an image from montaigne

 
Comparisons, it was anciently thought, were among the royal tools of thought, along with logic. One of the interesting thing about comparisons is how, buried beneath them, we find coincidences, intersections on the plane of concept or image. And the comparison is all the more powerful in that, like a coincidence, it produces a cognitive shock, a crossroads surprise. The shock, if the comparison goes off well, will be transmitted to the object we began with. It will seem not only as if we have given an explanation, but we have given a surplus of explanation.
It is here that comparison runs into trouble, for, like coincidence, it seems tangled in superstition. Enlightenment begins, perhaps, with a suspicion of the surplus of explanatory value. Ancient  enlightenment – the sceptics and epicurians who came after Aristotle – recognized that comparison did too much work. It is as if an occult power, a dark force, planned that meeting of concepts or images or situations. The enlightenment state of mind is always allergic to occult forces. These are, after all, the things that plunge us perhaps all innocently and without taking notice into a magical view of history. And yet, if the Enlightenment wants to have a history of itself in which it too figures against the forces of unreason and superstition, if it works towards “progress”, it is always itself subject to a self-subverting contradiction, the projection of some force that makes for history as a progress, a force that is not a force, when logically analyzed, leaving us a history without a motion, which frustrates our idea of what history should be.  Which is just to say that enlightenment itself often does not resist the temptation to seek out destinies and fates, and tarries with an image of history as a sort of white magic.
This is one side of comparison. Another side is its absorption, over time, into the literal, the long march from connotation to denotation. Coincidence, here, is routinized, or overlooked so often as to seem no coincidence at all.
There is a haunting comparison in Montaigne’s essay, “On the useful and the honorable” – which Florio translates as the Profitable and the Honest – which speaks to comparison itself within the public sphere. This essay begins the third book, which was published four years before Montaigne’s death, in 1592. The third book has a certain retrospective splendour, rather in the manner of Shakespeare’s The Tempest – one feels that Montaigne, like Prospero, is about to break his rod and drown his books, as the last voyage approaches. On the useful and the honorable (de l’utile et l’honnête) mingles memories or summings up from Montaigne’s public career with a reflection on the division between what it is useful to do for the state – what profits the prince, or one’s ambitions - and what it is honest, moral, honorable to do from the perspective of the private individual.
The image and comparison I have in mind arises in the context of a characteristic moment of self-accounting, with its to-and-fro motion:
“What was required by my position, I furnished, but in the most private way possible. As a child I was plunged into it up to my ears. And I succeeded well enough, but I have often, in good time, disengaged myself from it. I have since avoided meddling in public affairs, rarely accepting to do so and never requesting it. Holding my back turned to ambition. If not like rowers who advance, thus, backwards. Nevertheless, being embarked, I find myself less obliged to my resolution than to my good fortune. There are, indeed, paths less inimicable to my taste, and more adapted to my temperament, by which, if my fortune had called me in the past to public service and advancement in the opinion of the world, I know I would have bypassed all the arguments of my reason and followed it.”
The to and fro is held together here, I think, by that discrete glimpse of rowers advancing with their back turned. It is an image of progress that surely has a double root in Montaigne’s own experience and in the classical authors.
For a man who saw the world as constantly dissolving one hard element into another, Montaigne was very phobic about water, much prefering solid land, and even the bumpiness of coaches, to the waves. Nevertheless, he did travel, sometimes, by water. In a gabare, a flat bottomed boat that was poled or rowed. There was one that went from Bordeaux to Blaye, a village on the Garonne that was a point of contention in the guerilla war between the Catholics and the Protestants when Montaigne was mayor of Bordeaux. Indeed, advance has an emphatic military meaning as well as one that indicates a certain directed movement. The symbolism of the rower who, facing backwards, advances the boat must have suggested itself to Montaigne hundreds of times. But perhaps he was also inspired by an essay of Plutarch’s which was thematically akin to this essay: If it is true that we should live a hidden life.
“The oarsmen, turned towards the stern, chase after the catch by the action that they impress on the oars in a sense contrary to the direction of the vessel. Something similar happens to those who give us such precepts: they hurry after fame in pretending to turn their back on it.”
I have been revolving this image in my head, and it grows more interesting the more I think about it. Here fate, fame, progress, and a strange reversal of how we think of human progress all come together. I think there is a long European history of this image, which to my mind, more than the invisible hand, says something interesting about the upper class view of what eventually becomes capitalism. Aren’t we, vagabonds outside of the gated community, those backwards rowers?

The reactionary rictus: Macron's deformation of social insurance

 Paul Quinio's editorial in Liberation about the collapse of the debate on the "deform" of the social insurance system in France revolves around a reference to an apocryphal phrase of Churchill's: that democracy is the worst system of government, except any other. That quip has always been a conditional surrender of an essentially reactionary stance, according Capital and the established power the lion's share of the discursive wealth of the nation - as well as the real wealth - and calling it democracy. France has never submitted to this kind of thing. The strike, the demonstration, all are not dead in France.

Macron viewed his larger task one of "normalizing" France - a nice little Thatcherization with some euphemism liberalism thrown in, like "apologizing" for colonialsm (while of course keeping French troops in Africa whenever the cause arises). The "reform"/deform of the social insurance system was key to Macron's larger cause. Quinio is entirely right about Macron's ultimate responsibility for the further decline of "democracy":

"But we must observe that the Chief of State has forgotten that the French, in barring the route to the extreme right, have in the second round of the presidential shown proof of their political maturity. Since, Emmanuel Macron has made a show of having been elected "normally" on his program (the reform of the retirement system) or his person. To this political maturity he has only responded with contempt for a non-neglible part of his electorate. To turn his back on the spirit of his election (and the promises of his second round campaign) is all the more an error in that he doesn't have, politically, the means, sitting as he does on a relative majority. That he enfeebles his majority, that he enfeebles he himself isn't really the important thing. But that, by his choice, he has raised up the French against each other, at the risk of further fragilizing the machinery of democracy that permitted him to fill his place, is much more serious."

I don't think Macron gives a shit for democracy, and so I am not totally in accord with this editorial, that credits Macron and the majority with good faith. This rhetorical assumption of good faith, which journalists, washed in the neoliberal waters, bring to the powerful seems to fight the forces arrayed against democracy on the worst terrain possible. However, it is true that Macron has exacerbated a division, a fracture, in France that is symbolized by the very deformation of the system he is trying to put through - a deformation that will make the lives of the upper class that much more cossetted and the lives of the rest that more ugly. Financially, the reform is judged not by a market standard - by that standard, the interest on French bonds shows that there is no crisis - but on a fictional-symbolic standard - it is the crisis of tomorrow that requires this action now. Interestingly, other crises of tomorrow - for instance, a climate change that might well wipe out French agriculture, decimate the rivers, and destroy the lifestyles of the majority - are to be approached petit a petit, until, alas, we all have to adopt to the Sahara-fication of the world.

The crisis of the tomorrow is here today: an out of control oligarchy, a muffled health crisis due to despair, a disenfranchised (politically and economically) youth, and an establishment that considers rules are for others. Myself, I see no way that Macron's "reforms", which will most likely be voted in by the Senate, will last past Macron's tenure. The deformed system will be so swollen with exceptions it will be a joke. Although: it was always meant to be a joke. On the principle that he who laughs last laughs best. That is what reactionary culture and politics amounts to.

liberalism, neo-liberalism and the justice system

 

I was reading Madame de Stael’s Considerations on the principle Events of the French Revolution – as one does – and found this perfectly formed sentence that rang my chimes. De Stael is explaining the predominance of a Richelieu or a Mazarin, who though foreigners came to possess such absolute power in France, and she produces this perfectly balanced sentence:

« Les individus de cette nation sont trop vifs pour s'astreindre à la persévé- rance qu'il faut pour être despote ; mais celui qui a cette persévérance est très-redoutable dans un pays où, la loi n'ayant jamais régné, l’on ne juge de rien que par l'événement. »


« Les individus de cette nation sont trop vifs pour s'astreindre à la persévé- rance qu'il faut pour être despote ; mais celui qui a cette persévérance est très-redoutable dans un pays où, la loi n'ayant jamais régné, l’on ne juge de rien que par l'événement. »
Translation: The individuals of this nation are too lively to submit to the perseverance it takes to be a despot; but he who has that perseverance is very formidable in a land where, the law having never reigned, one judges only by the event."
De Stael’s Considerations, according to the introduction by Laurent Theis, made a large stir when they appeared in April, 1818, the year after her death.. Remusat wrote that it was an event on par with the appearance, in 1802, of Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity, De Stael had died in 1817, as the White Terror was abating, but while the Reaction to the Revolution was still strong.
By the time she died, she was a force apart, a real force in Europe. Having, through her father, the fabulously rich banker Jacques Necker, entry to all the great houses of the Ancien Regime before the start of the Revolution, and being a brilliant woman – a quick study who instinctively combined the culture of sensibility and the ideals of reason in her own bearing in the world – she had made herself almost singlehandedly (shout out here to Benjamin Constant, her sometimes lover) the transitional figure between 18th century revolutionary principles and 19th century liberalism.
It is from that perspective – a classical liberalism that was still magmatic, still unclassical – that she surveyed the Revolution.
This, to her, meant having a strong sense of the France of the Old Regime – a France with its multiple terrors and wars, and its striking inability to produce a governmental form that would legitimate the social hierarchy by which it was ostensibly ruled.
Liberalism, which gives scope to inequality of wealth and power as an inexpungable part of human society, and preferable to the attempt to abolish them -an attempt that is both violent and futile – has long had a hard time with justice. If justice before the law is, in theory, where all citizens are equal, the practical situation of justice forms not an exception to the rule of inequality but a reflection of it. How could it be otherwise? The third power of government is based on a theoretical miracle, even as liberalism's great charm as a political system is the acknowledgement that miracles don't happen.
“One judges only by the event” – by what the powerful do, not the rules to which they are theoretically bound. In this, I think we can see reflected not only French history, but American history too. In our late neo-liberal hour, it is characteristic, maybe diagnostic, that the breakdown of all parts of the justice system – from police enforcement to the almost comic marketplace in lawyers that gives the rich a headstart to the imbecility and political ambitons of the judges to the inhumanity of the jails – we are witnessing something like an Ancien Regime moment. De Stael’s idea of the outsider who gets inside and becomes a despot is a pretty prophetic description of the extreme right leader – Trump and Bolsanaro being the latest examples. These leaders thrive when the system of justice unwinds as completely as they have unwound in the U.S. Surely among the multiple reasons that Obama was succeeded by Trump is the Obama administration’s idea that punishing big businessmen and businesses was an economically bad idea – in essence, giving their seal to the oligarchy. The Chickenshit club of the Justice department – as Jesse Elsinger called it in his book – casts its shadow today. Who among us thinks that the scoundrels at the top, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, are going to receive the same treatment, the same punishments as some black 19 year old accused of selling an ounce of crack? Nobody. The very idea is laughable. The whole of the legal profession exists to make that a no-go. Les Miserables, dressed up in American popular culture, is going on every day in every city in America, and we all know it.
Events ride mankind, and always will. But rules soften events, make them easier riders. As the rules cease to apply, we all feel the spurs in our flanks, drawing blood. They will ride us to death.

Alchemists among us, blockhainin'

 

When Marx overlays the transformations of money into commodity and commodity into money with the parodic language of alchemy, he is following a theme that goes back not only to Faust, but to the beginning of the theory of the political economy. About which, Carl Wennerlind has written an essay entitled “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England.” Wennerlind’s essay  proposes that the 17th century natural philosophers took the alchemical proposal of creating wealth out of nothingness – or base metal – quite seriously. And, vice versa, "when the Bank of England showed in 1694 how credit-money could function, there was a rapid falloff in the patronage of alchemists…”

Curious phrase, credit-money. We would now simply say money, since it wouldn’t occur to any possessor of same to assume that the material ot of which the money was made was equal in value to the money. You won’t get much for a strip of green paper that doesn’t have the magical symbols of U.S. power on it now, will you? Of course not.

“Credit-money… served as a means of payment and had the capacity to circulate widely. These paper notes were wholly or partially convertible into assets or income streams designated as security. As such, they could fully complete a transaction and serve as a store of value…” In the system of political thinking that held at the time, this was as miraculous as the transmutation of metals promised by the Philosopher’s stone – or so our author claims. It is for this reason that the two things – the bank and the alchemist – were held in the same field, as substitutes one for the other. Or rather, the bank, by the alchemical feat of creating value out of de facto currency, drove out the alchemists, who’d been patronized by the Stuarts. ‘This transition from alchemy to credit was swift and complete, perhaps nowhere more dramatically evidenced than in the Duke of Orleans’s dismissal of his court alchemists in favor of John Law’s land-backed paper currency.”

That last event has an aura, doesn’t it? The court alchemists are always trying to get back in. The latest species of them mechandize pseudo-currencies, which have cleverly named themselves “crypto-currency”. A crypto currency is a contradiction in terms – currency itself is the most obvious thing, and has to be in order to operate. A crypto-currency, on the other hand, props itself on the subliminal idea that all that obviousness is simply the surface of some conspiracy, against which the little guy – the little guy who spends a lot of time fantasizing about internet poker and such – has to protect himself.

Carl Wennerlind wrote about this phenomenon in another article for the Berfois, an online magazine so erudite that few people have heard of it. https://www.berfrois.com/2012/03/carl-wennerlind-credit-alchemy/ Which might be the reason that Sam Bankman-Fried was invited to the big NYT Dealbook summit instead of Carl Wennerlind. More’s the pity, for while SBF is an Adderall addled son of privilege whose business career is a xray of our current state of corruption, including the indulgent justice and regulatory system that seems deadest on giving him the tenderests of pats on the hand for defrauding thousands of customers of billions of dollars. Wennerlind could have spoken about a genuine topic: the perennial search for absolute unearned wealth. A sort of zero in the general economy of sacrifice.

Here's a quote from the Berfois article.

“Despite many reports of successful transmutations [of base metals into gold], efforts to find the lever that would give mankind control over the money stock failed to materialize. At this point, the same social reformers who had pursued alchemical transmutations switched their attention to the promotion of a generally circulating credit currency, authoring some of the first proposals for such a currency. The similarity between alchemy and credit was far from lost on them, with one person suggesting that a well-functioning bank is:

 

Capable of multiplying the stock of the Nation, for as much as concernes trading in Infinitum: In breife, it is the Elixir or Philosophers Stone.

Casualties of Credit [Wennerlind’s book] argues that there was indeed a link between alchemy and credit, but one that goes deeper than credit money replacing alchemy as the solution to the scarcity of money problem. I suggest that the new political economy that laid the foundation for the Financial Revolution was greatly influenced by the Scientific Revolution, which included alchemical, as well as, Baconian and probabilistic thinking.”

Winnerlind’s article turns on a history that is overlooked by the usual historians of economics. Though you will see beaucoup titles and phrases about the “magic of the market” and the “alchemy of finance”, these things are taken as Disney metaphors, with no roots in the actual beliefs of businessmen and bankers. Winnerlind’s history is a reminder that no, actual businessmen and bankers do search for philosopher’s stones, which, at this present moment, is dressed up as encrypted blockchain technology – something that is as real and as futile as alchemical torts and the search for transforming lead into gold. The seventeenth century writers had already discovered that money is metaphor  - “Materia Prima, because, though it serves actually to no use almost, it serves potentially to all uses.”

We are still there, guys.

 

All of which had to do with England’s problem in the Early Modern Era – a shortage of specie. The solution proposed by some members of the Hartlib circle – the most advanced philosophers in England, including Boyle and William Petty – was to fund experiments to turn tin into gold.

the chuckle track and the obscure object of bourgeois desire

 

Adam doesn’t like the tv shows I watched when I was a kid, which are easy to find on the net. Especially the comedies. He can’t overlook or overhear the laugh track – an object that is also called a laughtrack and a laughtertrack. I’ve told him that some shows had live audiences – I have a dim memory that Norman Lear shows had live audiences – but Adam is a media wise child. He might be ten, but he’s a Parisian, no country bumpkin: “didn’t they put laugh and applause signs up for the audience”?

When I was Adam’s age, laughtracks were the rage. You couldn’t watch a comedy on network television without an accompanying laugh track. Watching them now, the laughtracks seem grotesque. They have aged badly. They make the exercise in nostalgia painful.

I’m not sure when the laugh tracks disappeared. After about 1980, I stopped watching network television. And even now, I watch network series, when I watch them, on Netflix. However, it would not surprise me if the laughtracks were junked around the time the Berlin wall fell, and throughout the world the old monopoly television companies were revamped, an event that had incalculable political consequences in so many places: Italy and the U.S., in particular.

The prehistory of orchestrated audience response reaches back to long before the Cold War – all the way back to the commencement of the entertainment industry in the 19^th century. In 1820, in the full swing of the reaction in France, a company was founded in Paris with the title: L’Assurance des Succès dramatiques. This agency, run by a former wigmaker named Porchon and his partner, a M. Sauton, would hire people to make a play or an opera a success. These claqueurs, as they were called,  would be sure to applaud, laugh loudly at the jokes, cry copiously at the sad parts, and in other ways make sure that a playwright’s opening night went well. Porchon would even loan money out to the writer – Alexander Dumas was one of his grateful clients.

Orchestrating audience response, before, had been an idiosyncratic matter of rivalry between aristocrats and the theeater troupes they patronized. Here, however, was a taste of capitalism – putting audience response on an industrial basis, the same kind of logic Marx and Engels celebrated in the Communist Manifesto:

“We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.”

And so it was with the entertainment industry.

We possess a ‘Memoir of a Claqueur” (1828) by one Louis Castel Robert. Robert’s story was of a reality that requires, for its full comprehension,  the intense cultivation of history – the history of France in the 1820s. Having inherited some money, and being of a tender, philosophical disposition, Robert, a young man in Paris, naturally pissed his funds away on drink, women, books and idleness. At the end of this process he confronted an unpleasantness that many of his type encountered, viz, debtors prison. In Sainte Pelagie, he had the good fortune to fall in with a man named Mouchival. Mouchival was a common looking fellow – yet Robert soon learned he was not so common after all. He was only in Sainte Pelagie due to a misunderstanding, practically - having co-signed on a loan for a friend – for Mouchival, like Porchon, was always a friend in deed – he found himself being charged with it. The man, however, was quite equal to the situation. As an entrepreneur in the claqueur field, he had simply written to a rich client who fancied himself a dramatist and expressed the need for some cash, for which he would, in the future, supply such services as may be required, yours truly. Thus, he was utterly confident of rescue. Rescue, in the form of francs, eventually did appear, but sent by an actress – through which he, in turn, rescued his promising young acquaintance, Robert. Which is how Robert found a place to fill in the world as a claqueur.

The claqueur was a character type in Paris, a figure out of Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The yellow gloves of the claqueur were particularly distinctive, and became a nickname for the claque crowd. – les gants jaunes. Robert writes that Mouchival gave him ‘elementary instructions in the science of cabales, and treated, as an experienced master, all the articles of the tactics proper to making plays succeed or fail.” Robert learned the “circumstances in which it was necessary to applaud or whistle, cry or laugh, be silent or scream, yawn or blow your nose.”

As Mouchival soon teaches the young man he has inexplicably taken under his wing, the surface work of the claqueur is just one link in the chain of profit. A more noticeable link is in the work of selling tickets. A certain number of tickets are allotted, free, to the claqueur. He can sell the superfluity himself. But the claqueur is not the only one to scalp tickets. Indeed, a good part of the theater world, from the actor to the usher to the critic, supplements their income on such sales.

The ontogenesis of the media world is here: content is rarely the profit item. It is the advertising, the peripherals – from concert t-shirts to influencer endorsements – that keeps the wheels going.

Interestingly, in the seventies, there was a show where the laugh track became, for the writers and creators, a controversial issue: MASH. This was a comedy about the Korean War, with obvious reference to the late Southeast Asia war. The producer, Larry Gelbert, did not want a laugh track. The network did: “Gotta have a laugh track. Because they always had had laugh tracks. This was so people would distinguish it from a drama. That was what they kept saying.” Gene Reynolds, the producer I believe, folded, but put in “a very discrete laugh track.”

Alan Wagner, president of programming for CBS in those days, was a proponent of laugh tracks: “The laugh track is overused – and I’m guilty of that as much as anybody. I’ve overused it badly, with some pretty core pilots, trying to goose the audience’s response. And the guy who invented that machine, I don’t think he did a very good job. There are some pretty raucous sounds in there – its hard to make it subtle. Hard to get a chuckle track out of that.”

Among tv comedy insiders, according to Saul Austerlitz’s book on the sitcom, Seinfeld, a hit comedy of the 90s, was positively ancient in its format compared to the Larry Sanders show. The latter dispensed for the most part  with the laugh track. It was the future. Austerlitz singles out Friends as “the last of the hugely successful traditional sitcoms, laugh track and all”.  It is not that the laugh track totally disappeared in the era of the Global War on Terror, but it was broadcast to an audience that no longer recognized this mechanized form of claqueur.

Perhaps the post-laugh track era, like the post-truth, post-post, post-Twitter, post-Facebook, post-democracy, post-reactionary, post post post Roger era, is a symptom of something. But being no pundit, I can’t bullshit a generalization here. Although I do know that exploiting the exploiters, the revolutionary takeover of the orchestration of audience response, is not on the table. Capitalism will find a way.

 

Blues for the "we"

 

I’m a great believer in the impersonal “one”, and the editorial “we”. What the linguists call an agent defocuser. However, as an editor of academic papers, I have found that neither “one” nor the editorial “we” is in favour at the moment. It is the age of “I” or the passive verb. The former I often find intrusive, and the latter cowardly.

However, you can’t be American and to the manner born without knowing, in your bones, that “one” is a hopelessly upper class agent defocuser. To say: One doesn’t do such things, is to mark oneself as the type of person who either goes to the Yale Club or wants to go to the Yale Club.

I wonder why this class aura hangs around the “one”? And why it has so little oral usage – in the oral, one becomes, oh so fatally, you. In Benjamin’s essay, the Storyteller, the oral nature of the story, as opposed to the novel, has to do with the space of its performance. The storyteller in the village is face to face with the audience, within touching distance. And that touching distance shines out in the American “you”. There are novels written in the “you” form, and they seem somehow to be wearing the wrong clothes – for the “you” is a barroom bark, and perhaps should be paired with the “one” as bluecollar to blue blood. Myself, I like to think of myself as a blue collar upstart, an imposter of sorts, and perhaps this is the reason I am so fond of “one”. But I am also fond of “we” as an editorial gesture. But there is “we” and there is “we”.  The “we” that makes me cringe doesn’t reference the text that both writer and supposed reader are inhabiting, but a social space. In that bastard form of prose, the newspaper column, the we bleeds all over the place. The we goes to fancy restaurants, worries about sending the kids to prep school, and observes the other – which might even have its own “we”! – as going to diners, beating the kids, and voting for Trump.

I am going to lose the fight for the editorial “we”, a less snobby and more inclusive doll. One knows this. But one tries, nonetheless.

Roots of the paranoid republic

 

When Kurt Lewin came to America in 1929, he was already a famous figure in Berlin. Lewin had started out in social philosophy, the kind of thing practiced and theorized by Georg Simmel, but he had taken a turn into social psychology, and held a chair in Gestalt psychology at the Berlin university in the twenties. Having been trained in philosophy, he was fascinated by the underlying theory of the psychological experiment, criticizing the idea that the application of statistics and modelling the psychology laboratory on physics or the natural sciences was the best route for social psychology’s object: the mechanisms of human interaction.

These are the dry vocational aspects of Lewin’s life in 1929. However, you can’t explain Lewin’s influence simply by referring to his papers. Rather, there was something about the man himself, apparently. This is the story told in James Korn’s history of the use of deceit in social psychological experiments:

“A German-Jewish immigrant … radically changed the direction of American social psychology. Kurt Lewin already had a following in the United States as a result of an article

published by J. E Brown (1929) and an invited lecture at Yale University in 1929. The Yale lecture foreshadowed the nature of his impact because, although most of the audience could not understand what he said (he lectured in German), his obvious enthusiasm held the attention of his listeners.”

 

In my experience, Yale lectures are usually not to write home about: they are often detail distressed – too much or too little – and the speaker makes no attempt to put life into what he or she is saying. A professor at Yale told me a long, amusing anecdote about Lacan’s lecture there – which, much to the surprise of his hosts, was not only incomprehensible – it was Lacan, after all, and used the model of elephant sexuality to explain something – but was also in French. In the professor’s recounting, he had to restrain a colleague who was threatening to go on stage and clock Lacan in mid metaphor.

 

Perhaps Yale talks bring out the bizarre. In Lewin’s talk, he demonstrated his theories by showing a short film he made of his wife’s eighteen month old niece attempting to sit on a rock. The film was an expose of the way even an infant sequences a task without having a specific experience to guide her.

 

To give an entire talk, in 1929, in German was, let us say, a bold move: that it added to Lewin’s glamor rather than diminished it is pretty impressive.

 

Korn’s book is about the rise and relative fall of using deception – often employing confederates, as in a con game – to create a social psychology experiment; Korn claims that the origins of this kind of thing, or at least the impulse that led to experiments that are known to all, such as the Milgrim experiment, came originally from Lewin’s work and influence on his students – students who also included businessmen. In fact, Lewin was fascinated with organization, including business organizations, and it is no weirdness that his American biographer, Alfred J. Marrow, was an industrialist.

 

Lewin’s film clip – and his early advocacy of filming subjects – is not only about his underlying theory of what social psychology should be doing – discovering sequences, not behavioural pairs on the Pavlovian – Behaviouralist model – but also about his subjectivity as a product of the Weimar era. Marrow’s biography doesn’t mention it, but it is not hard to imagine that Lewin was a fan of Fritz Lang’s films. In particular M., the film of Lang and his scriptwriting wife, Thea von Harbou, that is in many ways exactly like a social psychology experiment, with secret observers, such as fake blind beggars, watching the streets for the child murderer and marking him so that others could find him. It is odd to think of how Lewin transposed the modernity of Weimar Berlin to mid America – exactly mid, as he spent his best years in America in Iowa, at the University of Iowa’s Child Welfare center.

 

However, his deception experiments were not played on children – but on the usual prey, college students. At Harvard he conducted an experiment on the “fear response” in groups that was a model of the deception experiment – it was structured around a supposed experiment that was really a lure for the real experiment. For instance, students or other volunteers would be told they have to solve problems. Then the psychology student would say that they had completed the experiment, and would they please stay in the room and write down their analysis of their experience. He would walk out the door and lock it. Then smoke would be directed through a grill in the door, and people in the ceiling above the room would watch to see how the group was affected by finding smoke, that is, evidence of fire, and a locked door.

 

Fun.

 

Or as Korn puts it: “In this study we see many of the deceptive elements that would be repeated later in social psychological research: a bogus task, misinformation from the experimenter, and hidden observers.”

 

It interests me that the controversy about these small scale deceptions has been about the ethical problem of how they might harm the participants, but not about the larger problem of infecting the public discourse with the scientific practice of deception, and the power-relationships this entails. What does this do to the “scientist”? What does it do to the larger public that becomes aware of it? How does this ease with deceptive elements work when they are annexed, say, by national intelligence agencies?  Although most of the controversy about the ”post-truth” era is an invitation to fake deepthink, there was, during the Cold War years and up until now, a comfort with deception on the part of the intelligentsia and the powerful that fundamentally undermined the trust needed to maintain a democracy. And I think these routinized deceits have never been given the historical prominence or consideration they deserve. The construction and use of  paranoid machinery is one of the discoveries of the twentieth century that is having a massive effect on the twenty-first century.

 

The citizen-paranoid seeks a society-paranoid – which is the very image of authoritarianism.

 

Yet, this picture of Lewin is not complete. He was, in truth, a New Dealer liberal, an advocate for less authoritarian ways of teaching – in a series of famous experiments, his group at Iowa showed how more democratic classrooms were actually less liable to arguments, tantrums and bickering. The authoritarian method of the Lewin liberal is interwoven with the liberal goal of a society of tolerance. We toil in this net.