The knight's move

 The Knight’s Move is one of Shklovsky’s typically enigmatic books, where the essay form breaks up under some strange paratactic pressure, as though a dialogue were being attempted through the static crackle of a bad connection.

Although Shklovsky is the ideological opposite of V. Rozanov, that weirdly creepy but charismatic moraliste, but he was fascinated by him in the pre-revolutionary period, when Shklovsky wrote some of his most famous texts. The fragmentary style was, if not borrowed from Rozanov, at least incited by his sense of the way Rozanov’s writing on literature where having an effect on the way people read novels, what they expected from them, in the 1900-1917 period. In an essay on Rozanov, Shklovsky called him a master of the oxymoron – that moment when the dialectic collapses. Oxymorons are a kind of tomb in which the contradiction becomes a kind of petrified juvenile delinquent style. Rozanov’s reactionary ideology was a death-driven thing, whereas Skhlovsky want to resurrect the dialectic from the oxymoron – just as revolution emerges from the hostile juxtaposition of opposing classes. “In Russia,” Shklovsky wrote in The Knight’s move, “ everything is so contradictory that we have become witty in spite of ourselves.”

Shklovsky book, it that is what it is, is governed over the a stunning comparison of the writer – or the writing – to the knight’s move in chess. The knight’s path is different from the other power players. It cannot even move to the square ahead of it or of the same color. The conclusion Shklovsy draws is that the “knight is not free- it moves in an L shaped manner because it is forbidden to take the straight road.” That non-freedom is like the non-freedom of the writer.

Shklovsky , typically, drops the metaphor. But since the move entitles the book, and the book is about literature, he lets the broader implication pull us along – we cannot confuse the eccentric with freedom.All the notions that traditionally refer to the artist’s freedom, or familiarity with chance, the whole dual notion of inspiration, in which the freedom of creation is granted only at the cost of annuling the creator, in as much as inspiration exists outside of and through the creator, are subsumed in the iron law of the strange move. Strangeness, the disjunction, the lateral movement that is not even completely lateral, is not so much spontaneous but rigged. And yet, what is being rigged but a violation of the conventions of the straight road? And even if the movement is rigged, its effects are not. This is where Shklovsky’s image differs from the inspiration tradition, which situates inspiration not only outside the author but outside the work. The work is the product of inspiration in this way of thinking. For Shklovsky, it is precisely the inverse. Inspiration is a product of the work – that is, the devises in the work inspire the infinite filling in, creating the interest in the work. To use Seanne Ngai’s vocabulary, the work is full of gimmicks.

In work, however, in which the devices seem to force us all into straight lines – in work that is, for instance, political – the knight must make a harlequin’s leap – that is, it choses the choice that is given due to the nature of the board itself, where possible moves are not exhausted but given in a limited canon and, even so, the combinations are infinite.

This is one of the reasons that even bad, horrendous, terrible politics can produce, in literature, good work. We can wish Pound and Celine, for instance, away, but they will come back and haunt you.

1Ian Balfour

Finding, Discovery and the episteme me hearties

I’ve always thought Foucault missed a trick, in Les Mots et les choses, by not devoting attention to the epistemological position of the term “discovery” in the 17th and 18th century. I don’t think that neglect was negligible, either – it points to one of the oddities of Foucault’s book, which is that it removed the conceptual history he was telling from the trans-Atlantic context of colonialism that was one of the great material events of his donnee. Not only trans-Atlantic, but Indian and South Asian as well. Restoring “discovery” to its place would both confirm certain of Foucault’s intuitions and shuffle the order of things in interesting ways – it would give us a handle on deconstructing Foucault’s text. Discovery is writ large not only in the period’s natural philosophy, but in its law, its ‘anthropology”, such as it was, and in the practice of adventure that traverses the disciplines. Discovery did an enormous amount of work at the time, legitimating a trans-Atlantic order that still exists, and that was built on top of the discovery myth.

“Finding” has no such royal pretentions. If discovery is a kingly word, finding is a jack in the pack. It is still related to the basic nature/culture divide, so a part of the raw essence of the discovery ideology, but there is a modesty in finding. It suits the contemporary sciences, where every researcher comes up with a “finding” – ah, the mock humbleness of it all! Natural philosophers, those baroque sages, came up with “discoveries”, a term that is hard to hide in the bureaucracy.

The above does not exhaust the semiotic career of finding, of course. One of the great childhood activities is finding. Partly this is because children are built on a scale that allows corners and pockets to assume a greater prominence in their world. Partly this is because finding is basic to a number of childhood games – indeed, Freud’s construction of the fort/da game is built upon a relational element, the finding. In a culture that takes the child as an image of the authentic person – all social vices scraped away – finding will have a certain innocent aura.

A casual search in Science, a journal that has been in existence for about 150 years, finds that finding as a noun came after a long career of x "finding" y - which meant concluding, or sensing, or becoming aware of, etc. Finding here is not so different from finding as a child's activity, although put to an adult purpose. By the 1890s there was some indication that all of this finding, all of this sticking thumbs in the vast plum pie of the world, was in need of a noun that was less charged with the imagination and projection of the subject than discovery. Of course, discovery was still around, and is still around as a candidate for finding, but it has become a little too boastful as a noun - it is more pop science than science. Finding migrated into science discourse from legal discourse - where the finding as a judgement has been an official term since the seventeenth century, as far as I can find. I believe it is Tony Gibbons who noticed the steady creep of judicial speech into other speech domains, and the consequent transposition of concepts of equity in ordinary life situations. But the creep of judicial speech into the realm of science has not been, as far as I know, extensively studies.

So this is the lost and found, or found and lost, of discovery and finding. Some future Foucault should note these things.

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.

Like

Comment

Share

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.