Therapeutic nihilism and us

 

In these days of evil on the telly – and on the computer screen and in the climate shift, etc. etc. – my mind has been drifting towards the topic of therapeutic nihilism. In a sense, when peeps say we can imagine the end of the world more than we can imagine the end of capitalism, they are positing some natural power in capitalist arrangements that is powerfully reminiscent of the state of medical science in 1844, when the Viennese doctor, Josef Dietl, published his manifesto in the Zeitschrift der K.K. Gesellschaft der Aerzte zu Wien that proclaimed the proper scientific limits of medicine.

“Why don’t we demand of our Astronomers to turn the days into nights, of our physicians that they turn winter cold into summer heat, our chemists that they turn water into wine? Because it is impossible, that is, because it is not grounded in the principles of their sciences, and because astronomers, physicians and chemists are upright enough to confess that they couldn’t do it. But then, why do we demand that our doctors heal lung diseases, dropsy, arthritis, heart disease, etc.? Are these demands somehow grounded in the principles of his science? Absolutely not!”

The list of diseases is impressive, and impressively, we don’t have a “cure” for arthritis, for instance, even today. But the twentieth century not only saw the invention of airconditioning, turning summer heat into winter cold, but an amazing structure of therapies that could address the body’s ills in a manner undreamt of by Dietl.

In 1844, this world of cures – or therapies that could alleviate illnesses, such as insulin for diabetes – seemed extremely distant. It was an unimaginable world.  Dietl’s nihilism was a reasonable belief that the cure was an area not of science, but of chance. However, this did not mean doctoring was substantless: “The doctor must be valued not as an artist of cures, but as a scientific researcher [Naturfoerscher].

I often take this stance towards Marx. The communism he strove for depended, of course, on the thoroughness of the capitalism that he diagnosed. In a strong sense, it arose out of it, like … well, like the response of the body to a disease. The analogy is inexact, however. This body is the disease, and its cure is a new body, arising from the old one. Resurrection.

We all know how the resurrection belief has worked out – it has become a master trope in our metaphoric imagination, but it has less of a grip on our sense of the real future. Although, of course, literally billions  of people believe that it will, more or less literally, happen.

In the case of our political economy, it is easy to see that most economists are even more mired in a nonsensical world of cures than that of Dietl’s colleagues. To believe that you cure inflation with unemployment and then you heat things up until unemployment sparks off inflation is to have the most primitive sense of the general economy. It loses sight, in fact, that the economy is not a master but a servant – a servant of the social whole. Its only reason, its only footing in humanity, is to make the quality of human life better. It it doesn’t serve that purpose, kick it to the curb, start over. To rephrase slightly the slogan of the Wat Tyler rebels: “First we’ll hang all the economists.”

In fact, as it proved, therapeutic nihilism was not so nihilistic as all of that. Diagnosis eventually lead to water being turned into wine, or at least to an Austrian physician discovering blood types in 1901 and blood transfusion becoming a real thing after the discovery of anticoagulants, research that was hurried up because of (natch) war, as in World War One. Turning water into wine was nothing compared to transfusing blood properly and easily to a patient, but the creep of blood blood blood in the twentieth century mapped the creep of cure cure cure. Diagnosis, the left hand, found cure, the right hand.

A hopeful story. We are not mired in a world of therapeutic nihilism forever. We don’t have to accept that.

Saving the heritage: France's system of retraite

 

Lucie Mazauric was a museologist of the rarest sort – a Radical Socialist (along with her husband, Andre Chamson), a resistor, and a key member of the “circus” – mi-clochard, mi-aristo, as she puts it – who hid France’s museum treasures, its Da Vincis and Delacroixes, from the Nazis. In Ma Vie en Chateaux, she gives an account of this adventure: the finding of places of safety, the gathering of equipment to guard the treasures, especially fire-fighting equipment, the getting trucks together to convey it, on short notice, from one place to the other.

“But this happy specialisation, even as it filled us with pride, didn’t prevent our trucks from becoming ever more dirty at every new displacement, and our personnel ever more tired. We trailed after us a miserable baggage that gave us the air of travelling, not too prosperous, jugglers. In the end, the cases were worn out, the nails were lost, the gas was hard to find, the wrapping had lost their initial freshness. However, we buckled the buckle, the paintings were returned to their hanging places nail by nail, the sculptures pedestal by pedestal, and we had to marvel at it all.”

I have this feeling about that other French treasure: the social security system. A work of eighty years. While the Macronists are destroying it now, out in the street, with the air of down at heels jugglers, our protestors, our strikers are determined to save it. And we will have it back, every nail and pedestal of it, so to speak. I don’t believe France will lose its heritage because a lot of jumped up suit, clustered around their suited and rolexed Ubu Roi, have decreed it so.

Vive La France!

the great American sarcastics

 

Although listings of the top 100 novels or authors or movies or albums or whatnot are often contrived and set at large in the world as the most shameless kind of clickbait, we rarely have listings of the one hundred greatest sentences, or lines. I think that one of the greatest and most influential sentences of the twentieth century is the one at the beginning of England Your England: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

Orwell’s sentence had, I think, a tremendous influence on the whole WWII generation of American writers. In a literal sense, this situation, turned around, is the whole songline of Catch 22. Yossarian very correctly thinks someone is trying to kill him – precisely because he is one of the highly civilized human beings trying to kill other human beings, from civilized to not yet toilet trained, in the cities he is dropping bombs on.

Kurt Vonnegut’s entire style was based on seeing in this alienated way – that is, alienated from the not-seeing required for patriotism, hierarchy and the whole cultural extent of the defence of liberal capitalism. It is a seeing that Carlo Ginzburg, in an essay on the proto-history of estrangement, brought back to a very old stoic discipline – the kind of disenchantment by the real in which Marcus Aurelius instructed himself.

Here's a marvellous bit by Kurt Vonnegut that seems to have dropped out of Orwell’s sentence and landed squarely on American culture in the last half of the twentieth century.

“Reading is such a difficult thing to do that most of our time in school is spent learning how to do that alone. If we had spent as much time at ice skating as we have with reading, we would all be stars with the Hollywood Ice Capades instead of bookworms now.

"As you know, it isn't enough for a reader to pick up the little symbols from a page with his eyes, or, as is the case with a blind person, with his fingertips. Once we get those symbols inside our heads and in the proper order, then we must clothe them in gloom or joy or apathy, in love or hate, in anger or peacefulness, or however the author intended them to be clothed. In order to be good readers, we must even recognize irony—which is when a writer says one thing and really means another, contradicting himself in what he believes to be a beguiling cause.

"We even have to get jokes! God help us if we miss a joke.

"So most people give up on reading.”

One of Orwell’s essays is called, self-flatteringly, In front of your nose, as in “seeing what is…” There Orwell speaks of the trouble, the absolute bother, it is to see what is in front of you. Orwell, like anybody raised as he was raised, could see what was in front of his nose as long as he was facing in a certain direction among a certain sort of people – mostly of the masculine flavor. But what he did, at best, was see that this is, exactly, how he saw. It is, in fact, exactly how I see – and must re-see and re-see in order to see at all. There was a rightwing trend, a few years ago, for “stoicism”, with stoicism confused with masculinity, as defined by the Skull and Bones club. That isn’t stoicism at all. Stoicism is for slaves, as Nietzsche saw, and in as much as Marcus Aurelius could become familiar with it, it was a technique that royally dethroned him.

So most people give up on reading, as Vonnegut writes, because it is more work than it looks like. The slave’s inner voice is tuned in to sarcasm – because, as its etymology of “tearing flesh” tells us, the slave sees that the whiphand doesn’t rule because it is right,but because it holds the whip. The stoic see that Jesus’s admonition that we love one another and forgive our enemies elevates us above any God that condemns to the whip – to the “gnashing of teeth”, sarkazein. That God, having forgotten to forgive, has forgotten the essence of divinity, the love without limit. And in the profane world of gnashing of teeth, highly civilized human beings will spend oodles of time and trillions of dollars trying to find ever new ways to kill you.

The great American sarcastics saw that, at least, clearly. In front of their nose.  

Illegitimacy in France: Macron's bossism

 

You can hear the cop cars at night. Distant booms. In the morning, there are ashes on the sidewalk and the street. Practically, the 49,3 regime has reposed its awesome littleness in the hands of the Minister of the Interior, a man named Gérald Darmanin. A man born out of time - he would certainly have flourished in the good old days, circa 1943, 1944. A rightwinger pur et dur, he has been stirring up his forces to do their utmost - illegitimately hassling demonstrators in all four corners of the Hexagon.

You can smell the illegitimacy. It smells like smoke and tear gas.
Macron always goes below the line that you have drawn in your head - surely he couldn't be that arrogant, that blind, that clueless? Yet this product of a thousand McKinsey position papers always comes out with the boss-ist position, like a vending machine always comes out with the chewing gum when you put in the dollar in change. Unless something jams. It is a bit of a mistake to look for comparisons in politics - Macron's choreography is pure business. He's a corporation type through and through. What he would like to do in France is enact a mass layoff. Alas! Certain U.N. decrees make this impossible.
Oddly, for such a business oriented guy, Macron apparently never took the class, "how to hide your evil". So he shows it again and again. However, he has cleverly figured out how to strategize the fascists. Thus, he is always looking for some future point where it is either Macron or the fascists. Hence, the many subtext in Macronie - by which I include Le Monde - where Macronist worry that the result of all the "fuss" over the very very very necessary reforms will benefit the Le Pen fascists. Very worried, worried to tears, these Macronists. And their solution to that worry is: get behind the great man!
While this goes down like a refreshing drink among the media elite who have benefitted from Macron's tax cuts for their class, out in the street people, the vulgar crowd, want to take a big dump on it. And on the chief.
One thing to note before I end this rant: the reforms are advertised as changing the age of retirement to 64. That is inaccurate, though, for millions of cases, where the protocol for full retirement will change to 67, 68. If you are one of the people who started work at 18 and stayed with the same work - well then, you might be a lucky 64! Otherwise, good luck.
France is experiencing that part of neoliberalism called shamelessness. But the shame is comin' at you from the street, all you think tankers and nudgers!

poem by K. Chamisso

Oh poet without portfolio!
In the raplines of this city
Cell phone to cell phone
You seek some operator’s voice.
 

Control without purpose, purpose without heart
Out of the stones themselves some grotesque starts
To urge us to turn turn turn again
And change our stone stare into
Something living and lost.
But the wire in our ear is inexorable
And we’ve forgotten what we meant to say.

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.