to this very day in our mock democracies.
Still, if property is the root of freedom, those who have no property are an embarrassment in a free state. They represent, well, non-freedom. Naturally, their superpowers of non-freedomness involve them in sucking the property from those who have them – or, in other words, quantitatively lessening their freedom. The image of the poor as parasites was not an invention of Locke’s – it was certainly part of a larger fear of the masses that one finds in all over Europe at the time –but what was different was attaching this fear of the poor to the idea that they were, in a sense, the antithesis of freedom. Thus, by a rather bizarre alchemy, those people who benefited least from the system, who, by any practical view of the system, had the least power, posed the gravest threat. This inversion of social reality has had a long and glorious career in the Anglosphere: most recently, the right has been drooling over its theory that the financial crisis arose cause black and Hispanic poor people, prodded by the government, tricked poor honest bankers  into subprime loans and couldn’t pay them, thus causing the downfall of the true and onlie system of Operation Freedom, under our beloved Bush.
Locke would have recognized the truth in this story. Locke, in his pamphlet to the Board of Trade on the Poor Laws, which responds to the appalling rise in the charge for keeping the poor (a diminishment of freedom if there ever was one), cast about for ways to repair the situation. He came up with solutions that Romney himself might consider. There were the working schools, where poor children from three (when idleness starts cropping out like a disease) to fourteen could be maintained in blessed industry; then there is the revival of Elizabethan laws against beggars, where Locke proposes seizing them and taking no shit from them, but hustling them off to seaports, finding places for them on ships, and treating them like galley slaves for three years time – which should be sufficient to do them in; and the maimed, of course – who have an excuse for begging – should be stuffed into a house of correction.

If I were Romney, I’d be reading my Locke. He’s your man for regaining the Freedoms We Have Lost to the rascally 47 percent.  

hide and seek from a metaphysical point of view

The essence of childhood is playing. For me, the essence of that essence was not War, not Red Rover Red Rover, not baseball, kickball, badmitten, solitaire, smear the queer, acorn fight, not Battleship, Monopoly, Chinese Checkers, Life, Operation, not dress-up, swinging on the door, birds, spying – no, the sum and mirror of childhood and, I think now, life was hide and seek. I look back over the vast and forbidding snowfall of years, I look back over the forbidding terrain of physical growth, short term memory loss, and the painful and constant realization of the drain of a million trivialities that has utterly wasted 99 percent of my spiritual energy, I look back  on myself pintsized (a vision that substitutes a photo of myself for a tactile and living image – I cannot imagine being three feet high, it is beyond the limits of my imagination), and hide and seek looms up  as the emblem of the labyrinth into which I had fallen from another labyrinth, that which extends on the negative  side of the zero hour of birth and touches nothingness – labyrinth to labyrinth. Hide and seek involved the elemental spirits: an It, a countdown, hiding places, a base, and tagging. I still remember certain successful hiding places: the clothes hamper in the Colonial, a large cardboard box – a mover’s box in which to hang clothes – in Dad’s part workshop, the prickly vacancy between the pittus porum and the house on Nielsen Court, the upper branches of a pine tree in the bit of woods three blocks away, bellydown among the dust under a bed somewhere… Of course, finding a hiding place was only the first order of business, since the point was to creep out of it at the right moment and make a dash for the base without being tagged by It. The game involved an uneasy détente between the senses – the visible (hidden/not hidden) and the tactile (tagged/not tagged). We could easily come up with the semiotic wiring of the game through the putting into play of such oppositions.

We could do that. But I want to think about It. In a way, It was the most interesting figure in the whole drama. That It was called It may still be the most tremendously poetic event of my life; it is an unending source of wonder. I have read philosophers speak of the beginning of their vocation as a wonder about how things were made – how, to be more general, there was something instead of nothing – but my vocation started with the wonder of It. It seemed distilled from the adult metaphysics that papered over all the mysteries with farreaching linguistic assumptions. It rains, it happens, it is what it is, how is it out there, how is it going – that it is the old mole for true. It, in other words, is a premonition in ordinary life of what Nietzsche called the Ubermensch, and I’d really like to know if the young Fritz played hide and seek, and if the German version of the game calls the counter It.

However, It is not just about the more-than-human. It is about the transmission of negative power. It is about being the King of the Golden Bough. With one touch, an It conveys its succession. This is the origin of politics,

I think – politics begins and ends in hide and seek. 

And it also speaks to touch, that especially uncanny sense, which we have a tendency to make the hands responsible for, although of course our feet touch, our sphincter touches,  our lips touch, our noses touch, and we touch where we have the skin for it. We touch things outside of us. Living in this interface is no joke, and  confusing enough that we need, quickly, to sublimate some touches and highlight  others and come up with rules.

From these rules, the flowers of anxiety spring.

One of the great things about hide and seek is it casts that anxiety into the 

form of art. This is something we can do. The music of hide and seek pitches 

numbers (in the form of a countdown) against giggles. Giggling was always part 

of the rivalry between the hiders and It. Hiders sometimes were discovered 

because they giggled – but on the other hand, giggles tease the hunting It. 

“Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer.” The It, like Mallarme’s faun, both

loves and regrets the tipping point moment when the nymphs recede – 

when the hiders reveal themselves – not only because the It can then 

transmit Itness to some lagging hider, but also because, opening his 

eyes at the end of the countdown, he has in a sense reversed the world. 

That is the point of counting backwards – backwards is the witchy direction, 

the anti-dialectical motion, it is the motion of the Sabbat, reflected in 

saying the lord’s prayer backwards, or in general in all backwards rituals

 – and thus the world in which the It’s eyes are opened is not the world 

of waking, but the world backwards, the world entered by a back door 

(Kleist, in On the Marionnette theater, has his dramaturge speak of our loss 

of Paradise in this way - "But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim

stands behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to

see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back." This is a precise description

 of hide and seek). That is of course the world of dream, which in so far as 

it is identical with itself, is simply the world.  At the same time, it isn’t,

 that is the dream world is a play world, since the dream is solitary, and 

It –whose solitude is so extreme that it is an It – is about to cast off his

solitude and his It-ness in an act of contact. He couldn’t do so if the very

ground of the possibility to do so wasn’t encoded in hide and seek. Hence, 

the giggles, which are – as any Kantian could see – transcendental. And this

is the proper way to take transcendental moments – they are funny.

It is the funniest thing in the world, being It, being a hider, playing hide

 and seek. My intellectual development is arrested, or just arrested enough, 

to see the glimmer of the messages here – but I have spent my whole life 

trying to decode them.  

 

the myth of the modern reader

This happens.

I decide that I need to understand Heraclitus’ famous fragment, ethos anthropos daimon. It is on my to do list. So I go to some journal articles. I look up Bruno Snell. I look up some books. I am trying to get a handle on daimon. I look up T.M. Robertson’s translation and explanation that daimon can me fate and can mean divinity. I look up Richard Geldard’s book on Heraclitus. And it is in Geldard’s book that I come across one of those assumptions that litter academic books – an assumption about how “we moderns” view things – that makes me doubt the sociological bones of Geldard:

“The problem with “Character is fate as the translation is that in both denotation and connotation no sense of the word daimon as spirit orsome power either within or without is even implied, unless one wishes to burden the word “fate” with excessive determinism. Moern readers, however, feeling free of ruling ruling forces (except the power of DNA, perhaps) understand such translation to say that as human beings we hold our destiny in our hands soley by virtue of our character.”

Modern readers? I have no idea what modernity Geldard lives in. The country he is writing in, the United States, contains, for the most part, readers who consistently affirm that they believe man was created by God. Another lively section of the modern readers cohort affirms a hodgepodge of new age beliefs, which seem to center around various ideas about reincarnation and past life experiences. Geldard has obviously never visited the “philosophy” section of a mall book store (if there are any left), where the shelves are crammed with “metaphysical” books in which self-help and a certain cosmology are nicely blended – for modern readers.

I am not blaming Geldard alone – phrases like this drip casually from many an academic pen. Having swallowed some notion of “modern” which comes entirely from a small part of their own lives, that passed in a classroom, they casually set forth this heuristic fiction as sociological fact.

I was raised in fairly modern circs. Air conditioning, vaccines, cars, computers, jets. All the accoutrements. And I have rarely met anyone who did not feel that outside forces were operating in their lives. One of the phrases one hears regularly, when one listens to people’s life stories, is that there was a “reason” for things. The reason one, for instance, had bad relationships x, y, and z, is so one could have good relationship “a”.  The reason Smith had a car accident is so Smith could learn to be kinder to his children. The reason Jones had to go through bankruptcy is so Jones could learn the true value of worldly goods. These heuristics proliferate not under the surface, but on it. Go to a crowded restaurant at noon and listen to what the people at the other tables are talking about, and you will likely hear a “reason” story, or a variant.  This notion of a reason operating in one’s life is as widespread in the United States as the idea of a daimon, or of a fate, in Greece, as far as I can tell.

My irritation with Geldard has to do with my encountering, all too often, casual remarks about “moderns” which seem to have no footing in anything besides the mind-forged image academics have created of each other, all believers in the most up to date modern science and masters of their rational self-interest. The creation of this fictitious image  has other consequences – for instance, the creation of a fictitious teleology, with the modern looking back on the past as something that “leads up to” us. In a sense, this is the intellectual “reason” story. It confuses a fact about the seriality of the time line with a stronger sense of ‘leading’ that, well, seems daimonic.

Once one grows sensitive to it, one begins to find the “modern readers” trope and the way it functions in academic writing fascinating. For one thing, modern readers are always better readers. Or, if they have lost some connection to the past – the past that is too sentimental, too racist, too crude – the writer is  there to do the proper brokering work. So intent is the academic on this brokering work  that he or she rarely looks up at the world of narratives in which the “modern reader”  moves, which includes a superhero with spiderlike qualities, whole cable stations devoted to dramatizing romance novels in the most sentimental way possible, other “reality” tv shows about discovering the ghosts in haunted houses, etc., etc. The video game and most crude division between good guys and bad guys are standards of modern narration, as are effectless murders’, childish FX, and periodic moral panics involving such things as widespread satanic abuse in a vernacular that is lifted almost verbatim from the witch panics of the 15^th century.

So this use of the “modern reader” gives me the heebee jeebees. I want to say: The modern reader, boss – he dead.  

Michael Gordon, warmonger, up to his old tricks

Michael Gordon, the gross warmonger reporter at the NYT, has a headline story today in which big tears are shed over the fact that the U.S. didn't even get a nice little military base in Iraq - oh, the grief! I always like to think of Gordon in terms of his various triumphs in reporting about Iraq. Who can forget his eagerness to relay fake information about Iraq's nuclear weapons before the war? This is typical Gordon, lying through his teeth, helping to bring on hundreds of thousands of deaths:

“WASHINGTON, Sept. 7, 2002 -- More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to

enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.
The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms. President Hussein has met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq's top nuclear scientists and, according to American intelligence, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West."
It is sweet that the NYT has a policy of retaining reporters who relay absolute falsehoods - as long as they are in good with the Pentagon! Makes me feel all comfy inside.

The GOP wants to raise your taxes

I find the GOP strategy of alienating the 47 percent who pay no federal income tax rather puzzling. A family of four, husband/wife/two kids, now pays about a 5.6 percent efficient rate in income tax. This means that well over 47 percent pay from 0 to 5 percent. The number is surely well over 50 percent of the American electorate. In essence, the conservative paranoia that we now face a world of “takers” has already happened. It is not in the interest of those who pay 5.6 percent to have their taxes raised and their benefits cut. This is precisely the GOP policy. In fact, it is the end of a long GOP strategy on taxes that has worked well. The GOP has campaigned against taxes, and the medium household has been happy to vote for them on that principle. The GOP, that household has noticed, never really cuts ‘entitlements’ – not to the medium household. They are prevented by the Dems, to an extent, and by their own hypocrisy. But finally ideology is overcoming strategy, and the GOP is actually running on a plank to lower the taxes of the rich and to raise the efficient tax rate of middle income households. The Democrats, who are looking up their butt at a mirage deficit, seem to be lagging behind events. Romney’s video tape might wake them up. The GOP wants to raise your taxes. That should be the Dem mantra.

Individual and character

Is individualism a philosophy? Is it a code about the way people think in modernity, or are thought for, thought for that is by institutions and organizations and the people who put up signs and the people who say, fill out this form? Does it describe a society centered around markets? Or is it a theory that helps us understand societies that center around markets, if there are any?

This is a question that confronts us as we try to assemble the lines of descent that went into the making of character in the late seventeenth century. There is a theory, put forward by Jacques Bos, that the character writing of the seventeenth century can be seen as a stage in the making of individualism – the character that the character writers are concerned with is all external show and symptom, “a representation of a certain category of human beings…” Our task is to discover how, from this literary stylization of the person, we get to the twentieth century, where “there is an almost self-evident connection between the words ‘character’, ‘individuality’, and ‘inwardness”.   

Bos’s notion of the the problem fits in with a broader sense of the way the ‘civilizing process’ in the West has gone. The individual and individualism are contrasted with an earlier communalism, out of which, for good and ill, the Western Paleface has broken.

But I’d like to harry  the idea that the individual and individualism are what we are all about in the twentieth and twenty first century, as well as this rather Hegelian sweep towards the inward. It is not that these are illusions; rather, I think character is something more than their factotum, and that its assembly and spread – across fiction and fact, through the spheres of representation, is a movement containing other movements.

To start off, then, one needs a sense of where individualism came from – that is, as a sociological category – and a sense of how it has been used by historians.

The analytic story goes back to the two decades between 1830 and 1850.

In Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime and the Revolution, which he published in 1856), there is this paragraph about individualism:

“Our fathers did not have the word individualism, which we have forged for our use, because, in their times, there was not, in fact, an individual who did not belong to a group and who could consider himself absolutely alone; but each of the thousand little groups that composed French society only thought of themselves. Thus it was, if I may so express myself, a sort of collective individualism, which prepared souls for the true individualism which which we are acquainted.

And what is the most strange is that all of these men who hold themselves so apart one from another became so similar to each other that it was enough to make them change places to no longer recognize them.”

Tocqueville is no random witness to individualism, since he was perhaps the first to use the term in a sociologically sophisticated way in Democracy in America. The United States even then had the reputation of being an individualistic country.

Tocqueville’s notion of distance, of being apart,  of being alone seems, then, to be part of what individualism is. The beat, here, falls upon the individual apart from his social ties. Yet there are a number of paradoxes here. In the United States, one of the commonest severe punishment that one can inflict on a prisoner is solitary. In solitary, the individual fills his cell in complete solitude. The individual is all- and that all is his punishment. This should help us see that individualism, with its logical stress on the private and the lone person, is, at the same time, not solitudinarianism – the individual is not primarily conceived under invidualism as solitary. This semantic fact is often washed away when we try to grasp invidualism from a quantitative point of view, as though it were about individual atoms. If the individual and the solitary were synonymous, this would be an uncontroversial move. But one has to merely dip into the rich semantic flow of ordinary language to see that the solitary is the negative projection of the individual. “He is a loner” is not a compliment in American speech. “He is a self-made man” is a compliment in American speech. The path of solitude and the path of the individual are not the same path; yet they can be confused due to the conjoined meanings of alone and lonely – the individual, like Robinson Crusoe, is envisioned as ultimately acting alone, even if we project him into corporate headquarters.  But he is not envisioned as being alone – because then he could never get into corporate headquarters. He wouldn’t want to.

Tocqueville was writing at a time when individualism was also being discussed in socialist circles. Steven Lukes points out that individualism became the target against which early socialists, like Blanqui and Cabet, spoke out. In Germany, Karl Marx in the German Ideology – written in the 1840s as well - spent much of his time hashing out what the individual was from a social perspective. It is with Marx that we start getting a sense of the individual as something linked not to the soul, or even to social distance, but to production – to the economic system”

“The difference between the personal individual and the contingent individual is not a conceptual difference, but instead a historical fact. This difference has, in different times, different meanings – for instance, rank as something contingent to the individual in the 18^th century, plus ou moins even the family. It is a difference that we must not make for every epoch, but that instead every epoch, under the different elements that it finds itself in, makes for itself, forced, actually, not by concepts, but through material collisions of life. What appears contingent to later times as its opposite to earlier, and also among the elements of the earlier that are passed down, is a form of commerce, which corresponds to a specific development of the forces of production. The relationship of the forces of production to the form of commerce is the relationship of the form of commerce to the occupation or activity of individuals.”

This strongly anti-conceptual approach to the individual – who emerges first as a social fact within the forces of production that embody the collisions of life – gives Marx a sort of history of individualism. Individualism  waits on the emergence of the individual, rather than individualism arising in the educated class and bringing into existence the individual. Marx’s story, then, leads us firmly away from the solitary – who emerges in life’s collisions too, but within another set of conditions – and sets up his attack on Stirner, who in Marx’s view is engaged in rescuing an archaic social category and conflating it with the individual in a massive act of bourgeois self-mystification. Whether Stirner’s notion of egotism and the “Own”  is really bourgeois self-mystification or the expression of a nausea with a modernity that set the teeth of the children of the bourgeoisie on edge – I will leave to later. In any case, Marx’s targets shifted in the 1850s to the political economists, and here I think he was able to put to better use his sense of parody and bafflement. The  Robinsonades of the economists really do play a strong, self-mystifying role in building up the codex of capitalism.

Marx set the terms for economic historians looking at the sociology of capitalism, and its origins. Those origins would be linked to the individual as a creature of economics. We should look, in the medieval period, not for what the saints wrote in their summas, but for what the smallholders wrote in their wills. If pre-capitalist society went as it was supposed to go according to Marx, we would find that the properties of the small holders were bound by laws and customs that would disallow or strongly hedge about the market. The same of course would be true for the large landholders. Given the largely agricultural nature of Europe, this meant that any sort of trade would be shaped by the larger system of production that based the producer on the family, on bloodties.

It was just this thesis that was challenged by Alan Macfarlane in the 1970s. Macfarlane went through the records of a small area of Essex, Earls Colne, and he found that in the midst of the feudal night (or if you will, the humane society of peasant England), smallholders seemed to be selling their lands left and right, and disinheriting their children, and in general pursuing their individual interests like the money mad characers in Balzac’s novels.

For Macfarlane, the market in land in the sixteenth century discredits the theories – like Karl Polanyi’s – that periodizes the creation of the system of “fictitious commodities”, such as land and labor, at a much latter date. Similarly, it destroys Marx’s thesis about the origins of agricultural capitalism, which does not start with the large landholders squeezing their tenants, but with the smallholders creating an active, non-family centered market in land under the nose of the large landholders.

Macfarlane’s interpretation of his data has, however, been subject to a number of shocks since he published his thesis in 1978, in The Origins of English Individualism.  Notably, Govind Sreenivasan has studied the same corner of the English world and found much greater family continuity in small landholdings than are accounted for by Macfarlane. Sreenivasan, whose expertise is in German peasant society of the early modern period, went over the records for Earls Colne and found that the land-family bond was much stronger, statistically, than it was represented by Macfarlane. He drew up an indictment in his article on the matter that went after three aspects of Macfarlane’s thesis:

“First, the depiction of the weakness of the land-family bond is exaggerated. Secondly, the description of the causes of the turnover of property is incomplete and therefore misleading. Thirdly, the reconstructed concepts of kinship and property are directly contradicted by the sources.”

Pulling back, what we see here is that the dispute about land tenure is set in the terms Marx lays out in the German Ideology. It is a materialist approach to individualism. Which, in a neat U-turn, comes back into an infuses the system of production that makes possible materialist approaches. But in following this turn, we tend to lose sight of, and normalize, the idea of the individual, or the easy notion that we live  in a liberal order that promotes individualism. Because if the individual is taken in the Stirner sense – if its materiality is not its place in the system, but its place as an organism born and bred and having a brain that does certain things all the time – then we are also talking about a cosmic vision of the world – how the world is put together, what the limits are on human beings, and how they live within those limits. These are not reducible, point by point, to their horizon of possibility – the system of production. This is, I think, what makes Marx’s notion of alienation so important, and so intrinsic to revolution – for revolution is the other horizon of possibility from which the capitalist system can be analyzed.

I am taking my cues from this tension in Marx.  From Marx to surveys of smallholder sales in the 16^th century, we can run the individual into the space he – always he in the history, a significant and overlooked warp – inhabits and infer the creation of individualism as a matter of habit and a mental tool – but we must also not overlook the fact that the individual in the market is a phenomenon that points to a larger thing – a murderable forked thing, something that casts a shadow inside himself, a non-planetary shadow, a thinking shade.

Earl Colne may seem a long way from Theophrastus, but as in fact the history of “character’ in the seventeenth century is about the way a term and concept in learned culture sinks into ordinary culture, which makes it important to have a broad sense of ordinary culture and the forces – the conflicts - that shape it. And I think it is also important to have a sense that the learned culture is not a progressive culture. Its learning does not represent the forward flight of the absolute spirit.

The 47 percent

Romney’s 47 percent remark reminds me of something I wrote before the great crash of 2008, in September, 2007, to be precise, about the lifestyles of the high and low as a great cultural fact. I wrote this in Austin, never dreaming that my future was so close to the radical changes I have undergone. But it does witness to something larger than my own little scrambly destiny.

“I read the papers. Everybody reads the papers. So the papers say retail sales are sluggish. They say that retailers have predicted lower sales for fall. And they say, the stock market went up again. They say the stock market went up because of the news about retail sales. Out of the bad news, the market honed in on a report from Walmart predicting better sales this fall. And that was enough to send the market up 65 points.

American capitalism is infinitely interesting – not as interesting as the way of a man with a maid, but as interesting as the mating dance of the great horned grebe. In the last fifteen years, the economy has done something that it isn’t supposed to do, according to past history. In the past, the business cycle has given us numerous examples of bubbles that blew up at a certain point. After the bust, there was always an overreaction and a downturn. After the collapse of the market in 1929, for example, there was a tremendous collapse of consumer spending in 1930. There are also long term overreactions. The implosion of the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s set back the stock market in England for fifty years.

Economic history seems to have taken a turn in the 1970s, however. At least since the last big recession in 1991, the Bubbles are now being succeeded by other bubbles. This is made possible by changes in government policy, the increase, by several orders of magnitude, of the cash on hand commanded by the wealthiest five percent, the elevated purchasing power of the consumer, and the interregnum in which the internal American consumer market has been allowed to quietly go on, churning up purchases and debt. So the stock market crash of 2001-2002 is succeeded not by an overreaction, but by the quietest loss of two trillion dollars in history, succeeded by a bubble in the housing market, a targeted bubble, so to speak, which is crashing now just as a bubble in the stock market, which we can fairly date to the intervention of the Fed this summer, takes off. Is this genius or a confidence game?

In the beginning, economics was tugged between Smith’s optimism and Ricardo’s pessimism – between the notion that the market would take the place of the monarchs and prime ministers in that neat little history of the progress of mankind, worked out by the Edinburgh philosophes, on the one hand, and the worry that the winner take all nature of the market, plus Malthusian constraints of our restricted supply of natural resources, would doom us to an increasingly immiserated working class, a pampered and overcompensated upper class, and a world of busts. As Marx saw, quite accurately, the same internal dynamic that drove capitalism to produce affluence drove it to periodically collapse in the midst of its products, helpless to utilize them. Unless this system were overturned, we were inevitably headed to the world of Wells’ Time Traveler, where “the queer little ape-like figures” of the working class Morlocks kept up the world of the haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty like Bloomsbury eternalized – the Eloi, the elect.

Of course that didn’t happen, or hasn’t yet. One could say that the Morlocks have just been moved out of the gated community countries into the ghettoized, but that would still not be quite right – besides which, it would transform Marx’s precise notion of the relations between the working class and the bourgeoisie into almost any two-fold conflict. No, life more abundant was wrung out of the capitalist system by the workers through unionization and, not least, the threat of communism, and it took a long time, and involved the full use of the countervailing powers of the state, which was put in the unaccustomed position of actually operating, seemingly, against the interests of the corporations. This short interval has long closed, but the corporations find it useful to keep up the pretense that the state and private enterprise are matched in deadly combat, with all the other nonsense about our pious preference for a smaller scale of the state. But the long march to abundance took enough time that the system not only assimilated the greater purchasing power of the working class but learned to exploit it. And then, of course, inevitably, manufacturing began, in the U.S., to follow agriculture in the train of obsolete sectors. Or, more precisely, just as the Great depression was about the shrinking of the agricultural dependent population and the final displacement of rural America, the Reagan years – which we still live in – are about the shrinking of the manufacturing sector and the final displacement of Rust belt America.

That leaves us with symbol pusher America. And with a nagging feeling…

The usual case against a bubble is that there is nothing tangible that it attaches to. The land being sold by John Law’s company near the wonderful Mississippi river was a dream; the electric combination of Samuel Insull’s was a fraud. The Enron guys were beyond fraudulent, taking their profits on future sales in 2009 in 1999 and the like. Bubbles are about spreads, rather than tangibility. The conservative in us shrinks back at the edge of the world of spreads, for here there seems to be a great abyss, filled with numbers, with not a product to back them. Thus we get the hoary economic chestnuts, like the one about the Fed ‘taking away the punch bowl’ after a too vigorous elevation of equity prices, and the like. And of course after a bubble, we are supposed to feel some pain. Economists generally will criticize deliberately nurturing a bubble – although of course, to explicitly deliberately nurture a bubble is a contradiction in terms. One has to do it while pretending not to do it. Because there is a residual moralism here warning us against building our dwellings on sand. It is as if the alternative – to let the business cycle do its work, to let the invisible hand smite the evildoers – is favored precisely because we need some hygienic punishment after the orgy. Kraus once said that Germans confounded God with his stagecraft – with thunder. Take away the lightning and you take away God. Some related emotion is involved in treating bubble to bubble economic policy as bound to fail. For if it doesn’t, there is no God. Especially one who laid down the iron laws of economics.

All of which doesn’t mean, by the way, that bubble to bubble economic policy isn’t bound to fail. I can’t help but think this cycle of stock market expansion is not going to go on long, since it seems to utterly discount the signals that we are headed for an economic downturn of some kind. However, spread is king, and the question is: do those economic signals matter? For the wealthiest themselves exist behind one of the greatest bubbles ever. If we think of the tegument of the bubble as consisting of the difference between the wealth commanded by the top five percent and the rest of us, it has now assumed a monumental thickness never seen before. And inside that bubble, the difference between the top one percent and the rest of the wealthy has created a similar bubble. It is hard to believe that any hard times, ever, will poke through that mass. Though surely there is some limit that no bubble pumping by the state can violate, I don’t know theman that can say lo, it is here, or lo, it is there.

…So much for the balance of doom and gloom against the lack of a long run. I’m more interested, frankly, in the social and cultural effects of the age of the spread than whether it is sustainable. In former bubble periods, there have always been those who suspected that this was all a dream. I don’t feel that about this period: people are acclimated to the No Choice, Never a Choice dominant of our time.

As a writer, it used to bug me that I am in such a poor position to see this moment of Americana. I am, after all, mired in the lowest strata of the American economy, the bottom 20 percent. Fuck the money, the problem for me as a writer is that I seem to be deprived of the tacit knowledge of how the vast majority of my fellow yahoos live their days. I can bike past the cars, I can imagine the restaurants, the clubbing, the life of consumer products, the day to day in offices, the laptop computers on which one does – something. But that vital displacement which is the writer’s life, daydreaming about other people – I used to think that I had blown it by becoming such a scag. Can I even imagine going home to my McMansion and watching the wall sized tv’s high def pictures of whatever? No.

However, my choices and failures don’t bug me so much any more. First, of course, that lifestyle bores the shit out of me. It bores me the way Emma Bovary’s life bored Flaubert – only in the writing of it could Flaubert find the almost imperceptible nuances that made it a real life for him, and only then could he have mercy. Mercy is the final stage in writing, it is what one blindly tends towards. Second, in the age of the spread, there is a real advantage to living, as the poor necessarily live, among tangibilities. The McMansion and the wall sized tv pale in comparison with the tangibility of, say, the strategic buying of dairy products, waiting for five cent shifts in prices. While I suspect that the demon of intangibility really does haunt the days and days and days of the average householder, who have built their McMansions on spread, the real demon of climate haunts us Morlocks – there is no way to avoid the cold when it is cold if you are walking, or riding a bike. Or hot when it is hot, or rain when it is raining. That this isn’t omitted from life puts one in an oddly advantageous place. Hardy remarks of Tess Durbeyville that she was a Victorian lass, educated by the State, while her mother was still a Jacobin – that in one generation, a two hundred year gap had grown up between them. A clever observation. So what if Tess’ mother had written the book? I can write sci fi just observing what goes on about me, because it goes on in the future – the future being defined by income strata in the U.S.

Now, this isn’t to say that the heroes of nineteenth century novels are unacquainted with spreads. On the contrary, their heroism rises out of the struggle with the spread – Emma with her lenders and Dmitri Karamazov with his; Pip with his benefactor, Nana engulfing the mortgaged estates of syphilitic Second Empire syncophants. When, in the Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes checks his bank account and finds he has 2,000 or so bucks in it, he is declaring his independence from this old, nineteenth century crew. The heroes will now always have money in their bank accounts – Rabbit gets rich, and even crazy Herzog builds a house for himself. However, Rabbit is as dead as Buffalo Bill. Except, of course, for the thirty percent on the bottom. But this may be where the richest stuff is, the phantoms in the street, walking in plain daylight. Phantoms of tangibility.