the fascist heart of Narcos

I’m watching Narcos, first season. Excellent show, but like Homeland, it has a fascist heart. The latter’s heart was all in the war of civilization, aka Muslims equal terrorists. It was never, the West equals massive war dealers and makers killing Muslims and erecting totalitarian states, aka the Saudis and company.There was not even a hint that this was part of the argument. In Narcos, the first show begins with the DEA agent embracing the idea that a criminal investigation is a “war” and gives an approving nod to Pinochet’s death squad action against those terrible ‘dealers’. Then of course there’s the quick flick to America, where the fact that cocaine was increasingly being used in the eighties is taken not as an indication that the particular form of suppression chosen by the state, in particular the formation of the DEA and the extraordinary powers granted it, were a huge mistake, but instead, that the dealers are more evil than we ever thought they were. The DEA, operating as a catalyst to make the smuggling much more violent, then legitimates itself with reference to the violence. And then there’s the money – which is depicted, hilariously, as going from the US to Colombia. This, we are gravely assured, alarmed the good business community of Miami. Miami in the eighties went through an economic boom precisely for the opposite reason. Nobody was investing in Colombia. Like good Latin American capitalists, the dealers invested in the US, and the US banking system and government was complicit all the way. The deregulation of finance and the increasing acceptance of offshore banking just happened, by amazing coincidence, when cocaine’s black money became a major presence in the international system.

About the money, the show is DEA dumb, siting street prices as though they were writ in concrete. The problem for the dealers was that, in spite of the great fiasco of the DEA, they had too much product, so the street price went down.

“Cocaine’s wholesale price fell sharply during the 1980s, rose somewhat in 1990, and then declined fitfully during the rest of the decade. In 1993, the wholesale price dipped below $50 per pure gram, and has never exceeded that level since. The price has fallen every year since 2000, settling at its all-time low in the first half of 2003 ($37.96)” I take this quote from WOLA, which takes it from the American government. Even so, prices and amounts should be viewed with caution. The DEA and police department habitually inflate the price of the drugs they either interdict or claim are on the street. There is really not a reliable index in this area. Estimates are made in the most hazy way, and then, unsceptically, distributed by a press that has long identified with the DEA and the “war on drugs.”

Narcos, unfortunately, is still animated by the spirit of Harry Anslinger, the founder of the Federal antinarcotics bureau and the man who, from the 1920s to the 1960s, did more than anyone else to create the drug mythology. It is painfully stupid to broadcast a series about cocaine that includes crackpot evidence about how rats will prefer cocaine to food or anything else when the audience, and sans doute the people who produced the show, have largely experienced cocaine in their own lives, and know how various responses to it can be. It is and will be the case that cigarettes and alcohol cause more damage than cocaine and heroin put together. The state may well have reasons to suppress the latter two, but those reasons shouldn’t  be allowed to trump reality or fill our prisons. Now, of all times, is not the time  to make the DEA heroic. 

the room and the wave in Woolf - a beginning

The black spot – the pirate’s anticurrency - of the utilitarian mindset, as was seen early on by critics like Hazlitt and Macaulay, was that it led to no larger purpose. Macaulay, attacking James Mill, made some great shots at the utilitarians – “whose attainments just suffice to elevate them from the insignificance of dunces to the dignity of bores” – but attained his larger purpose by arguing with Mill’s narrow definition of the purpose of human action on the grand scale:

“But what are the objects of human desire? Physical pleasure, no doubt, in part. But the mere appetites which we have in common with the animals would be gratified almost as cheaply and easily as those of the animals are gratified, if nothing were given to taste, to ostentation, or to the affections. How small a portion of the income of a gentleman in easy circumstances is laid out merely in giving pleasurable sensations to the body of the possessor! The greater part even of what is spent on his kitchen and his cellar goes, not to titillate his palate, but to keep up his character for hospitality, to save him from the reproach of meanness in housekeeping, and to cement the ties of good neighbourhood. It is clear that a king or an aristocracy may be supplied to satiety with mere corporal pleasures, at an expense which the rudest and poorest community would scarcely feel.”

This anthropological protest against the utilitarian apriori was greatly expanded by Veblen at the end of the 19^th century. It is certainly not a comprehensive critique, but it speaks to a “lowness” in the utilitarian world view that was certainly felt by almost all the Victorian sages.

But those sages also saw that, indeed, the era of the satiety of mere corporal pleasures was on the horizon. From the sugar that sweetened the tea of the poorest laborer in England in the 18^th century to the new department stores that Zola and Dreiser wrote about, a sort of synthesis was being enacted in which the great social purpose was not to satiate desire but to arouse it.

The result, in its critics eyes, was that a utilitarian culture slowly dissolved the belief that there could be any larger purpose, or that desire was anything but a tool to profit.  Simmel, in the Philosophy of Money at the  end of the 19^th century, saw that this was an insistent characteristic of a society in which the social nexus seemed to have been supplanted by the cash nexus: rationality becomes less about reason as a living, dialectical entity – an open spirit of inquiry - and more about the best strategy for making a money, for playing the angle, a strategy to which all creativity is subordinate. Simmel’s sociology may have enormously exaggerated the inroads of rational self-interest: Europe was still a continent that was majority peasant in 1900, and larger purposes, ominously, were everywhere. But there was something inexorable about the social logic that Simmel lays out, something that could be felt, like a chill, on ever street of every city. It was not only among intellectuals that the idea that humans were reduced to their use in a machine that was felt to be an insult to humanity, and a source of suffering. On the other side of Simmel’s money-bound society were the many critiques and utopias, all of which were meant to solve it, or transcend it, or roll it back. It was certainly felt by Mill, in the 1860s, that something had gone wrong with both the social logic of utilitarianism and with happiness itself, as it was currently interpreted. Woolf and the people that she knew all felt that something had gone badly wrong. But the difference between 1850 and 1922 – the difference that Woolf had dated, famously, to 1910, in her essay on Arnold Bennett – was that the failure of the larger purpose was not seen as a bad thing, but rather as a stone that had been lifted from off our breasts. At least in Woolf’s own writing, this becomes an aesthetic principle of loose ends. The word about Woolf is that she is always psychological.  However, one cannot get very far reading Jacob’s Room in this way. In a sense, Jacob’s Room is a rubican novel – once she wrote it, she could not go back. What she does in it is suggest that the novel need not be tied to the fate of the character. Instead, fate could be put to one side, and a certain looseness, a certain concantanation of life paths, can be thrust into the foreground.  

Myself, I am continually thrown back on a persistant binary in Woolf’s writing between the room and the wave. Jacob’s Room, evidently, stakes itself on the room – but it is a book filled with waves. In an early scene in the book, when Jacob is boating with his Cambridge friend Timmy Durrant, the wave is thrust into literature itself – or, rather, literature is thrust into the wave.

“The seat in the boat was positively hot, and the sun warmed his back as he sat naked with a towel in his hand, looking at the Scilly Isles which--confound it! the sail flapped. Shakespeare was knocked overboard. There you could see him floating merrily away, with all his pages ruffling innumerably; and then he went under.”

“… all his pages ruffling innumerably”! This is such an intelligent adverb that I myself go under it, bow to it, sink beneath it. This must be said. But to return to my point,  this is not the only place where the wave becomes the great universal solvent in which all things are dissolved and resolved.

I’ll do more, I hope, with the room and the wave later.

  

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.