The Kantian baby

The Kantian baby – imagine that there is such a thing for a moment – exemplifies corporeally the Critique of Pure Reason. Reason is, as anyone who has hung around babies knows, the mouth, which anything can enter that the baby can reach and pull. It obeys the purely formal law of its size.  If it were big enough, the baby would put a car, a street, its parents, the house, or the sky in it. But it isn’t that big, so the baby puts in, say, the tip of the tail of the cloth green cat, or – if the parent isn’t wary – the circular wooden bead, or the rounded end of the rectangular parental pinky. It is here that synthetic aprioris are born, and they will proceed to dance like fairies around the baby’s cradle, in a fusion of now and shape, lulling him to sleep. But as we have already mentioned, the supreme bliss of reason depends on reaching and pulling. On, in fact, picking – that supreme tool of understanding, analysis, which resides in the hand. Picking and grasping – this is what the hand does (English, in its genius, even makes grasping synonymous with understanding. Henry James’ characters may look like Edwardian adults, but they, like babies, are always “grasping” mentally; it is a word that he loves, as though the hand’s warmth were needed to fight through the verbal fog which his characters so often pull over themselves). Admittedly, the picking is hesitant at first, and what the eye and body seem to aim at – here’s the pacifier, here’s the squeaky toy – is often not what the hand lands on. Instead, the hand frankly stutters there as it is in the full force of its arc towards the object, and instead what do we have? We have the edge of the blanket, we have a pen, we have the ear of the green frog doll (or is it a frog? With that cat’s ear?). But gradually the hand and the incredibly delicate fingers get better at the whole hand eye coordination thing, and then we pick – we pick the little chain of links of the earring or necklace, we pick and grasp and pull the handle of the coffee cup (sending it on a fatal, romantic dive towards its one true love, the keyboard of your computer). These are picked out of the continuum, grasped, pulled. Oh insatiable fingers!

Of course, reason rules – the fingers pick in order to raise the thing picked to the mouth, which opens in all innocence, naively, hopefully. Reason is a dreamer. But as we  look back, we are amazed at all the picking we’ve done, our miner’s work on the continuum. The continuum, however, is vast, our equipment is disproportionate to the world it is set loose in, and in the end we have picked up so few things, even metaphorically, that we will probably die longing, our fingers wrapped about one more shape – a plastic tube, the fringe of a polyester/cotton coverlet. Still, I admire that instinct for picking and grasping. I honor it here, as much as I can, in these sentences.

cultural relativism and me

I think of myself as a cultural relativist, but I am constantly irritated at my fellow culture relativists and the debate they wage with their antipodes, the various kinds of moral absolutists. I have a list of complaints, but I will hold back the full thesis, and content myself with merely two of them.

1.       The wrong enemy. There has been a long and, to my mind, futile hunt and peck debate between the relativists and the absolutists concerning the universality of this or that custom or norm. Relativists like to point to things like the fact that the pharaohs of Egypt married their sisters, and absolutists like to point to the universality of the incest taboo. This debate was waged to an extent in the ancient world, but in modernity, it was the discovery of America, and the difference of the Americans, that kickstarted it in the seventeenth century. Seventeenth century writers loved to list the odd beliefs and customs they found among the Americans, and from these lists sprang the science of anthropology. From these lists sprang, as well, modern historiography, as the discovery of American difference led to a re-reading of the classics, and the discovery that the ancients were not the civilization that the European humanists took them to be. Lafitau, remarking that the beliefs of the Iroquois reminded him of nothing so much as the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, was on to something. That something was: European civilization was, at its root, un-European. In fact, looking around at the vast majority of the European population (which consisted of peasants) and the folk beliefs that flourished in villages and courts, Voltaire joked that the territory of the savages began twenty five miles from Paris. He was exaggerating – savages inhabited the streets of Paris and the halls of Versailles as well. It was not just the Nahuatl who believed men could change into beasts – this was a belief solidly upheld in court in Rouen in the 1690s.

However, cultural relativism is not the thesis that there is no universal norm. It is the thesis that there is no society that upholds and follows an absolute norm. In fact, cultural relativism gets its strength from the universality of normative structures. What the relativist observes is that those structures are not coherent, but conditioned, hinged, in a double bind one with the other. Characteristically, a norm binding on individual members of a collective does not bind a collective itself, which may well demand that the individual make an exception of every norm in the service of the collective. On the blog, Crooked Timber, a few weeks ago, there was a discussion of universal norms stemming from a post in which one of the Crooked Timber writers proposed that no society condones torturing to death infants for pleasure. This was a curiously conditional absolute – why was the “for pleasure” included? Because of course the ruling class in collectives routinely demand that the members of the collective go to war with other collectives, and in so doing they demand that children be tortured to death – as they were in Hamburg and Hiroshima, in Stalingrad and Falluja, for instance. The justification for bombing and warfare is, however, serious – seriousness is the real legitimating foundation of the collective’s norms. Here, of course, in modern liberal republics, we run into a little logical problem, in as much as the collective is supposedly ruled to the end of allowing people to pursue their happiness – and it seems that a roundabout case could be made that babies are then tortured to death for the pleasure of the collective. But there is no real need to make that  torturous case about torture – all the relativist claims is that the structure of excuses, of the temporary suspension of norms as a norm, is universal in all collectives. There are, then, no morally homogenous collectives. All collectives have hinged norms, structures that code other structures and, in effect, annul the absolute condemnations that run through those structures.

2.       Judge not that ye be not judged. There is, in liberal societies in which cultural relativism has flourished, a tendency to say that the moral of cultural relativism is that you cannot judge other cultures. This idea quickly leads to the idea that cultural relativists have to accept Nazis, slaveholders, etc.

Once again, this confuses the cultural relativist argument. In fact, the conflicting structures that the relativist observes are all based on judgment. A collective holds to its identity by judging, differentiating itself. The relativist does not conclude from this that we need another absolute at another level, a trans-cultural one – for there is nothing in that other level which would “solve” the problem of hinged structures. Far from claiming that the individual can’t judge other individual in other cultures, the relativist claims that the individual can’t help judging other individuals in other cultures. A collective will use the idea of absolutes to create exceptions for absolutes – this is how social logic differs from logic.

Interestingly, absolutes are socially overdetermined. The absolute can introduce a vital, unstructuring moment into the collective. From Socrates to Rousseau, from Jesus to Mohammed, there arise representatives of the popular perception that the permanent state of exception claimed by the ruling class of the collective is wrong. These figures stage their protest on behalf of the absolute, and thereby create a kind of anti-social community – a sort of expropriation of the charisma of the powerful. In this moment of protest, a dream emerges – the dream of a morally homogenous, non-hierarchical community. This is one of the great prods to the softening and humanizing of culture. As a relativist, paradoxically, I am all for these instances of unstructuring, as long as they are not completely successful. For the dream of the morally homogeneous community, when it isn’t futile, quickly turns monstrous, as it purges those who threaten that homogeneity. Most of the time, the unstructuring moment succeeds not by converting the collective, but by weakening its inhumanity. The pacifist, the civil rights advocate, the seeker after truth –  I have tremendous respect for these righteous figures, who have modified the horror of life. Relativism, by contrast, has spawned only one doubtful prophet – Nietzsche. On the other hand, the recherché de l’absolu, which has spawned thousands of prophets, has spawned no wits – save Chesterton, who is an odd case. The wits largely fall into the relativists camp.

Liberaliness

Does nobody remember the election of 2010? The GOP did not run on cutting medicare - they ran on restoring the cuts Obama proposed. And running to the left of Obama, they smashed the dems, who had their hands tied behind them by the clueless prez.

With the new budger, O. has once again enacted the same strategy. As a political strategy, his idea seems to be that trading the votes of the Washington Post op ed crew (they will love the cuts to gross entitlements) for the votes of the majority of Americans (who hate the cuts to the entitlements they have earned over a generation of wage stagnation and peculation by Wall Street) is an excellent idea. It isn't that the Dem voters will vote for Republicans - they just wont vote. This is an easy dynamic to see. As a farcical sideshow, this disaster will be accompanied, in the comments sections of liberal blogs, with Dem operatives or Obama fans adopting strident and bullying tones towards those who find the strategy politically pathetic and economically noxious, to be followed by the same shills explaining the Dem losses of 2014 on "holier than thou" leftists and liberals. Such are the limits of politics in the era of the mock demoracy, as the plutocratic parties battle for the margins.
One cannot, then, see this from the point of view of seerious politics. There is no serious politics going on here - the viewpoint of the majority is going to be ignored by whoever they elect. So one has to view it as a form of entertainment, comedy on a low level. And of course the balony factory, aka the establishment press, will provide the stage directions for this farce in their own inimitable language, half high school cheerleader, half dimwit. Thus, the NYT today, in Jackie Calmes thumbsucker, presented us with this alice in wonderland analysis:

"The president’s views put him at the head of a small but growing faction of liberals and moderate Democrats who began arguing several years ago that unless the party agrees to changes in the entitlement benefit programs — which are growing unsustainably as baby boomers age and medical prices rise — the programs’ costs will overwhelm all other domestic spending to help the poor, the working class and children.

“The math on entitlements is just not sustainable,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, one of the few Democrats to unequivocally endorse Mr. Obama’s budget. “And if you’re not finding ways to reform, where do you squeeze? Well, then you squeeze early-childhood programs, you squeeze Head Start, you squeeze education and veterans.”

Ah, the small but growing portion of liberals who think that unsustainable medical costs are best met by - throwinhg those costs back on the individual! Its a whole new kind of liberalism, a sort of truthiness liberalism, which simply uses a new language - for instance, it used to be that the justification for entitlements is that certain costs can't be sustained by the individual household, but now, through liberaliness, we simply and easily reverse that notion and hope nobody notices that we are speaking nonsense. The NYT, always looking for the cutting edge and always finding it a couple years after it has become the boring norm, is charmed by the fact that it is small but growing - which is usually what the doctor says before he recommends surgery. Alas, the surgery that will be performed will separate the small but growing plutocrat friendly party - defending entitlements by eviscerating them - from the large but powerless body that cannot find any defenders among a political class that has merged entirely with the gated community crowd. It is the politics of the tumor by the tumor and for the tumor.

I can't wait for the Media to find the new Dem version of Paul Ryan to represent this small but growing liberaliness faction: Obama's heir!

In one way, this doesn't come as a surprise: Obama did say, in his first debate with Romney, that he and the governor agreed completely on social security. But I was caught up in the small delusion that the election of more liberal Dems to the senate would stifle Obama's liberaliness. It didn't.

Obama's beliefs

I can't really criticize Obama for not sticking to his beliefs. After 2010, you would think that he would have changed his belief that cutting "entitlements" was a good political idea. The GOP ran to the left of Obama in that election, pointing to the cuts he was proposing to Medicaid to rally the troops. Well, Obama is doing it again, proposing a transparent cut in Social security at a time when social security should actually be raised quite a bit. So, we at least have evidence of a core belief, which Obama shared with freedom loving Thatcher and Reagan: government entitlements are the problem. I like how this comes on the heels of the inauguration speech where O. made heavy weather with inequality as a bad thing. He's apparently changed his mind, since his proposals will make it visibly worse. I actually thought the Dems had learned something in 2012, but they didnt. Instead, the same feckless turn to the right is going to be their theme in 2014. Giving the GOP an opportunity to rescue Social Security from the Dems. It is funny, this game of piggy in the middle played by the two plutocratic parties in the age of the mock democracy.

critique in the age of whatever

I went to a groovy coffee shop the other day. Prayer flags. A wall dedicated to poor children, smiling toothily (or not) in photos, serving as an advertising prop to sell accessories in which the gimmick is assuring the consumer that the merchandizer will shift some of the ready, or an inkind equivalent, to the kids. Smiley clean moral people behind the counter. So there I am, and suddenly I feel an advent of that futile senile anger that I am sure I will spend years expressing. I become, in a word, more Walter Sobjackish – so after ordering a latte and a drip, I point to a camera high on the wall behind the cashier, under which there is a smiley face and the words, smile, you’re on camera, and I ask her whether she felt the slogan was a way of making us feel actually happy about losing our basic freedom not to be surveilled or watched. These words came out of my mouth, I am sure, in good order, nary a messup in syntax, but the woman’s face (she was probably nineteen) showed utter incomprehension. Then her companion, of about the same age, decided it was just that I didn’t understand the sign, and told me that it was like we could all pretend to be movie stars. I however thought that this didn’t quite grapple with my off the cuff critique, and so pointed out that it is by such delusions that we lose our basic freedoms. And then, not wanting to be a total jerk (the spirit of senile anger leaving my shoulder, I guess), I conceded that there was nothing we could do about it, so what the hay. I got my latte and the drip, and the woman then resolutely turned to the next customer, hoping that he, at least, was not a jerk.  

Another note on Nostromo

Conrad was a logistics man before he was an author. Unlike Melville, whose sea experience, as Charles Olson notes, was in an assembly line – in as much as the whale was caught, cut up, and its oil extracted on board ship – Conrad sailed with the middle men, the truckers and dealers. This experience within a small node of the greater global market system made Conrad sensitive to both the pre-capitalist mentality – which lent its aura of romance to the seaman – that the dealer was constantly in contact with in the far places of the earth, and one of the fundamental facts of capitalism – the dominance of exchange. Everything turns into money in the system – everything is fungible. In actual fact, pre-capitalist notions pervaded, and still pervade, the system. When pure capitalism penetrates a certain a-capitalist level, the level of more complicated exchanges, it undermines itself, for capitalism is parasitic on the economies it supposedly supercedes.

The x marks the spot where the inhuman fungibility of the capitalist ideal encounters the redoubt of the  a-capitalist mentality is the treasure trove. Treasure – whether it is the miser’s hoard or the pirate’s chest – was much on the mind of Conrad’s colleagues in the later 19^th century. In the contention between Henry James and Stevenson over the art of the novel, treasure becomes – I think not accidentally – the symbol of their difference:

Mr. James refers, with singular generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for hidden treasure; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words.  In this book he misses what he calls the “immense luxury” of being able to quarrel with his author.  The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the volume laid aside.  Still more remarkable is Mr. James’s reason.  He cannot criticise the author, as he goes, “because,” says he, comparing it with another work, “I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for buried treasure.”  Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he has never been a child.  There never was a child (unless Master James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and beauty.  Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has protested with excellent reason against too narrow a conception of experience; for the born artist, he contends, the “faintest hints of life” are converted into revelations; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority of cases, that the artist writes with more gusto and effect of those things which he has only wished to do, than of those which he has done.  Desire is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory.  Now, while it is true that neither Mr. James nor the author of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone questing after gold, it is probable that both have ardently desired and fondly imagined the details of such a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and well aware (cunning and low-minded man!) that this class of interest, having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout to the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream.  Character to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers and a liberal complement of pistols.  The author, for the sake of circumstantiation and because he was himself more or less grown up, admitted character, within certain limits, into his design; but only within certain limits.  Had the same puppets figured in a scheme of another sort, they had been drawn to very different purpose; for in this elementary novel of adventure, the characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities—the warlike and formidable.  So as they appear insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, they have served their end.  Danger is the matter with which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realise the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear.”

In fact, James – Stevenson could have replied – certainly did write about treasure. What else are the Spoils of Poynton? What are the Aspern Papers? And what – to go into a later novel – is Adam Verver doing in The Golden Bowl, if not treasure hunting?

The treasure has certain characteristics that signal its archaic status, its connection to the economic world of the limited good – to use George Foster’s term from his article, Peasant Society and the Image of the Limited Good, which – without Foster knowing anything about George Bataille’s work – gets a crucial dynamic in the closed world preceding capitalism. This is the notion that wealth is, centrally, something taken from the common pile. It is thus already an act of violence, best sealed by keeping quiet about it. The hesitation that we still feel about “telling your business” derives from the idea that your business is obscurely wrested from someone else’s – that, at the very least, it steals from someone else’s luck. Nostromo is in a sense an x ray of the clash of different fundamental economic notions. It is a clash that is associated, by historic necessity, with colonization and decolonization. Like Kurz’s horde of ivory, the horde of silver that lies at the center of the actions around which the narrative takes shape is something wrenched out of the world system, dialectically negating the very system that gives the material worth.

George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite (1883), gives another, Marxist interpretation of one of the great nineteenth century treasure narratives: the Ring of the Nibelungen. He takes Wagner’s treatment of the Nibelungen horde as a kind of Hegelian motif that organizes a gloss on the history of modern Europe. It is the history of the rise of the Plutonic kingdom. Too easily, Shaw adopts the idea of the natural economy, one of primitive communism, which effaces the intricacies of the image of the limited good, and thus the cursed sense of treasure, in the peasant economy. Balzac and Marx could have told him better. But he does capture a second aspect of treasure which is echoed, both rhetorically and thematically, in Nostromo – the mysterious power of capital, viewed as a treasure, over human life:

Let me assume for a moment that you are a young and good-looking woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to leave the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking them, enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and preciousness, no human being will ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that frame of mind the golden age will endure.

Now suppose a man comes along: a man who has no sense of the golden age, nor any power of living in the present: a man with common desires, cupidities, ambitions, just like most of the men you know. Suppose you reveal to that man the fact that if he will only pluck this gold up, and turn it into money, millions of men, driven by the invisible whip of hunger, will toil underground and overground night and day to pile up more and more gold for him until he is master of the world! You will find that the prospect will not tempt him so much as you might imagine, because it involves some distasteful trouble to himself to start with, and because there is something else within his reach involving no distasteful toil, which he desires more passionately; and that is yourself. So long as he is preoccupied with love of you, the gold, and all that it implies, will escape him: the golden age will endure. Not until he forswears love will he stretch out his hand to the gold, and found the Plutonic empire for himself. But the choice between love and gold may not rest altogether with him. He may be an ugly, ungracious, unamiable person, whose affections may seem merely ludicrous and despicable to you. In that case, you may repulse him, and most bitterly humiliate and disappoint him. What is left to him then but to curse the love he can never win, and turn remorselessly to the gold? With that, he will make short work of your golden age, and leave you lamenting its lost thoughtlessness and sweetness.

In this sense, Nostromo as a character is the negative image of Alberic, Wagner’s dwarf, who steals the Rhine gold from the Rhine maidens. He is, instead, handsome, brave, and notoriously generous. And yet he defies Shaw’s rather smug psychology. Once treasure is introduced into the world, it is not merely the malformed, in a transvaluation of values, who glom onto it and begin the process of inoculating society with the desire for exchange in itself. Rather it is, at least in Nostromo’s case, the well formed who, inadequately equipped with an outmoded code of honor, are captured by  the power of treasure, even as they are forced into the shadow side of capitalism. Shaw’s interpretation of the Rhine gold is, as far as it goes, revelatory; but it all too quickly dissolves the difference between treasure, in the form of gold, and capital, in the form of money. This transformation is fraught with more magic than Shaw can accommodate:

In due time the gold of Klondyke will find its way to the great cities of the world. But the old dilemma will keep continually reproducing itself. The man who will turn his back on love, and upon all the fruitful it, and will set himself single-heartedly to gather gold in an exultant dream of wielding its Plutonic powers, will find the treasure yielding quickly to his touch. But few men will make this sacrifice voluntarily. Not until the Plutonic power is so strongly set up that the higher human impulses are suppressed as rebellious, and even the mere appetites are denied, starved, and insulted when they cannot purchase their satisfaction with gold, are the energetic spirits driven to build their lives upon riches. How inevitable that course has become to us is plain enough to those who have the power of understanding what they see as they look at the plutocratic societies of our modern capitals.

Conrad was not satisfied with the character of Nostromo. He was unhappy about the last two chapters, in which Nostromo becomes more and more like Alberic. And one feels, in reading the novel, that Nostromo is a creature who is explained into being before he exists as a palpability. He is always too spurred, too … operatic. Conrad only hits upon Nostromo as a solid existence to be explained, instead of an explanation to be solidified, when, two thirds of the way through the book, Nostromo begins to confront the Plutocratic society that Costaguana, as the Republic of Occidente, has become – with himself  unconsciously aiding the process. He, in other words, experiences a genuine raising of consciousness: he becomes conscious of class as an economic fact.