the parable of methods

In a letter to Sophie Valland, Diderot gave an account of an argument concerning method between his friend Grimm and M. Le Roy. Grimm hated method, or at least talk about method – either you knew how to arrange things through the force of things, or you do not. Le Roy took the opposite opinion. Just then the secretary of the ambassador of Naples in France – Ferdinando Galiani – spoke up:

“My friends, I am reminded of a fable: listen. It will be, perhaps, long, but it won’t bore you.
One day, in the midst of the forest, there arose a dispute concernng song between the nightingale and the cuckoo. Each vaunted his talent. “what bird, said the cuckoo, has a song as easy, as simple, as natural and also as measured as me?|”
- What bird, said the nightingale, has one that is sweeter, more varied, more lively and more light and more touching than mine?
- The cuckoo:  I say little, but what I say has weight, and order, and is thus memorable.
- The nightingale: I love to talk: but I am always new, and I am never tiring. I enchant the forests. The cuckoo saddens them. He is so attached to the lessons of his mother that he would not dare chance a tone that he hasn’t got from her. Myself, I don’t recognize a master. I play with the rules. It is when I infringe on them that I’m admired most. What comparison can there be between his fastidious method and my happy inspirations!

The cuckoo sought to interrupt the nightingale several times. But the nightingale sang on and didn’t listen: it is a little their characteristic fault. Ours, carried away by his ideas, followed them with rapidity, without caring about the responses of his rival.

However, after  the exchange of replies and counterreplies, they agreed to give the judgment of their dispute up to a third animal.
But where to find a third equally instructed and impartial who could judge them? It is difficult to find a good judge. The went in search of one everywhere.
They were crossing a meadow when they perceived an ass with the most grave and solemn aspect. Since the beginning of assdom, none had ever sported such long ears. “ah, said the cuckoo, in seeing them,”we are really fortunate that our dispute is an affair of  ears: here’s our perfect judge. God created him for us especially!”
The ass was eating grass. He hardly imagined that one day he’d be called upon to judge music. But Providence amuses itself with all kinds of things. Our two birds abased themselves before him, complimented him on his gravity and judgment, and exposed to him the subject of their dispute, after which they humbly begged him to listen to them and decide.

But the ass, hardly turning his heavy head and not missing a blade of grass, made them a sign with his ears that he was hungry and that today was not his day to assume the judge’s seat. The birds insisted: the ass continued to graze. In so doing, his appetite eased. There was some trees planted along the path through the meadow. “oh well, “ he told them, go there. I surrender to your wish: you will sing, I will digest, I will listen to you, and then I will tell you my opinion.

The birds went like a shot and perched themselves. The ass followed them with the air and step of a judge made of cement walking through the halls of the palace of justice. Finally he arrived and said: “begin, the court will hear you.” He was of course the sole court.

The cuckoo said: My lord, my argument is such that you cannot miss a word. Grasp the character of my song and, above all, observe the artifice and the method.” Then, breathing deeply and flapping his wings to emphasize the beat, he sang: coocoo coocoo coocoo coooocooo coocoo. And after having combined this in all possible ways, he fell silent.

The nightingale without a preambule deployed his voice, threw himself into the boldest of modulations, followed the newest tunes, and the ones that were the most rare. His cadences were such that they verged on the breathless; now one heard the sounds fall and murmur from the bottom of his throat like the ripples of a stream which loses itself among the pebbles, now the voice went higher, swellled little by little, filled the entirety of the air and remained there as though suspended. It was successively tender, light, brilliant, pathetic and painted whatever character it took on. But his song was not made for everybody.

Carred away by his enthusiasm, he kept singing; but the ass, who had already yawned many times, stopped him and said. I don’t doubt that everything that you sang there is very beautiful, but I don’t understand it. It appeared to me to be bizarre, tangled, and incoherent. You are perhaps more expert than your rival, but he is more methodical than you – and I, I am for method!

Such is the parable of methods.

Gehlen on alienation, Marx, and instituted freedom

In 1952 the conservative sociologist (and literally, I should note, a former Nazi one of whose students, Fritz Arlt, was a key functionary in the destruction of Poland’s Jews) Arnold Gehlen published a famous paper entitled “Over the birth of freedom from alienation.” The paper had two goals. One was to establish the essentially idealistic geneology of Marx’s notion of alienation. Gehlen traces it back to Fichte’s notion that the I in actualizing and externalizing itself experiences some essential loss of control. That feeling of loss and the desire to reestablish total control of the ego’s activity is compared, by Gehlen, to the French revolutionary terrorist program to establish total control in order to have total freedom – except, as Gehlen amusingly puts it, Fichte was just storming the Bastille of his own head. The idealistic assumption about the total I, here, is then traced through its appearance in Schelling and Hegel up through Marx and, to an extent, Freud.

As Gehlen says, Fichte’s insight was a genuine idea – and genuine ideas are rare in philosophy. Instead of claiming that Fichte is simply wrong about the “I” and its self-activity, Gehlen claims that alienation, as it develops in German idealist philosophy, describes a genuine phenomenon. That phenomenon concerns a two-fold sense of the world: on the one hand, the feeling that “man” or some creator has constructed the world, and on the other hand, the feeling that the creator is in the power of the created. This feeling, of course, slips from man the collective to oneself as the individual, a part of a partial collective. This powerful explanatory schema was employed, according to Gehlen, by the next generation of left Hegelians, like Feuerbach, to explain and demystify religious belief. God, it turns out, is a perfect symbol of the alienation process at work: man creates God, and then reverses the relationship so that it is God, in myth, who creates man. That historical and intellectual reversal is, perhaps, the central property of myth. Myth in this enlightment sense is that which both perceives the power relationships implicated in the real and reverses them. Thus, myth cannot be dispelled simply by claiming that myth is a lie – an illusion is not a lie. It is a genuine phenomenon out in the world. Here Gehlen is content to point to how illusion is laid on the table and understood, freeing us from it. Myself, I think he could have gone further: it must be dissipated not by analysis, but by the movement of the angle of one’s vision. Analysis might convince one that what one is seeing is an illusion, but only that practical movement can dissipate the illusion.

But Gehlen isn’t just investigating the idealistic background of Marx’s comments in The German Ideology. He is also interested in Fichte’s idea on account of his own idea – that the human being characterized by a fundamental lack, which is at the nucleus of her or his consciousness. Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology might argue with the details of Fichte’s sense of the I, but not with the general structure. Fichte, according to Gehlen, characterized the lack of control to which the I is condemned as the realm of bondage, of unfreedom. Here’s the rub, for Gehlen: in fact, the dream of total control, of the identity, say, of product and intention, is not the highest degree of freedom, but instead an erroneous reading of what freedom is all about. As Gehlen puts it, in a rhetorical flourish that would gain the approval of any Cold War liberal anti-communist: “Whosever enthusiastically realizes the feeling of freedom and the great determnation of man, whosever wishes to live out this titanic relief into which this feeling streams, whoever in this thought feels his heart beating more strongly, will, by an enigmatic destiny, find himself becoming the pacesetter of the Guillotine.”

Of course, Gehlen’s words are harder to read if we put them against the background of the pacesetters of the concentration camp, like his former student Arlt, whose thesis comparing “Israelite” women and Icelandic women – to the advantage of the former – was passed right on through by his thesis advisor. But looking aside from this: Gehlen’s notion is that the moment of alienation is not a moment in which freedom is lost, but is, rather, when it becomes a practical reality. Freedom is never direct: Humans can to themselves and their kind only maintain enduringly an indirect relationship, they must take a detour, alienate themselves, find themselves, and for this purpose we have institutions. These are the clearly human produced forms, as Marx saw correctly, in which the spiritual, an even in its greatest riches and pathos an undulating material, is realized, is interlaced in the flow of things and is thereby able to endure.”

This perspective, which welcomes alienation, bears the distinct flavor the capitalist consensus of the time – when, of course, the mention of alienation could not be avoided. It lives on when alienation is no longer a word to conjure with – has been almost unanimously junked by both the rational choice right and the rational choice left.

However, I am suspicious of this junking, its motives and its function. I'll return to this another time.

the no alternative years

Labour  failed in the most basic ways. They had four years to develop a counternarrative, but instead developed a counter-excuse: "we were so austerian, as austerian as you!" Basically, if you can't capitalize on the reserve of good feeling for government agencies like National Health and the reserve of bad feelings for privatized agencies, like the train system (ooops, that dittoed under Blair), then you should not play ball.

There are good defeats and bad defeats. A good defeat is one that lays the ideological groundwork for the future. A bad defeat is one that leaves behind a wreckage of opportunism and users. The Labour defeat (why actually are they still called Labour?) is of the second variety. It was hard to care when, as was obvious months ago, they had succeeded in turning certain victory into defeat. Running on a blairite message of nudgery and sticking to austerity against a tory party that was also running on a blairite message, they lost lost lost. And then, too, there was the repulsive - to my mind - Milliband, who has the look and feel of an upper class jerk.

So why didn’t Labour hammer austerity? Well, you have to talk about why the Great Slump happened if you are truly going to hammer austerity. And that means you have to talk about the City - which were and are great friends of the Blairites. There is a stupid analytic habit of thinking of elections as separate events from the rest of the political flow. They aren't. By choosing to softpedal the problems caused by the City, Labour backed itself into a corner long ago. Plus, of course, they have to bear the burden of the insane and wicked foreign policy of the Blair years. Given these burdens, one had to mark Labour down as the underdog from the beginning. The excuse that it was mean old Murdochian media that put them down won't work - Labour's victories have traditionally come against the establishment press – the one exception being Blair, and we know the sacrifices that Blair’s endorsement imposed. To face that media attack requires being nurturing of a structure that can withstand it and attack back - organized labour – to create a counternarrative. Blair (whose victories were a disaster for Labour) carefully cut the tie to labour. While Ed Balls retreat on austerity was bad in the campaign, it was the symptom of a wholesale disintegration of the old labour structure. 
A good case in point is transportation. Have you ever ridden on a London bus or a british train? They are awful and much, much more expensive than theircounterparts on the continent.

But the thatcherism that Blair adopted and passed on to his successors disallows any discussion of the issue of privatisation - which was accomplished, in the UK, after the Thatcher government thoroughly trashed the service and maintenance of the nationalized train system. A simple populist program that would call for comparable pricing to the norm in the EU would actually have put money in the pockets of the wage class. But it would have offended the city, and the blairites, and so it can't even be spoken. Instead, the pledge was a process one of handing power over buses back to regional authorities and blah blah blah. It was typical of the thrd way style: a lot of boring process talk to get around offending the moneyed. 

I think this election is a premonitory of the next pseudo-left wipeout, in France. The PS has set itself up for one of those defeats it will be hard to survive. Unfortunately, we will have a rightwing Europe to contend with in the next decade. Unfortunately, too, it won’t look much different than if we had a pseudo-left Europe to contend with in the next decade. No alternative, once a slogan, is now a cancer.

enough mass death, please

Excellent article about what is happening in Yemen.

It is part of the comedy of our time that the assembly in France is voting in measures to strip the citiizens of their privacy in the name of protecting them against "terrorism", when their foreign policy is directed towards flooding the Middle East with arms and helping the Saudis destroy countries like Yemen, thus creating the perfect conditions for terrorism. It is as if the government were promoting a strict quarantine of its citizens on the one hand while funding a petri dish firesale of toxins on the other hand.

When Ukraine split into two pieces, the former president fled to Russia, and Putin's Russia supplied the rebels in the East, there was universal condemnation from the bien pensants. There was even a comic conference of the usual pro war wankers, the BHL types, in Kyev. When Yemen split into several pieces, the former president fled to Saudi Arabia, a totalitarian country, and SA bombed the shit out of Yemen to restore him, without a whimper from the bien pensant crowd. The US jumped into the fray on behalf of those friends of democracy, the House of Saud, and have had a great time assisting with the dronage. Hmm, meanwhile, the outrage from the thumbsuckers at the New Yorker or the NYRB - the crowd that includes George Packer and Ben Judah, who froth every time Putin winks are busy doing other things - honing their TED talks, no doubt.
But I'm a wee little pee, not a Gargantua of liberal interventionist virtue. And I'm raising my wee little pea voice to say: stop bombing the shit out of Yemen! Immediate aid for the people, who are on the verge of an Ethiopian style famine!

I have long given up hope that the Western states are anything but the pawn of their plutocrats. But perhaps on this issue, the good side can win. Enough of mass death, please.

desperate characters

I am reading Paula Fox’s novel, Desperate Characters, and I’m grudgingly forking over the admiration. The grudging comes not because of anything having to do with Fox, but because of the backstory that the novel was “re-discovered” and republished due to Jonathan Franzen, who wrote an essay – always a venue for a Franzen ego-trip – about how good it was and that it was better than Updike or Bellow. Well, it is pretty obvious, given Franzen’s sexism, that he was using Fox as a proxy to say that he was better than Updike or Bellow – see, even a girl is better than those big boy writers!

I am reminded of Bellow – less of Updike – by the formal structure and scene of Fox’s novel. It is like Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet in that the novel takes the urban decay of NYC in the late sixties as its pervading scene.  The adventure is in the street, while all the stage setting takes place in various lengthily described rooms, where the party, the lunch, or the wait for a doctor takes place. Such staginess is, perhaps, endemic to life in the metropolis, which unfolds, for the prosperous, in a milieu of interior decorating and chatter. There is an ineradicable theatricality about such scenes, and Fox is extremely good at making it into novelistic. One should also note how of the times this is  – once you have established a standard of furnishing, the garishness and shoddiness of public space becomes all the more oppressive and threatening, all the more indicative of some catastrophic slip in the moral economy. J.K. Galbraith had already pointed out in the Affluent Society, which was written in the fifties, that underinvestment and undervaluing of public space was a creeping disaster in America. It was as though evidence of adequate funding would be taken by the middle class as an affront, since it would visibly use their tax dollars.  

Fox’s brilliant idea is to set her central couple, Otto and Sophie Bentwood, in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. That mongrel of a word, gentrifying, hadn't yet started running around in the  vocabulary of the sixties,  but all the same we recognize the attributes, the the contact zone that, once established, allows Fox to play off public squalor and private order to the effect of undermining both the security and the virtues of the latter. Although Fox is evidently on the liberal side as a person, as we can see from one of her authorial interjections about a George Wallace for President poster, still, the pathology of the downward tending exceeds the perception of our well to do protagonists by enough of a margin that one feels more than a whiff of the Moynihan Report. The poorer residents do things like piss out the window, throw garbage on their front lawn, and kneel, drunk and vomiting, on the sidewalk. Even doing more normal things, like borrowing 11 dollars for a train fare to see a dying parent, they do it with a sort of pathological panache.

The volume on this kind of things is, of course, turned up in Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Bellow is too good a novelist to be confined to his intentions, I should say. However much he intends Sammler to be a sort of moral center, Sammler’s sexism doesn’t really convince the reader that this is the morally centered way to see the world – the women he directs it upon are just too concretely realized, Bellow’s own opinions be damned. They are dreamed too well to follow the will of the dreamer. High art, y’all.

Fox is not aiming for the panoramic effect in Desperate characters; none of the characters “speak” for her, nor, in spite of the numerous references to urban decay, is there a lot of larger cultural pointmaking. There is a subtext of references to French literature – Sophie being a native speaker – with the chief names being Racine, Balzac and Zola. Like Balzac, Fox has no Flaubertian neurosis about inserting herself as an author in the text. This makes the text more complex. At one point, Otto, who we have seen as cranky and given to yelling at Sophie or grumbling at her at least, is in bed with his wife, when Fox ESPs his heart:  “He loved Sophie – he thought about her, the kind of woman she was – and she was so tangled in his life that the time head sensed she wanted to go away from him had brought him more suffereing than he had conceived it possible for him to feel.”

A lesser author might have tried to wedge this news announcement about Otto’s deepest feelings into the story indirectly. Fox simply cuts to the chase. And it is all the bolder in that this announcement directly proceeds Otto’s marital rape of his wife, which ends, after he orgasms, with his thought: “He’d got her that time.”

Not, I should say, that Sophe recognizes Otto’s act as rape, either. The couple are a curious blend of insightful and blind.

This is to say: I’m glad I ignored Franzen’s recommendation and read the novel anyway.

Baltimore

It seems to jerk a certain chain with the right whenever it is discovered that the cop who kills or maims the black person is black too. The point made is that this is, then, a priori not a racist act.

There is a larger point here, a truth that is in real conflict with the conservative vision of America – for surely it is not only a racist act. The militarization of the police, and their elbow room to do illegal acts and acts of brutality, is not simply racist. It is also the effect of the way in which domestic affairs in America, since the Nixon era, have been framed in military terms – for instance, the War on Crime. It is also the effect of class. The overwhelming number of victims of police brutality are in the bottom of the income and wealth brackets. And the African-American population has long been on the bottom of the pole, statistically, with regard to wealth and income. It is a fact that nobody cares about in the United States that the Great Recession struck black households harder than anybody else. Pew Research had this to say in 2014:

“The wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households in 2013, compared with eight times the wealth in 2010, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Likewise, the wealth of white households is now more than 10 times the wealth of Hispanic households, compared with nine times the wealth in 2010.

The current gap between blacks and whites has reached its highest point since 1989, when whites had 17 times the wealth of black households. The current white-to-Hispanic wealth ratio has reached a level not seen since 2001.”

1989 – twenty years of painful progress wiped out. Do we want to talk about this every day? No,  we don’t want to talk about this every day.  We will not talk about this on a boat, we will not talk about this with a goat, we will not talk about this on the tv news and we sure as hell won’t talk about this in the halls of Congress.

Clearing out the underbrush, then, we still have the fact that three of the cops charged in Freddie Gray’s death are black.

Here, I think we should turn to the indispensible Charlotte Linde and her ethnographic study of an insurance company. In explaining how the insurance company tells a story about itself, Linde made the point that the persistance of the company depends upon “drafting” people into that story: this she called  “narrative induction.”

 The title of her article is:  “The acquisition of a speaker by a story: how history becomes memory and identity.”

Narrative induction properly locates story as part of a process of initiation (which, being a “native” thing, or occult, failed to qualify for the verbal place held by identify with). Linde, in this paper, is obviously moving from her concern with stories people tell about themselves – the point of which is to say something significant about the self, and not the world – to stories people tell about the world. Those stories often are about experiences not one’s own. They are non-participant narratives.

Linde divides the NPN process– as she calls it – into three bits: how a person comes to take on someone else’s story; how a person comes to tell their own story in a way shaped by the stories of others; and how that story is heard by others as an instance of a normative pattern.

This is all about how the police work. Police departments lean on their members to become police, to identify as police, to see their enemies as the police define their enemies, to define their friends as the police define their friend. As Linde points out, most of the work on this kind of thing has been done in religious studies. Specifically, the study of metanoia, conversion stories. But there’s metanoia and then there’s metanoia. There’s St. Paul on the way to Damascas, and there’s Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, on the way to the relative wealth of a Toyota Car Dealership, owned by his father-in-law. That’s why Linde, not having access to St. Paul, opted to study the trainees of a major American insurance company in the Midwest. Linde is interested in class issues. In particular, stories of occupational choice. In her Life Stories book, she presented some evidence that professionals present their occupational choice stories in terms of some vocation or calling, while working class speakers present it, more often, in terms of accident or need for money. Philosophy professors rarely will say, for instance, well, I needed a steady paycheck, looked at the job security of tenure, loved the idea of travel and vacation time, so I went into philosophy. They will give a story rooted in their view of themselves as emotional/cognitive critters.

Police work, in America, has often served as a transitional profession, over generations, from working class to white collar. Since police unions successfully raised the benefits and pay of police forces in the eighties in cities around the country, the benefits are sometimes comparable to that of a middle manager. However, it is very much the case that, like philosophy professors, many a cop will say that they always wanted to be a cop – not that, all things considered, driving a truck paid less than being a policeman. There’s a strong vocational charisma, here.  Blue doesn’t erase black and white, but the kind of white that the police represent – that formed the police consciousness, so to speak – is a legacy that the integration of police departments has not negated – merely modified.

The right has never recognized racism as a structure – in the same way that it has refused to recognize class as a structure. Alas, the latter has now become mainstream: as the countervailing power of labor unions  has dwindled, there is little sense, even among supposedly lefty academics, of class or for class. There’s been a large blindness about the class based imaginary that makes it hard to understand class conflict when it rears back and punches you in the face. In Freddy Gray’s case, you have a trifecta of racism, class conflict, and the militarizaton – or should I call it the death squadization? – of the cops.  

goddamn it: we exist!

There are sounds that torture our animal souls beyond endurance, as is discovered by children the first time they scratch a blackboard. The car alarm, untended, in the city night makes the surrounding apartment dwellers dream of firearms and blasting not only the car, but the owner. Then there is the classic crying and screaming of the baby or toddler on the plane flight. It is an amazing fact of natural history that the lungs and vocal chords, otherwise so undeveloped, could raise such mature decibels of sound, and for so long! I once shared a trans-atlantic flight with a two year old girl, six or seven row back, who was evidently sick, in some kind of pain, and able to scream ceaselessly for about two hours. Her parents couldn’t calm her. I would put that girl, at that moment, up against the lead singer of Metallica for sheer volume any time. Yet, being a parent myself, I had no appreciation for the guy in back of us who kept suggesting that she should be stuffed in the bathroom – I dreamed of stuffing him in the bathroom, dousing his head in that weird aluminum vortex of a Boeing toilet, flushing him into the ocean.  

However, our animal nature’s are as keenly attuned – or at least I find mine is, and I don’t think this is special with me – with a perhaps evolutionarily attuned sense for another variety of sound, one that gives us a rare and complex pleasure…

A story: every week day, around 5:10 p.m., I walk the three blocks to the Y pre-school where we keep Adam.  I always leave in a bit of a disgruntled state, since I suddenly realize, around 4:30, that I have a ton of things to do that I now don’t have time to do. But as I approach the school, I always have this moment – not the best moment of the day, not every day, but always in my top five – which comes about simply because I stroll past the wall of the outside playground that abuts the sidewalk. I can always hear inside that wall the sounds of the children, who  I know are strewn about the slides, the plastic car, the plastic castle, the swings, the area in front of the small basketball hoop, and in circles around the teachers, and who are chirupping, screaming, talking, shrieking with joy (their running in the wobble of the voice), laughing and weeping over some crisis. The whole din always seems to touch some spring within me: I feel an affective state we do not have a noun for. It is something like hope without an object.

Kant, of course, is the great without-an-object man. For Kant, beauty was disinterested. Art of any type is fundamentally purposive but without a purpose, a use. We have lost our way if we are thinking of what use we can put beauty too – how we can photoshop it, for instance, to sell a product. We have lost our way to what the aesthetic is about. Well, we can dicker with Kant here – in fact, all of our culture dickers with Kant here – but the feeling of hope I am describing is something like this purposiveness without a purpose. I hope, but I don’t hope for the future. There’s no moral conclusion to my hope, like  hope that we will all someday hold hands and sing. It is a feeling of great expectation without thinking that anything much is going to happen. I know that I’ll pick up Adam, get his stuff, the empties from lunch, go to the store with him, go home. The end, as Adam says, turning the last page of a picture book. These things do overlap, perhaps, my feeling – if I Venn diagramed it out, there’d be the minor expectation of the routine with Adam overlapping the hope without an object, surely.

But that unoverlapped part, it seems to me that the hope is just this: that we exist.

Goddamn it. We exist.