the biography of a price

We live in an epoch in which objects have taken one of the attributes of kings - that is, they get biographies. The biography of the fork, the pencil, Wall Street – the transfer of the life story from the human to the inhuman has become quite fashionable, as though, since we all know about the pathetic fallacy, we are allowed to systematically commit it. I jest, ho ho – and in fact I have to admit that there is something life-like about these things and their passage through our lives. If they aren’t alive, they still have mana – a lifelike power. They become totems.
However, noone, so far as I know, has done a biography of a price. Ah, there’s a subject! One would first have to wrest it from the enormous mystifications of the economists, who know what a price must be without often looking at what a price is, and one would have to restore it to its true nature, its genesis, its type.
Scratch a price and you find an adventure. We’ve become accustomed to thinking that the adventure it encodes is determined by a thing called a “market” – and so mystery calls to mystery. The mystics of capitalism have shamelessly spoken of the “magic of the marketplace” – which serves as an alibi for our adventurer. In fact, all adventurers deal, at one point or another in their careers, with magic. From Raleigh to Cagliostro, from the average American politician to the Spanish conquistador, all have used magic to fill in the gaps, biographical and strategic. But the biographer’s strong suite is a counter-magic: a grasp of details. While the adventurer sheds one persona for another, one claim to effects at a distance for another, one spectacle for another, the biographer, that dogged leveler, reconnects the membra disjecta with a thousand and one facts, with fine filaments of cause, deliberation, association and purposes (a plural that covers serial disappointments, self-subversions and incompatibilities – for the biographer is not your rational expectations robot, explaining that all can be explained through a system that explains anything. A biographer who seeks to explain a life is a biographer who has gone mad).
The critic Harold Innes claimed that the story of modernization in the west is the story of the penetration of the price system. This is an insight that holds together a truth and a falsehood. Just as there are no solitary human individuals – every mother’s son or daughter of ‘em must be a mother’s son or daughter – so too, there is no single price. Price’s came into the world en masse, rather than as a single prototype – no caveman hammered out a price, held it up, and said, now what will this be goood for? But Innes’s insight is also false, in that it treats price system as something autonomous – it is as if, with the word system, we move from the puppet to the puppetmaster.
TBC

realism again

A wonderful thing about taking care of a 21 month old that might not look, on its face, like a wonderful thing, is the amount of app-less time the child’s care forces upon you.

Adam, at some point a month ago, changed his sleeping pattern. The 9 month old that got to bed at 7 p.m. and slept until 6 or 7 a.m. stopped working like a sleep machine. Now, it is around 8 p.m. that he gets to bed, and we have to stay with him until his breathing takes on a certain open mouthed regularity and the sound of the pacifier being tasted, taken out of the mouth, and reinserted ceases. While this activity, or hopefully, inactivity, is going on, we lay in the bed next to his crib. If we get up too soon, if we misjudge the breathing and the routine with the pacifier, if we try to escape from the nursery and get back to making dinner or watching a video prematurely, Adam turns on the waterworks.

Last Monday, this is just what I was doing. I didn’t have a light on or a tablet near by. I didn’t have a book or a piece of paper. The only app I had was the high window in Adam’s room, which frames a random portion of the sky. Although this portion of the sky does its best, no doubt, to be interesting, it isn’t, very. However, it does have one good trick: it turns, as though bruised, from a lighter blue to a clotted bluish purple in the hour between 8 and 8:30. And I, lying app-less on the bed with my head propped on the pillow, am in a good position to confirm the progress of the evening, the regress of the sunlight.

At this moment that I’ve been laboriously budging us towards in this fudge of words, I was not so much thinking of the physics of light but about realism. Again.  

To return to the thread I was pulling in a previous post about realism: I think that it is a mistake to connect realism to the real, as its distingushing characteristic. Rather, it is the real through the lens of the plausible, the credible. What constitutes the plausible or credible, in a society, is closely connected with the whole question of credit in every sense – economic, sociological, epistemological. To see realism as a narrative form – or rather, to see realism as making up the  kind of world in which narratives of plausibility exist – helps us to disconnect it from a defining opposition with, say, idealism, or romanticism.  

I’m concerned with fiction – so I thought, lying app-less. Adam was still not snoring.

But I am not saying that this is the only characteristic, am I? Connected to it is the fact that in these narratives, the world is “full”. The authorial voice can represent that fullness – as it does in Balzac or in Dickens. Or the authorial voice can be removed, and the world be given as full, as in Flaubert. It is no wonder that, so often, the pursuit that traverses these words is that of the borrower by the creditor. Credit is everywhere – or so it represents itself.

 Against this realism there is another world of narratives that are shot threw with the plausible. One could say that they are parasitic on realism in so far as the implausible effect requires some sense of the codes of realism. In these narratives, the assumption of the fullness of the world and the creditworthyness of the narrator suddenly snaps in the readers head, like a pencil.

For instance, the pencil which, having written the account of the barber who accidentally cut off the nose of one of his customers and found it in a roll baked by his wife, decides to get rid of the culpable probosis by taking it to a bridge and throwing it in the Neva – only to be wrapped in a fog both physical and textual:

“Ivan Yakovlevich turned pale.. But at this point everything became so completely enveloped in mist it is really impossible to say what happened afterwards…”

But at this point Adam’s breathing became unmistakeable, and what happened afterwards to my meditation on realism is really impossible to say, since I can’t remember it. It was time to make dinner.

realism

If things are in the saddle and ride mankind, as Emerson said, then let us imagine that things take a break every now and then and let words ride.  It is a 30 – 70 split, perhaps, is what I am getting at. This being so, it is foolish to argue with a word once it has established a claim on mankind.

In fact, this is just the kind of foolishness that philosophers – who at one time acknowledged themselves to be half-fool, although now they more often consider themselves to be half-scientist, a half and half creature that to me is still fool – like to engage in. Thus, I, in my half a fool robes, have always had a steady dislike for the word “real” and its court favorite, “realism”.

Here’s my reasoning. If real is meant to refer to the constitution of reality, then, in my opinion, it cant go picking out some bits of reality and discarding others. It must be wholly promiscuous, rather than half chaste. It must include magic, dreams, mirages and perceptions as well as carpenters crowns, heaps and pi. In other words, I take real to make the widest of ontological claims. However, in actual use, real has been turned into an ontological grift, setting itself up as something ontologicallly direct as opposed to all those soft ontologically indirect objects.  These, the realist wants to say, are dependent on  a subjective privilege that takes us out of the real and into the ideal, or the fanatastic.

Here we spot everyday dualism, doing its silent work. And everyday dualism has its advantages, or it wouldn’t hang around. But those advantages, which prime it for everyday distinctions, don’t prime it for metaphysical argument. There, it forgets its place. It rubs up against its own original quantitative claim – that reality is all, whereas non-reality is nothing – and  can only help itself out of its dilemma by silently inserting assumption into the discussion that , indeed, must be discussed before we can have the discussion.

In my opinion, realism is only plausibility writ large: it is a view on what is possible and important that gains its justification from a certain class background. Aristotle, in the Topics, speaks of endoxa – credible opinions – that are “accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the wise”. This is the filter through which reality becomes realism. The privileged point of view is given us by the class system in the regime in which that point of view is expressed. The reputable class bears various names, depending on the regime we are talking about, whether it is the middle class in America, or public opinion, or most scientists, or – more commonly – an implied everybody who counts that lurks behind a passive construction (“as is well known,” “as is generally agreed”, etc.). Realism’s affiliation with plausibility, rather than reality, is the secret of why the term seems so indeterminate, when you come to close quarters with it.  

swatting at the structural unemployment solution, again.

The Board of Editors of the Scientific American has annoyed me with their editorial comment in the current issue. It is one of those nattering naif kind of comment about how, gosh, machines are gobbling up jobs, and this explains rising inequality, rising unemployment, stagnatine wages and the rest of it. The quote a study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osbourne in which the authors predict that, in the coming decades, 47 percent of American jobs will be rendered obsolete by hyper hyper technology, everything from tax preparer to locomotive engineers. Significantly, there’s no mention of CEOs – even though that is a position which, using a few basic data search devices and some algorithms, could easily be folded into a couple of computers. But of course – NO! Not our sacred risktakin’ job creators! Not their jobs, Jesus…

Anyway, what irritates me is the blindness to like data. Because here’s the truth: capitalist private enterprise, as the Great Depression showed and as Marx reiterated back in the nineteenth century, cannot come even near to what the economists call full employment – that is, cannot employ 95 percent of the working population. States increased in size after the 1940s not only because states had more to do – particularly with social insurance and healthcare and education, o my! – but also because without the government hiring, we will be in a perpetual twilight of recession, even in a boom. If Government on the local, state and federal levels had continued to employ, over the recession, as they had before it, we would have long achieved the same level of unemployment as in 2005, Bush’s one boom year.

What I wrote about this in 2009 still stands today. Remember, whenever you hear economists or Janet Yellen or whoever speaking about employment, they are pulling a fast one – in fact, they have pulled it so fast they may believe it themselves. Full employment is not and cannot be achieved under modern capitalism by the capitalists. End of story:

 From 2009 ---

Here’s the truth. Since WWII, the government has gone from employing about 13 percent of the workforce to close to 17 percent. At the moment, according to the Bureau of Labor, there are around 22 million Americans employed by local, state and federal governments.

This means, at first glance, that the private sector employs on average about 82-84 percent of the work force. In actuality, given a very rough average of unemployment of 5 percent, the private sector ends up employing closer to 80 percent of the work force. 

At the moment, what has happened is that the private sector employs about 78 percent of the work force, as unemployment has gone up. Although government has held steady, no doubt in the next year, there will be layoffs from the government, too, This means that neither the private sector nor government will employ the percentage they do on average since WWII.

I put these figures out there so that one isn’t lulled into a discussion of whether the neo-classical models assume full employment or not. This is a nice, liberal discussion, but it overlooks the more fundamental lie, which is the assumption, which is swallowed like the sugar in liquid cough medicine, that the private sector somehow could efficiently employ 100 percent of the work force. It can’t. It has never been able to get past 85 percent in the post war period. There is a limit to the weight it can lift. We know what it is.

So the only argument about the stimulus is this: should the government absorb the extra unemployed or not? That is, should the government grow 3 or 4 percentage points?

The argument against this is not an efficiency argument. That is a stupid argument. The argument is, rather, that somehow, business can absorb the extra unemployed. Which means that the right is saying that, in the next year, the private sector can expand 4 or 5 percentage points to assume its usual standing in the economy.

Do you believe this? Does anybody? No tax break tax cut bullshit should take anybody’s eye off that ball. The question is: how can the private sphere possibly expand to absorb the 4 to 5 percent of the unemployed?

In reality, the right is saying, let the unemployed grow. And underneath that is the notion that if we can actually diminish the salary of the average worker, then businesses will be inclined to hire them. This, without the bullshit, is the right’s position. The recession is an opportunity for business to gain permanent tax cuts and hire people at reduced rates. 

Now, the only way this will actually bring business back up to its traditional 80 percent position is if the pie shrinks. 

I foresee that laying out the numbers in a way that everybody can understand them will not happen. Rather, we will have more endless droning about endlessly bogus functions from conservative economists, who will be countered with ever more esoteric models from liberal ones. The point will be to cover up the real situation, so that we will be fogged in, and deprived of the ability to use our own two eyes to see what the situation is, and decide for ourselves what we want done.”

What I wrote in 2009 has proved to be the case since. The Democrats have silently acceded to the agenda of shrinking the government, which means that the pressure to keep wages down in the private sector becomes much more powerful, and the surplus labor value thus released flows to the wealthy in a sweet, sweet stream of honey.

This will keep going and going and going. Given the Democratic policies that we have now, we are giving America’s children the chance to experience what it would have been like if the government hadn’t stepped in to stop the Great Depression.

 

strike out against the culture of impunity!

When the military junta in Argentina folded in 1983, President Alfonsin came to power, and started proceedings against certain members of the military high command who had participated in the Dirty War, as well as the leaders of the Monteneros (those who survived) for kidnappings and murders. However, the trials affected only a few. In 1986, the full stop law was enacted, the limited suits to those that would be enacted within 60 days of its passage, all others to be rendered null, and the due obedience law, in 1987, which halted the trials that had passed the full stop law. Then, when Menem wasw elected in 1989, he began issuing mass pardons, mostly for the military but some of them for the Montenero leadership (which, it must be said, has always been suspected of actually being led by agent provacateur, notably in the case of the leader, Mario Firminich – see Martin Edwin Andersen’s Dossier secreto for details).

Collectively, Alfonsin’s decrees were known as the impunity laws. In this way, the State covered up for the almost thirty thousand murders committed by the military junta.

Against this coverup, a civil rights organisation began to hold Tribunals against Impunity in Buenos Aires in 1990, with the aim of revealing as many facts as possible and shaming the state.

I’ve been thinking about this vis-à-vis the United States. It seems to me that we have been living through the era of Impunity, here: from the horrors committed in the name of fighting terror to the invasion of Iraq through the Obama directed drone war; from the unwillingness of the Justice department and the SEC to reign in or jail anyone for the financial meltdown of 2008 to the widespread fraud by the banks in the paperwork they have submitted to courts concerning mortgages; from the abolition of jury trial in the case of suits for damages to corporations to the Supreme Court’s increasing willingness to lend cover to any plutocratic attempt to buy elections and change laws in their favor. On the cultural front, there is the impunity enjoyed by those in the media who have cheered along all these things, and who have never lost a dime for being not just wrong, but disastrously wrong; not just mistaken in their reporting or analysis, but being willing conduits of propaganda and lies.

And I’ve been thinking – wouldn’t it be nice if the occupy organizers did something on the Argentina model. With the masses of information made available by Snowden, with what what we know about the massive frauds in the financial sector, and finally, with what we can find out about the massive buying of the federal legislative and executive branches – the revolving door between officeholders and business, and the more secret doors that link the hiring of their relatives and associates – their clans – by the corporations they are supposedly regulating, it would make for, at least, entertainment. RFK in the sixties took a subcommittee to various locales in this country to investigate poverty. On similar lines, a tribunal against impunity could go to Cleveland and take testimony on the sack of that city in the 00s by mortgage lending bottom feeders – could go to Atlanta and show how laws against fraud were fundamentally abandoned by get rich quick state legislators – could go to New Orleans and show how few people have suffered for the negligence in Katrina – could go to Reston, Virginia, where the CIA is located, and show how the CIA systematically constructed and operated an  international network of torture sites. This is just the tip of the impunity iceberg, of course.

I had a dream… 

Celebrating Slate Magazine always wrong coverage of the War on Terror for the last eleven years!

Crooked Timber periodically hosts a fest mocking Charles Krauthammer's promise, in 2003, to retract his beliefs if the US didn't find the WMD in Iraq. In that spirit, LI has long wanted to mock a buncha targets for their administrative asslicking and general stupidity in the great war bubble period between 9.11 (which, the press assured the American public, somehow proved that George Bush was a great president, perhaps the greatest) and Mission Achieved day May 1, 2003.

I keep coming back to Slate, the home of the always wrong contraro-belligerati, Christopher Hitchens - whose columns on Iraq can even now provide hours of sick humor - and such astute warhawk liberals as Jack Shafer. Shafer, somehow, sticks in my head because he took it upon himself to mock Johnny Apple, the NYT thumbsucker-reporter, for harboring any doubts about our great and glorious victories in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Here's a quote from a Shafer piece that, word for word, could be used as a sort of standard unit to measure stupid. An SUS, if you will.

From March 27, 2003, Shafer begins with what he obviously thinks is a delicious quote from his low hanging liberal fruit. Shafer sizes him up with the standard Slate smarm, then delivers what he obviously thinks is a knockout blow:

Like other leaders facing larger, technologically superior forces, [Saddam] has found ways to improvise and to take advantage of the fact that the fighting is taking place on his home ground. He is waging a campaign of harassment and delay. It is not likely to change the outcome of the war, but it will prolong the fighting, make it more costly for his adversaries and profoundly affect the way it is seen in other Arab countries and around the world. [Quote from Apple]

Apple doesn't use the word "quagmire" to describe the allied effort as he did on Oct. 31, 2001, during the early, shaky days of the Afghanistan campaign. (See "Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam.") But the gist of his Afghanistan piece and today's Iraq piece is the same. The United States has bitten off more than it can chew; the allied war effort is underpowered; we've underestimated the enemy—again!; air power is overrated; and guerrillas can do U.S. forces great damage as they did in Vietnam.

Apple's fear that dropping bombs on civilians wouldn't "win Afghan 'hearts and minds' " and that the country would prove ungovernable even if the United States won turned out to be unfounded. Two weeks after his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, the allies liberated Kabul, and 16 months later the place is at least as governable as San Francisco."

This, this is the guiding spirit of Slate, its faith. For a long time, slate has been a sort of goldplated SUS for the media. Shafer, of course, is the stupidest of the stupid, meaning he is enamored of his own brightness and credentials, and is the sort of fellow you want to invite to a talk show.

But there are many Shafers out there - it was his talent to wrap up, in one heaping helping, the CW of the press, which collaborated as much as they could in making the Middle East and Central Asia a place of dizzying and endless violence.

Ha ha! That stupid liberal, comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam. And in a way its true: we've been in Afghanistan much longer than we were in Vietnam.

Slate- were glib analysis based on shaky factoids goes to die.

the second week and Rousseau

The second week. 

Every morning Adam boils over when we finally arrive at the school, and clings to me – but with less and less conviction and fear. Today, I got him to his classroom through the kitchen area. There is a sliding door between the two areas, so as soon as Miss Britney swept him up, I closed the door, stocked his box in the refrigerator, and snuck around to see how he’d do through the windows of the class, which face the hall. In Miss Britney’s arms he was wearing an air of contentment, and she brought him to his little scoop seat and sat him down with the rest of the kids. As she was doing so, some child yelled, “Adam!”

A friend!

One of the reasons we are breaking Adam’s heart each morning and exposing him to the discontents of civilization, such as they are, in a pre-school is that he has only been around adults. He is, after all, an only child. He’s a sociable one too – it doesn’t surprise me that he is soon calm and contented in his teacher’s arms, because he seems to have a knack for adults. What he needs, of course, is to pull away from his parents into childhood – the ‘hood of other children. It is an odd bond, this between parent and child – it grows by splitting.

Rousseau, in the Discourse on Inequality, writes:

“Were we to suppose savage man as trained in the art of thinking as philosophers make him; were we, like them, to suppose him a very philosopher capable of investigating the sublimest truths, and of forming, by highly abstract chains of reasoning, maxims of reason and justice, deduced from the love of order in general, or the known will of his Creator; in a word, were we to suppose him as intelligent and enlightened, as he must have been, and is in fact found to have been, dull and stupid, what advantage would accrue to the species, from all such metaphysics, which could not be communicated by one to another, but must end with him who made them?”

It isn’t true that everything Adam thinks ends with himself, since he loves to babble to us, have us chase him, have us change the video (taking my hand and pressing it on the tablet’s screen to indicate we’ve had enough of this episode of Petit Ours Brun), hug us, laugh with us, disagree with us about his clothes, tell us in no uncertain terms that it is not bedtime, etc.  This is not civilization and its discontents, however. Adam is perhaps not old enough yet for the child who yelled Adam! But it is a good sign to me.

Adam!