The plutocrat problem, or What Macron hopes to accomplish by lowering the quality of French life

 The paradox of the plutocracy can be x-rayed by the simple application of marginal utility theory. This theory differentiates between percentages of total sums of income and wealth. Thus, the quality of life that is diminished by taking away half the income of a person making 20,000 dollars a year is considerable – it would actually throw that person into poverty. The quality of life that is diminished, on the other hand, by taking away fifty percent of the income of someone who made 100 million dollars a year would be, on the contrary, zero. There would be no effect whatsoever on their housing, their nourishment, their entertainments, etc.

When we extend this insight, we can see that the plutocrat might be abstractly satisfied by the state cutting their tax burden to zero, but in truth, this will not add to their quality of life. Which is why at a certain point in the money chain they switch to the quality of power.

The quality of power of the French upper one percent has long been nagged by the successes of the French working class in the forties through the eighties. This was viewed as an affront to their entire ideology of success: the unsuccessful should be unhappy. This is often presented as an incentive, but it is really a derivative of the plutocrat’s dilemma. To increase their quality of life, when money itself doesn’t do it, one must measure it against the diminishment of the other’s quality of life. This, more than anything else, explains Macron’s social policies. To make the average person work two more years has its economic logic – surplus labor value is always a plus! – but that doesn’t really drive this train. What is desired is that the unsuccessful – that is, the non-upper class – feel that non-success. They feel it in their very bones and muscles. In this way, the upper class can feel that their own quality of life has improved on a moral scale, which is recognized by the state: the moral scale of money. It is a deep counter-movement towards the very enlightenment that “liberated” commerce. It provides relief for those who actually exist for a man like Macron – those who can afford to shell out hundreds of millions to repair Notre Dame without having to sell a single bottle of expensive wine in their cellars, without losing a night of sleep, or a vacation, or a notice in the papers. Those who can afford, as the late head of Renault did, to “rent” the Versailles for a wedding anniversary party.

This is the real battle. The odds, as any Le Monde lapdog can tell you, are on the side of the plutocrats. As Francoise Fressoz put it yesterday: “… the strong opposition of the French to 64 years is from the beginning accompanied by a sort of resignation born of experience: all the reforms of retirement are contested, but none have been put back into question.”

None up until now. Is this the magic moment?

manif sauvage

 

I drifted down Rue de Temple around 9:45 last night. My goal was the Place de la Republique. I thought there might be an impromptu demonstration – a manif sauvage – there, if anywhere. When the censure was rejected and the “reform” became law, I felt that I had to see what was happening in the streets. I told A. that if I felt I was in some spot where the cops would target me – or demonstrators in general – that I would ghost. But in my neighborhood everything was just the same. We live, in the Marais, in a sort of cloud cuckoo land, where the garbage is still being picked up.

The first indication that the night was going to be a little less calm came as I passed the park which is in front of the Mairie. On my left, there’s a little alley by a church, where usually there are a lot of homeless people camped. Out of the alley, suddenly, came a stream of running people. As I went farther and saw more clearly, I saw the cops, all geared in their Robo-wear, moving at a trot down the alley. They were yelling stop. Nobody fleeing them was that stupid. The people who emerged from the alley managed to reach the other side of the street and simply dispersed. You couldn’t tell the people at the café from the potential manifesteur. Up ahead, I saw the usual flotilla of cop vans, about ten or fifteen. I decided, after standing there for a moment, to continue.

As I crossed from Temple to the Place, I noticed that some of the people who’d run out of the alley were with me. And as we reached the Place,these people walked ahead. Nothing was happening, and then suddenly a crowd formed. It got larger. The police didn’t respond right away. And then the crowd started singing. To my astonished ears, it sounded like Ca ira. It wasn’t. Later, at home, I looked it up: On est la. The song of the gilet jaunes. The song of the Macron mini-ice age:

On est là !

On est là !

Même si Macron le veut pas,

nous on est là !

The other part, which I didn’t hear sung – because a demonstration is not a chorus – is :

Pour l’honneur des travailleurs et pour un monde meilleur,

même si Macron le veut pas, nous on est lಠ! 

Usually, it is simpler to say Macron, demission, foutre!

I decided to drift up the street in the direction of the Bastille. I called A. I said everything was fine. Then the crowd started to head my way. I walked with them. My companions to the right seemed to know exactly what to do. As we passed by some construction site on the sidewalk, with its barriers, they grabbed the barriers and took them into the street. Other people brought other matter. It amazed me how easy it is to make a barricade. Oncoming traffic came to a stop, and the crowd poured into the street.

At this point I began to chicken out. I saw the empty spot behind the marchers and the cops coming up behind, and I suddenly had visions of the kettle. There’s been a lot of violent face to face at Republique over the last couple years with cops and protestors. So I called A. up, and she advised duck down an alley and come home.

Which I did.

All pumped, I looked at the live stream someone was sending over Twitter. I watched the cops milling around the Bastille. Then the noise of the demonstrators. Then the strategy – a crowd of disparate pedestrians suddenly coalescing into a group. Then the cops massing. Then the fires – in garbage cans, spreading to bikes – and the dissolving of the protestors before the cops and their re-coalescence. It isn’t guerrilla war, and it ain’t beanbag. We will have to see whether a government by the rich, for the rich, and of the rich will rule France – or whether their Plan B., Le Pen, comes in. Or whether by some miracle we can rescue France from this awful, mediocre version of reaction.

the living line, the unbearable genius of the self

 

Marcel Schwob bel

onged to the same fin de siècle generation as Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, his colleagues on the other side of the channel, and Jules Renard and Felix Feneon, the great art critic and anarchist terrorist. He, like RLS, and his friend Renard, was not destined for the long life on the pedestal – which makes it appropriate that one of his best known works, Imaginary Lives, is full of praise of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.

It is hard for me to read the introduction of Imaginary Lives and not think of Borges, who, like Schwob, separated the paradox from the apology. In the Western tradition, or at least the high church version of it, paradox has an essential and divine place: to believe in an absurdity is a surrender wreathed in cosmic drama. But if the absurdity does not induce belief, what we are left with is paradox itself, as an aesthetic and ethical object and ploy. Schwob’s paradox, in the Imaginary Lives, is that biography stumbles aesthetically when it attaches the figure to the world event – when biography is taken not as art, but as history. To get to this argument, Schwob uses  Aubrey and Diogenes Laertes Lives of the Philosophers,  inserting  an elegant, emblematic reading of a story about the Japanese artist, Hokusaī:  

« The painter Hokusaï hoped to arrive, when he got to his one hundred and tenth year, at the ideal of his art. At this moment, he said, every point, every line traced by his brush would be living. By living, read individual. Nothing is more similar than points and lines: geometry is grounded in this postulate. The perfect art of Hokusaï demanded that nothing be more different. Thus the ideal of the biography would be to infinitely differentiate the aspect of two philosophers who had invented nearly the same metaphysics.”

We have something near this idea in geometry itself – the fractal. That self similarity that creates a difference. This, of course, is not what Schwob was thinking about – rather, Schwob was thinking about the way art ideologies, theories, schools, tend to want the lines to be similar. They want realism, or symbolism, modernism or post-modernism. They want the lines to be lines and the characters to be characters, because life is short. But if life is long, if you achieve the one hundred and ten years, you will perhaps stumble upon a line that is not like any other line, and a point that is not like any other point. At the end of The Man who Was Thursday, Chesterton summons up the same paradox, but as a nightmare. The poet-detective, Syme, pitting himself against an anarchist gang, pauses in his breakneck quest and reflects:

“Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective, that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism always settled back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something--say a tree--that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself--a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.”

Chesterton had an ultimately comfortable idea that the Church was the answer to all that. But if the Church is just an ordinary institution, then the unnatural symbolism becomes a haunt in a world without ghosts. And this, even for spirit seekers – or especially them, with their middle class desire that “science” prove the paranormal – is too much uniqueness. And who can bear too much uniqueness? It is hard to be the geniuses that we all are.

Jupiter stumbles: the curse of Macron

 

Perhaps the most Macronist of all Macron things during the debate about the reforms – the debate in the street, the debate in the supposed Legislature – was Macron deciding that this was just the time to give Jeff Bezos the Legion d’Honneur. I missed it when it happened – I was turned on to it by the excellent, very sad article in Media Part by Nicholas Mathieu: « Savez-vous quelle réserve de rage vous venez de libérer ? »

I read the Mathieu article after reading the “what does Macron’s inner circle think” article by Le Monde, which keeps in intimate and admiring touch with the circle around the great man: “Selon plusieurs de ses proches, le président de la République n’a « aucun scrupule, aucun regret »(According to those close to him, the president of the Republic has “no scruple, no regret”). This is how Le Monde writes – a far cry from the revolutionary stylings in 1792 of Pere Duchesne, the paper whose motto was: Je suis le véritable père Duchesne, foutre!” – I am the fucking real Pere Duchesne. Who would write, for instance, of his great anger against the so called aristocrats, the Duc of this, the Prince of that. Between the fuck it and the “proches de la President de la Republique” there is an abyss set. But all your abysses and all your interior ministers won’t keep that abyss from being crossed at some point – no man or woman can say where.

In the Marianne story about the honouring of the Amazon man, one reads: “C’est une décoration qui fait grincer des dents, surtout à gauche.”  But what gauche? It is the gauche in unions. It is the gauche that realizes that Macron is honouring a union-buster. It is his riposte to the unions he refuses to talk to. The only syndicat that counts for Macron is the syndicat of bosses. The man has an upper class autism of a high order – usually, in the evolution of neolib popularism, the Tory or the Republican has figured out how to hide behind the working man. Macron has never figured out even so simple a ploy. Boris Johnson looks like a political genius next to a piker like our President. The figure he most resembles, in the neolib spectrum, is Bush – Bush the first. George H.W. Bush. A man who could never release his lips, his famous lips, from the silver spoon around which they were wrapped. The man with the same strange personality, the man with the mistress (which, as Hilary Clinton once said, everybody in D.C. knew about)  and the wife-mother.

I despise all Bushes, yet in one way Bush did more than any president since: he took seriously a global climate problem, the depletion  of ozone, and he did something decisive about it. Politicians come in all sorts of flavors. As bad as Macron is, he does have a balanced sense that it is time for negotiation in the  Ukrainian war. And he is not the foreign policy disaster that Hollande was, all the way around. One could imagine him a fairly competent foreign minister. But not Jupiter, never Jupiter.

Dethrone the king. Fuck!

 

serious

 
There is a Jewish myth recounted by the philosopher Shestov that goes like this: when the
angel of death comes down to close the eyes of man, the angel’s body is all covered with
eyes. Sometimes the angel discovers that he has made a mistake. The term of the man’s
life that he has come for still has more time to go. So the angel pulls one of the eyes
off his body and gives it to the man. “ … then the man sees strange and new things, more
than other men see and more than he himself sees with his natural eyes; and he also sees,
not as men see but as the inhabitants of other worlds see: that things do not exist
"necessarily", but "freely", that they are and at the same time are
not, that they appear when they disappear and disappear when they appear. The testimony
of the old, natural eyes, "everybody's" eyes, directly contradicts the
testimony of the eyes left by the angel. But since all our other organs of sense, and
even our reason, agree with our ordinary sight, and since the whole of human
"experience", individual and collective, supports it, the new vision seems to
be outside the law, ridiculous, fantastic, the product of a disordered imagination.”

 

Such men are then considered mad. And not only by others,but by their lawfully seeing selves. , “And then begins a struggle between two kinds of vision, a struggle of which the issue is as mysterious and uncertain as its origin.”

Long ago, I taught an intro philosophy class at Austin Community College – and by the way, let me say I love community colleges! Much more important than Harvard in the total scheme of things. There is a laudatory phrase in French – sérieux – which is inadequately translated by “serious”. It signifies a solid worker, a student who applies herself. It doesn’t mean the highest grades, it means the best intentions. And that is what I found at community college among students who had day jobs.  Anyway, there they were, there I was.  I would begin with this Shestov quote, thus forever corrupting my students vision of what philosophy is – if they took other classes, they’d learn it was all syllogisms and ignoble surrenders to convention. I was a terrible philosophy teacher. Not sérieux. But I did my best for my students.

So:  I am a stout adherent, even in my decline, of outlaw vision, the convergence of poetry and the love of wisdom. It is the romantic agony all over again, granted. Yet, I’d maintain that the eye covered angels are not happy about where humankind has gone. The gift of the third eye has been so collectively refused that we are in the same febrile state of conceptual imprisonment as was felt by people like Hugo Ball, one of the founders of Dada, before the First World War. Every headline is another  iron bar in our collective cage.

They are not what they appear and disappear when they appear. People at dinner parties talk of the climate apocalypse in thirty years and then pass around the delicious fish – or such is my experience. What’s not right is not right. Who doesn’t know this, even with two eyes?

Vienna 1921 - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 Vienna 1921

…. where, cigarladen, the “social vampire” steals

from a drunken greenhorn his daddy’s crowns:

Stören Sie nicht der Spiel!

A great admirer of tits, and morocco bound

Pornography, illustrations by Rops.

In the Cabaret Hölle your table, monsieurs

An occasional word with the cops

To smooth down any controvers.

The song surrenders to the singer

Her shorn eyebrows, her glossed back hair

its lips of glass, its sacre coeur.

Shall we linger

by the fall guy’s latest lair?

… his wife threw vitriol

At one of Europe’s famous flirts?

That face was not, although,

Marked – her hat received the worst

Of it… in the “fameux hôtel Sacher”

Behind the Opera, there they built

A love nest out of Masoch and Schnitzler

Everything in gold late Habsburg gilt.

Later: “Les femmes m’ont trompé, le jeu m’a trahi »

The cat, the fatal cat, is out for a spree.

Yellow gloved player in your mental cabaret

Your belly up deuces are leaden and gray.

- Karen Chamisso

The miniaturist of the apocalypse: Alfred Polgar

 

Alfred Polgar is a name that rings no chimes in the good old Anglosphere. His great fan, Clive James, the Australian essayist, tried to remedy that situation in his mini-encyclopedia, Cultural Amnesia; however, the effect of his article on Polgar is to make him seem untranslateable and forever in the corner pocket of the Habsburg Empire freaks out there. Unfair!

From the classic New Yorker talk of the town piece to Nicholson Baker, miniaturism has had an honourable place in English language lit. Polgar has a distinct family resemblance. His great period was in the interwar era – which, for German writers, ended in Germany in 1933, and in Austria a little later. Polgar was resolutely modern, a cinephile, a presence at the great modernist theatre events, Piscator and such. He was, ultimately, a reviewer – except what he reviewed was often a moment of streetlife, a smell from his childhood.
The quintessence of his art is in a little piece entitled “Orange Peel”. Here he reviews the reaction of a legless beggar to a man throwing away an orange peel. That’s the show, people. He explores the beggar’s motives for yelling at the man for throwing away the orange peel. Then he reviews his own motives for writing about it. Then he puts in doubt his own witnessing, as the evening was approaching, the light wasn’t right, and perhaps the beggar wasn’t legless after all.
“But let’s leave open the question of why the beggar’s soul slipped on the orange peel. Let us leave the small event, around which bloom psychological, social, ethical and cosmic perspectives, uninterpreted. Since, even so, the same circumstances broaden out and occur in heaven and on earth and between the two, we can surely authorize the question why just this story of the orange peel had to be written. Oh, whatever stuff must be written! My literary credo is that one should not write anything which a person cannot read with interest and implication an hour before her death. But that leaves not much other literature than the Bible and the stock market report (Kurszettel).”
Between God and the devil, the bible and the market: now that is an apocalyptic place for a minimalist writer! I love it.