The unbearable

I like to think of degrees of separation, of connecting links, that come about because “the production and consumption of all lands have become cosmopolitan” as a result of the relentless bourgeois search for markets. 

Take, for instance, Pavel Annenkov. It was Annenkov who happened to visit Belinski right as he was reading an ‘extraordinary’ novel, one that, one that, Belinski said, ‘reveals such mysteries and such characters in Russian life as never discussed before.” The novel was Poor Folks, and the novelist Dostoevsky. Pavel Annenkov happened to be in Russia in 1846, which is why a friend of his from Brussels, Karl Marx, was writing him letters there.

Poor Marx, of course, had had to move to Brussels at the prodding of the French police, although in truth it was a strange affair. Why should the wrath of the Prussian government – pressuring the French government – come down on him? He was not even involved in the article that was the cause of his expulsion – an article applauding an assassination attempt on the Prussian king in an exile German journal. 

Annenkov and other Russians were attracted to the milieu around Proudhon and Bakunin, It was through this circle that Herzen met – to his later regret- the German poet Hedwegh, Marx’s great friend. Annenkov had attending a meeting of the communists in Brussels. I like to think that Annenkov might have mentioned the names of some of the new Russian writers to Marx – for instance, Gogol. 

Marx’s letter to Annenkov is well worth reading – and, for those of us with a keen eye for the intersigne, there is something so very right – so almost uncannily right – in the fact that Annenkov, in this year, is involved as an observer both with the beginning of Dostoevsky’s career and with Marx’s. Annenkov had asked Marx’s opinion about a book written by Proudhon. Remember that Proudhon is, at this time, a European celebrity. Marx – well, he was known by some, and admired greatly by Frederick Engels, but he had trouble focusing. 

The letter is here. It is a letter about, among other things, God and money. A subject that Dostoevsky has been attuned to from the first – although we are far from Crime and Punishment as yet. 

“Why does M. Proudhon speak of god, of universal reason, of the impersonal reason of humanity, which is never mistaken, which has been, at all times, equal to itself, of which is it enough simply to have the correct consciousness in order to find oneself in the true? Why put on the feeble Hegelianism in order to pose as an esprit fort?
Himself, he gives you the key to the enigma. M. Proudhon sees in history a certain series of social developments; he discovers the progress realized in history; he finds at last that men, taken as individuals, do not know what they have done, have been deceived in their own movement, that is to say, their social development appears at the first view as a distinct, separate thing, independent of their individual development. He does not know how to explain these facts, and the hypothesis of universal reason manifesting itself is all ginned up [est toute trouvée]. Nothing easier than to invent mystical causes, that is to say phrases, where common sense can’t supply any. 
But doesn’t M. Proudhon, in avowing that he does not understand anything of the historic development of humanity – and he avows this once he resorts to sonorous words about universal reason, god, etc. – doesn’t he avow implicitly and necessarily that he is incapable of understanding economic developments?”

The idea that history is happening behind our backs – or, to put it more personally, that our lives are operating behind our backs – verbally echoes a famous moment in Marx’s (posthumously published) German Ideology, which I am going to translate without smoothing out the gnarly structure of the sentences. There’s a reason that the sentences are gnarly: the sense, here, is a sort of Laocoon, in the toils of the snake Ourubos:

“That it [alienation] thus becomes an “unbearable” ["unerträgliche"] power, that is to say, a power, against which one revolutionizes, is integral to the fact that it has produced the mass of mankind both as thoroughly propertyless [“eigentumslos"] and at the same time as in contradiction to a world of wealth and culture spread before them, which both presuppose a great increase of the force of production, a higher level of its development; on the other side, this development of the forces of production (with which already the empirical existence of persons is put on a world historical rather than local footing) is, as well, an absolutely necessary practical pre-supposition, because without it only lack is universalized, and thus with neediness also the struggle for necessities begins again and we have to reconstruct all the old shit [die ganze alte Scheiße sich herstellen müßte] – and because, furthermore, only with this universal development of the forces of production is a universal commerce of people posited; thus on the one side, the phenomenon of the “propertyless masses among all peoples is produced all at the same time (universal competition), each making themselves dependent on the overthrow of the other, and finally the world historical, empirically universal individuals replace the local ones.” 

The complex that is built around “alienation” here goes through certain recognizable steps.

First, we have what I’d call the Frankenstein moment. This is the moment in which the people who are collaborating realize that somehow, without their choosing it, the division of labor has taken on a life of its own. This in itself is an important clue that alienation is unthinkable without division of labor of some kind: between men and women, between adults and children, etc. It appears again and again in Marx’s writing, every time giving us a sense of the social uncanny. The monster, it appears, is alive:

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”

Beautiful! And hideous. At the same time the system produces the most astonishing beauty – such refinement and cultivation [Bildung] as has never been seen before -- and a wretchedness, and evacuation of life, that has also never been seen before. This evacuation is described in two terms: of unbearability and of propertylessness. Unbearability is, Marx claims at this point, the condition without which the masses won’t revolutionize. In the sixties, when Marx was good and thoroughly Nietzschefied, this moment would give rise to doubts – is it a fact that the bourgeoisie, here, is the great producer, and the proletariat merely the reactive social body? If this were true, of course, it would truly put a spoke in the whole system – for the rising of the proletariat would only create the old filth, the old shit of fighting for survival.


The second moment has to do with located this unbearability in relation to the instantiation of universal history – the world market – in goods and labor that characterizes the modern system of production. Marx never takes back this insight. At the time he is writing the German ideology, very few business enterprises spanned the globe, and the logistics of manufacture, trade and communication are – in spite of his comments in the Communist Manifesto – only at the beginning of their irresistible rise. Certainly, the velocity with which silk moved from Canton to London was faster than the days when it had to go to Manila, then Acapulco, then across Mexico to Veracruz, then to Europe – or through Central Asia to Turkey, through Italy and up through Europe. Marx saw that already, branches of industry in one country would manufacture goods for sale in a far away country – as for example, Chinese ceramics, produced for the European and American market – and that there was a greatly increased commodity and money flow. Marx’s emphasis on this – even when explaining alienation – is another clue that alienation has to do with a vast and seemingly monstrous system that has arisen behind the backs of the worker. Before human beings become the subject of world history, their monster already is. Earlier revolutions against the unbearability of the system of production were as local as the system itself. The transatlantic revolutions might be said to be the first true revolutions - the French revolution, spread across Europe and fought out, in an unexpected way, in Santo Domingo, kept working in the liberation of Latin America and even, one could say, in the 1910 revolution that overthrew the Chinese Imperial court. Marx, in a famous 1881 letter to a Dutch socialist, Domela Nieuwenhuis, wrote: “The general demands of the French bourgeoisie laid down before 1789 were roughly just the same, mutatis mutandis as the first immediate demands of the proletariat are pretty uniformly to-day in all countries with capitalist production.”

In the German Ideology, the interweaving of the high level of the forces of production and their global scale leaves its impress on the chance of success of communism:

“Without this, 1, communism would be able to exist only as that of one locality; 2, the powers of commerce themselves could not have been developed yet as universal, and thus unbearable powers, they would have remained domestically-superstitiously “circumstances” ["Umstände"], and every expansion of commerce would negate local communism.”

To summarize: the  moment in which the monster opens its eye – in which man’s creation, to speak in Frankenstein’s terms, seems to operate behind man’s back, and subject man to its will – is the moment in which, rightly viewed, a whole series of developments falls into place. This moment – which is a moment, I would say, in the ‘becoming unbearable’ of social conditions, and thus is intimately entangled with the history it sees – is the condition for understanding what the forces of production have wrought. Alienation comes from those forces: alienation is their monster.

At the end of Marx’s letter to Annenkov – which is obviously connected to the work he is doing, at that time, which resulted in the section of the German ideology that presents a broad outline of capitalism as the heir to universal history -  Marx makes an observation about Proudhon’s theory as an expression of the class views of a group he knew well, since they constituted the Communist League – the petit-bourgeois.

“The petit-bourgeois, in an advanced society and by the necessity of its status, is made up of one part socialist, and one part economist, that is to say, he is awed by the magnificence of the high bourgeoisie and sympathizes with the griefs of the people. He is at the same time bourgeois and people. He prides himself, in the depths of his consciousness [dans son for intérieur de sa conscience] to be impartial, to have discovered the right balance, which he has the pretention to distinguish from the golden mean [juste milieu]. Such a petit-bourgeois divinizes the contradiction, for contradiction is the basis of his being. He is only a social contradiction put into motion. He has to justify by theory what he is in practice, and M. Proudhon has the merit of being the scientific interpreter of the French petite-bourgeoisie française, which is a real merit, because the petite-bourgeoisie will be an integral party of all the social revolutions that are in preparation.” 

The petit bourgeois (raise your hands in the air if you are a member!) was not, as Marx supposed then, a transitional class type in the spread of capitalism. The petit bourgeoisie has become instead a dominant element, populating the ever expanding sphere of circulation. To probe the soul of that element is the task of literature. Lets end this with another quote. This one is from Gerard Cornio’s Figure of the Double in European literature. For Cornio, Balzac’s Rastignac and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov are doublets, and both encounter doubles in their lives: 

‘Raskolnikove is also placed at the crossing, at the crossroads of doubles, but between [this pair] reigns incompatibility: Raskolnikov cannot, like Rastignac, accommodate himself to social and moral contradictions, accommodate himself through his personel consumption, he has to chose, to cut, to make choices which are sacrifices.”

Plots and secrecy

When I used to review novels for Publishers Weekly, the form was dictated partly by the editorial limitation of space: I had 250 to 300 words to operate in. Conventionally, the review would either start out with or end with some elaboration of an adjective – basically, blurb territory. Then would come characters and plot – or telling what the novel was about. If I could find the room, I might refer to the writer’s reputation.

Now, this procedure relies heavily on the idea that a novel is about a plot, and that a plot is something that one can extract from the text that ‘moves’ the events and characters in the novel forward. Even if the novel varies “forward” – even if it is arranged chronologically so that it looks backwards, or it mixes up narrative patches that are in the past or future of the narrative’s present – the plot is the thing that makes the novel. The plot is to the novel what the plays are to a game – a plot encloses, in a determined field, the chances that the narrative rehearses in its serial plot-parts. If an orphan goes out one foggy afternoon to visit the tomb of his dead mother and discovers an escaped convict among the graves  –  which happens in the first chapter of Great Expectations – I expect that this will have a bearing on the entire action of the book, an action which involves numerous small actions over the course of twenty some years. The action, the plot, is a great maker of pertinence, that very English virtue that Grice made into a fundamental part of conversational implicature.

There is, of course, another meaning of plot, which refers not to the implicate order of fiction, but to the conspiracies or plans of human beings in secret coordination, one with the other, to bring about some event. A plot in this sense hinges very much on secrecy.

The plots of fiction and the plots of non-fiction have a way of converging – in fact, the latter seems, sometimes, to have almost swallowed the former, as though none of the stunted rituals of modern life present the interest to the reader that is associated with plotting in secret.

In The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode brings together the narrative motive and secrecy as though, in reality, the plots of non-fiction have always been the secret sharers of the plots of fiction.  He usefully uses the notion of insiders and outsiders. A secret creates an immediate divide between those who share it and those who don’t. I itch to put the term “sharing” under scrutiny, here, since it seems to stand outside of the dominant exchange system and point to other systems of wealth and power – but I am more interested, here, in the categories of insider and outsider with relation to the form of narration.

Kermode takes the Gospels as an exemplary narrative. It is an inspired choice. From the perspective of secrets, the Gospels make the very strongest claims for the privilege of the insider. It is not that the Gospels unfold a conspiracy, although certainly some conspiring goes on to do Jesus to death. But the real secret, here, is in the double life of Jesus – on the one hand, a small time carpenter’s son, on the other hand, the beloved son of God. To understand the plot requires not only knowing that Jesus believed that he was the son of God, but believing it oneself. It requires metanoia, conversion.

Not only does the insider understand the plot, but if the insider is correct, the outsider can never understand the plot until he or she becomes an insider. The ritual of becoming an insider is not simply a matter of cognition, but of a special kind of semi-cognitive thing: belief. The belief comes not from the head – with its cognitive gearing – but from the heart – which understands that feeling is not subordinate to the world, but quite the reverse. And if this is true – death, where is thy sting?

To get away from the pull of the Gospel, Kermode’s point about secrecy and narrative is made in more general terms in a later essay published in Critical Inquiry: Secrets and Narrative Sequence.

“My immediate purpose is to make acceptable a simple proposition: we may like to think, for our purposes, of narrative as the product of two intertwined processes, the presentation of a fable and its progressive interpretation (which of course alters it). The first process tends towards clarity and propriety (“refined common sense”), the second towards secrecy, toward distortions which cover secrets.”

This does seem like refined common sense. And yet it shakes off, way too thoroughly, the insider/outsider categories that Kermode was using in the Genesis of Secrecy. I think that shaking off points to a retreat to a classically ahistorical project: salvaging the presentation of the fable. As though the presentation came all in a block. After which – and the after here signals, again, a certain ideal temporality, not an empirical one but a conceptual temporality – we find interpretation.

I’m thinking about this common sense presentation of the two elements of fiction at the moment because I’m writing a fiction. One of my readers asked me, when I sent her the fourteenth chapter, to write her a plot outline, because she has been receiving the chapters over time, as I write them, and she wanted not to have to go back to previous chapters to see what was going on. So I wrote the plot outline, and I was mildly surprised to see that the plot I wrote was, in a sense, impossible to infer from the chapters so far, which encompass more than half the book.

I have harbored Dadaist dreams of writing a novel which would have one surface plot for the reader and another for the author – and perhaps another outside of both the reader and the author. In this book, the plot that the reader thinks binds together the book is not the real plot, but incidental to the real plot, as it is understood and put together by the author. However, why not strain at that pitiable thing, the author? What if the real plot of the book is not understood by the author as well? As in the myth of Bellerophon, where a messenger carries a letter which, unbeknownst to him, requests that the receiver kill the messenger, perhaps the author of the plot could be considered a blind messenger, delivering a different plot from the one he or she knew? After all, there is a large degree of blindness in the world.

In a sense, such a novel would be an anti-gospel, because it would be closed, ultimately, to any access to its secret. The insider, here, would be defined by the fact that the secret he holds could not be shared. This would turn the world of the plot in a sense upside down. I don’t quite know how this kind of plot could even be constructed – a plot that resisted ever being known.

Surely, this is the great modernist temptation.  

The age of skipping

Neither Jesus nor Socrates left us any footnotes. The oral form into which they destined their teachings does allow for references, but these references have a more choral than notorial nature – they echo, they caress, they allude. But if they never exactly cite page and author, if they do not exactly locate the quote, both teachers do indeed quote, and do indeed gloss. They tease the footnote, one could say. This is the way it is, mostly, with prophets and poets – although there are exceptions, such as Pope’s translations of Homer, Swift’s joyful notes to The Tale of the Tub, Eliot’s credentialing notes to the Waste Land, and finally the takeover of the text by the note in Pale Fire and the backtracking notes of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, notes that are less in the Swiftian mode, which mocks all metalevels, and more in the mode of a certain desperation concerning metalevels, a desperation that the footnote’s totalizing authority has been lost. Or, to put it another way, if the footnote is an epistemic instrument, one that delivers a certainty with a robust reliance on the correspondence theory of truth (here is the author, the page, the publication, the publisher – everything the reader needs to find a source), then it bears its textual fate – to become a doxic instrument, a reference to, for instance, the entry concerning Uqubar in the  The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia

(New York, 1917), or, less radically, a space that is invaded and undermined by the uncertainties of the world of midrange objects in which we live, ourselves one of them.

There’s an overview of the literature on the footnote by Fabio Akcelrud Durão in Critique 10, 2012, which has made me want to read vast volumes: from Bernays (1892) to Andréas Pfersmann’s evidentaly magisterial study of the topic, Séditions infrapaginales. Poétique historique de l’annotation littéraire (XVII^e-XXI^e siècles), Genève, Droz, coll. « Histoire des idées et critique littéraire » (vol. 464), 2011, 536 pages. And yet, I have a feeling I won’t. I have a feeling that in this lifetime, even as I edit for money and write my little things for love, I will have to keep skipping. My hope is that I can make a certain poetry of skipping. And that at least I will know the references.

   

Milton Friedman's wrong: the social responsibility of business is not just to make a profit

Milton Friedman wrote an article for the NYT Magazine in 1970 that was appropriately headlined: The social responsibility of business isto make a profit.

While Friedman was not the first to make the argument, his reasoning certainly is the starting point for an idea that has lodged in the American soul like a tick in a coon’s ass.

The reasoning is not, as it should be, legal, which is why, from the very beginning of his argument, Friedman goes off on the wrong track:

“The discussions of the "social responsibili­ties of business" are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. What does it mean to say that "business" has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but "business" as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense. The first step toward clarity in examining the doctrine of the social responsibility of business is to ask precisely what it implies for whom.”

Why, you might ask, can only persons have responsibilities? There’s no reason given. The premise is probably some kind of individualism of a very weird kind, in that actually, when we look at how responsibility turns up in everyday practice, we find collectives and institutions operating under the rule of responsibility all the time. There’s nothing in ordinary speech that rules out such sentences as: The responsibility of the Highway Department is to build and care for highways. But Friedman’s lack of an argument for the proposition that only individuals have responsibilities is a minor tic – even if it reflects an individualistic mindset that is founded neither in anthropology, sociology, language or philosophy, but solely in an individualistic ideology.

The second step, however, is where Friedman goes very wrong: “A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but "business" as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense.” The problem here, of course, is that business as a whole is something that doesn’t make much sense. Businesses exist in a number of ways in a number of contexts, and surely the way to talk about business is to specify the context one is speaking in. A business in Alexandria in 300 B.C. is undoubtedly going to be run with some differences from a business in NYC in 1970. One of those differences is surely going to be the fact that the business in NYC in 1970 has to declare itself to the state. There are various ways in which this responsibility can be modified, depending on the scope of the business, but anybody with a halfwit’s sense of commercial law knows that past a certain size, businesses as a whole do have a responsibility – one that divides them into licit and illicit enterprises.

Friedman, of course, was not a lawyer. He was an economist, with a certain ideology. In 1970, as John Kenneth Galbraith made clear with his book, New Industrial State, from 1967, large businesses – corporations – certainly were not operating to maximize their profits. They were, to use an ugly term, satisficing – trying to achieve a level of profit consistent with their sector, while conceding a certain opportunity space that may have created, at least in the short term, more profit.  

Friedman was notoriously dissatisfied with the compromise between ‘socialism’ and the ‘free market’ inscribed in the way that businesses in the post-New Deal, post-war period were actually doing business. He wanted to change the ethos of management, which is why he argued for a unilateral view of the responsibility of businesses. He succeeded in helping create a new management ethos. Unfortunately, the idea that business only exists to make a profit – a statement that is clearly false, since the purposes of business are modified by the laws to which businesses are responsible – emerged as a truism of the Reagan era, partly because it is so easy to state – it has the cocksureness of the popular maxim, on the order of “if you’re so smart why ain’t you rich” – and partly because the underlying premise is firmly rooted in a peculiarly American myth of individualism. Which is why an argument that seems to confound the way things necessarily are with the way Friedman would, as an economist, prescribe the economic order – an argument that is specious on the surface – has gained such footing. It all seems like so much melted butter in the mouth:

“In a free-enterprise, private-property sys­tem, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct re­sponsibility to his employers. That responsi­bility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while con­forming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”

Here one notices that the owner is reduced to a simple function: the owner wants as much money as possible, thus, the business is about making as much money as possible for the owner. But in truth, these owners, especially of large organizations, are a heterogenous and shifting lot, especially in comparison with the entrenched status of the corporate management. Unless that corporate management recognizes its responsibilities – which are spelled out not ethically, but legally, in a contract – they can manage as they will. Or they can manage to loot as much money from the business as possible, on the theory that their ultimate responsibility is to make as much money for themselves as possible. Of course, the managers aren’t the only contract bound individuals here – so are the owners, who are most often owners of the companies stocks. All of which points to the fact that owners and managers are endowed with responsibility not as a natural part of their positions, but as a derivative part of the contractual positions.

My argument, here, is that there is nothing in the idea of the free market system that defines and limits the responsibilities of businesses. Rather, those definitions and limits come into play in the contractual intermediation that brings businesses into existence. One could easily require all corporations to have a portfolio of ‘social responsibilities’ that would bear on the contractual responsibilities of owners and employees alike without, theoretically, damaging the free enterprise system.  The year Friedman published his influential essay, J.W. Hurst published a history of the corporation in the U.S. “The legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States”, which disproves Friedman’s principle, at least as regards the evolution of the corporation in the United States. Hurst shows how business went from being unchartered by the state to being chartered, and how the owners and managers were endowed with or developed their degree of power over the business enterprise.   As Hurst points out, in the colonies and in the pre-bellum U.S., “the legistlature’s grant was necessary to incorporation… that it authoritatively fixed the scope and content of corporate organization.” Which means, simply, that businesses can have multiple purposes designed into their papers of incorporation. For instance, the state can decide that it doesn’t want to be burdened with the negative externalities of business – pollution, for instance – and make the corporation responsible for taking care of those externalities. At the same time, the state can desire that the enterprise undertake its business because it views the undertaking as a social good. And thus it can bring together a number of social purposes in the corporation, without thereby destroying the corporation as an entity.

Battering down the idea that the social responsibility of business is to make a profit is an excellent way of making businesses socially positive once again. It is certainly high time to rewrite the rules of incorporation, including the pernicious rule that allows interstate companies to incorporate under the rules of some selected state – interstate companies should incorporate at the national level with the Commerce Department. This simple rule would be a small start in bringing the plutocracy to heel, at least in the States.