Deconstructing the rankers

 

 

 

“Nobody will deny that in a world in which everything is connected through cause and effect, and in which no miracles ever happen, each part is a mirror of the whole. If a pea is shot into the Mediterranean, an eye that is sharper than our own but infinitely less fine than the eye that sees all would be able to trace the effect on the coast of China. And what other is a particle of light which contacts the surface of the eye compared to the mass of the brain and its nerves?” This is one of my favorite passages in Lichtenberg. It expresses a great idea, a fantastic idea, the imagery of which has a sort of hypnogogic flickering, as though Lichtenberg had magically been able to recover one of those great ideas that one has just as one is falling asleep, which are forever lost to the consciousness that wakes the next morning. 

I often think of this passage when I read someone assessing the importance of an author or event, especially when they do so to make some invidious point. I thought of this when I read the nasty and falsefooted essay attacking Greenblatt’s The Swerve by the head of Harvard Publishing, Lindsay Waters in a Boundary 2 issue from several years back. Waters essay is an excellent example of the American habit of ranking, and then of attacking the ranked for being ranked too high, as though we were all perpectually taking our SAT.  This passage, for instance: 
“English professors have been proclaiming for decades that they were disseminating subversive ideas that would shake Western civilization to its foundations. They wanted to shock and awe the bourgeoisie. Yet, look who has rocked America and the West to its core: economic theorists, bankers, and accountants—a curious turn of events. Robert E. Lucas Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent, whom I published at the University of Minnesota Press decades before they won Nobel Prizes, were leaders in the production of ideas that deconstructed the international economy. By comparison, the impact of de Man barely measured on the Richter scale.”

Poor De Man! He probably didn’t even know that the chief of the Harvard University Press had a machine that could give us a Richter reading for events! Although one suspects that perhaps Waters doesn’t exactly understand his own machine. Certainly the description of Lucas’s work has a certain distinct odor of bullshit. “Deconstructed the international economy” did he? I can’t imagine that Lucas thinks of himself as deconstructing the international economy. As far as I can tell, Lucas is mostly connected with the model of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium and the idea that expectations of economic actors are affected by government regulation in such a way as to make such regulation broadly inefficient. I wouldn’t exactly say this rocked Western civilization to its core. On the other hand, Waters seems to have a large experience of drunk English professors – because I’ve never read a sober one, beginning with De Man, who promising to shake Western civilization to its foundations. De Man, for all his sins, saw what shaking Western civilization was all about in the 1939-1945 period. Famous for deconstructing the international economy – at the point of a gun.

However, it would shake Western civilization to its foundations if we had some richter scale for the effect of every pea that was cast into the ocean. Contra the head of the Harvard Press, however, I think we can say apriori that such a scale, and the mechanism for applying it, doesn’t exist and will never exist. What Meso-American savant would have guessed that a King and Queen presiding over a podunk peninsula were about to shake the whole order of things by financing the idea of a ratty Italian ship captain? Perhaps the apriori will be reversed when Christ and the Angels descend to earth and begin to judge the quick and the dead. But even in this case, I would bet that Lucas and de Man would be judged to have different effects on different people for different reasons. As would, say, Oprah, Dale Carnegie, and the scribe that wrote the ancient Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. No one scale will apply. 
 

Geography lesson

 Geography lesson

The clams clamor on the shore

I walk by – a tempus fugitive

leaving behind a bitch’s spoor.

This is life. This is how I live.

We’re all undressed in its big blue eye

- that ill named, that surly Pacific.

Our tsunami will come by and by

- divorce, mass shooting, penny panic

of all the investments we should never have made.

isn’t this life? This is how I live

among tanned life guards in their umbrella shade

the beach is a tempus fugitive.

I’m an Atlantic girl. I see Europe

I see Africa. This is how I live.

I’ve come to Cali and I’ve lost my scope.

I’m homesick, I’m – a tempus fugitive.

- Karen Chamisso

Art for art's sake , motherfuckers

 

Art for art’s sake was born to be the weakling, the easy target, the punching bag. Imagine the effrontery of the thing! If a painting, a piece of music, a poem exists for its own sake, we are dangerously near the point where any dirty sock with a hole in it can stand up and claim a vote in the household. No throwing the sock out without guilt. No throwing the sock out without a little murder.

Art for arts sake is so intolerable, so against common sense, that we immediately feel it is a provocation. Who is behind this nonsense? And our first thought is: must be the artist. Now, it isn’t true that we hate all artists. We love the celebrity ones, the Hemingway or Picasso bio-pic on HBO, which – a plus! – comes with ample script opportunities for female nudity. Click-bait, hein? But the average artist wears no HBO-able glitter, but swans his or her poor ego around, a poser, and we are secretly sure a, that this creature will fail, and b., that the best part will be watching their come-down. Unless of course they are trust-fund kids, in which case our hands are tied. But for the average artist, we have as much respect as we have for the guys in dark alleys showing their pee-pees. However, friends, say what you will about the alley exhibitionist, they don’t ever go around saying pee-pee for pee-pee’s sake.

The for-the-sake of all things was decided long ago, although, yes, we weren’t consulted. Some economist, I think it is Nordhaus, has put a nice little price tag on the end of the world: 600 trillion dollars back in 2000, I think it was. Now this is the ultimate for-the-sake of. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, says that 600 trillion, and we have made damn sure that rule is ruthlessly carried out. It has taken the place of that interior light that Descartes, quaintly, believed we harbored as cogito-s – now we know it is all hard wiring that plugs into no big lightbulb, nothing but firings and misfirings in the internal furniture.

Not of course that we don’t bow down to the price tag of some of those beauties. The lost Van Gogh that some sharpeyed person sold for millions! Now, that is something, and we can all dream of that exchange. Rich people, as is well known, have to spend their money somehow, and be sure they will resell that Van Gogh for some fantastic sum! Profit, as they say, for the sake of profit.

One of the more comic aspects of art-for-art’s sake is we are assured that it is an elitist attitude. Eurocentric, even. Temporarily, we lose our minds and think that artists form an elite. Of course, you can ask your average janitor about that, and I think the answer is no. But because the conversation is usually confined to artists themselves, much lather is put into the elitism biz.

My own humble is that the whole picture of Europe, in which every Irish and Galician peasant is a bearer of “high European culture”, is bogus. Europe, or the West, until the modernizations and wars that destroyed the mostly peasant societies of Europe, was represented by a very small percentage of the population. The population, like any colonial population, had to be “europeanized”, Westernized. Even as the peasants fled into the city, they took their Little Tradition, to use James C. Scott’s term, with them. Scott sorta conflates the little tradition with the oral and the Great Tradition – science, rationality, all the big words that flow out from the poobahs – as textual. I think that goes too far. If you scratch an aristocrat from Louis XIV’s court, you will quickly find the most peasant like beliefs imaginable, such as the belief that you can make certain sacrifices to the devil to attain your ends. As a matter of fact, when the Paris police chief, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, investigated the affair of poisons – the supposedly widespread use of poison among a certain sector of the aristocracy around Louis XIV’s court – he found a whole world of fortunetellers, street corner conjurers, and sellers of love potions in Paris, circa 1677, that would have easily be recognizable, pari passu, to Nahautl speaking villagers in Mexico in the same year.

We can romanticize that Little Tradition or not. One thing we can’t do, though, is pretend that rationality or science or any of that was the predominant mode of thought in Europe ... well, ever.

One of the archaic remnants of belief in the little tradition was that the object had a certain “personality”, a certain integrity. This integrity wasn’t simply a cost or affordance represented by the price system. It was what it was. It was art for art’s sake. And it took a long course of industrialization to beat this idea out of artisans and workers. It still hasn’t gone away: there are peeps saving their lucky socks with the holes in them, and even darning them. It happens. And there are peeps making poems because the poems want them to, not the market or the classroom. Socrates, somewhere, speaks of the conversation he is having with some antagonist as having a “life”. This broader sense of life still trickles into the art world, shamefully. In the Great tradition, we have one word for that kind of thing: masturbation! The unprofitable expenditure of seed, the self-enjoyment that we call self-abuse. You ain’t no kinda artist if somebody, somewhere, doesn’t look at what you are doing and call it masturbation.

I never have understood, by the way, and P.S., who exactly pays the 600 trillion for the end of the world. My heretical thought is ,maybe the end of the world is the end of money, and the world without any people is worth exactly zip, in terms of dollars and sense – common sense. But that’s the kind of sentiment that makes the economists laugh.

Tiresome Tiresome anti-cancel culture and what it is all about

 

I am a big fan of certain reactionary writers. Of pedophiles, racists, misogynists and a buncha sorry ass mandarins. At the same time, I am aware that criticism of these people for being pedophile, racist, misogynist and otherwise showing a sorry ass vibe is true, and that those who consider such criticism part of “cancel culture” have a very odd view of reading and what it entails.

Where does that view come from?

The cancel culture debate is so flatheaded and without fizz that it is stale pop all the way down. The interesting thing about it is that it connects to the current crisis in academia. Namely, in the humanities and social sciences.

 The Cold War policymakers in the West and East saw big advantages in funding academia. The massive expansion of higher education has had enormous social effects, one of which is, in my opinon, understudied – I’d call this the scene of reading.

 

Read the autobiographies of the poobahs of the 19^th century – and in particular, women – and you will find that it was not done in a classroom. It was done in Papa’s library, or with books from a lending library; it was done through buying newspapers, it was done in cigar factories by readers, it was done on the hoof. As far as recent literature is concerned, there was no teaching of it in universities. It was only in 1919 that Oxford deigned to produce a syllabus that allowed for the study of 19^th century literature. Compare that to universities today:  Oxford now offers a contemporary literature course. Berkeley offers, in its 125E course, the following texts: Diaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad; Harding, Paul: Tinkers; Johnson, Adam: The Orphan Master's Son; McCarthy, Cormac: The Road; Strout, Elizabeth: Olive Kittredge; Tartt, Donna: The Goldfinch.

 This easy acceptance of the latest novels would have given a heart attack to the dons of 1919. Is this philology? They would have moaned.

 In the heyday of the cold war humanities departments, there was a search for transgression. It was, it must be said, a strange search: how could you “teach” the transgressive in an institution that would give you a degree with which you were credentialed to join the great middle managerial class? But the paradoxes of that period of managed capitalism seemed, at the time, less a thing of paradox and more a resolution of the affluent lifestyles to which we were all heir.

 Well, neoliberalism put paid to that notion. The great universities are now run by the same kind of people who run businesses – flatheads looking to stuff their pockets with money and increase the endowment. As for the humanities, that is now a loss leader, a headache for the real job of the university – signing contracts with big pharma, keeping the business school growing, and buying property on which to build unnecessary monuments to donating plutocrats in a win-win of tax avoidance.

 

Unfortunately for the administrators, not all the students, yet, have been roped into taking business inspiration 101 and going on to accounting shenanigans 404. Some of them still tiresomely want to read whole books, often fictions, and even poetry – which is all very fine for 3 minutes a week on the NPR, but otherwise, can you imagine taking it seriously?

 The cancel culture controversy is absurd on so many levels, but the one that truly amuses me is the conservative knuckleheads, who barely got through that Tom Clancy book, and have since gotten their entire knowledge of the maitre from video games, lamenting that we no longer teach, I don’t know, Charles Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend anymore in our classrooms. They have temporarily skipped trolling tweets about you studied fucking English instead of engineering? LOL! They will go back it, though. We live in a time where they armies of ignorance occasionally stand, arms akimbo, to reproach us for boycotting Roman Polanski’s art films from the fifties. Among other reasons, this is why I love cancel culture – it so rouses up the yokels!

 

 

the slave world

 

One of the oublis of the Nazi state was the accelerated construction of a slave economy – the so called “forced laborers” – Zwangsarbeiter.  There are various estimates of the number of forced laborers – by 1944 there were thirty thousand labor camps and over 8 million forced laborers. The extent of the slave system and the speed with which it was set up to intersect with every industry and service in Germany was astonishing. By 1941, 1.5 million Poles were slaves; 1 million French war prisoners were slaves. 2.5 million Soviets, by 1944. 50 percent of the Poles and Soviets were women.

The full awareness that this is what a slave state does – that what the Nazis did in 3 years were what the French, Portugese, Spanish and English did to West Africa for 300 years – seems to have been erased, or at least largely left aside, from the general discussion of slavery. There is a rhetoric among white nationalists in various countries that occasionally discovers white slavery, such as was enormously present in the Mediterranean slave markets of the early modern period; but the claim of ancestral victimage is really just a rhetorical ploy. The real enslavement of one’s grandfather/mother is not claimed, because, I think, the shame of it has a long effect.  The enormous generational shame of, for instance, the French slaves in Germany. The use of slaves everywhere, from the horrors of Peenemünde to the IG factories, is a difficult collective matter to comprehend.  Slavery operates not only as brute force, but a massive campaign to interiorize shame, to create, through beatings and yelling and the regime of humiliation, the untermenschen soul.

In the history books, the forced labor of prisoners is not generally described as slavery. There are many gradations between regimes of forced labor; prisoners of war in the twentieth century, and prisoners in general, are often made to work. The Soviet gulag was a grotesque monstrosity of forced labor. In the case of the Nazi regime, the “prisoners” were not given sentences – the idea that they could one day become, again, free laborers was not even considered by the Nazi legal system. To have a sentence, even a death sentence, is to be recognized by the state. The Nazi regime created a vast system of non-recognition – of social death. Forced laborers were once resistors, or were of the wrong ethnic type – gypsies, Jews, Slavs – and they were captured, herded together packed up and sent, by train or oxcart, to concentration camps, from thence being farmed out to tasks that brought no reward. More than that, ill treatment was often the larger point – forced laborers were marked for death at some point. Although Himmler apparently assured the other Nazi leaders that these subhumans would not be mixed with or seen by the German population, this soon became an impossibility. They went to places like the Heinkel Airworks in Oranienberg, where the population of forced laborers swelled to such an extent that they could no longer be housed impromptu in the cellars of the factory complex, and a camp had to be  built, since they needed at least the laborers to survive at least temporarily; or to Dora, in the underground, where the excavation of the tunnels went on in conditions that were freezing, dustfilled, dark, and low, a true hell into which a force of starved and beaten inmates selected from Buchenwald and tending, statistically, to be French, was jammed.  It was common, in Dora, for the slaves to be assaulted when they went into offices of the German functionaries there, who relaxed from their stressful days by stabbing them with scissors or pencils or beating them with broomhandles, whatever came handiest. Memos were written cautioning functionaries not to do this, since it increased the mortality rate, which thinned out the herd of slaves and impeded the pace of construction.

At some point, we will have to think of the KZ world – a world that overlapped with the extermination camps – and the world of the Gulags and the prison colonies that popped up all over beginning in the late 19^th century as elements of the same general phenomenon. Emancipation, to my mind, is the model of what is positive about the Enlightenment – and the way the Enlightenment was financed, directly or indirectly, by slave labor is what made the Enlightenment a shaky ideological phenomenon. But emancipation does not happen all at once, in a decisive lightning stroke. It is revocable, incomplete, and easy to attack. Slavery is always just below the surface of even our contemporary politics. It is not far from us at all.

 

The limits of clarity

 

Clarity – or clearness, a word that blemishes the clear, slightly, with the -ness – has an almost universal claque. It is the rare soul who says anything against it. Such applause for something that is at once so direct and so... hard to define, even vague, is a phenomenon that is worth looking at. There are few papers out there entitled: against clarity. Alison Stone wrote a paper entitled the “Politics of Clarity” (2015) which tries to sort out the utilization of clarity concerns by “analytics” to deflate “continentals”. It is a good paper, and it makes good points about how the call for “clearness” is often used to enforce an ultimately patriarchal norm.

“Pushing this concern further, we might say that the notion of clarity is itself a myth. "Clear" thinking is merely thinking that fits in with, embodies, and fails to challenge the hegemonic power relations of the surrounding society. Such thinking seems "clear" merely because it is familiar, and this is because it is thinking in which dominant power relations are naturalized. To celebrate clarity is to mask the real issue: power.”

Stone’s paper is built on an opposition between “transparency” and the “mask”. Clarity has long been caught up in this opposition – it easily shifts to transparency. It is interesting that the clarity-transparency terminology, when applied to speaking, only work as “masked” metaphors – as metaphors referencing light and vision. Joyful things, one would think. So why is it that clarity so often comes with a ruler to rap the student’s blundering hand – or the continental philosopher’s?

Bryan Magee, writing about clarity in philosophy, makes the argument that clarity is a property of the structure of the philosophical text, and not of the elements – the sentences – that make it up (which sentences instead of paragraphs is one of the unclear things about the essay.) He also inserts a rather astonishing  understanding of these issues through the example of Kant:

“Some philosophers, most importantly Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, lay out a structure like this with the utmost clarity, yet in unclear sentences. In his case it was because he had spent many years thinking his critical philosophy through, but then wrote it down hurriedly because he was afraid of dying before he finished writing the book. The result is clear thinking expressed in unclear sentences.”

I am not sure what this account references. Kant spent years “thinking his critical philosophy” would seem, to me, to mean Kant spent years writing notes on what he was thinking. But for Magee it seems to mean, literally, that Kant built it up in his head, like it is said that Mozart heard his compositions – although unlike Mozart, who supposedly wrote down his compositions without an erasure, Kant, afraid of death, rushed his work. This might be the most doubtful account of the Critique of Pure Reason I’ve ever read – especially in as much as Kant made significant changes in the editions of the Critique, not a thing a man fleeing death tends to do. If Magee were correct, the correlary would be that Kant’s Vor-kritische Schriften are probably written more clearly than his Critical work. I don’t know who claims this – I doubt Magee has actually made the comparison.

However, the notion that the approach of death tends to lend a premonitory obscurity to one’s writing is very much part of the “myth of clarity”. Clarity requires some lifting of stress – a bourgeois insight that, I think, could help us think about what clarity is, why its desireable, and what its limits are.

In Stone’s essay, she points to a classic instance of polemical “clarity-making” – Carnap’s analysis of Heidegger’s phrase, Nichts nichtet – nothing nothings. Stone moves from this to Adorno’s notion that clarity, attached to “common sense”, has a repressive function. It should be noted, though, that Adorno was quite as convinced that Heidegger was speaking “jargon’.

This points to the problem with taking the “analytic” and “continental” schools as homogenous blocks, rather than didactic fictions that arose in the post World War II academic scene. Jargon, Adorno’s word, points to the connection between slangs and subcultures – Adorno’s own prose, to a certain ear, is incorrigibly Weimar-ish, the mixture of Karl Kraus’ attempt to discipline all thought into the bounds of the epigram and sociological terms derived from not only the Marxist but the Simmelian and Weberian traditions.

Am I saying the limits of clarity are the limits of my own subcultural group? This goes too far, I think, exaggerating how far from the main these subcultures are. I admit that Heidegger’s riff on nothing can be danced upon with some glee, but that “analytical” philosophers go all reverent with admiration when Tarksi comes out with the news that a metalogical truth is possible

“A materially correct truth-definition logically entails all instances of the form: (T) «(A) is true if and only if A*, where '«(A)' is a name of the sentence A and 'A*' is its translation into a metalanguage.”

A veritable font of unclarity for the laity,  starting with “materially correct” and moving onto “translation” and “metalanguage.” The notion of the translation seems, uh, to make this whole thing rather  circular – in the best Heideggerian tradition.

Is there a form of clarity that can take into itself our deathhauntedness and our tendency to make explanations more important, and more cumbersome, than the object of explanations? A question for philosophers.  

 

note on the cold war: the defector

In Sir Thomas Ellyot’s dictionary of English from 1559, there is an entry for defector: “he that so departeth or rebelleth, or goth from one to an other.” It goes back to a group of latin words that mean weakness, lack, or desertion – relating the word to defect. It is, to say the least, interesting that desertion, going from one to an other side, and lack are so conjoined. The word lies there in the general linguistic bank, from Ellyot’s time to the 1940s, when suddenly its time arrives. New words or phrases, I have found, can be plucked from the archives of the New York Times by their quotation marks. They are swaddled in these marks (“defector”) due to the New York Time’s linguistic gentility – they have not yet grown up enough to walk around without quote marks. Other newspapers and magazines will either use the baby word enough that the quotes disappear, or the word itself disappears.

In Russian, similarly, there is a word that applies to the set of agents covered by “defector” – “the one who does not return”, nevorzvrashchenets. Which implies a going forth – a movement. I have no idea if the etymological journey of that word is similar to that of defector, or it is was brought it into prominence in the late forties. It would not surprise me.

The cold war was many things to many people – newspaper articles, the spread of automatic military rifles, the triumphant entry into colonial capitals of victorious, ragtag guerillas, oil pipelines, synthetics, planned economies, missile building, the stretch from the concentration camp Dora to the walk on the moon, etc. - and one of the things it was was a period of defectors. The defector and the cold war are twins. Of course, I am tempted to say: every period gets the heretics it deserves. Which is the kind remark that is also rooted in a cold war thematic: the identification of ideology with religion. This was considered, at the beginning of the cold war, a decisive and cutting insight – communism is a religion! The idea being that the atheists were deceiving themselves. And, of course, you can’t build a social order on a deception. It also explained the stubborn adherence of smart individuals to evidently illogical and horrific ideologies. It was that irrational thing, faith.

A little of this can dissolve more than its users orginally intended. One could begin to doubt that any social order can be built on foundational logic and rationality. This doubt started to bubble up from the depths in the 60 in America and Europe.

What need did the word “defector” meet?

It seems prima facie that the two “camps” – the non-communists and the communists – needed a word to convey something a bit different than traitor for those who came over, went forth to their side. The grinding gears of presenting a soviet defector in the press as a ‘traitor” made a softer word necessary. However, this was more than a case of Orwellian manipulation; for, indeed, the notion of treason in the cold war was under pressure, along with the notion of the unilateral state.

It might seem easy to label Klaus Fuchs giving the Soviets America’s “atom bomb secrets” an act of treason. But this would imply a relationship between the soviets and the U.S. that was certainly in play in the forties, due to the fact of their military alliance. Furthermore, the whole base of the atom bomb program was built by, among others, exiles who technically were “betraying” their various countries of origin, which countries had fallen into Naziism or fascism. As twentieth century states grew bigger, developed elaborate intelligence agencies, militaries, and welfare agencies of all kinds, making it harder and harder to “locate” the state, particularly as it intersected with giant corporations and other states. If Klaus Fuchs is a traitor for giving America’s nuclear secrets away, what are we to say of the method by which Israel developed its nuclear bombs? The relatively unknown Zalman Shapiro, who helped build the first nuclear powered American subs, is suspected by some of having smuggled uranium to Israel from his Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. in Apollo Pa. Others, namely Seymour Hersch, suspects that it was material that was just carelessly lost in Apollo – a much worse crime, in my opinion.

I imagine that if Shapiro did smuggle the uranium, he did not do it, in his own mind, as a traitor.Just as I imagine – and imagination is important here – that Harry Dexter White, who gave documents to the Soviets while he was at the State department, did not think of himself as a traitor. Rather, in both cases, there was a sense of do it yourself foreign policy. There's a long tradition of this in the U.S. - and in other countries undergoing radical political change, defined by one of another faction in the country.

What happened at Apollo is interesting. Here's a link. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/.../numec-affair-did-highly...

Defector arose as an answer to a conceptual puzzle about sovereignty, but it never really provided a satisfactory answer. Oddly, as the corporation globalized and the wall fell, the defector also retreated as a figure of current interest. Straight out for money sales of arms and secrets seem not quite to fit the defector imago – nor do they speak to the revenge of the traitor.

As the state gets mistier, the betrayal of the state gets mistier. We defect, now, from Amazon, not the free world, and we defect to other media platforms, in a world that is same as it ever was.