facts or factoid, it doesn't make any difference to Frank Bruni

I find the whole GOP presidential frosh tryouts great fun. One of the things they bring out is how bad, how completely and hopelessly bad, our political reporters and commenters are. Case in point: Frank Bruni's column intoday's NYT.   Bruni, and the NYT, have been doing their best to blow on the flames, dim as they are, of Fiorina's popularity - thinking that this will certainly countercheck that Trump! So this is the kind of thing you get: 

But here comes Carly Fiorina, and her brand is aced-it-already and know-it-all. I’ve seen this firsthand.

For a magazine story in 2010, I followed her around and interviewed her over several days. Someone would mention a flower; she’d rattle off a factoid about it. I’d ask her about a foreign language that she’d studied; she’d make clear that she’d dabbled in two others as well. Her husband would tell a story; she’d rush to correct him and fill in the details.

Now, as a reporter, it was Bruni’s job, apparently, to accept at face value any bullshit he was presented with. The flower and its factoids, that is bizarre: what, did Fiorina discuss the evolution of the Sago palm? And what is it with fact and factoids, or are they (oh, I know this answer teacher! I know it!) approximately the same thing for the NYT’s ace reporter? And what foreign language was it, exactly. And how did she “dabble” in two others. Could she actually speak, converse, in a language other than English? Did Bruni talk to her in that language?

Yes, Bruni’s bizarre anecdotes, offered to reinforce the point that here is a woman who is all policy paper, seem exactly the kind of thing that a candidate would do to impress that most gullible of species, the Timesman. But gullibility, as any conman knows, depends upon the subject’s unconscious vanity. In this case, of course, the vanity is institution wide: it is the vanity that the reporter’s are also all policy paper. It is an odd thing that after decades of press fiascos, from the swallowing of every bit of ratbait put out by the Bushies about Iraq’s “threat” to the US to the notion that the economy was rock solid in 2007 and 2008, which was the grand narrative of the NYT business pages at the time, people like Bruni still think the general public is in awe of them – that they are authorities, no less. The reason they aren’t authorities has something to do with the inability to distinguish between facts and factoids, and the inability to either name a flower or a language or to judge competence in either biology or Spanish – presumably the foreign language under discussion – or French, or Chinese, or any other language.

Bruni’s column was about what a dolt Governor Walker is. But what it proves is what a gull Bruni is.  

on the incredible luck of the Bushes

I expect as few surprises from the GOP as from a plugged in digital clock. So last week, I was as miffed at the evident sinking of Jeb Bush as the standard bearer as I would be if my alarm clock suddenly switched from telling time to throwing the I ching. This article, by Adam Nagourney and Jonathan Martin, has convinced me that I underestimated how deeply, deeply incompetent the GOP is. The mechanics of the race are such that if Trump wins both NH and SC, which I think he has every likelihood of doing, it will be hard, maybe impossible, to stop him. Not that I care outside of my position as amateur handicapper about it at all. Trump is no more racist or sexist than the lot of the others. And as a man who uses bankruptcy the way another person would shower after a hard game of touch football - washing off the dirt - I have no doubt that, in the slim case he was elected, he'd soon forget his fascist - or should I call it Jacksonian? - promise to deport 11 million immigrants. Right now, as a person well and truly burned, I am simply enjoying the pundit class desperately trying to cry up any indication that the "Trump bubble" has burst. Hence, the obsessive focus on polls that show Trump down, and the blind eye turned to larger polls - for instance, the recent NBC one - that shows him solidifying his lead in the race. Trump makes me dream a bit. If the Dems had only nominated someone, in 2004, who would have gone after Bush's masculinity the way Trump has gelded Jeb, who knows? We might have had a one term junta blip.The Bushes are awful easy to knock down. They depend on the kindness of strangers - of a fawning press and a solid Wall Street backfield. Otherwise, they go bump.

the casualties of utilitarianism

“ I could write the history of every mark and scratch in my room…” Virginia Woolf

Both John Stuart Mill and Virginia Woolf were products of families prominent in the history of utilitarianism. In fact, Woolf’s uncle, James Fitzjames Stephen, wrote a book against what he took to be  Mill’s apostosy from utilitarianism, which you can’t be more ultra than that, while her father, Leslie, whose eminence in the Victorian world was as unimpeachable as the Queen's, made time from during his vast labors to write the canonical history of the English utilitarians.

Famously, John Stuart Mill, educated according to his father’s, James Mill’s, notions, suffered a great breakdown in his youth, which he attributes, in a way, to the creed in his autobiography:

“For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue; but that if I could see such an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure; content, as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the general lot.

This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event of my life.”

Woolf’s breakdowns, at the end of the century, are well known as well, although less often connected to the Stephen family’s place in English thought. In Virginia Woolf’s memoir of moving to Bloomsbury from her father’s house in Hyde Park in 1904, the year her father died, she uses the move as a way of symbolizing the end of the Victorian era – the “shadows of Hyde Park” – and the beginning of a new era. During the transition, she was mad. It was the second time she was mad.

“While I had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas, Vanessa had wound up Hyde Park Gate once and for all. She had sold; she had burnt; she had sorted; she had torn up. Sometimes I believe she had actually to get men with hammers to batter down – so wedged into each other had the walls and the cabinets become. But now all the rooms stood empty. Furniture vans had carted off all the different belongings. For not only had the furniture been dispersed. The family which had seemed equally wedged together had broken apart too.” –Old Bloomsbury.

Now, a philosophy by itself doesn’t often cause people to hear birds singing Sophocles. But I would claim that there was something in utilitarianism that was connected to both of these breakdowns. It was, in part, the contradiction at the heart of the utilitarian synthesis of 18^th century hedonism and the calculation of self-interest. While that hedonism was the starting point, the massive industrial structure of the calculation of self-interest that was flung across the 19^th century rather buried it. At the very least, in the dialectic, the douceur de la vie was distorted beyond recovery. There was, of course, a line of Victorian intellectuals who recognized this very well – and mostly they fell on the right. Mostly, reactionaries. From Carlyle to Dickens to Ruskin, there was a great, screaming sense of the sacrifice made to the calculus of rational self interest. And yet, it had the effect that it became hard, if not impossible, to recapture what the 18^th century meant by hedonism. Dickens, for one could only, at the furthest reach, imagine happiness as owning a house free and clear with a pretty housewife to occupy it (and sneaking around with one’s mistress to make it tolerable). Carlyle imagined fascism, and Ruskin a return to the era of the Gothic.

Interestingly, at the time that Woolf was having her second attack of madness, she’d been reading one writer who was very much on the quest for a more 18^th century version of happiness: Walter Pater.

I’ve been reading Jacob’s Room, and thinking about these things,  which I think converge in that novel. But I’ve also been thinking about what it meant for Woolf to move out of Hyde Park – out of the Victorian era – and into the modern era. In Jacob’s Room, at least, I think the complexities of the end of utilitarianism as a creed are taken into an opposition that runs through the narrative between the room and the wave.  

I think I’ll pick at this thread tomorrow.

the politics of the headline: corbyn mythologized

Using Barthes’ sensibility to analyze the myths circulated during the recent Labour leader campaign, I think I can safely say that charting the way Jeremy Corbyn was turned into a threat means understanding the work of one particular tool: the headline.

Two days ago, the headline actually burst into the content of the news itself when an editor at the Daily Telegraph, which presents itself as a non-tabloid conservative paper, had to back down over his headline for Corbyn’s appointment of John Mcdonnell to his shadow cabinet: Corbyn has just appointed a nutjob as his shadow chancellor.  Today’s foxhunting set don’t go for that chav stuff, which is so much for the maid, so the editor eventualy changed the headline.  

In the process, though, he briefly lit up the politics of headlines.

As writers know, and readers, for the most part, don’t, the headline is not composed by the writer of the story or the review or column. Headlines are thus, peculiar things, true relics of, if not the death of the author, at least his or her continued subservience to the institution or patron for whom they write. On the one hand, the headline must tip the reader into the story in some way, while on the other, they must also operate to show how the reader is to read the story. In this second function, headlines are more akin to the answer to riddles, or the punchline to jokes, or the moral of fables, than they are to the entry in a dictionary or encyclopedia. That is, headlines are less indexical, or denotative, than oracular, or connotative.

They also exist systematically, which means that headlines can be treated as a genre, with certain conventions. The Telegraph editor’s mistake was one of misunderstanding the headline convention that is given by the paper.

Tabloids, of course, are famous for exploiting certain conventions of the headline – transmuting the typographical excess of the headline into a more general rhetorical excess. Readers of the NY Post or the Sun know that the game is all in the headline, and that the rest is, for the most part, filler – thus neatly reversing the “normal” relationship between text and title. Non-tabloid papers also transmute the excess of the headline, but in a different way: here, the libidinal possibilities of the headline are sublimated. It is the quintessential bourgeouis act, act least in the classic Weberian sense – like the capital that is accumulated by the bourgeois and spent prudently, the headline’s typographic independence is made subservient, for the most part, to a more nuanced interpretation of the text that follows. One might say that the non-tabloid paper understands itself to have an indexical responsibility.  Thus, the print is normally smaller, the use of slang lesser, the spirit of gleefulness, when released, turned into giggliness rather than sadistic display, and so on. Of course, just as the answer to a riddle is different than the answer to a mathematical problem (the riddle both solves a cognitive disjunction and exploit the shock of it, for one thing; for another thing, a riddle limits its systematic effect), so, too, is a headline different from merely a paraphrase. It is in this difference that a certain politics ranges.

One noticed – readers noticed and commented on – the sudden appropriation of tabloid like headlines by the Guardian and the Telegraph as Jeremy Corbyn moved from being a political eccentric to the leader of Britain’s second largest political party. Here, one feels, the headline, in all its implication, started driving the news. Private eye made a funny comparison of what Corbyn said and what he was reported to have said – underlining the systematic bias of the newspapers. The abridgement and distortion of Corbyn’s comments – whether about Hamas and Hezbollah or about Osama bin Laden or about segregating trains at rush hour between men and women – is not something I’m going to go over one more time. Rather, I want to point out that the spirit of the headline, with its capacity to seemingly contain a whole truth while actually operating a fiction-making abridgment, infected, as it were, the reporting itself.

This does not exhaust the meaning of headline politics in this instance, though. For passing beyond the effects of the text, there is also the total effect of the headline in the newspaper context to consider. A headline, after all, announces something new. In the case of Corbyn, much of what was reported wasn’t new at all – he has been a remarkably busy speaker over time. But the effect of the headlines was to make it seem as though new information was being dug up about Corbyn – or, to put this inversely, that Corbyn was hiding his past. This is of course an especially important maneuver in modern image management, so much so that we have a name for it now: gotcha journalism. It is not just that the figure who is “gotten” is exposed, but the exposure implies that the figure has been busy hiding. It makes the newspaper’s research, which is not actually very much work, nowadays, what with Google, seem like an “investigation.”

There is probably much more to say about this rich topic, but now I have to pick my son up from school. So that is it.

barthes on myth

In “Myth today,” Barthes’ methodological supplement to his series of decoding essays on quotidien life in 1950s France, Barthes tells us that he the “myths” he analyzes are products of language – of what he calls a peculiar “theft” of language – and are not contents. Unlike the usual study of myth, which proceeds from fictions like the God of the Sea or unicorns, Barthes view is that myth names a procedure. “Myth is not defined by the object of its method, but by the fashion with which it offers it.”

This linguistic fashion or mode leads Barthes to make some great generalizing remarks, in order to establish the semiotic norm within which myth is found. Myth, according to Barthes, always operates on the level of tokens (valant pour) rather than types. Within the system of tokens, “myth is a particular system in that it constructs itself in deriving itself from a semiological chain that pre-exists it.” To understand how this works, Barthes borrows an example from Paul Valery. Suppose that you, like Valery, are a fifth grader and you are learning Latin. You open your Latin book and you find an illustration of a lion and under it the phrase, quia ego nominor leo. This means, For me, I am called a lion. What is the real meaning of this? It is not that you are meant to think, this lion is saying he is called a lion. Rather, you are meant to think, this is how a subject accords with its object grammatically. Though the presence of the signified – the lion being called a lion – exists, haunts, the example, that primary meaning is subsumed in the larger meaning, which is implied in the entire situation that involves Latin class, the student, the book, and the illustration.

“On the plane of language, I will call the final term of the first system, the signifier, the sense… on the plane of myth, I will call it the form.”

This distinction doesn’t specify what is special about myth, but simply puts it in the set of such exemplifying gestures. Myth does have a property that distinguishes it, which is the way it empties or deforms the sense – in this way, it performs a “theft of language”. The theft of language – or the theft of the signifier – is what myth does. Although it can’t do without the signifier, which operates as a constant variable, it can also not do with returning to the signifier – for that means demythifying. This is the second of the three different types of reading of myth. The first does make the logical move from the sense to the example. This, for Barthes, is a cynical moment in the rational production and use of myth – it is the p.r. man’s gig. The third reading is simply to fall for the whole thing, to respond to its dynamic, to understand its non-presence as presence.

This semiological reading of myth, in Barthes, is associated with, but not entirely implicated by, his ideological reading. In this reading, what characterises all myth is that “the mission of myth is to ground a historic intention in nature, a contingency in eternity. For this gesture is that of bourgeois ideology itself.”   

This is Barthes great theme, however much he turns to different ways of wrestling with it.

self-consciousness: notes

We were walking down the street the other day, Adam and me, and we passed a woman who stopped and smiled and said to me, you have the Coppertone baby there. Referring to Adam’s blonde curls and his tan, the result of our visit to the beach over Labor Day weekend.
I smiled back at her. We walked on and Adam said to me, I’m not a baby.
I’m not a baby. Adam has begun to use this phrase quite often. And it has made me think about … well, about the origin of self-consciousness.
We all know, consciousness has a fatal tendency to doubling, to finding itself in front of mirrors, or even, in many cases, fun house mirrors, a mirror effect that is even reflected in the possibility of there being a first person subject in Indo European languages, at least, which leads to the grammatical possibility of that first person taking itself as a predicate. Every cowboy, structuralism teaches, is eventually caught in his own lasso. But we have a tendency to freeze this moment, this mirror stage, outside of the history of our experience, as though self-consciousness were enacted in some lunar zone outside our biology. 
Which is a fancy windup to saying that the stage of “I’m not a baby” is full of unteased out sense, I think. For not being a baby means, I think, I’m not a baby any more. This of course means that I was a baby once. In fact, in the very near past. Adam, like any little boy in the age of digital photography, can, if he chooses, wander through galleries of pics of himself being very much a baby. A year ago he was one and three fourths, and two years ago he wasn’t even one – and yet he was, here on a bouncy bounce, there with Momma, there with a toy giraffe. He certainly recognizes himself in these pics – in a way that is more implicating for him, now, than it is for, say, me, looking at a baby pic of myself (is there one? I don’t have a lot of pics of myself as a child – or, actually any). 
I often ask Adam if he remembers things. Do you remember Grandma’s Dog? Do you remember Atlanta? Etc. Many times he says yes, and sometimes he begins the game with me: Dad, remember the swimming pool? For us, his babyhood is something that has, somehow, slipped beyond our grasp – is he already almost three? Oh Jesus. Oh I loved it when he was asleep in his cradle. Oh, I remember him learning to walk. Etc. All of those moments, and yet he grew up when I was absent minded, when I was thinking of something else, it always seems. But for him, there is the bio-temperal fact that he is not a baby, and that he was a baby, and that the baby he used to be is an object he has left behind, with the object’s properties: a certain size, a certain capacity to make shrieky sounds, a certain inability to do what big boys like him do. So, he left the baby behind, and yet he is, or was, that baby. 
Part of the weirdness of Western culture is the high value it puts on youth. I have a complex theory about this which has to do with early capitalism, the demographic changes in the composition of the household which accompanied or were implicated in the rise of the capitalist mode of production.  The ideal of age has been thoroughly overthrown, now,  but  the conditions that determine the mortality rate allow us now to live, en masse, to unheard of ages, which means that there are more old people than ever before, This age overhang is, itself, a sort of accident, and one that probably has a future, just as the youth had a future in the accident that changed the household norms of the seventeenth century. Youth was created in the vacuum of waiting for marriage by choice, that necessary period of accumulation before a man could hope to marry or a woman could consider marriage.  At the moment, though, old age, advancing age, is curiously lacking in a culture of its own. It looks backwards to its youth for the culture that it has, a reflex conditioned, massively, by the semiosphere. I don’t want to read this cultural phenomenon back into Adam’s own looking backwards – a backward look marked, in proper Lacanian style, by a negation. However, I do think this moment helps us break our theoretical trance before the mirror stage and bring back history. I’ll have to tell Adam next time he says it: Adam, you are such a Marxist!

corbyn and conditions

Another day, another prediction in the British press that Corbyn will lead to the end of labour, or massive losses in 2020, or tory heaven. Whatever.
It is an amazing spectacle. Three months ago, not one of the people who are gifting us with their predictions of what is going to happen in five months was able to predict what was going to happen in three months. Back in those rosy days, the press pundits in the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph, etc. were all busy wondering whether Kendall was going to carry the day. Maybe it would be exciting Andy Burnham, New Labour's plastic man!
But ignoring past failure is a prerequisite for future prediction among the press set.
So polls that are more like focus groups are wheeled out, from the usual suspects. And the pundits have settled down to learn nothing from their experience, as is their wont.
What is to be learned from their experience for the rest of us? Let's take a grab at the obvious.
All the establishment actually believes that current conditions will continue indefinitely. They have not only bought the idea of austerity as one that can be sold to the people, they believe it will actually bring about economic security to their own type, The "poor" will be disadvantaged, and the press establishment that pretends to pinkish tendencies often cries crocodile tears over the fact that Labour, disempowered under the British Fidel Corbyn Castro, will make Labour unable to achieve the power to help the disadvantaged. The pinkish tinge, nowadays, means entirely forgetting how the middle class was built, as well as the fact that the "poor" are actually working class, part of the machine that produces surplus labour value that drifts to the capitalist. Instead, being pinkish means asserting a sort of charitable impulse in the busy elite, while allowing them to get on with producing a more and more glorious speculative sector.
Well, in five years, perhaps the austerity of the Tories will bring prosperity to the average British household. But perhaps, in five years, Britain will have to pay the price for having fed a swollen financial sector while neglecting everything else except arms sales. Here's a scenario: China and India stumble. The business cycle god does not suspend history even for such upward strivers. This spreads alarm in the financial sectors, such that there is another financially caused recession. The tories continue, as they almost must, their insande austerity fetishism. The UK unemployment rate, which is currently a cool 5.5 percent, nearly doubles to 10 percent. Corbyn, who has adopted a tone of opposition such that the Tories have publicized it, now stands as the man who said austerity would ultimately make things worse - and as the man warning against an economy that is supported by a swollen financial sector.
Labour might still lose, but the Tories would be in pretty bad shape under this not so fantastic scenario.
The press establishment is still living in the 90s, still thinking there is no alternative when the alternative they have chosen has already led to disaster in 2008. Of course, they neither predicted that disaster nor actually experienced it, as is their wont.
I would not put too much trust in whatever they write. They live in shells, like oysters, but unlike oysters, they rarely produce a pearl.