Who are the "poor"?

 Who are the "poor"?

A few years ago, Paul Collier penned a review of some left leaning economics books in the TLS that contained an exemplary rightwing view of what left wing economics is all about. The key sentence is here:

“In thinking coherently about capitalism, a helpful starting place is to ask yourself: why are poor people poor?”

Brandishing this question, Collier proceeds to find the left wing answer inadequate, and offers his own critique of financialized capitalism.

However, for a left winger, this is certainly not a helpful starting place to plunge into an analysis of capitalism. It hasn’t been a helpful starting place since Karl Marx, in 1842, starting reading the French radicals and discovered the economic and sociological category of “class”. Such is the amnesia that has befallen contemporary liberal and lefty-leaning groups, who’ve inherited all the shit of the Third way movement of the 80s and 90s, that they have forgotten their own history, and might well fight Collier over the best way to ‘help’ the ‘poor’. For the better two thirds of the twentieth century, however, leftists would have laughed at this starting point. These thinkers, activists and politicians knew full well that Marx was right, at least about this point. In fact, they asked a much different question, at least outside of the Soviet bloc. That question went: can a system based on the exploitation of the worker be so modified that the level of exploitation goes down, even as the system becomes global?

From this vantage point, we can derive another question: why are the middle class people middle class? A question tentatively answered by Karl Polanyi when he pointed out that the classical liberal consensus broke down in the twentieth century as the state became a very large actor in the creation of the economy. In the US, with the New Deal and the Great Society; in France, with the dirigiste regime; in the UK, with the welfare system; in Scandinavia, with a combination of strong unions and the socialist parties. During this time, state intervention, which included massive public employment, enlarged the middle class beyond all recognition. What had once been a class mainly of professionals, administrators and other actors in the sphere of distribution (workers who, as Marx put it, performed non-productive labor) was now flooded with new members, not all of whom shared the same middle class values, but all of whom shared the aspiration for a middle class life style.

Who paid for this? Capital. The state, by its regulations, its taxation, and its support of labor’s bargaining power, hoisted the middle class on the neck of the capitalists.

There are many reasons this period did not last. Suffice it to say that the middle class era is ending, with the middle class life style now an uncertain matter, and the financialization of households a new phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon that Marx foresaw, but it is fascinating. Marx did believe that under pure capitalism, the level of exploitation would go up until the worker owned nothing. This hasn’t exactly happened. Rather, the level of exploitation and the level of financialization have worked in tandem to this goal. In 2004, the OECD published a report on the indebtedness of American households, divided by income. Those households that made below 64,000 dollars – in other words, the middle class – owed, at that point, approximately 238 percent more than they earned. St. Paul is right: in this world, we must see as though in a glass, darkly. Thus, the period of the “ownership” society under Bush was the period of peak non-ownership. As the crash showed in 2008 up until now, these figures aren’t abstract. Many millions of middle class people literally own nothing. If you sell their main asset, the house, they will only get what they paid for it or less.

Are these the “poor”? By no means. But the left is concerned with classes – the poor are not a class, but a description that doesn’t place their members in the real, capitalist economy. As Marx discovered in 1842, the poor is not the correct description of the working class. It turns a sociological category into an object of charity. The disappearance of the working class as a category, and the substitution of the term “poor”, is an example of Third way and right wing trolling.

Don’t fall for it.

Atomic Soldiers on Parade - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

O you bone-seeking babes of micro-light

You downwind masses with your glow-in-the-dark milk money!

You paid the secret tithe – secretly.

The pledge of allegiance in such small hands!

While Dr. Strangelove’s voyageurs explored the glands.

Desolation row has long been gentrified

In a win-win for the creatives, public-private funding.

What flakes blow in the hair dryer gusts

In the alley where the dumpsters overflow

With cartons of spoiled truffles, no one knows

Or measures with the zombie Geiger counter.

Down in the narco baroque private room,

A party is watered with La Mordorée 1991:

His money’s LBOs, hers, bein' 18

We’re all hypnotized by this barely legal routine,

And search the IAEA safety glossary

For appropriate responses.

“Migration: the movement of radionuclides”

“… most commonly in groundwater flow”;

It’s a cute meet as cute meets go

But my question’s about the whole body dose

Or “how to survive the atomic Bomb”, in paperback

Found in a box of Mama’s old clothes.

Bikinis from the atoll, sunglasses, cancer clusters

Bazooka Joe's dying, boys, dying like gangbusters.

prisoner's dilemma world - Cold War lives

 

The conceptual children of the Cold War came out of its belly with the apocalypse in their eyes, a mindset conditioned by the great global unconditional surrender of the Axis. There was a ghastly optimism in it that danced in the nuked ruins of cities, and then rebuilt them carefully, like the potential targets that they were. Keep your high use population away from the epicenter, and let the low use population take the brunt - that was the day's secret slogan. Its secret epic was composed of the classified memos the AEC scientists and functonaries send each other about the "downwinders" who took the greatest fallout hit from above ground atom bomb tests. But downwind is a generous wind, which is how testbomb strontium 90 became a component of every pint of milk drunk on the Eastern seabord too.

Among this progeny one finds the “prisoner’s dilemma.” Like all the problems in game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma arose in the fold between economics and the Air Force – between the Cowles commission and the Rand corporation, between the economy of managed demand of the future and the Air Force’s interest in dropping hydrogen bombs, or at least threatening to, for maximum effect. In reality, it came out of a problem in game theory developed at Rand and observed by Albert Tucker, a Princeton mathematician who grasped the structure of the game in a story about two prisoners who are confronted with a “game matrix” of three options. They can either both stay silent, they can, one or the other, rat on the other, or they can both confess. The payoffs are structured so that the one who rats on the other will get the most benefit – if, that is, the other doesn’t rat on him as well. If they both confess they will get the least benefit. The most rational option, the “equilibrium” point, is the most irrational from the point of view of self interest: that they both stay silent. That irrationality evolves from the fact that neither knows what the other is doing – they are isolated from each other.

This impressed game theorists, who defined rational in that irrational way that utilitarians and economists define it: as maximizing one’s own ‘advantage’. In this world; the advantage of, say, true repentance a la the end of Crime and Punishment is hogwash – Raskolnikov got it right the first time when he axed the pawnbroker. But in the world of Bentham and Raskolnikov, the prisoner’s dilemma seems to show that situations can arise when an action that is logically rational turns out not to bring the maximum payoff – that is, it turns out to be irrational. Of course, iterated prisoner dilemma games often tend towards the maximum payoff, but this is because iteration sneaks in communication between the two parties.

In Alexander Mehlman’s Games Afoot, which explains the prisoner’s dilemma, he uses a beautiful, hoodish terminology to divide the strategic positions open to the prisoners: the sucker and the traitor.

If we look at the prisoner’s dilemma game long enough, we can see something more than a variation of détente and deterrence between the superpowers: we can see the deep structure of Cold Warf American politics and its drift after the war was “won”. It is a politics divided between “individualism” and “collectivism”, or, to put it more frankly, between traitors and suckers. Individualism is not actually a natural position – in the game, it is a condition enforced on the players via the simple but elegant use of iron cages. This is a more difficult thing to accomplish outside the think tank laboratory, but you can approximate it through a vast media noise machine. Which is exactly what we have. And then you have the suckers – the “liberals” – who have made their bet on solidarity. But of course this solidarity is a funny thing – suspecting the traitors of having the better deal, accepting the terms of rationality as Raskolnikov defines it, it is solidarity with a bad conscience. Suckers in American politics have long satisfied their thirst for solidarity by being solidaire with liberal financiers and corporate heads. Not, by any means, the dreadful suckers who sweat and, when you give them computers and the Internet, immediately start using them to play online poker and watch porno – the dark mass out there sometimes despairingly referenced by NYT’s finest one percent opinion columnists.

The prisoners dilemma regime is at an interesting point. The neo-liberalism that attempted to “do’ social democracy whilst allowing the 1 percent to gorge themselves with a vast share of the social product is now disappearing in the maw of “debt” – while who the “debt’ is owed to is a nicely obscured topic, never broached in polite circles. But as this happens, the prisoners start crowding into the cells. The capitalism that in their parents and grandparents lifetimes proved wildly beneficial, elevating lifestyles over three generation, is now spinning back. The generation coming up may be the first since the nineteen twenties to experience capitalism as a curse, rather than a blessing. The prison can only hold so many prisoners before they do start communicating. And who knows what “irrationality”will result.

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Reflections on an oak tree

 

If we go by the gospels, Jesus had unhappy encounters with trees. Not just the tree of Calvary, the wooden cross on which he was hung; there was also the fig tree that had no figs, which Jesus, like any hungry traveller, cursed. Later, the fig tree died, and the disciples, who were following the wonder-working rabbi, put down the casualty as another miracle. I don’t think Jesus thought it was a miracle, but he figured it was a good emblem to illustrate a sermon, and so he made it one. Why not?

I have happier experiences with trees than Jesus, and I’m not talking about not having been nailed to a cross. Although I haven’t. Mine are more like those described in Marin Buber’s I – You: the tree is my other, my true you. I can contemplate a world without people and think that this would be very sad, at least for people. But when I imagine a world without trees, I am truly horrified – this would be a planetary injury, a real loss.

Of course, I’m  wised up, taxonomy-wise, and know that “tree” has no validity any more in the scientist’s table of categories. It falls apart at the edges, and isn’t a genera, really. This is all the more grotesque in as much as, historically, it was the form of the tree that inspired Linnaeus’s categorization of living things. The form persists, but the tree has died.

I’m neither a wonder working rabbi nor a scientist. I’m the son of suburban Atlanta, where the foothills of the Appalachians fade into the flat red clay of the Piedmont. An area where bulldozer and chainsaw raked the old stands of forest and the real estate entrepreneurs put in the streets, the sewers, the houses on little patches of property (ranch, colonial, cap cod) sown with grass seed and ornamented with pittis purum, Japanese plum, and pine, a wonderland for the migrating Yankee like my Dad in the 1960s.

Amidst the carnage and new growth, a few trees survived. On my little cul de sac, on the corner lot owned by the C.’s, there was a most impressive white oak, a truly majestic throwback to the past. The C.’s were a tragic family. Everything was going so well, when the 17 year old boy, a high school star, owner of a mustang, all white teeth and promise in the yearbook, was killed in a car crash. The C’s never recovered: divorce, drugs, the house sold. I was friend with the youngest son, M., before the crash. We spent wonderful hours lining up toy soldiers and knocking them down with acorns, abundant in the yard; at other times we shinnied as we could up the tree. Not to the top by any means, but up above the mere yard by enough that if you fell you’d crack your skull or break your leg, surely. M. was the neighborhood wily boy, the scamp, the Dennis the Menace, full of schemes. I wasn’t, but I was a big mouth, so we got along.

So we would get up in the lower branches, among the anttraffic and squirrels. And we’d inch out on the bough, and sit up there, and be filled with Huckleberry Finn bliss!

All of that has passed. I have driven past our former house, and it is a sad place. It burned down once, long after we left. The yard’s untended, the carport still bears traces of the fire, a scattering of trash and broken toys. As for the oak, it is still there. However, it seemed last time I saw it less splendid, shrunken, not the tree I remembered.

I attribute this, however, to my older eyes. They see many things, but they can’t see what they once saw, when I was a kid.

 

The platform review rides again! Stephen Marche at Lithub

 My old buddy Chris Hudson pointed out this article on Lithub by Stephen Marche, and I went and found that very 00s thing, the platform Review! The Platform review takes a tour d'horizon of, usually, fiction and tells you why the current scene sucks, It used to be the specialty of James Wood when he was at the unlamented TNR under Leon Wieseltier, the biggest poseur since Norman Podhoretz. You know, Leon? who also considered himself a chaser of women, usually the ones working at the TNR, which meant he was cancelled for a microsecond and then has come back with some well funded mag called Liberties, as in the liberty to chase your hot intern around your desk, or grope her at the bar after impressing her with who you know. Liberties will no doubt sponsor platform reviews, but I wonder if, this time around, the bait will find fishes.

James Wood made way for Dale Peck, whose platform reviews turned up the volume and were way more reactionary than James Wood's - so appropriate for the age of the Global war on tater-totism - or was that terrorism? My fave, in the series of platform reviews, was Zadie Smith's review in the NYRB of novels by Joseph O'Neill and Tom McCarthy called, fingerpointingly, two paths for the novel. Zadie Smith had been attacked, if that is the word, as a hysterical realist - a word that came out of James Wood's platform review of I think Delillo.

When I was a reviewer, I never had a chance to deliver a platform review. I sorta sigh for what could have been, even though I don't really have a view of what the novel should be. I do have a view as to what a minimansion should be, or a sports car, but not the novel. I do have a view, even , about what the platform review should be, and Stephen Marche's, try as it may, is too diffuse and too unfooted in any historical sense of literature to do. Much as I dislike Wood's taste in contemporary novels, I grant him a large background. But Marche is the kind of guy who evidently has never heard of Hemingway posing in liquor advertisements, or Lillian Hellman donning a mink for a mink advertisement, and so he thinks he's found the symbol of the age in poor Amanda Gorman, the woman who read the poem at Biden's inaugural:

"Amanda Gorman, after her reading at the inauguration of Joe Biden dressed in a magnificent Prada yellow coat, caused Google searches for “yellow coat” to increase 1,328 percent. She signed a modeling contract with IMG shortly after. The first thing a young poet needs to be heard today is not mastery of language nor the calling of a muse. It’s a look."

The calling of a muse - a muse, just you know one of them, maybe they prank call you, maybe its sextexting - and the idea that poets are so sunk in the lyric they don't have time to master the look (tell that to Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Jean Cocteau, Alan Ginsburg, etc. - there are very few modern poets who have not practiced a pose, found the right combination of clothing and hair and intensity to make a look. Which is not a criticism, simply a sociological banality) is a crock. I will say for Groman that she was alive at the stand, more than you can say for Robert Frost (another poet who decided to adopt the cranky farmer look) at JFK's inauguration - nor is her poem the sort of lousy bullshit that Ted Hughes used to pull out of his ass to celebrate the royalty when he was "Poet Laureate" of England.

Gorman, though, is necessary - even though she is a poet - to produce Marche's hook, which is that we've moved from hysterical realism to pose prose. Which of course leads us to posers, but Marche doesn't quite go there.

I do give Marche points for not so obviously chopping away with a dull blade, which was Dale Peck's forte. The fall from Wood to Peck was steep - a sort of hysterical reviewing gone overdrive. Of Marche's target, Sally Rooney, I have read one novel, and I liked it, although not enough to remember it and defend it. I don't think it is any more indicative of our "contemporaneity than Anna Burns Milkman, which had that bad magic vibe I love in a novel, plus the orality - much like James Kelman's How late it was...

I wonder if the platform-review is gonna make a comeback? I guess only time and Twitter will tell.

she reached out - a poem

 

 

With her blood in the water short silk slip

- her sleeping giant eyes -

Isn’t she the cutest knock on your door

Since you made it to the big girls club?

 

She’s knuckled down on the finish line

-         This is a transition period – stuff happens!

“ It was the wrong issue before the war,

and it's the wrong issue now,”

 

Sez the man with the plan.

He cannot see her as he veers into oncoming

- this daughter of Night - who from her rape

Bore that scar Helen.  

- Karen Chamisso

Interessant, na? cool thoughts in a cool shade

 

Friedrich Schlegel as a young dude was adept at netting the words that were in the air – and a lot of them were in the 1790s. Thus, in his essay on Greek poetry, he netted the word “interessant” – interesting. In Kant’s critique of judgment, the aesthetic realm was distinguished from the practical realm by its dis-interest. It was not interested in money, science or ethics, in itself. Schlegel took this to be a description of art in its “objective” state. Being a German romantic, he connected German philosophy to Greek culture – an often repeated move – and contrasted the objective art of the Greeks, an art that was natural and close to pure aesthetics, with the interested art of the moderns. That we label Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles Oedipus the King both tragedies is, for Schlegel, an error in the universal inventory – Sophocles being objective, and Shakespeare introducing the “interested” element.

The interesting – and self-interest – are, for Schlegel, hallmarks of the modern.

According to the OED, the etymology of the word ‘interest’ is mysterious. Until the sixteenth century, interest was spelled interess in English. It seems to have come from inter-esse, between being. Isn ‘t that the doxic object in its (non) essence?  It meant a claim on, a share in – what you give is what you take, potlatch rules. But the old French was interet, and it meant loss, or damage. Somehow, the “t” made its perilous way across the channel and stuck itself to interess. Which of course still meant share, claim, and contained economic meanings that would pacify Shylock – but it also broadened out to mean being curious about. Is curiosity a harm? Does the evil eye drill a hole in your soul? Or is the object or person or event claiming you? Or you, it?

Kant in the Critique of Judgement cut bait and decided that the aesthetic, at least, could not be reduced to the useful. The beautiful is without interest – although, with Kant, that moment of disinterestedness gives a satisfaction.Friedrich Schlegel, in his study of Greek Poetry, has his own sense of Kant’s beauty – beauty is not, to read Schlegel one way, for the moderns, precisely because it does not damage, it does not claim. It is an ancient ideal. The modern ideal is the interesting. Schlegel was 22 at the time he wrote his essay. He was in Dresden. It was the year of retraction – 1794-1795 in France. Schlegel was on that point in the arc of his career where he was tending rightward. He ended up, of course, as an old Metternich propagandist.

Yet in spotting the interesting as the fundamental modernist aesthetic mode, he was definitely on to something. It is one of those aesthetic modes fated to be continually jinxed by philosophy, which can’t get over its Greek fixation oneauty. Recently, Sianne Ngai has been stirring things up by reflecting on marginalized aesthetic categories, like cuteness, zaniness or the interesting. In her chapter from her book about these aesthetic categories, the interesting gets dubbed the “merely interesting”. Ngai, too, goes to Schlegel for the codification of the interesting in the long game of contrasting the subjective modern to the objective classical. Schlegel, however, shows that the logic of the interesting – as opposed to the interest-ed, is stymied by the in-betweeness – the inevitable projection – of the subject. The interesting, to use McLuhan’s contrast, is cool, while the interested is hot.

In the English and American culture of the nineteenth century, the interesting had little standing. Interesting never fell from the lips of a critic like Hazlitt, or Ruskin, or Arnold, who were uncomfortable with the implication – at its most radical – that there was no room, here, for judgment. That is, the interesting seemed merely interesting, with that mereness making for a degree zero of judgment. The Victorians were nothing if not judgers.

In the revolt against the Victorians, the interesting returns to represent, mysteriously, an aesthetic attitude, something I associate with Stein and Duchamp.

“As lan Mieszkowski underscores in Labors of

Imagination, the interesting for Schlegel is thus ultimately a matter of comparison based not on kind but on degree. "Since all magnitudes can be multiplied into infinity," Schlegel writes, "Even that which is most interesting could be more interesting .... All quanta are infinitely progressive" (35,72). There is thus a sense, as Schlegel's fellow Athenaeum contributor

Navalis notes, in which what is Most interesting is the 'presentation of an object in series-(series of variations, modifications, etc.).” Ngai, 122.

Schlegel’s idea here derives in part from the opposition to what he took to be the source of Greek objectivity – the search for the perfect. If we see the perfect as the contrary of the interesting, we get close to why it is such a modern – modernist – aesthetic mode, and why it is dogged by its own generated opposite – the boring.

 

Ngai’s chapter follows Schlegel in defining the aesthetic mode from the side of the spectator, the aesthetic consumer, rather than the producer. However, once we grant the interesting a right to its place in the aesthetic domain, we are granting it a place in the whole set of motivations that come together in creation – motivations that may well overwhelm the divide between producer and consumer.

 

Which is where I will leave this note.