a voter strategy that worked until it didnt

I've long had a theory that the GOP and the neolib Dems benefit from the fact that GOP voters, for the most part, can get their moral rocks off voting against the gov. in the confidence that what they will receive is a bit of a tax break - and continued service from the Gov, since the opposition Dems will see to that. Thus, Social Security and Medicare are safe. That was not a bad strategy for GOP voters - and Trump seemed to reaffirm it when he promised the continued service from the Gov. Now the shit is coming down, and the Dems are finally weak enough that the GOP can do what it wants without any check or balance. In consequence, you can superimpose, over those maps showing the Red counties - which were in rural or exurban areas of the country - another map, showing where the burden of cuts are going to fall. Guess what? The bleeding will start with them. The strategy doesn't work if there is too much GOP-ery - then the moral stance agin the Guvmint becomes a practical sink or swim deal.

When I use the word strategy, here, I should make it clear that it is a strategy the way natural selection is a strategy - it is not the intention of the voters individually, but the environing pattern they react to and shape as a group,

So why didn't the Dems pick on this in 2016? a recent Vox article about HRC's ads, to which a major portion of campaign funds were allotted, tells the sad tale. HRC ran on a platform that was full of incredibly popular programs. She could have trounced Trump in every policy category. But her campaign team thought they were on the Apprentice set, and didn't go with icky policy stuff. Cause who really cares if you can afford childcare or healthcare? This is still echoed in the pundit chamber with remarks about how dumb your average American is. Cause we are all for democracy, we who went to the Ivies, but come on! Those dummies always need our nudgin'.

the voice stage

From the beginning of the human race until around 1880, no human being ever heard his or her voice. Socrates didn’t, Sappho didn’t, Jesus Christ didn’t, and Abraham Lincoln didn’t. Jenny Lind, it is said, made a wax cylinder for Edison, so she might have gotten a scratching inkling of what she sounded like in the 1880s, long after her singing prime. 

In a strong sense, what this means is that the voice had no mirror. One of the great wonders of modern life is that one was invented.
It is hard to imagine ourself back to the millenia of being, essentially, like actors in a silent movie, at least to ourselves. Yet long before there were phonographs, there were sayings about hearing one’s own voice. We do have a strong sense of our voice, we seem to hear it. But when we record it, it seems a wilder thing, not the thing we recognize. There is, it turns out, a delicate interface between inhabiting a thing heard and having the sound itself confront us in its full materiality, uninhabited by us. Nowhere else is the so called "user illusion' - the illusion that we are in control of the thing we use when we are actually following its preprogrammed design - so actual.

The era initiated by Edison did not, of course, make the voice mirror universal. It took some time for audio technology to get there. When I was a kid, cheap tape recorders were available with which one could tape oneself, but it was, at best, an entertainment that was outside of the daily routine. I think one of the great moments in the history of human voice was the invention and distribution of answering machines. Although several devices to record telephone calls existed in postwar America, they were either expensive or discouraged by At and T, which wanted to monopolize the market with its own high priced technology. Attachments to record were actually just gussied up tape recorders, the older kind of tape recorders. What changed was the advent of recorders with magnetic tapes and integrated circuits that made recording incoming calls less cumbersome. An advertisement (in a 1977 Popular Mechanics) for a Ford Code-A-Phone 1977 shows a machine that would be easily recognized by the children of the seventies: a sleek silver rectangular box on which you could record a message just by holding down an inviting plastic red button, and which allowed you to easily erase messages and record over them. In addition, you could call yourself, press a code, and have the machine play back your messages over the phone. Magic! I remember my parents getting a similar box. So the first widespread consciousness of one’s own voice in America was the voice saying: this is X Smith, or this is the household of X Smith, leave a message at the beep. I remember my Dad making such a, when you think about it, referentially complex message. What kind of token was it? It had the qualities of the written, and yet, it was part of no system of linguistic representation – it was neither phonetic nor ideogramatic. It was, at best, an echo – echo writing. It was the thing itself, except that it wasn’t.
There’s really no metaphor for this, no comparable historical situation. This was something new in the psychological construction that we had always had around our voice. No echo ever prepared us for this.
My Dad never puzzled about the philosophical problems the telephone recorder posed. In fact, if this was a blow to human narcissism (different from Freud’s three moments: Copernicus, Darwin and Freud), its effect was muted. Especially with my old man, as far as I could tell.

The function of the voice in the psyche, as Freud conceived it, was crucial to the formation of the conscience. It was the parental voice that was, in a sense, recorded by the infant’s answering machine – making the conscience something foreign to the ego, something injected into the ego. This was the root, Freud felt, of the paranoid symptom of feeling observed: “the patient complains of the fact that all his thoughts are known, and their behaviors are watched and spied on. They are informed about this rule through voices that characteristically speak to them in the third person ('Now she's thinking of that again', 'now he's going out').

However, I don’t remember Freud speaking of our reaction to our own voice. Although by this time the gramophone had become a common bourgeois household object, access to record one’s own voice was pretty much restricted to entertainers and celebrities. Although perhaps one underestimates the place of recording the voice began to play in the imagination of modern culture.

In a fascinating essay entitled ‘Primal Sound’, Rilke recorded a memory of his school years that happened about the time the first gramophone was produced. The physics teacher in his class made a primitive instrument that used waxed paper, a cylinder of cardboard, and a bristle from a comb to show how sound waves could be captured in a material and replayed.

“At that time, and years afterwards I supposed that the evidence of this independent sound, taken from us and preserved in an outside material, would remain a sensation I’d never forget.”

Yet, as Rilke goes on to say, the moment of shock that the sound came out of this primitive record did not remain with him as the sense of this primal scene (Rilke describes it precisely as a primal scene, the infant beginning of something that would grow endlessly larger) . It was absorbed in the moral economy of everyday routine, so to speak. Instead, his mind fixed on the grooves themselves: “It wasn’t … the sound out of the funnel that remained uppermost in my memory, as it happened, but instead the marks carved into the platter which remained peculiarly present to me.”

In the rest of the essay, Rilke’s thought takes a sort of paranoid turn – if we remain with Freud – and instead of the peculiarity of his own voice, it is the peculiar idea that sound is frozen into substances everywhere – in as much as things are grooved. What if we found a way to “play”, for instance, the grooves in a skull? Perhaps even these grooves – in particular, the coronal suture – represent some primal sound – the scratching of God’s own finger on us, mere platters.

We all tunnel forward in our manias. Mine, here, is that this obvious turning away from the shock of hearing – even if so faintly as to be an intimation – his own voice is the negation around which Rilke has created his essay.

As far back as I can remember, I haven’t liked to hear the sound of my own voice – even as I loved recording messages in other voices I’d imitate. Although I am just the kind of person the phrase “loves to hear himself talk” was made for, I love to hear it in that shadowy place inside the voice, surfing the glottal instance that is not at all petrified in an outer material substrate. The voice, separated from me, recorded, become a thing, has always seemed to me a peculiar, shaming weakness.
I thought about all of this when, a couple of days ago, I played a quicktime film that Adam’s teachers made. Each student made a picture of a jellyfish; then each sat before the teacher, with her phone camera, and explained it. Adam came about sixth or seventh. I thought he was wonderful.
Adam didn’t. He said he didn’t like his voice. 

Because this is not the first time that Adam has heard his voice, his remark made me wonder if something happens – some voice stage new to our natural history, something that is separate from Lacan’s mirror stage – that gives us a sense of the self that is at once exposed and that we would like to avoid.
The bad conscience of the voice brings us back to questions of the dialect, and of imperial power. Hmm, where am I going with this?

dialect and defeat

I’ve been reading two books that are mainy written in dialect, or at least non-standard English. One is Their Eyes were watching God, Zora Hurston’s most famous novel, where the  black Southern dialect alternates with an authorial voice written in standard English. Hurston had a folklorist’s expertise in dialect. She wrote the novel in Haiti, and must surely have been thinking about how Haitian creole had separated itself out from French to the extent that it was a separate language. Hurston was right proud of her rendering of black speech, and criticized Richard Wright for what she believed were amateur mistakes in trying to convey its sound and power.

The other book, Ice Cream Star, by Sandra Newman, is about a future in which the US is populated largely by tribes of teens, who all face a disease that eliminates them when they enter their young twenties. The teens are black – although the plot in the book begins with an encounter with a “Roo”, a white man who is presumably Russian. The entire book is dipped in the language that Newman makes up for her narrator, Ice Cream Star.

Wright accused Hurston of making a minstrel show of a novel. I wonder if he was responding to the way the two levels of English operate, with standard English becoming the median of understanding and  explanation – producing the usual distance that the authorial voice mediates between the actions and the characters and their passions and the reader. The traditional hierarchy between low passion and high reason, of course, stands behind this. But, as a particular instance of that structure, there is also, in the play of phonetic spellings, a sort of global implication of a kind of illiteracy in the characters, as if they were misspelling their own words. Given the American penchant to use black speech against the speaker, to lower the status of the speakers, it is easy to see where Wright is coming from.  But as Hurston is writing from Haiti, where the idea of using creole against the chains of orthodox french was certainly in the air, there’s another perspective on the dialect business, a claim and proclaim program.

There is a long history of dialect as a literal, or rather, oral declaration of independence. Walter Scott did the same thing with Scots. The jungle of apostrophe marks that accompany these forays against the metropole are the equivalent of the dust  tossed up by some vast marching army of Goths, on a pillaging expedition to Rome.    

In Scott’s novels, the tie to the extinguishing of a culture, as the Gaelic highlands culture was extinguished in Scotland, is the loser’s wound that throbs beneath the whole edifice.  Scott’s dialect characters are tied to their political and economic station.  Here, from Old Mortality, is the  kind of thing that occurs frequently in Scott:

"Your leddyship never ca'd me sic a word as that before. Ohon! that I

suld live to be ca'd sae," she continued, bursting into tears, "and me a

born servant o' the house o' Tillietudlem! I am sure they belie baith

Cuddie and me sair, if they said he wadna fight ower the boots in blude

for your leddyship and Miss Edith, and the auld Tower--ay suld he, and I

would rather see him buried beneath it, than he suld gie way--but thir

ridings and wappenschawings, my leddy, I hae nae broo o' them ava. I can

find nae warrant for them whatsoever.”

And here is the kind of thing that occurs in Hurston – a snippet of dialogue between Janie and Tea Cake:

“Ah know it and dat’s what puts de shamery on me. You’se jus’ dis gusted wid me. Yo’ face jus’ left here and went off some where else. Naw, you ain’t mad wid me. Ah be glad if you was, ’cause then Ah might do some thin’ tuh please yuh. But lak it is—”

“Mah likes and dis likes ought not tuh make no dif fer­ence wid you, Tea Cake. Dat’s fuh yo’ lady friend. Ah’m jus’ uh some time friend uh yourn.”

               The image of a Vandal army attacking Rome brings up, of course, the barbarian/civilized opposition that has long formed a certain mainstream approach to dialect. Indeed, language follows conquest, with its attendant justifications all centering around some essential fault of the conquered. Rome, however, was founded by barbarians in the strictest sense – Trojans who were defeated by the Greeks. Underneath the victorious power, it is easy to find a level of subjection and defeat. The Scots tribes, whose defeat becomes Walter Scott’s theme, moved out – they populated much of the Southeast U.S. that Hurston knew. And they put their stamp of victory on the slaveholding society that raided at large other tribal societies.

               I’m going on to Newman’s book tomorrow.   

how bad was the Democratic response to Trump? Very very very bad

I've been thinking about this today, a little obsessively. And I've come to the conclusion that the dead heads in the Democratic establishment in DC are innumerate in a serious way.
Most of them are old white people, like Schumer and Pelosi. So perhaps this explains their bias.
I'm sure they think featuring an old white guy surrounded by a diner full of other older white people is a sure, a non-risky way of confronting Trump.
Actually, though, I'd argue that it is the riskiest bet they can make.
Given the fact that, at least since 1980, older white people vote Republican by between 10 percent to 20 percent more than they vote Democratic, what does it mean to pitch your entire response to them?

Your choices are: Ds want either less of them to vote, to convince them to vote D., or finally, you outflank them.

The first option is absolute. You absolutely want to discourage them. It is thus not identical with the third option, which is that you dilute their voting power by increasing the numbers in other sectors - blacks, hispanics, millenials - so that the older vote is proportionately diminished.
Given the trend lines with older whites, the most risky strategy is to try to convert them. Firstly, because it is statistically unlikely it will make a difference, and secondly, because it screws up your third option. It will bring more old white people out to vote. In 2016, there were a lot of reports that the Clinton campaign's idea to appeal to moderate Rs actually motivated a lot of Rs to go to the polls - and vote Trump.
So the DNC and the DC Dems chose the most risky option to play against Trump. But they will all assure themselves that they are playing it safe. This is how lost they are.

heidegger's naziism, locke's apology for slavery

The Magazine Litteraire had a nice dossier about Heidegger last month, heralding, I suppose, the translation of Heidegger’s Black Notebook into French. Those who keep up with those things will remember that the notebook is full of pro-Nazi, anti-semitic remarks, and continues in that vein even after WWII. Heidegger never learned anything.

Which of course leaves a problem for those who think Heidegger’s philosophy is important. Is it all, as Emmanuel Faye has maintained for decade, a coded philosophy of fascism? The argument here is pretty much one of critical integrity: it is disingenuous to leave out what we know about Heidegger’s naziism when explicating his texts. Faye, though, goes further, and relates Heidegger’s biggest text, Being and Time, to his naziism as a master explanation of what is going on. Bourdieu did the same thing. One takes a term like Sorge, care, and shows how it it is primarily a political, and not as Heidegger pretends, an existential signifier. In this way, by looking at Sorge in Nazi texts and in Being and Time, one pierces through to the true meaning of Heidegger’s text. 

This claim would be more convincing, however, if there were control texts – if we also went through Communist texts, or those in the journalistic world. Without doing this, we are pre-determining the orientation towards Naziism.

My own view is that the question of what to make of Heidegger’s Naziism throws into relief the larger question of how we do philosophical history. For my money, I’d say we do it badly. It is about great heads, marble busts lined up one after the other, all engaged only with each other. I think that philosophy, like any discourse, is less personal than that.  Reading Heidegger, Rosenzweig, Bloch and Benjamin, who were all writing in the 20s, gives one a sense that each writer is playing a variation of a code that was shared among a certain spectrum of German intellectuals who were trying to find an escape from the liberal paradigm that broke down in WWI. Looked at in this way, Heidegger represents the far right part of that spectrum, whereas people like Lukacs (whose Weber influenced essays, even before the war, could be read as though they were influenced by a much later book, Being and Time) represent its changing far left.  But Heidegger’s philosophy in almost all its major moments was easy to capture by leftists as well as rightists. It shows a misunderstanding, I think, of how philosophy operates – how the special terms and arguments are affordances that can be radically shifted in various systems without being negated – to pretend that Heidegger was writing merely for the cryptofascist crowd. He did, obviously, have the freedom to do so when he was loose in Hitler’s Germany, but he notoriously failed as the third Reich’s pet philosopher. The reason for that failure is that the Hitlerians suspected that vocabulary – they sensed something indelibly Weimarish in it. And they were right.

There’s a famous story – so I’ve been told – about Michael Dummett. He was completing a book about Frege’s mathematical philosophy when he read Frege’s own “black notebook”, his diaries, and found that he was a raving anti-semite. For a while, supposedly, he laid his work on Frege aside, not knowing if he should continue it. He finally did continue it.

I like the attacks on Heidegger for his naziism. I would love to see some more attacking on Locke and Hume for their racism. In Locke’s case, this wasn’t just a matter of condoning slavery – Locke, as a member of the board of Trade and Plantations, which supervised Virginia, was instrumental in coming up with slave codes. This is mentioned in Intro classes to Philosophy about zero times, in my experience, whereas Heidegger’s Naziism is always mentioned when he is explained. I would love to see a philosophy magazine dedicate a dossier to Locke and slavery, but I am pretty sure that is not on anybody’s agenda.   

How is the Dem party like the Titanic? In every way. No Joke

So on the same day the Dems dub ex governor Beshear - a name that is well known to every American household - to reply to Trump's state of the union speech, they elect Perez to chair the DNC. And the Titanic sails on! If I didn't believe that the spontaneous disgust of the American people for Trump will find a form, I'd be in despair. Beshear is a dem best known for advocating bipartisanship and shilling against obstruction. The response of this unknown outside of Kentucky seventy year old white guy to Trump will go down like jello with a laxative chaser. I can just hear, already, the agreements we have with the President! How we all have to push together! Push push push, push into the abyss. If they were going to put an ancient governor up against Trump, they shoulda chosen Jerry Brown, who is 80 but sharper than the whole DNC. But why give a shoutout to the most populous state in the nation when we can give a shout out to the loser from Kentucky? It is decisions like these that make me wonder how much further down the D party is going to go.
But at least, while demonstrating our abhorrence at Islamophobia, D's have also shown the American people that we are all right with islamophobia if it comes from big Democratic donors like Saban. So there is that.

Another day, another small triumph of cretinism. But at least it is sideshow cretinism.

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reading while white: Hurston and an image

I was puzzled about a passage I found in Zora Hurston’s Tell My Horse, and looked around for a gloss. The passage interested me, as it takes up the idea of the extermination of a race or ethnicity – a menace much in the air in the 30s, when Hurston visited Jamaica and Haiti. And, really, this is always in the air, the radiowave patrolled air, where a majority, or a group of people having an image of themselves as rulers evolves a history of oppressing a more powerless skin color, religion, or ethnicity. Extermination is the end point of racism, its utopia, the Lebensraum where Leben is much of a sameness. After explaining that Jamaican “mixed bloods” set themselves up as much higher beings than “negroes’, and encourage valuing whiter skin over darker skin, Hurston writes:

Perhaps the Jamaican mixed bloods are logical and right, perhaps the only answer to the question of what is to become of the negro in the Western world is that he must be absorbed by the whites. Frederick Douglass thought so. If he was right, the the strategy of the American Negro is all wrong, that is, the attempt to achieve a position equal to the white population in every way but each race to maintain its separate identity. Perhaps we should strike our camps and make use of the cover of night and execute a masterly retreat under white skins.If that is what must be, then any way at all of getting more whiteness among us is a step in the right direction. I do not pretend to know what is wise and best. “

The one person I’ve read who commented on this passage assumes, with no reference to the cues in the text backing that assumption, that Hurston is just being sarcastic. And the idea of retreating under white skins is a sort of mix of Looney Tune cartoon and bible image that might, broadly, be an indicator of sarcasm. However, I take the sentence to be Hurston’s way of maintaining a certain authorial inscrutability.The deadpan presentation of an exterminationist vision without 'pretending' to know if it is wise or best is a way of making us look at that vision not as something we refuse right off, but as something that we might be complicit in.

So much for my own readerly sense-making. But what really struck me most there was the popping up of Frederick Douglass where I wouldn’t have expected him – on the white skin side of things. I went wha??? Since Douglass seems to me an emancipatory figure that I would figure Hurston would like. How did he get in here?

It took me a while to realize that this was a question that marked reading while white. For when I looked into it, I discovered that Douglass’s second marriage to a white woman had a tremendous effect on his reputation both during and after his life, especially in the African American community. Surely it is this marriage that Hurston is alluding to, since there are no passages in Douglass’s writing that urge such drastic amalgamation.

I of course could be wrong in this conclusion. Regardless, Hurston’s style here is beautifully modernist – a lightening stroke of reference, and the image of striking camp under cover of night – of darkness – that involutes infinitely a retreat that advances us literally into the arms of the White race. For sheer lines – and I read for lines – Hurston has that twenties, that almost Augustan, wit, playing the dozens Dorothy Parker style.

Of course, another reading would be that Hurston took her cues from the linguistic patterns of black folkculture. Of this, there can be no doubt – but at the same time, she wrote for Henry Mencken’s magazine, American Mercury, and she definitely bears some marks of the house style, just as Updike bears marks of the style of the New Yorker.