what to do tomorrow? and the next day? Male anguish

The larger effects of sexism appear in curious places.

Take the inexorable eight hour day.

In the nineties, an historian, Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, interviewed workers – mostly retired workers – who had participated in a famous experiment in shorter work time. The Kellogg cereal company in 1930 adopted the six hour day as the standard, raising the wages of the workers to compensate. Hunnicutt’s research resulted in a book: Kellogg’s Six Hour Day. Interesting material there.

The plant was unionized in 1940, and the workers were polled. Most of them voted to keep the six hour day, although some departments voted for the eight hour day. After schedules were scrambled during the war years, Kellogg’s returned to the six hour day.

“In mid-1946, employees reaffirmed their commitment to the short workday, with 87 percent of women and 71 percent of men voting for six hours.” Yet in ten years, the vote had totally shifted. A majority of men voted to bring back the eight hour day; only departments in which women were the majority retained the six hour day.

Why?

Hunnicutt’s interviews suggested that the change came about due to two factors. One was a change in the way management administered the work force, with the decline of the line boss as yeller and coercer and the rise of the “coach” model of management. In conjunction with this was the use of the suggestion, floated by the management and agreed to by the male work force, that there was something feminine, or sissy, about the six hour day. As Roger Whaples summarizes the argument in his review:

 Management began to denigrate and “feminize” shorter hours. National union officials were very willing to trade shorter hours for offers of hourly wage increases. But most importantly many workers,especially male employees, seem to have changed their tastes. They became embarrassed by the short hours that they were working–shorterthan the shifts worked by men at other local jobs. They changed their rhetoric, down-playing the freedom that leisure gave, and asserting that they were “unable to afford” a six-hour shift, that longer hours were needed to “‘keep the wolf from the door,’ ‘feed the family,’ and ‘put bread on the table'” (p.140). …  Ultimately, most men during the 1950s needed little convincing that eight-hours and higher pay were preferable. Six-hour workdays wouldn’t let them keep up with the Joneses and many men did not receive much enjoyment from their marginal leisure hours. “Like management, senior male workers were concerned about the loss of status and control.”

It is interesting that these factors were not in question, or were not as disturbing to men, in the 30s. Why?

I think this minor incident points to larger changes in male, specifically American white male, attitudes in the Cold War period. What has happened now, in America’s Rotten Age, is not the result of one presidential election. These currents were set in motion a long time ago. On the one hand, the U.S. has long had a stronger feminist tradition than its European co-evals, with attitudes going back to the post-Civil War period of Daisy Miller. On the other hand, a reactionary male imago has been the constant cohort of this liberatory tendency. It is a cohort made up of feed-backs, such as the lack of any respect for the humanities, which feeds back into an entertainment industry that has long ago exhausted the limits of shock (either of violent death or of industrialized fucking), which feeds back into a sort of loss in the nature/technology interface, etc.

I’ve been spending my whole life thinking that the reactionary male imago was on its last legs, but it looks like it will long, long outlast my last legs.  

the backwards angel !

Lately I have been thinking of perhaps the most famous passage in Walter Benjamin’s work, the 9^th section of his theses on history.

“There is a picture by Klee entitled “Angelus Novus”. It shows an angel who looks like he is trying to escape something that he stares at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth too, and his wings are spread out. The angel is history must look like this. He has his face turned to the past. Where, to us, there is something like a chain of incidents, he sees a single catastrophe, the is untiringly piling up ruin on ruin, and throwing them at his feet. He would like to pause, to waken the dead and to conciliate the injured. But a storm blows out of paradise, that is caught in his wings and is so strong, that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him helplessly into the future, to which he has turned his back, as the ruins before him pile sky-high. That thing we call “progress” is this storm.”

This is a beautiful passage, a gorgeousness tinged with atrocity – especially for readers who know that Benjamin is soon to hide his work, flee Paris as the Germans defeat France, and commit suicide in a small Spanish town trying to get away from the certainty of death in a concentration camp. But this thesis is also a huge puzzle. How is the storm “progress”. And what is paradise doing here? And why is it all ruin? And why can’t the dead be re-awakened, if history truly has an angel?

Myself, I have long pondered on these things. Of course, for a real answer, one would have to plunge into Benjamin’s work at length. There’s an industry that does this. The angel has, in particular, been philologically reconstructed from Klee, the Talmud, and perhaps the mythology of modern German poetry (Rilke’s angels, which show up – as does Benjamin – in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, a film that provides a coda to the whole experience of modernism). I have been thinking about something that is, perhaps, more minor, more off the point:  the backwardness of the angel.

I feel a sort of weird vibe coming from this figure who blown backwards by progress – this figure behind whose back, literally, the future is happening. It is an interesting challenge: to trace with a fine Auerbachian hand the motif of backwards progress in European literature in the broadest sense.   Everything depends upon the angel facing the past, and not the present: the angel could fold his wings if he could turn

around – for presumably there is no wind coming from the future. The backwards motion is imposed on the angel – physically. The meaning of which for the spectator is that an old assumption is reversed, for the future is not ‘ahead’ of us here. That inversion of our metaphoric assumptions has a deeply disorienting effect. It stabs at our way of making time accord to space, and our orientation in space.

Tracking a motif in the wilderness of books is a little like trying to catch one drop in a rain storm with a pair of pliers. But as this motif is especially rich to me, I think I’ll make some suggestions, cast a broad net, see how this works out, and see, especially, why it so moves me. Cause it does, this angel being blown from the past into a future it doesn’t face. This reverse motion reminds me of something, there’s some kind of anamnesis at the base of it, some form in which memory stirs. Along the way, probably I'll touch on the rebus, the transmission of motifs, entropy, slavery, and the disorientation of all the senses.

The backward image, I think, can more concretely be traced in part to film, to the perceptual changes brought about in the nineteenth and twentieth century to transportation, which are traced in Schivelbusch’s great book, The Railroad Journey, and finally to a metaphor going through Montaigne back to Plutarch. That is how I will do this. First I’ll think about film.

The royal Flabellifer

When Walter Gropius built a little house for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, he included a screened in porch to (as his friend, Siegfried Giedion, puts it) “catch eastern and western breezes during the hot and humid summers.” Gropius built his house in 1938. Giedion gave his lectures, Space, Time and Architecture, about the same year. Giedion later expanded his lectures into a book,which went into three editions – but even in the fifties edition, he mentions “air conditioning” only once, with a reference to a building by Le Corbusier that “attempts a very simplified type of airconditioning”, with a footnote referencing Frank Lloyd Wright’s claim to have built the first air conditioned office building in Buffalo, New York.

The lack of concern for air conditioning is, in a sense, inscribed in the grandiose title of the book – Space and Time are monumental, while seasons, with their fits of hot and cold, are the very stuff of what Giedion might call “transient facts” – they are seasonal.

From the American p.o.v., Europe is painfully underserved by the air conditioning industry. From the European point of view, all of America’s gaudy wastefulness is epitomized by the enormous effort spent in blowing hot air into hot rooms in the summer. That effort has an effect beyond ductwork: for instance, it advantages the sealed window. Opening a window or a windowed door (such as the one I am sitting next to as I type this) has a pretty interesting psychological effect. One can see it, for instance, in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which looks at a New York City in which private life, in the summer, is conducted half outdoors, on fire escapes and porches.  Rear Window is so theatrical because real life was so theatrical; apartments weren’t castles, and the suburban house was not a monad set down on a plat seeded with antiseptic grasses, even if Mr. Blanding’s dream house was something like this.

I am the son of an HVAC man, so my mind naturally strays to climate control in the summer. We just went down to Montpellier, which was hot. Not that hot, not as hot as it gets in August, but somewhat hot. The mornings, though, were amazingly pleasant, the bird life was hopping, and the inducements to slow down and lie prone on some chaise lounge were not unpleasant, especially when the reality was accompanied by a cold beer. So men and my bourgeois softened hide couldn’t really complain. Still, the lack of air conditioning does provide a sort of control experiment – an experiment in climate control – that is interesting.

In Ancient Egypt, the equivalent of your friendly Air Conditioning man was the royal Flabellifer – the fan bearer. In those times, the artificial breeze was a product of an ostrich feather fan, and the royal nose was pleased by bouquets of flowers that were waved about at the same time. The royal fanbearer, apparently, was an enormously important post, perhaps because nobody knows more about the pharaoh than the primitive climate control guy sitting two feet behind him all day. There were no folding fans in Egypt – in the fan literature, this innovation is attributed to the Japanese of a much later date. The fan is, in a sense, a poetic continuation of two things: the leaves of trees and the wings of birds. Both leaves and feathers play a big role in the decoration of fans. It must have been a big kick for ancient homo sapiens to pluck a palm leaf and agitate it, thus becoming a mini-wind maker. The cosmos in our hand – the ancient dream! Who knew that from such primitive fashionings we would, in a remarkably short time, get our grubby hands on the atmosphere and stratosphere of the whole planet!

stalactites versus stalagmites at the end of history

There was a fad, in the eighties, for comparing the French Revolution unfavorably to the American Revolution. In that illwind of a decade, the reasoning was reliably coldwar-ish: the French Revolution led straight to the Gulag, whereas the American revolution led to: America!

In hindsight, and even then, one could see what was bogus about this judgment. For instance, its in your face racism. Black people simply didn’t count for the Francois Furet kind of historian. For another thing, the genocide necessary to create a white nation on the North American continent didn’t count. And finally, the judgment was really not about the Gulag, but about the great countervailing egalitarianism of the post-war years. It was that egalitarian that the cold war historians were particularly eager to dismantle.

Of course, this dismantling was never put so crudely. In fact, a synthesis between in-egalitarianism and egalitarianism was established, under the aegis of neo-liberalism. Here, the destruction of egalitarianism as a force in the political economy was coupled with egalitarianism as a civil matter. To put it in the class terms that were such a taboo in the Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand years, the upper class – which was almost entirely white, but was also a compound of people with different sexual desires and genders – accepted a certain kind of feminism and a certain kind of gay rights; both denuded of their original, grass-roots connection with larger issues of class. This meant that feminism was reshaped to consist of “breaking the glass ceiling” for upper class women, and not at all of paying for housework, or extending socialized childcare to all reaches and pockets of society.

The civil egalitarianism borrowed the mythology of the civil rights movement, but – in a gesture of true cultural expropriation – did not borrow the color the skins involved. In 1960, in the U.S., there were almost no rich African-Americans. In 2015, according to a study produced by the Federal Reserve in St. Louis,  rich African Americans – defined as the upper one percent – made up a grand total of 1.7% of the whole.

The best model for the political economy – and the politics that has driven it - of the last forty years is that of a stalactite. Small drops have created a large pointy structure. When I was a kid, the idea was that we were in the midst of a stalagmite change – the drops were mounting from the bottom. The switch from one to the other has sort of defined my life, and billions of other lives.

This is worth thinking about when the next headline catastrophe announces itself: the union busting, rightwing Justice Kennedy resigning; children put in cages and left in the Texas heat; trillion dollar giveaways to the wealthy; the gutting of labor unions. It is trivial, but symbolically large, that the official opposition to rightwing plutocrats is very, very, very concerned that we all stay “civil”. The official opposition is almost surely in or connected to the upper 1 percent.

The overwhelming “feeling” of the last forty years has been one of “not being able to afford things.” For instance, medicare for all is a huge “budget-buster”. Which begs the question: how is it that in a society that is at least ten times as wealthy as it was in 1950, or 1960, when large social insurance scheme were put in place, we have run out of money? The answer is pretty simple: since then, the working class – in fact, every household that makes less than 250 thou a year – has run out of money. All the money is packed in the upper 10 percent, and in the upper 10 percent, it is packed in the upper 1 percent. The inequality is staggering: it is, really, ancien regime, as though the French Revolution had never happened. The experiment is running its course: a political economy in which the cultural expectation of egalitarianism are systematically attacked is one that will, eventually, have to take down even the mask of democratic practices. The idea that abortion rights are being threatened because one farty old man on the Court resigns shows a terrifying blindness to what has happened in state after state for twenty years. It is easier to get an abortion in Ireland than it is in, say, Texas or Mississippi. For working class women, abortion rights – not to speak of the vast vast array of healthcare rights – are a sort of ghost. They are dead, but they still haunt us.

I’m a verbal, even a garrulous, even a graphomaniacal guy. But this Youtube video about wealth in the U.S. should be your absolute guideas to what has, what is, and what will be happening in the U.S.

Homo Economicus, perspectivism, and Blake

 I have two theses about modernity and economics. Here they are. The first is that there is a multiplicity of matrixes of exchange even within modernity – and that the seeming hegemony of the money matrix, to the extent that it even defines the economic as opposed to the non-economic, is a phenomena that has certainly penetrated other matrixes – such as the complex gift and barter relationships of family, friendship and alliance – without fundamentally ‘commoditizing’ them. In one sense, my whole thesis is that there is a dialectic structure that governs the degree to which the hegemony of money, as reflected in the character of homo economicus, can actually dispense with other matrixes, since its survival is threatened by its monopoly of all spaces of exchange. 
The other thesis is that rationality, as the economists define it, is linked to a realism that denies perspectives as anything other than representatives of ‘parts of reality’. Myself, I am a perspectivist of the ‘hard; variety – that is, I see no reason to put up with the idea that the parts of reality make up one reality. Reality, here, becomes a substitute for the God’s eye perspective – that point at which we can see the whole universe. Perspectivism denies that perspective can be constructed. It does not deny, it should be said, that certain processes might be shared among perspectives – say, a process for correlating statement and fact. Or even a process for ordering preferences. It simply denies that this formal characteristic has any substance. In other words, rationality within a perspective refers to the norms of the perspective, not to processes that transcend perspectives. Hard perspectivism contends that there is information in a given perspective – something that can be defined by simple axioms – that does not exist in other perspectives. In the clash of perspectives – which is the dynamic by which perspectives are made – this information can be completely lost – the way a passenger pigeon saw an oak tree no longer exists, for instance. I would not go so far as to say that 

different matrixes of exchange form completely different perspectives, but something similar might well hold – that is, that there is information in a barter exchange that can’t be transformed or translated into the money exchange. Etc. 

In other words, I want to build a theory about economics based on this phrase of Blake’s:
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

materialism and superstition

The positivist line in the history of the sciences can always be distinguished by one general assumption, which is that the present state of the sciences represents some kind of natural division of labor. In other words, the sciences as now constituted really do cut at the joints, so that we have clearcut, naturally founded divisions that are entailed by the subjects that the sciences study: astronomy is the result of studying the stars, economics is the result of studying exchange, psychology is the result of studying the mind, etc. Given this viewpoint, there is a certain teleology that organizes the whole narrative: astrology is the predecessor of astronomy, alchemy the predecessor of chemistry, etc.

Against this idea, the non-positivist looks at the sciences as defined by their social environment. Instead of looking at astrology as the study of the stars, it looks at astrology as a compound of the study of the stars, the study of the temperaments, and the study of governance. Instead of looking at alchemy as the study of the rocks or the molecules, it sees alchemy as operating as the study of treasure, the study of cryptography, the study of natural symbolism, etc. In other words, there is less joint here, and more tentacle.

The consequence of the non-positivist line is that we work outward from what the discipline said about itself at time x, and what was assumed about it at time x, instead of working inward from an exterior view about what we know, now, at time y, about the supposed contents of the science. The advantage of the first view is that we can catch in our net many, many connections that have been pruned away as the dominant episteme changed. And we become more aware that the conceptual oppositions that are assumed in positivism are products of a teleology rather than of an immersive reading of the sources.

Take, for instance, materialism.

It is often assumed that a great leap forward in the sciences occurred in the 17^th and 18^th century as a materialist program was organized to delimit and define acceptable explanations of natural phenomena. In opposition, there was a supernatural program that looked around to transcend the mere causal schema.

In fact, this view of the materialist program is very much a product of late nineteenth century positivism. The oppositions, in the eighteenth century, was much mushier than this. One of the problems that thinkers – the zemstvo, the intellectuals in the field, the doctors, lawyers, notaries, teachers, as well as writers – faced was that they grew up in a world of certain beliefs that seemed not to be absolutely unfounded. Their grandparents believed that certain people could, through sacrifice to the devil, transform themselves into beasts – and their parents definitely believed that certain people had the gift of finding water or treasure using a kind of cleft stick. They knew their parents, and some of them knew their grandparents, and they weren’t insane. They weren’t even stupid. So what was going on?

Materialism, far from opposing these beliefs, helped to explain them. Of course, certain superstitions were rejected – the belief in werewolves for instance or vampires required a very complex explanation, and usually the thought was: this is the delusion of ignorant peasants. But certain superstitions, properly understood, revealed a primitive grasp of material connections. Just as the sun’s gravity – that invisible force – explained the rotation of planets around it, so, too, astrology, properly considered, was all about cosmic forces that were material things, and could be discovered empirically.   

Or, to put a point on this: the demystification of superstition did not lead to the rejection of those things we might think of as “superstition”, but rather their re-enactment in other terms.

the extempore monument

“It sounds a peculiarly Romantic theme—a man's genius goes into notes and extempores and sketches towards some classical monument, which in the end turns out to be superfluous.” – Eric Rhodes

This is from a review of a rather obscure work by Humphrey Jennings, a British filmmaker, one of the co-founders of Mass Observation, and poet: Pandaemonium: 1660-1886 The coming of the Machine as seen by contemporary observers. It was written, as it were, in the thirties, at the same time that Benjamin was collecting his notes for the Passages work. Although Jennings didn’t, I think, know Benjamin, they were both moved by a strong Marxist impulse to understand the formation of class structure under capitalism by creating a vast citational structure – bringing, as it were, the production of the imagination, its collective factory of images, connections, and types, to the surface.

I think Rhodes is right that this is a very romantic theme: in fact, one could think of it as a conjunction of Novalis’s notion of the ultimate Encyclopedia with the Marxist notion of a witness that would probe, to the very depths, the history of obscure. But the paradox in both cases is that the witness has to come from sources, and those sources were, inevitably, literate and emplaced in the structures of literature in the broadest sense – natural philosophy, the newspapers, poetry, medicine, etc. The romantic impulse is to find, at some moment, the perfect conjunction of the immediate and the mediate: a private language that can be publicly understood. But the bingo of all the old Marxist boys lies, forever, around the next book.

In the preface he intended to write for the book he never completed (like the Passages work, Pandaemonium was always in process), Jennings wrote:

“In this book I present the imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution. Neither the political history, nor the mechanical history, nor the social history nor the economic history, but the imaginative history.

I say 'present', not describe or analyse, because the Imagination is a function of man whose traces are more delicate to handle than the facts and events and ideas of which history is usually constructed. This function I believe is found active in the areas of the arts, of poetry and of religion – but is not necessarily confined to them or present in all their manifestations. I prefer not to try to define its hmits at the moment but to leave the reader to agree or not with the evidence which I shall place before him. I present it by means of what I call Images.”

This was one of the lovelier dreams of Modernism. Jennings, even, takes an image from Apollinaire that is cognate to Benjamin’s idea of the angel of history flying backwards: In a radio broadcast, he “spoke of Apollinaire who said that the poet must stand with his back to the future because he was unable to see it: it was in the past that he would discover who he was and how he had come to be.”

One day someone – me – should dig around the roots of Benjamin’s image of the angel of history flying backwards. An essay on the lines of Carlo Ginzburg’s investigation of the roots of the image of atrocity at a distance, summed up in the story of the Chinese mandarin in Balzac. For these roots are not dead, oh son (or daughter) of man.