competition three

Sorry, I am under the gun on other projects. Writing this in fragments

If I take a turn and throw a dart at a dartboard and then someone else takes a turn and throws a dart at the dartboard, we don’t say that the darts competed – we say that the players competed. Competition, here, is rooted in games played by humans – its old, situated meaning. It is not projected onto nature, or that part of nature which is constituted by an artifact of  a plastc stick  with a metal point at one end and little fins on the other end. Nor would we say that the dartboard competed with the darts.

Yet competition, as we all know, has long overflowed the agone. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the game has long been recognized as a prototype for other, “serious” kinds of social activity.

We automatically associate competition in nature with Darwinian evolution. That model of competition, as Marx saw, owes a lot to the classical economists. Marx meant this as a criticism of the whole theory of Darwinism, as though a model taken from a temporary form of social practice was inherently falsifying when applied to natural science.  Engels, more sympathetic to Darwin, tried the same trick by applying dialectical materialism to natural history, although without really delivering himself of some serious, systematic book. Marx of course forgot his own huge debt to the  classical economists as wel, which showed, at the very least, that a systematic reference is not an act of allegiance or an unconscious surrender to ideology. In any case, Marx’s notion has been taken up by intellectual historians to the point where it has become a truism – as Stephen Jay Gould put it, “Darwin grafted Adam Smith onto nature”. However, as Trevor Pearce has tried to show, the idea of competition in nature between “species” is backgrounded by more than the Scots philosophers. He points out that the idea of competition relies on the larger notion implied in Darwin’s famous phrase in the  Origins: “all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature.”  It is within this framework that we speak of the “competition” of, say, the quagga mussel  which has “invaded” the Great Lakes econsystem and outcompeted another invasive, the tiger mussel.  

Pearce, while acknowledging the influence of Malthus on Darwin, claims that not enough is made of the influence of other natural philosophers, and in particular, Linnaeus. When Linnaeus wrote of the oeconomy of nature, he did not have in mind incipient capitalism. He had in mind a notion that was connected to the great chain of being and the metaphor of the household – and ultimately, of the court. 

monsters

The sleep of reason isn’t the only thing that gives birth to monsters. Language does, too.

Last week, Adam and I were walking to the store when we passed by a big office building on Wiltshire. The building presented a big window to the street, through which one could see a very empty atrium. I’ve passed by this building hundreds of times without thinking much about it. Adam posed his standard question to me – what’s that, Daddy? I said it was an office building. He seemed a little disturbed that it looked empty, so I assured him that somebody worked there. He repeated my words. It amused me that he said somebody like it was somebody’s name.

The next day he mentioned somebody again, telling me that somebody is in his office. We were walking home. I said that somebody is in the car and somebody is in the house we passed too. Daddy. Funny daddy.

Little did I know that somebody seemed ominous to Adam. And his multiplication was a bit terrifying. Gradually,  I understood, but not before somebody had assumed terrible proportions. Now when it gets dark, Adam talks about somebody being in his office. This morning, as we walked out the door and went to the left – our standard route to Adam’s school – Adam broke into a run, and kept looking backwards.  I caught up with him, gave him the standard adult rap about don’t ever do that, and he told me that he’d seen somebody.

Somebody haunts us. So, actually, does Mr. Nobody, from the Goodnight Moon book. These monsters come straight out of our language, which has dreamt them up. I’m going to have to figure out how to ratchet down the fear of somebody.

the island of laputa - competition 2

It is said that Chryssipus the Stoic held that there were, for all problems, true solutions. But he also held that at times, we can’t see them – and those times called for a morally disciplined silence. It is in this spirit he approached the paradox of the heap – the sorites. The paradox is as follows: if we construct a heap from seeds, say, we can, by adding seeds successively, reach a point where we might say that we have a heap, and identify that with the number of seeds we have used – say, 200. And yet, when we subtract one seed, we are disinclined to say that we no longer have a heap. Given that fact, we might play the game by claiming that we haven’t reached a heap no matter how many seeds we use in order to avoid identifying the heap with a certain number of seeds – but then, paradoxically, we will never achieve a heap. In fact, we don’t really seem to be able to quantify a thing like a heap; neither do we want to say that the heap is a quality when clearly it can be analyzed into its separate parts. To borrow a term from contemporary logic,  there is no “heapmaker” – so how can there be a heap? Chryssipus, according to Sextus Empiricus, recommended that “when the Sorites is being propounded one should, while the argument is proceeding, stop and suspend judgement to avoid falling into absurdity.”  Analytic philosophers, such as Mario Magnucci, who wrote a seminal paper on the stoic response to the sorites, have attempted to incorporate Chryssipus’s response into standard Western logic. To me, the stoic response is closer to the notion of Mu in Rinzai Zen. The famous Mu Koan goes like this: a disciple of Zhaozhou, a Chinese zen master, asked him if a dog has the Buddha nature. Zhaouzhou answered Wu – Mu in Japanese – which means no, empty, vacant, and – it is said – applies in different ways to the question: that there is no dog, that there is no Buddha nature, that the dog does not have Buddha nature, and so on. In other words, the answer is meant to break the mental habit of thinking that the way of assembly – where distinct parts are put together – and the way of disassembly, where distinct parts are separated, are grounded in the real. Indetermination is neither a fact of the real nor not a fact of the real.

Too often, disputes among historians about the rise or decline of some historical property fail to acknowledge that rise and fall are sorites. Hence, arguments become very vicious about what the risemakers or the fall-makers are, and when they occur. Accepting that historical narratives have a sorites paradox at their center helps us clarify the half-fictitious natur e of the business. Even if one doesn’t stop and fall silent, like Chryssipus, one has to accept the possibility that finally, withdrawal is the correct response.

Which is an elaborate detour on the way to approaching the vexed question of the “rise of capitalism” in Western Europe, which basically means England and France, in the eighteenth century.  Of course,Great Britain and France were mainly agricultural –as was the US until 1900. But the question is not just about the rise of industrialism, but the monetarization of agriculture and the emergence of a market system – and the emergence of a “spirit” of capitalism.

That spirit has been poked and probed since, well, the eighteenth century itself. One aspect of it seems to me to be a little less sore from the prodding: the re-evaluation of competition.

 In James Steaurt’s  Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767), there’s an interesting footnote that briefly outlines a counterfactual history stemming from the hypothesis that the Fall neveer took place.

“Hence I conclude, that had the fall never taken place,the pursuits of man would have been totally different from

what they are at present. Mayl be allowed to suppose, that in such a happy state, he might  have been endowed with a faculty of transmitting his most complex ideas with the same  perspicuity  with which we now transmit those relating to geometry, numbers, colors, &c. From this I infer, there would have been no difference of sentiment, no dispute, no competition between man and man. The progress in acquiring  useful knowledge, the pleasure of communicating discoveries , would alone have provided a fond of happiness, as  inexhaustible as knowledge itself.”

The joke in making paradise into  the Isle of Laputa was no longer funny fifty years after Swift to the moral philosophers of the Scottish school – nor, in fact,  to the whole tribe of improving theoreticians who Burke attacks in the Reflections.

More on this later.

  

an analysis of competition for amateurs

There is a story told about the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott. He was talking to a meeting of clergy. One of them asked him how they should decide whether someone who comes to them for counseling should be sent to a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. Winnicott memorably said: “If a person comes and talks to you and, listening to him, you feel he is boring you, then he is sick, and needs psychiatric treatment. But if he sustains your interest, no matter how grave his distress or conflict, then you can help him alright.”

I think Winnicott’s criteria for separating sick and problematic characters can be extended to what the essayist’s “expertise” is. If, as an essayist, you are dealing with a topic that is boring you, probably it needs to be sent to a specialist. But if it is problematic and fascinating, then you can deal with it.

Lately, the topic that I have been itching to write a mini-essay on is “competition”. Competition is one of the colorless words of our time. To be colorless is to be over-understood – so understood that one loses touch with what, exactly, the sense of the concept is.

For instance: the other day I was reading, in the New York Times, a story about “terror birds” – massive birds that lived tens of millions of years ago and that, when laying down and dying, as a favor to paleontologists of the future, left gorgeously articulated fossil remains. As in any story about a now extinct species, the coda has to involve how they became extinct.  In this case, as the story had emphasized how the terror birds prayed on the incipient mammalia, all rodent like beasts, at the time, we had a vague stake in their existence and disappearance.

The fossil adds to the diversity of terror birds and raises new questions as to why they went extinct two and a half million years ago.

Since the species varied in size and weight, terror birds maynot have died out because of an inability to compete with placental mammals, assome researchers have suggested, Dr. Degrange said.

Dr. Degrange has my respect for rejecting the colorless explanation that would have satisfied the NYT mindset, which is all about competition being good for everything, the very vehicle of progress.

That sentence did make me think that it might be nice to see how competition crept into the worlds of natural history and moral philosophy (economics division). I am going to write a bit more about this.

Spitting out the Bittner taste in my mouth

During his lifetime, Gunter Grass opposed the Vietnam war, the emplacement of Cruise Missiles on German soil, the two Gulf Wars and the triumphalist mood after the fall of the Wall. Naturally, this is the type of character that the NYT editorial board collectively takes dumps upon. Now that he is dead and the obituaries pour in, it is a wonderful time for “contrarianism”, so they publish an incredibly boobish op ed piece by a German they’ve been favoring lately with deadtree space, a cat named Jochen Bittner,  an editor for Die Zeit who was last seen in the NYT pontificating like Charles Krauthammer that the West has to seize the Moral Leadership of blah blah blah.
So he’s the NYT gunman on the spot. Here’s a couple of unintentionally hilarious grafs about his Grass problem:

"I was able to pinpoint my frustration only when I met Mr. Grass in person. A couple of months ago he came from his home in Lübeck, on the Baltic coast, to visit my newspaper’s office in nearby Hamburg. The conference room was packed: Everyone — editors, assistants, interns — all crowded in to see this living legend. Although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with mixed emotions about the man, the atmosphere was one of near complete adoration. It was the kind of secular worship that I expect no younger author will ever experience, even if he or she wins a Nobel.
Your generation has had it pretty easy, I wanted to blurt out. You grew big in times when strong ideology and determined judgment counted more than the hard work of examining what is actually going on around us. The way you saw the world counted more than the way it actually was. And there was always a lot of self in your righteousness….
...
I wanted to say all of this, in front of my enraptured colleagues. But I didn’t dare.”

So, we have Bittner, deciding that he represents his generation in Germany (although I’m pretty confident most of his generation has never heard of him) touting the old conservative rap about the “left wingers” but not daring to even speak up before his colleagues.
Luckily, though, he has a lot of that dissident courage in retrospect. So, the man who couldn’t disturb a confab with a famous author is more than willing to use the confession of that famous author that when he was 17, he was conscripted into the Waffen SS to say na na boo boo– and that is supposed to pop Grass’s moral bubble.
So what is the contrast here? It is a contrast of confessions, of Grass's and Bittner's. It is a contrast of unconsciousnesses. Are we supposed to think Bittner, under a regime that would put you in a concentration camp for writing anti-nazi grafitti in a bathroom, would have calmly told the Nazis to fuck off when they came for his counterfactual teen self in 1944? Well, of course he would. Like Mighty Mouse, he would give them the old one two and they'd fall back astonished. Then he'd leap over a few recently bombed buildings.

. Grass was a thoroughly Nazified teen, no doubt, and to my mind, this is one of the sources of his authenticity – he could see, unlike a rightwing critic like Joachim Fest that what was attractive about Naziism was also what was wrong with it - the whole ideology of strength, of toughness, of leadership, decisionmaking, contempt for relativism, absolute faith in what the established power thinks is right or wrong.. Fest  of course began the rant about Grass’s hypocrisy that is echoed in the Bittner piece, even though Fest himself had volunteered for the Wehrmacht, which he claimed was not responsible for any atrocities against Jews - at best, a delusive belief. At the time of Grass's confession, much was made about his  condemnation of Reagan's visit to Waffen S.S. graves. Pat Buchanan, for instance, had his word about it. The weaselish echo wends its way into Bittner's prose.

Bittner does represent one part of his generation – the upper class twits. When Fest wrote his bio of Hitler in 1973, what he was imagining was how nice it would have been if the Weimar leftists had been swept out with a little less anti-semitism - that is, if only Hitler had been Pinochet! It has long been a popular position among the twit set. Bittner is an opportunist of the first water, and I imagine a counterfactual 40 year old Bittner in 1944 he would have elbowed his way into some Deutsche think tank using the same networking methods he's so successfully employed in Merkel's Germany.   He’s a big product of the neo-con network,  EU section, with his positions with the German Marshall fund and his special relationship to Merkel’s Foreign Affairs office.  His embedness has been the subject of some fun in Germany, getting prominent play on the satirical show, Die Anstalt, which published his and his editoreit (Joffe)’s links with various think tank groups - and in Joffe's case, lobbyists. Of course, these two are prominent supporters of the American foreign policy line vis a vis Ukraine.   Bittner and Joffe sued, and lost the case – although the court gave two points to Bittner for one line in the broadcast. Anstalt seems to have been inspired by the wonderful French documentary, Les Nouveaux chiens de garde, which chopped up the purveyors of conventional wisdom in the media and showed their connection to various plutocrats and corporations.

Although the NYT considers itself an avenging God when it comes to those terrible left wing intellectuals in Europe, the Bittner piece seems to me to redound to Grass’s credit. If he repulsed such repulsive critters as Bittner, he must have been doing something right.

the interview experience

Robert Musil opens his interview-profile of the essayist Alfred Polgar with a joke:

One day I said to myself that the interview is the artform of our time. Because the mega-capitalistic beauty of the interview is tha the interviewee does the whole mentla labor, and gets nothing for it, while the interviewer does actually nothing, but pockets the honorarium.

The joke contains an important truth. Interviews are definitely built around a peculiar economic arrangement. Most of the time, we read the interview for the interviewee, not the interviewer, who is nevertheless given the byline (as Musil was for the Berlin paper for which he interviewed Polgar) and the fee. Mostly, the attraction is the better known interviewee – Musil was less known, in 1922, than Polgar, who was as well known in his day as, say, Roger Ebert is in ours.

The joke does not contain the whole truth however. Musil walks it back a bit in the next paragraph:

Other than this it is charming that one may, in an interview, ask a person questions in a manner that would otherwise be offensive. One must naturally get out of the moronic “how do you like our city” and “did you sleep well on the trip” . One must terrify the interviewee, shake him up; for one must successfully put questions, in the name of cultural duty, for answers that of his own free will he would never surrender.”

This is the whole matter of the interviewers art. Or no: I say this having done more interviews in my freelancing days than I can count, from the high – for instance, William T.Vollman – to the low, as for instance some mid level clerk in charge of the erotic comics section at the local comix store. I had no previous training when I was thrown into this work; I very quickly learned that what you read is not eactly what the interviewee said.

But more of that in a moment…

Just as Musil suggests, moronic questions are only good for softening the victim up. Or at least that is how it should be. In fact, as any faithful reader of the NYT Magazine knows, the moronic level is often the alpha and omega of the interview. For instance, there is the old standby, where do you work? This question is always being thrown at writers, for reasons that puzzle me. Would we ask an accountant where they account?  Yet, it is an inexpungable bug in the system of which interviews form a part. The place a writer writes has some strange attraction, it has become a tourist destination of the mind, yet I don’t know what the there is there. What does the question even mean, given that it is a rare writer whose head doesn’t suddenly fill, on the most unexpected occasions, with solutions to plot problems, phrases, rhymes, and the whole business.

However, while Musil says some excellent things about interviewng in this essay – I must get back to a few of them at some other time – he doesn’t say, no interviewer ever says, that there is a gap between transcript and copy. Transcript isn’t copy. After the interview is done and the tape recorder is turned off or the writing peters out in your notebook, where your unintelligible scribble has been lunging through the pages like a troop of drunken monkeys, you have to then take it all home, or to your office, or whereever, and make sense of it.

Sense. Oh.

Americans in particular are not raised in the kind of conversational milieu that made interviews, that 18^th century invention, possible. There’s a certain inabilty to form obiter dicta spontaneously as the ocassion arises. In the 18^th and 19^th century, all these figures, these Goethes and Samuel Johnsons, cultivated the pronunciamento like little dictators. It was as if a part of their brain snapped on and they could give a speech. This cerebral state hardly exists in the general population. Instead, there is a constant segue between half starts, riffs that deadend, rap that becomes air time, and the like. And – one hopes – in the midst of this, one will encounter some beautiful conclusive sentence, the kind that the publishers love, because their ;publication designers (whose firm belief is that nobody reads any more) can use it as a ribbon in bold, large type scrolling across a dense, three or four column page. Unfortunately, most of these glorous sentences wilt into mere platitudes once they are awarded big font size.

I love American speech; it is the glory of the country. It just doesn’t conform to the old strictures of the interview.

Thus, the relationship of the transcript to the interviewer becomes something like the relationship between a DJ and a stack of tunes. The DJ has to find, among the disparate sounds and songs, some common threads, as well as abrupt changes. He has to create a consistent soundscape.

Similarly, the interviewer has to recontext the context. Usually, for nstance, that beautiful sentence is nested in among a bunch of banalities. It needs to be lifted out. Other sentences need to be pared back, supplied with the verb that was dropped in the moment, pruned of the repetitions. The question answer format has to be straightened out too, as many interviewees tend to give the most satisfactory answer to question 1 when answering question 3.

In a way, Musil is right. The end product is the kind of  simulacra mega-capitalism thrives on. The interviewee, in my experience, is often delighted with one’s work.

Here’s an exercise: watch a tv talk show interview of Youtube, and try to take notes on the Q. and A. Then turn it off, read the notes and see if they make sense. Then make them make sense. Then watch the interview again.

Voila: the interview experience.

Johnson again, or getting near what I set out to say, but not saying it

For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.

There’s a famous story about the first time William Hogarth met Samuel Johnson. It happened when Hogarth was visiting Samuel Richardson:

“While he [Hogarth]  was talking, he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an idiot whom his relations had put under the care of Mr Richardson, as a very good man. To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forwards to where he and Mr Richardson were sitting, and … displayed such a power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this idiot had been at the moment inspired."

”

Hogarth’s testimony to the strangeness of Johnson’s presence, even to the extreme of thinking, at first impression, that he was a congenital idiot, is not idiosyncratic.  Famously, Johnson ate behind a screen at his friend Mrs. Thrale’s house, due to the fact that he was a notoriously sloppy eater. This was not due to some viciousness of his upbringing, but to some deep malfunction of his physiology. Johnson seems to have been afflicted with something ‘daemonic”, which has been variously diagnosed as Tourette’s syndrome, or epilepsy, or whatever it is that scrofula was – since scrofula was the diagnosis of his age. He was a man of tics, a man who could never totally trust his own gestures. For this reason  I like to thinki of him in terms of the daemon: and this is all the more appropriate in that he could only have lived in the eighteenth century, with its interpenetration of Enlightenment sensualism and Mesmeric mystery. It was an age has  features that only come out when looked at through the daemon. It was in a rented room in a house in Johnson’s London that Swedenburg, a man Johnson never met, I think, also met his daemon, or his angels, who threw him bodily around the place – and a working class artist, William Blake, met his there too. Curious how Johnson certainly seems on the other end of the spectrum from Blake, and yet it is easy to imagine Johnson having the kind of tolerance for Blake that he had for Christopher Smart.

Johnson’s prose is famously mannered – like Gibbon, Johnson never met a contrast that he didn’t want to set in prose marble. However, his conversation, as recoreded by Boswell and others, was a more darting affair. And yet, his acquaintances recognized his voice in the Rambler. Those wonderfully balanced sets, which seem so attached to pen and paper rather than tongue and gesture, were , apparently, rooted in the latter – it is as though the “Sir” which Boswell’s Johnson so copiously initials his responses and speeches, that term of address  in which respect and attack are mingled , seems to dance, unsounded, over those paragraphs that Hazlitt, later, would find all too balanced, and all too indiscriminating as between occasions for high style and occasions for low notice:

“We can no more distinguish the most familiar objects in his descriptions of them, than we can a well known face under a huge  painted mask. The structure of sentences, which was his own invention, and which has been generally imitated since his time, is a species of rhyming in prose, where one clause answers to another in measure and quantity, like the tagging of syllables at the end of a verse. The close of a period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense  is balanced with the sound; eacch sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza.”

Yet Hazlitt is, like everybody else, enchanted by Boswell’s Johnson, and makes a distinction between the writer and the speaker. The latter spoke as though he had cast off fear, while the former wrote as if any errant sound would plunge him into the abyss.

Yet we have the testimony of his friends that The Rambler did sound like Johnson. His voice was in it. Perhaps Hazlitt was showing his own dread of the grotesque when he compared the writing to a huge painted mask – exaggeration, the wild growth of some  familiar thing, is one of the tropes of the gothic, and of horror. And though Hazlitt is trying to show that the famously juggled style is, in the end, as boring as a metronome, his comparisons betray perhaps another more sweeping and painful anxiety, in which the problem is not that the prose is forgetable, but that it sets up an irritating vibration in the head, which is catching – one’s own voice can be infected by this sound.

Authority is the sign of the daemonic in traditional society. In Matthew, Jesus is said to speak with exousia – authority – while Paul uses the word in a curious way when he writes that the headcovering of women in the temple is there exousia – their authority to preach. Authority is evidently power, but not any kind of power. To know that of which one speaks is a kind of power, the kind granted to any classroom lecturer whose prepared his or her notes. That is the power of the scribe. Cultic authority is something of which one can be sensible – it can prickle the hair on the back of your neck – without one knowing entirely what is in back of it. Socrates’ daemon was wholly negative – it closed down avenues of thought and discourse.This is not necessarily because they were unethical or illogical.  In Plutarch’s dialogue about the daemon, the participants arrive at no clear notion of what it was – whether it was a sense for omens or whether it was a voice. Surely, however, Socrates felt it was an authority.

This, to my mind, binds together the talk in Boswell’s Johnson with the great essays.  Contra Hazlitt, the Tatler and Spectator of Addison and Steele, which he admired so much, have become merely dim references to fill out a tale about the coming of public opinion in early modern Europe – a terrible fate, that, to be a dog’s dinner for Habermas.  But Johnson’s essays grow more enigmatic. He does have a bulldog’s way of shakng a bone – and the bones he preferred were the standard tropes of the moraliste – self love, hypocrisy, vanity, folly, etc. But he had a strong sense that the drama that the moraliste made out of sentiments and vices was a puppet show, and that the real broke down the puppets sooner or later, as one sounded the depths about what one knew to be true of oneself and others, which means sounding the depths of what one doesn’t know about oneself and others. Where does this irrepresible ignorance, this internal illusion, come from?  It is Johnson’s constant theme; and a theme, if obsessed over with enough genius, becomes a form of authority, though it resolves itself in the indeterminacy of an enigma. God is a problem whose resolution is another problem, Novalis once wrote: and such problems all are lit with something divine, or daemonic.

This is the kind of thing that Johnson knows best. It is why he is the master of procrastination, that moment when knowledge confronts its essential helplessness before the fact that it transforms nothing, that it dissolves into a ghost if it isn’t the pawn of desire. He turns these moments into existential acts – acts of the highest futility.

“To act is far easier than to suffer; yet we everyday see the progress of life retarded by the vis inertia, the mere repugnance to motion, and find multitudes repining at the want of that which nothing but idleness hinders them from enjoying. The case of Tantalus, in the region of poetick punishment, was fomewhat to be pitied, because the fruits that hung about him retired from his hand ; but what tenderness can be claimed by those who, though perhaps they suffer the pains of Tantalus, will never lift their hands for their own relief ?”