Meryl Streep and President Fuckface

I have never had a lot of patience with celebrity culture, but after Meryl Streep's speech, and Prez fuckface's response, I suddenly see a use for it: bugging Trump! Every day for the next four years, some celeb should denounce Trump. In the Bush years, demonstrating did nothing. The press ignored it, the Dems rolled over for Bush, and Bush laughingly did his torture dance through Iraq. But apparently Meryl Streep can press Trump's buttons with the merest whisp of a speech. Trump's touchiness won him the presidency, but maybe it will lose him the efficiency he needs to put his monster dreams in motion. I don't know. But I do know celebs now have a duty in their interviews speeches and whatever. Make Trump mad. It is the least you can do for your country.

PS: speaking of actresses, Ray Davis at Pseudopodium riffs off of my post about HRC and Chicago to introduce his fave actress (and mine) Barbara Stanwyck as the excluded third in this discussion. https://www.pseudopodium.org/ 

shirley hazzard and the Lawrentian novel

In 2000, Gary Adelman, a D.H. Lawrence scholar, wrote an essay for Triquarterly about the strange death of D.H. Lawrence’s reputation in the academia and among readers at large. Adelman uses two sources for probing into the cultural discontent with Lawrence. One was the responses of the students to a course he taught on Lawrence; the other was the responses he gathered from  a letter he wrote to 110 novelists, asking about their own past and present reading of Lawrence. The students, Adelman writes, ended up hating Lawrence.  The writers gave a more mixed response. Some, like Doris Lessing, claimed that the idea that D. H. Lawrence is “not important” is purely ideological. Lessing claims that at least two of Lawrence’s novels (Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow) are among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. On the other hand, Ursula LeGuin had a lot of sympathy with the antipathy expressed by the students, especially for the change in the character of Ursula from The Rainbow to Women in Love. Adelman notes, parenthetically, that even his students loved The Rainbow.  Only in the context of being fed all things Lawrence did they turn on it.

My own sense is that Lawrence suffers now fromm having been elevated by Leavis and similar critics in the 40s to the status of Great Britain’s great 20^th century novelist. At the same time, this crew beat down Virginia Woolf, whose pathologies they emphasized and whose styles they derided. Woolf looks to me like she has ridden out that storm, and that Lawrence, in comparison, has suffered from having his pathologies elevated and his style – for mostly, he had one style – derided.

But what Lawrence tried to do with the novel is, I think, very much alive. Lawrence liked to have a number of romances at the center of his novels in order to show, firstly, the greater social contract that pushed upon these supposedly private passions, and secondly, to show how the greater social contract was being catalyzed through these romances. It is the second function that lent these romances a mythic power, which Lawrence often translated into terms that are a bit misleading and inadequate: that is, the terms of “man” and “woman”. The inadequacy of any person representing these vast categories is at the heart of the critique of essentialism.  Nevertheless, essentialism is the grid through which most popular critics today operate, figuring out how, for instance, young women “are” through the characters in “Girls” or even “Broad City”, etc. Of the drawing of conclusions about the greater social contract, there is no end, even as what categories are highlighted and which ones are subdued is an historical variable. There’s little talk, for instance, about the class of characters on TV today. Class has become unfashionable. This has definitely had an effect on the reading of D.H. Lawrence, who grew up in class-ridden England and never for

got the enclosing, deadly nature of class  (although sometimes, when he was at his worst, he seemed to think you could fuck your way out of it).    

I’m thinking of Lawrence not because I am reading him, but because I am reading Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, which is built upon the Lawrentian dialectic of romance and the social contract. Shirley Hazzard is, I think, much more intelligent than Lawrence – she has the kind of intelligence that Lawrence so often rejected, the kind that analyzes as well as synthesizes. Hazzard died this past December. When I read of her death, I felt a pang not so much of grief but of guilt. I have long known I should read Shirley Hazzard, but for some reason I thought that it would be an effort. So I took up the novel that, it is generally agreed, is Hazzard’s masterpiece. And the effort – as in all great reading – is aided and then overwhelmed by the tidal flow of the thing.  It has, whether Hazzard thought in these terms or simply absorbed them,  the Lawrentian lineaments of a thing both monumental and living – of history tested by sensibility. I want to say something fuller about it in some future post. But the thing to say about it in this one is: read it.          

the muse of human extinction and other new year's thoughts

Richard Posner, that curiously coldblooded judge, wrote a book in 2004 that considered the economics and law of human catastrophes. It was reviewed in Slate, from which I take this precis of one of his thought experiments.

“Consider the possibility that atomic particles, colliding in a powerful accelerator such as Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, could reassemble themselves into a compressed object called a stranglet that would destroy the world. Posner sets out to "monetize" the costs and benefits of this "extremely unlikely" disaster. He estimates "the cost of extinction of the human race" at $600 trillion and the annual probability of such a disaster at 1 in 10 million.”

The six hundred trillion dollar figure is  absurd and … almost touching. What Posner has stumbled onto is one of the theological conundrums of economics, much like the scholastic chestnut about whether God could create a rock that he couldn’t lift.  The scholastic chestnut was a way of parsing the logic of divine omnipotence. The six hundred trillion dollars is a way of parsing the limit of money and the economics attached to it, since a dollar without a human being to use it is surely a worthless dollar, one whose material carrier has suddenly lost all significance.

Since, with the election of Donald Trump, we are postponing for another four years any confrontation with the global disaster of climate change, we might want to start considering that six hundred trillion dollars as a sort of black hole:  the hole into which the Holocene disappeared.  I’m going to have a hard time, obviously, reading papers or thinking about “politics” over the next four years – since the headlines will be so many cocked guns placed at my ‘privileged’ head – and I can’t think I’m alone in this dilemma. Watching America under Trump will be much like cleaning up a public restroom stall that has been visited by a succession of drunks the night before. Or substitute your own image of overwhelming visceral disgust.  But I nominate for the muse of this epoch that mythical, mystical 600 trillion dollars, that impossible self-annulling sum. Someday, it will be as plain as the Jehovah’s writing on the walls of the King of Babylon: Even billionaires won’t be able to enjoy their tax breaks when we are all extinct.

And with that… Happy new years! 

Coming back to L'america

Going to France on Aer Lingus was a gas. Returning from France on Aer Lingus was, unfortunately, less gaseous. Or more, if I count my stomach. On our flight to, the plane was half empty. On our flight back, it was full of Irish moms who thought it was cute when their three or six year olds woke you up over the mid-Atlantic at what your body clock claimed was two o’clock a.m. It was like that.

In front of me, though, something interesting happened. Two guys sat down, and they quickly revealed themselves to be Bouvard and Pecuchet. The one, who I mentally nicknamed yeahyeahyeah for his habit of saying same when he allowed his seatmate to speak, began by recapping news events and quickly drifted into a soliloquy that lasted, I believe, for around three hours. He was obviously a Ted talk waiting to happen. His topics included his awesome college record, people he had met, the Spanish American war explained, how to invest, how Facebook is an awesome company, how to buy furniture, the nature of mathematics and intuition, and amazing facts you could cull from Wikipedia about ancient Greece. There wasn’t a conventional wisdom cliché that he didn’t leap at – from the fact that the Internet is about the “democratisation of knowledge” to the fact that our intuitions evolved before our mathematics did. It was as if he had swallowed the complete works of Malcolm Gladwell and was experiencing a bad case of hangover. His seatmate, who I nicknamed right right right for his habit of muttering this when yeahyeahyeah was on this or that spiel, was very impressed by the fount he found himself seated next to, and shared his own feelings about investment, buying furniture, the meaning of Trump, American foreign policy in the age of McKinley, and the whole evolution of life and mathematics conundrum. Yeahyeahyeah had one of those very male voices that cover all the crevices in audible space – he didn’t yell, but somehow his voice stuck out like a sore thumb (one that stuck itself in my ear) in the aircraft as we were all trying to find the kind of idiot movie or tv show that would lull away the tiresome hours. After this went on for literally hours, I began to develop a sort of admiration for yeahyeahyeah. Yes, 2017 will be a Trump imprinted disaster, but as long as there is a yeahyeahyeah around, it can be processed and made into an op ed; the world of cliché, mansplaining and sottise will endure. Florida may flood, and civil rights disappear, but Malcolm Gladwellism will reign, eternal, a Platonic form (Plato was born in ancient Athens, and form is one of his philosophical terms, which comes out of a story he told about a cave that proved that humans are shadows. It turns out that modern science has overturned this theory).  

And so we came back to L’america.  

Kill kill kill kill kill the poor

One of my emphases in the little book I wrote on Marx some time ago was that Marx made the great leap towards what became Marxism in  Cologne in 1842, when he became the editor of a newspaper there and did a few articles on a local controversy: the new legislative rules that eliminated the time honored custom of gathering sticks in forests owned by the great landholders.  Marx at this time was a graduate of law school. He gets it that the legislature  is creating something new here – a property – out of the denial of something old – a customary right. But it occurred to him that it was not enough to remain on the level of the law – for what was driving the legislative proces was not so much any legal confusion, or any unfolding of some previous logic in the legal code, a la Hegel, but instead, was a basic, extra-legal social force.

The custom of gathering fallen wood, as Marx came to see it, had its roots in another kind of social order. Marx latter on considered this social order as pre-capitalist,  evidently defining it from the ‘stage’ that succeeds it. However, I think it is entirely within the Marxist spirit to define it differently, as the regime of the “image of the limited good”, a phrase coined by the anthropologist George Foster to describe the image of the world inherent to those who inhabit a social economy in which economic growth is not the norm. The norm, instead, for the peasants and their governors, is of rise and fall, in which prosperity can be expected to lead to superbia, or vanity, which in turn creates the condition for the fall. The image of the limited good is congruent with the iconography of nemesis, or justice, a blindfolded figure holding a scale in which our sins and accumulations are weighed.

In this world, it makes sense to talk about the poor. There is no sense that in this world, the laborer produces such wealth as will cause economic growth to be the primary fact of the social world.  Marx, in Cologne, began to sense the meaning of this.

To put this another way:  Marx made the very important discovery that “the poor”, as a socio-economic category, was vacuous. The poor were easily recognized in pre-capitalist economies: the beggars, the serfs, the slaves, they all exist under the sign of minus. They had less, and that quantitative fact defined their social existence. What Marx saw was that capitalist society was not just a matter of old wine in new bottles – the archaic poor were now free labor. Perhaps nothing so separates Marxism from religion as  this insight: in all the great monotheistic religions, poverty is viewed in feudal terms: the poor you will have always with you. But in capitalism, or modernity tout court, the poor continue to exist as a mystificatory category, usually in a binary with the rich. In fact, the real binary in society is capital and labor. The bourgeois economists, and even the non-scientific socialists, operate as though the archaic poor still exist. To help them, we need to develop a method of redistribution that is, in essence, charity – run by non-profits or run by the government, but still charity. But Marx saw this in very different terms. Labor produces the economic foundation of capitalism – value. In these terms, it is not a question of the poor being a qualitative or moral category – it is a question of the alienation of value, of surplus value, that circulates through the entire capitalist system and allows it to grow on its own, while at the same time making it vulnerable to crisis.

Baudelaire famously created a slogan for the 1848 revolution: Assommons les pauvres. Kill the poor! This seems on the surface to be the most radical and effective of  welfare schemes, for it would get rid of the poor once and for all. But Marx explains why it wouldn’t work: the poor describes an illformed social category, a survival from the past. To kill the working class would be to kill capitalism itself. What Marx learned in the forests of Koln was that capitalism was as atheist as could be against property. Far from being founded on the defense of property, capitalism was quite comfortable with changing its definition to suit – capital. What was once a right of the “poor” – for instance, to glean windfallen branches – could be swept away with a penstroke when the large landowners so desired. What was once the very definition of property - to have the full usage of an item one buys - can suddenly be hedged round with limitations when we try, for instance, to copy it and upload it on the internet. We are suddenly deprived of the inalienable right to give our property - and this is named Intellectual Property, and a legal structure grows up around it in a heartbeat.  Property is not, then,  a constant element, but a fluid one, changing its meaning and effect with the system of production in place. To describe the poor as having little “property”, in other words, reified property, placed it outside the social, and disguised the social conflicts encoded in what property is.

Marx’s logical clarity, however, is a bit too bright even for many of his own followers, who are as prone to fall into the language of the struggle between the poor and the rich as anybody else. It is, after all, one of the richest images we have, and leads irresistibly to a one-sided discourse on equality.

One of the great contradictions of neo-liberalism is that it retains the vocabulary of the image of the limited good – “the poor” – while promoting an image of infinite growth – that is, of capitalism, with the financial sector dominant. Vox had a headline during the Democratic primaries that I thought was an exemplary reflection of this contradiction. The article criticized Sanders’ positions on trade, and the headline went: If you're poor in another country, this is the scariest thing Bernie Sanders has said. Poor here is taken as a group to which “we” must be charitable. If the headline had read, If you are an underpaid laborer in another country… the argument would have been more honest, although I am not sure the headline writer thought that he or she was being dishonest. Marx is very firm that the reserve army of the unemployed and the underpaid in all sectors are the foundations of the wealth of nations. Neoliberalism certainly recognizes their function, but disguises its intents by transforming this into a mawkish morality play.

In a sense, that headline is the exact moral antithesis to another famous slogan: workers of the world unit, you have nothing to lose but your chains.    

the political welfare state: why conservatives oppose political laissez faire

I've made this argument before, but it is always fun to make it again.
The electoral college is mostly treated as a political and ideological question. However, from the neo-classical economics viewpoint, it is obviously simply a question of welfare.
First, voting is, like buying and selling, an action regarding a property.
Given the rule that every citizen in a republic has the right to vote, we can treat voting in the way we treat income or earnings. The state can either lower the tax on voting - which means treated every vote the same way - or it can tax and redistribute the value of the vote.
In the electoral college, successful states are like successful corporations. They are defined by having more people. Unsuccessful states are defined by having less people. This definition ignores other standards for success, but it is functionally sound, in that those states with more people are also states that generally have higher GDPs. This is only semi-circular - although more people indicate more production, other conditions could limit the production, and thus the GDP. As it happens, though, the distribution of GDP through the fifty states corresponds closely with the population of the states.
Thus, "poor states" - those with lesser populations - would not, without the federal government intervening, have any more power than is defined by their population.
But the Electoral College changes this. Those states, like California, that are successful are taxed at a high rate politically, and the tax is given to poor states. Vis a vis Wyoming, for instance, California residents pay a seventy five percent tax - or, in other words, every vote cast by a Wyoming resident is worth three cast by a Californian.
This political welfare system, viewed in good neo-classical terms, is bound to create a system of effects - that is, of perverse incentives. A state like Kansas or Nebraska protects itself in the political market place using the welfare it is given. It entrenches itself in behaviors that lead not to successful statehood - ie more population and greater GDP, but in behaviors that continue the benefits it gets as a welfare beneficiary. Welfare discourages labor - or at least the neoclassicals assume. Political welfare discourages political labor. Nebraska or Kansas or other politically poor states are encouraged not to invest in education, or to make their states attractive to incomers, and they extend that opposition on the national level, trying to undermine states like New York or Florida or California or Texas.
This model gives us a nice fat paradox: conservative politics in the US depends, increasingly, on political welfare. In a system of political laissez faire, California would and should have a greater say simply because it has been politically successful. But conservatives oppose political laissez faire.

As we would expect, the welfare system's distentions are becoming evident and intolerable. Eventually, there will come a crash. Trump is a sign that the crash is coming.

genoa

I’m in Genoa, a city I never imagined I’d visit, even thought it is a city I have imagined. Lovely, the city, the port, the cafes, the grocery stores – food, consumption of, being the guts of tourism, museums being the eyes and brain – the wonderful colors of the houses, pastel meditteranean. If you think, as I do, that world civilization (and the at the time unnoticed end of the Holocene) began in 1492, then you have to say that Genoa has cast its shadow over the world, even if the world has not noticed it that much. I mean, the great Meditteranean Republic has never intruded its dramas on us, like Venice or Florence. The Renaissance, I’m told, has not retained much of a foothold in Genoa: a couple of streets. Nothing like the grand structures of the 19^th century, Nietzsche’s Genoa.  We looked at the façade of a wonderful church, not the cathedral but nevertheless bearing, as the Baedecker Guide from 1906 puts it, alternative courses of black and white tile, which gives it a cheerful, salt/peppershaker appearance, but also having the required raft of gargoyles. I haven’t yet set foot in this or any of the older Genoese structures. But I have been thinking about cathedrals, lately, reading Hugo’s Notre Dame, which is a very diffuse novel in which long excuseses take up such questions as the meanign and function of cathedrals. Hugo is never quoted by historians or sociologists of technology, but should be: in one of his excursuses, he explains the cathedral as a devise that, though intended by function to house the worship of god, actually, through its subordinate affordances – its rose windows, its statues, its spaces, its bas reliefs, etc. – operates as a veritable book, makes legible the stories of the tribe to the people who have constructed it and come to it to worship, or simply pass by it. In Hugo’s account, the cathedral’s competitor is not the Protestant church, or anything like that, but the printed book – or, in fact, the printing press itself. This balance between cathedral and printing press, this putting them into relation, precedes and must have influenced Henry Adams Virgin and the Dynamo, and still echoes today in the banal speech of technogeeks going on about “disruption” – lacking, of course, Hugo’s leonine roar. In Hugo’s system, its rock or paper – with paper destroying rock. And, in a nice karmic yo-yo, it is now paper versus silicon – metal destroying paper.

Well, leaving these thoughts behind, we are all enjoying Italian views and speech, and thinking a bit about Nietzsche, who lived in Genoa at various high points in his life. According to the editors of his works, he at first kept his address in Genoa – the second time, though, he found lodgings in Salite della Battistini. Genoa was associated in Nietzsche’s mind with the writing of the Froehliche Wissenschaft – the Gay Science – one of his masterpieces. The Battistini is pictured here, on a site that seems to lament the Genoese forgetting of Nietzsche http://www.primocanale.it/notizie/l-oblio-di-nietzsche-tra-i-graffiti-e-l-incuria-in-salita-delle-battistine-a-genova-152109.html

Nietzsche took ship from Genoa for various trips: to Naples, or to Nice. Genoa was still a great port In the late nineteenth century, but not the port it became, according to my friend Luca, in the trentes annees glorieuses of the postwar period. Then the industry collapsed. But the port is still a major loading area. From the café on the pebbled beach where I am writing this, I can see a vast freighter out there in the water. Santa Monica, with its pleasurecraft, has been left a world  behind.  I’m told that globalisation has reached here, and that the ships I see are manned by Phillipine sailors.  The Phillipines, that far reach of the global system “discovered” by Magellan. In an exclusionary move typical of the free flow of goods and capital over our borders, these phillipine sailors don’t come ashore. They don’t get drunk and go whoring in the dark streets around the docks. There are no dark streets there. Instead, they stay on board ship, lacking the proper papers to plant their feet on Italian soil. No dancing in the street like the sailors in a musical for them! Slave labor has been replaced by contract labor, which breathes freedom, freedom and freedom to the ears of neolibs everywhere. But the freedom of contract is strangely one sided,  with the makers of the contract having all the freedom, and the signers of it having only the freedom to sign it, and undergoing its burdens after that magic moment. To oppress or compress what the contract makers can put in the contract is, as we know, the sheerest tyranny. Luckily, our globalised competitive nation states aren’t about to compell the contractors to follow the rules of human dignity.

Nietzsche felt that in Genoa he began his recuperation – from both bodily and mental sicknesses (and how he would have hated how, a hundred twenty years after him, we have so comfortably adopted the ‘metaphor’ of healing – the conjunction of the medical and the ideational, the shock derived from it, having become so banal as to bring tears to my eyes every time I hear someone use the word healing – and yet knowing that even so, a bit of enlightenment lies in the overused trope) and expressed his gratitude to Genoa in a letter to a friend, Koeselitz: And so once again I am going to try to fix myself, and Genoa seems to me the right place, three times a day my heart overflows here, with the auguring mountains in the distance and their adventurous mightyness. Here I have crowds and rest and high mountain paths and that which is even more beautiful than my dream of it, the Campo Santo. The Campo Santo was the famous Genoa cemetary, and Nietzsche shows himself to be a solid nineteenth century man with his ecstatic mention of it.

I haven’t seen it yet, and perhaps won’t.