New Year's Eve revery: death and the net

 

“Yama said: The good is one thing and the pleasant another. These two, having different ends, bind a man. It is well with him who chooses the good. He who chooses the pleasant misses the true end.

 

The good and the pleasant approach man; the wise examines both and discriminates between them; the wise prefers the good to the pleasant, but the foolish man chooses the pleasant through love of bodily pleasure.” – Katha Upanishad

 

The context for Death’s routine – Yama is death – is the following: Nachiketas is the son of Wajashrawas, a man who had reached that point in his life when becoming a sage took priority over all else. So he gave away his property. Nachiketas, like the young man in Lewis Carroll’s Father William ("You are old, Father William," the young man said,/"And your hair has become very white;/And yet you incessantly stand on your head--/Do you think, at your age, it is right?"), decided to bother the old man and asked “Father, have you given me to someone?” After being asked three times, Wajashrawas said yes, I’ve given you to Yama – death. Recall that Father William also became impatient with his young man after three questions ("I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"/ Said his father; "don't give yourself airs! /Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?/ Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"). Nachiketas then proceeded to go to Yama’s house, and spent three days there without eating and drinking. Threes, by the way, haunt this story, as they haunt all stories involving wishes. Sure enough, Yama, impressed by Nachiketas’ ascetic regime, grants him three wishes. Nachiketas’ first wish is to be reconciled with his father. His second wish is for Fire. But Yama balks at his third wish, for Nachiketas wants to know if there is something after death. To know what comes after death puzzles even the gods. But Nachiketas insists. Thus begins the second chapter of the Katha Upanishad, with the verses I quoted above, with death making a primary distinction between the wise, who chose the path of the good, and the foolish, who chose pleasure. In the translation made by Shree Porohit Swami and Englished by Yeats, the verse goes; “Who follows the good, attains sanctity; who follows the pleasant, drops out of the race.” I take this to be teasing us with a sense of paths, tracks, traces – something that lets us follow. But I also like the translation I am quoting: “These two, having different ends, bind a man.” In Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”, there is a nice passage about Ananke’s net – Ananke being necessity:

 

“According to Parmenides, being itself is trapped by the “bonds of powerful Ananke’s net.” And in the Platonic vision of things, we find an immense light, “bound in the sky and embracing its whole circumference, the way hempen ropes are gound around the hulls of galleys.” In each case, knots and bonds are essential. Necessity is a bond that curses back on itself, a knotted rope (peirar0 that holds everything within its limits (peras). Dei, a key work, meaning ‘it is necessary’, appears for the first time in the Iliad: “why is it necessary (dei) for the Argives to make war on the Trojans?” That verb form, governed by an impersonal subject, the es of everything that escapes an agent’s will, is traced back by Onians to deo, ‘to bind’, and not to dea, ‘to lack’ as other philologists would have it. It is the same image, observes Onians, “that, without being aware of its meaning in the dark history of the race, we find in a common expression of our own language: ‘it is bound to happen.’

 

Tracks do form nets. Reading this, I thought surely Callaso would then reference Vernant and Detienne’s wonderfully mysterious book on Cunning among the Greeks, which teases out a variety of binding, rope twisting and corded words to fill in the semantic field of the ruse – of metis. But he doesn’t. Myself, I am reminded of the fact that civilization has long been identified with metalwork – the bronze age, the iron age – rather than work with fabric. When the Spaniards conquered the Incas, they conquered a culture that had inherited another set of assumptions entirely, deriving from knots and nets. Charles Mann makes this point in 1491, going over recent discoveries in Peruvian archaeology that point to the privileged place of netmaking and weaving from the earliest times. And, of course, there are the khipu, the Incan knot language that was assumed, until recently, to be a form of accounting. Gary Urton, a Harvard archaelogist, is the most prominent recent figure to say, not so – there’s words encoded in those knots and filaments. But such a base for civilization, such soft technology, blindsided the Europeans, who couldn’t even see that it was a technology. Even though, of course, knots, strings, fabrics, weaving do have a lively underlife from the Greeks through the Renaissance witches, and of course every marriage is a knot tied. (Although there is a counterknot to prevent marriage – the noueurs d’aiguillettes were persecuted by Parliamentary decree in France).

Everything here is so old that it happened in your dreams last night, from the three wishes to the division between the wise and the foolish, the path of the good and the path of pleasure, and the bewilderment that came over you as you went down the path until a wolf appeared…

 

que voy a hacer - je suis perdu…

THE ROMANCE NOVEL OF COLD WAR PSYCHOLOGY: under Maslow’s pyramid

Recycling a piece from earlier this year.

As I have been reading the old school coming out of the woodwork to sign tribunes in support of Depardieu and his woman-beating ways, my mind drifted to my little comment on the astonishing influence of Maslow on Cold War culture. Which I didn't think, o tears of things! got enough attention.

There has been, as far as I can tell, no canonical study of how and why certain ideas – psychoanalysis, Abraham Maslow’s theory of needs, gestalt therapy – infiltrated into the precincts of that most American of sciences, organization science, and all its business school progeny, a long event that is co-eterminus with the eruption of the business school on the university campus.  The ultimate American utopia is the corporation – those of us on the reservation outside of it just think of ourselves as the dreamers of the better future. But inside those corporate walls, that future is manufactured wholesale. And what is a future without a psychology? And what good is psychology if you can’t manipulate it to market goods and services?

In 20th century America, war, organization and information systems formed the sinister matrix to which our best guides are still the great dark codexes: J.R., Gravity’s Rainbow, Flow my tears the policeman said. Randall Jarrett’s tailgunner glosses not simply the belly of the state at war, but the great human product of the 20th century, organizational man.

Maslow’s career, to be read properly, must be read by the flickering light common to incendiary bombings and the vast, flawless labyrinth of neon lights that track the corridors of skyscrapers and  insane asylums.

Early in his career, Maslow’s major research concern was what he called dominance. In a paper from 1937, The Comparative Approach to Human Behavior, he wrote:

“The writer some years ago was confronted with the problem of the relationships between dominance behavior, sex behavior, and social behavior. The attempt to study this problem in humans directly turned out to be a failure. The multiplicity of theories, the variability of concepts and of terminology, the sheer complexity of the problem itself, the impossibility of separating the superficial from the fundamental, all combined to make the project a baffling and even possibly an insoluble one.”

This is a rather odd methodological statement. Why should we posit special relationships between the behaviours he lists – or even take those behaviours (such as dominance behaviours) as given? Especially as, on his own account, there is a ‘variability’ of terminology and theory.

Dominance, here, is certainly the dominant pre-occupation. The paper suggests that the problem is one that we all know from the sciences – the problem of being ‘objective’. Maslow’s suggestion that we can get there by an indirect route – namely, comparison with the less ‘baffling’ behavior of primates – and so disentangle the bloody bonds of human behavior was, of course, in the post-war period amply taken up. Yet the method seems to make headway sideways, for what could make the behavior of primates less baffling when the original baffle is in the cultural construction of the terms of the problem?

“It is just this situation, e.g. complex of similarities and differences, that makes it possible for the psychologist to set up experiments in which the main variable factor is the relative presence or absence of cultural influence. If these cultural influences can be controlled out by experimentation which involves groups of humans and infra-humans, there is then promised an improved possibility of achieving greater understanding of what our primate inheritance may be.”

What could ‘control out’ cultural influences mean, applied to the highly culturally specific notion of experimentation? Maslow here is participating in the social sciences paradigm that seeks the ultimate Other – the Other who functions, paradoxically, as the silent parameter, void of all ‘cultural’ properties – for instance, the property of having a first-person status – and at the same time as the template for the social sciences subject.

The zeroing out of cultural influences to get to the nub of the subject – this was Abraham Maslow’s project in the pre-war years, but he had to deal with people, who seemed puzzlingly culturally bound. His biographer, Edward Hoffman, in a po-faced prose that matches the Cold War subject, puts the problem in terms of those humans who are, well, women.

“As Maslow’s research progressed through late 1935 and early 1936, he noticed a frustrating pattern. While women high or moderate in dominance-feeling were usually cooperative in submitting to the embarrassing interviews -some even volunteering after hearing about Maslow – almost none who seemed low in dominance-feeling volunteered or completed the interview. Low-dominance women frequently refused to continue with the interview despite hours of patient reassurance. Maslow sometimes pleaded with them to cooperate “for the good of science”, usually to no avail.”

I challenge anybody to read those sentences and not laugh.  I am reminded of the paintings Alice Neel was doing while Maslow pleaded with “low-dominance” women to complete his questionaires. In particular, the painting of Joe Gould, who is shown with sitting naked, his penis exposed, while two other endowed figures, their penises drooping majestically, stand on either side of him.

Maslow turned, then, to  animal studies to overcome his own frustration. But he returned to the human, thinking that he could bar entrance to disturbing cultural influences by actually welcoming them, aiming for the dead center of normality in which the cultural and the natural would achieve an equilibrium.

Under Maslow’s pyramid one can find a sacrificial victim – just as major structures were often built, according to legend, over the body of someone sacrificed to the gods. The gods, here, of dominance. Thus, his research was directed towards understand ‘normal’ female sexuality. To get behind this problem, Maslow, curiously (the curiousness is the absolute blindness to his own cultural subjectivity) culled out Lesbians, Catholics, blacks and all women who came from families whose fortunes were not in the upper 5 percent of the American income percentile from his research set. He interviewed the resulting selection of women, all students at Columbia University, and concluded that the dead center for which he had embarked had finally been hit. And thus he was able to pursue a problem he articulated in a journal jotting from 1960:

“the 2-fold motivation of women (1) to dominate the man, but (20 then to have contempt for him, go frigid, manipulative, castrating, and (3) secretly to keep on yearning for a man stronger than herself to compel her respect, & to be unhappy, & unfulfilled & to feel unfeminine so long as she doesn’t have such a man.”

From experimenting on animals to the ghastly postwar obsession with the frigid bitch – this is, of course, the dark side of what appeared, in the sixties, to be a humanizing program. The social structure should satisfy the needs of the people – isn’t that really what marketing is all about? Contemplating Maslow, we understand why the center did not hold in the sixties – cause it was such a damnable place. Look around at the cultural war against women, among others, and you can see that we have not gotten past the Maslows of this world.

Marx, Gogol: dead souls among the woodfall

 

Its very hard to find anything in Gogol, right up to the meaning; Gogol somehow shrinks from your touch, wriggles away. He hides, and when you finally find him it won’t be right, it won’t be him: it isn’t that you have found him, but that he thrust himself out where you didn’t expect him, where there was no place for your ideas of him, where he wasn’t yesterday. That Gogol is no longer where you remember him; this one is not where you expect him. – “Being Burried Alive, or Gogol in 1973 – Andrei Bitov

 On the one hand, it is a mere coincidence that, as Marx was writing about windfallen wood in 1842, in Russia, a novel named Dead Souls was passed by Nicholas I’s censors and published. On the other hand, no Gnostic historican can afford to turn up his nose at mere coincidence – for are we not the slaves of intersignes? And surely this must be an intersigne, an exchange happening in the basement below universal history, where all the dealers in codexes are busy cutting them up and mashing them back together.

 To look at windfallen wood from the aspect of whether it can be defined as private property, Marx claims, tells us a lot about what private property is defined as. The same can be said for buying dead souls – souls that exist on an equality with live ones on the tax rolls. What Chichikov has figured out (and was born to figure out – in Chapter XI, Gogol’s portrait of the birth and schooling of a rational choicer certainly shows us this much) – is what we now know in various other forms – the credit default swap, the leveraged buyout, etc. Which is that in capitalism, the nominal, given the right circumstances, easily triumphs over the substantial. One buys a company making real things – like mattresses – with debt itself. All of these brilliant financial innovations were not dreamt of in Nicholas I’s Russia; and yet, buying dead souls in order to take out a loan from the government to buy a substantial estate – Chichikov’s general plan – touched on the very essence of financialization. Touch on its intersection with the forces of life and death – which is why in the town of N. (a town Gogol describes in his notes as pure emptiness), a stout middle aged man, looking neither handsome nor ugly, having no real distinguishing trait about him, could, in the course of his business, eventually be mistaken by the townspeople for the Antichrist – that is, Napoleon – himself.

Meanwhile, in Köln, Marx is writing about dead wood and live ownership.

Marx, in the Holzdiebstahl articles, allows himself to speak of the “poorer” class - ärmere Klasse – which, for those of us who’ve done our time on the Marx job, followed the old man’s routines, read the letters, tapped the secondary literature, written our reports, know the drill – is an indication that we are in the early stages of the man’s career here, in this text. The Marx of 1860 knows that the class of the poor misconceives class – which describes levels within the system of production, not something as contingent as income. The class of workers may be poor, but their class status is defined by what they do. Meanwhile, as those covering the classical and neoclassical economists know, the poor remain fixed as a primary economic unit in their schemes and dreams, in crude opposition to the ‘rich’. For class has dissolved as an organizing property among the economists, and economic units are determined outside of their place in the system of production – outside of their productive function, which enters in terms of a labor market. The labor market is a marvelous thing, a beast as fabulous as any reported by Pliny. The labor market, of course, then gives us a throwback sociology, which gives us these things – the poor, the rich – as a sort of hybrid of magic and statistics. In the neo-classical world, the rich face the poor, in the first instance, without mediation, and then, in the second instance, in an interface mediated by the state, that ‘redistributes’ money from the rich to the poor. This is the fairy tale, this is the leitmotif, this is how it is told on all holiday occasions. And thus, so much is allowed to the second of Polanyi’s double movement – that is, the movement that pulls against and curbs the social excesses of the pure market system. The state, here, functions solely to take care of the welfare of the poor. On the other hand, the first movement is ignored – in which the state redistributes, indeed, makes possible, the welfare of the rich. The state is the dead machine that creates its live doctor Frankenstein – that is, private property itself. A process that accompanies capitalism down to the present day, where private property can now be had in the genes of a virus; we cut up the planet’s atmosphere and apportion it out. And so property emerges where no property was – and so accustomed are we to this phenomenon that we do not even think about or see it.

Thus, even at this point in his life, Marx – without his essential tools of class and the system of commodities – understood that this ‘side of the economy is, as it were, being twisted out of shape by the application of categories that do not reflect the dynamic axis of the economic system – in fact, seem as though they were designed to obscure it. The law is no longer written on stone tablets, but jimmied into place by those who control the legislative activity. All of which rather disturbs the high abstractions of the philosophy of law taught to Marx in Berlin. And – as the articles on wood theft show - the greatest of these misprisioning category-makers and voluntary blindspots turns out to be the divide between the private and the public spheres, which is ideally true, and practically a sham.

 Yet, as I’ve pointed out, at this point in his career Marx is still working with these categories, still looking at socialism with the eyes of a lawyer – or rather, a philosopher of law. There is an old and oft told tale about how all of that works out, which skips over the Rheinisher Landtag and puts Marx in a capsule with Hegel, where they struggle for dominance. And who am I to object? The tale is all well and good and philosophisch like a hardon – but we should remember that Marx isn’t, actually, in a capsule, nor is he simple a figure in the history of philosophy, with its Mount Rushmore like heads. Neither the law nor justice jumped out of Hegel’s encyclopedia. The law was something any peasant, any Josef K., could bump into in the midst of life, in a wood. The legal approach to property, Marx will find out, is one-sided – insufficient. It is only when this insufficience gets too big for its britches and goes around presenting itself as the totality that we fall into mystification.

 Marx already touches on parts of that mystification in these articles – but I feel irresistibly impelled, by every imp in my bloodstream, to sample some Gogol here, who had a knack, a supernatural knack, for dramatizing muddle. In the 9th chapter of Dead Souls, as we watch two women devise, between them, a story about Chichikov’s plan to elope with the governor’s daughter for which they haven’t a shred of evidence or even a thought that proceeded their confab – as this beautiful error is hatched in their gossip, and the two women become more and more descriptions of themselves – the agreeable lady and the lady who is agreeable in all aspects – Gogol pops his head out to make a rather astonishing case that this is the equivalent of what happens when the historian – shall we even say, the universal historian? – conjectures a story into the world:

 

That both ladies finally believed beyond any doubt something which had originally been pure conjecture is not in the least unusual. We, intelligent people though we call ourselves, behave in an almost identical fashion, as witness our scholarly deliberations. At first the scholar proceeds in the most furtive manner, beginning cautiously, with the most diffident of questions: ‘Is it not perhaps from there? Could not such-and-such a country perhaps derive its name from that remote spot?” Or: Does this document perhaps not belong to another, later period?” Or: “When we say this nation, do we not perhaps mean that nation there?” He promptly cites various writers of antiquity and the moment he detects any hint of something – or imagines such a hint – he breaks into a trot and, growing bolder by the minute, now discouses as an equal with the writers of antiquity, asking them questions, and even answering on their behalf, entirely forgetting that he began with a timid hypothesis; it already seems to him that he can see it, the truth, that it is perfectly clear--- and his deliberation is concluded with the words: “So that’s how it was, that is how such-and-such a nation should be understood, that’s the angle from which this should be viewed!

 

To so radically equate gossip with historical philosophy leads us, surely, to Marx – if only because Gogol, too, is responding to the ‘historical school’ that derives from Herder, Schiller and Schelling; and because Marx, like Gogol, has an eye for the principle of the ludicrous. There are two ludicrous themes in the wood theft articles. One consists in how, exactly, law is re-creating the status of the private property holder in the face of his history – “for no legislation abrogates the legal privileges of property, but it only strips it of its adventurous character and imparts to it a bourgeois character”. There is certainly an undertone in this description, which makes the normalization of feudal law into a cynical play, a game of dress down and dress up, of stripping the adventurer and imparting to him the burger’s placid certainties, that reminds us of Gogol’s Insprector General – and may have been meant by Marx to refer to Beaumarchais. No undertone of comedy is ever insignificant in Marx. Our second ludicrous theme consists in the parallel Marx draws between the modal status of the windfallen wood and of the poor. The wood that by custom is gathered in the forest – wood that is scattered, strewn - is cut off from the organic tree, and thus becomes philosophically unnecessary and organically dead. Meanwhile the gleaners, the poor are also cut off, in as much as their customary rights are contingent [zufaellige] concessions, and thus their very existence, insofar as it is based on these customs, is outside of justice [Recht] – which puts it in Robin Hood’s realm, apart, accidental. In fact, in a beautiful phrase, Marx claims that the custom [Gewohnheit] or usages of the poor are the “anticipation of a legal right.” The spirit of Benjamin, the angel of history Benjamin so fiercely invoked, floats over this idea that the little tradition, the shared usages of the peasants, anticipates the moment of their legal recognition in the future. That anticipation is, of course, the revolution.

If you be honest and fair - poem by Karen Chamisso

Everything was major

She made the decision

Wrapped in the xray love blazer

To trouble the division

Between the kitchen and the lawn.

The grass whispered under her feet

Slanders older than the jewels she pawned

While God peeped

Like one of the Elders out of a cloud.

Everything was major.

I can’t do it, she said out loud

I can’t

I just can’t

do

do or feel.

In the kitchen she slew

The roast beef made England-red

She slew the puree, she slew the peas

Then she took her head

And slew with the greatest of ease

Every highwire, every antic thought

Burned recipe after recipe.

Later, it was the smell that caught

their attention. Olly olly oxen free.

Colette

 

This year – this shitty shitty year – opened in France on a hopeful note: it was the 150th anniversary of Colette. Everybody party!

So I dutifully decided to buckle down to Colette.

However, Colette is a writer who exists not to give you a buckle down experience, but an unbuckled one. And certain of her more famous novels – like the Cheri – make me a little nervous. Like the famous Maurice Chevalier song, Thank Heaven, for Little Girls, there’s the perv undercurrent here.

Yet it is true that, once you discard this, and once you appreciate that Colette had, very much pre-social media, a strong sense of the self as selfie, you can surrender to the wonderful French. I have been reading La naissance du jour, a book from Colette’s second phase. Her first phase, or so the Colette-ologists tell me, begins with the legendary story of how she discovered writing up through Cheri, in 1920.

Colette came out of the demimonde. It is hard to find a  parallel to her career in the Anglophone world. Jean Rhys is a sort of parallel, but not very. Imagine a softcore actress from some ludicrously lecherous Showtime series becoming one of the greatest American writers – that is the sort of the thing that happened with Colette.

 Married to an unbelievably disgusting man, “Willy”, who was an impresario of a stable of writers all churning out “sexy” novels for the market in the first decade of the 20th century, she was, as legend has it, locked in her room until she turned out her first Claudine novel. She gave Willy what he deserved as he kept coming home with younger and younger women he'd seduced – a divorce. Also, she made his posterity in a series of later description in her autobiographical writings where he writhed like a worm on her hooked prose (hey, I wrote it, I stand by it!). After Willy, to pay the bills and for the hell of it,  she became a dance hall performer, took for a lover a woman named Missy, la marquise de Morny, and staged a play with her, the Egyptian dream, where she gave her a French kiss at the end – which was too much for even the Moulin Rouge crowd.

Did I mention she performed topless?

Colette is a strong contrast with, say, Marianne Moore, although they were both, in their own ways, exhibitionists. Hell, can you write and not be an exhibitionist? Even Emily Dickenson, even Fernando Pessoa, were, when all is said and down, showing and telling.

The biography naturally lights up the writing, and not in a bad way – so often, in French lit, writing well and being, outside the text, a Grade A asshole go together. Need I mention Celine?  It is a standard that certain American writers, like John Updike, strove to emulate. But they just didn't have the style, although Updike descibing himself masturbating some women in the back seat while his wife in the front seat was driving does, well, get some sort of prize.

Colette is, on the contrary, a likeable working woman. Of genius.

Here is a passage from the NdJ:

« Elle a donc pu, elle, se pencher impunément sur la fleur humaine. Impunément sauf la « tristesse » – appelait-elle tristesse ce délire mélancolique, cet ennoblissement qui nous soulève à la vue de l’arabesque jamais pareille à elle-même, jamais répétée, – feux couplés des yeux, calices jumeaux, renversés, des narines, abîme marin de la bouche et sa palpitation de piège au repos – la cire perdue des visages ?… Penchée sur une créature enfantine et magnifique, elle tremblait, soupirait d’une angoisse qu’elle ne savait nommer, et qui se nomme tentation. »

So much of this, like so much of Henry James, seems, out of its framing here, merely ordinary. Colette uses magnifique often to speak of bodies, but its coupling – and everything is coupled here – with enfantine renews its sense: the selfie becomes self. As for the phrase, « abîme marin de la bouche et sa palpitation de piège au repos », well, Nabokov eat your heart out.

Rabbits, up and at em!

 

Consider a person who had every reason to be happy but who saw continually enacted before him tragedies full of disastrous events, and who spent all his time in consideration of sad and pitiful things. Let us suppose that he knew they are imaginary fables so that though they drew tears from his eyes and moved his imagination they did not touch his intellect at all. I think that this alone would be enough to gradually close up his heart and to make him sigh in such a way that the circulation of his blood would be delayed and slowed down…”

Thus Descartes, quoted in Stephen Gaukroger’s  Descartes: an intellectual biography. Descartes imaginary person has become the man in the street, whose moments are taken up by flash ads on the telephone, cable tv, porno, and the garden of earthly delights that is the internet. We know, now, or think we do, what is fabulous and what is intellectually objective. Yet with such constant parallel networking between the two, the happy – the comfortable, the housed, the fed, the educated – have the imagination of catastrophe constantly before their eyes, while the conditions of catastrophe, the actual loss of dwelling, food, children, clean water, security and all the rest of it is for other people. So much “only connect”, so much “what can you do?”

 I am exhausted by catastrophes like Gaza. I’m exhausted by the gradual shutdown of all the institutions and values that made for social democracy, once, and the substitution of competition – read Hobbesian anarchy – and powerlessness, which we are led to think is the very summit of democracy. But my exhaustion is no argument at all. It is simply a condition.

No good can come from the exhaustion we feel as political agents.

Brecht said that humans learn as much from catastrophe as laboratory rabbits learn about biology. This phrase is rich in implications, one of which might be that just as there is a science that registers the rabbit in a certain order that is beyond the rabbit’s capacity to understand, so, too, there is a science, or at least an art, to catastrophe. Biology isn’t expressed in any one biologist, and catastrophe isn’t expressed in any one powerbroker. Rather, the artists of catastrophe exist in a community that works to make sure that the conditions of catastrophe bear down with a crushing weight on its victims. The members of that community don’t recognize themselves as artists of catastrophe at all, perhaps, but only in terms of the individual roles. They support. They oppose. And so instead of the rabbits pondering the experimenters, you hear, for instance, the X “supports” Hamas because X – in this case, me, but many others – supports a ceasefire. Support doesn’t mean, as it does among the experimenters – as it does for Netanyahu, for instance – material support, a system of arranging money and favors to keep Hamas in business. That type of support is beyond our rabbit-y remit. No, support means you open your moth and say something.

We, as rabbits, have to get out of the cage and bite the experimenters. Enough with “supporting”..

Neoliberal culture and Ivy-ization

Neoliberal culture and Ivy-ization have gone hand and hand in our Post Cold War World.
How’s that for a hook?
When I was a whippet, I went, as an undergrad, to Tulane, Emory, Centenary College of Shreveport and, via a Louisiana scholarship, Paul Valery Université, aka Université de Montpellier. I never met anyone at that prelapsarian time who was hung up on the Ivies. A friend from High School went to Harvard, but this friends stands out, to my mind, more for an accident that happened to him one summer when he was on a crew building warehouses. On this I-Beam about twenty feet up from concrete pad he sawed into his shoe with a mechanical saw, and had to hop to the outer wall and climb down the ladder to get help. This was a glory that surpassed all mere feats of grade-pulling.
To return to the hook. In the semi-social democratic Sputnik era, the top was filled with the products of state universities and small private liberal arts schools. Although Kennedy brought in a buncha Harvardites, and Nixon had his Kissinger, there was not another Ivy league prez until George W.H. Bush. And after that, ca, c’est le déluge.
Harvard Business school has always been, for me, the epicenter of neoliberal culture. It wasn’t just the churn of awful lawyers finding their way to the Supreme Court from Yale, like some radioactively mutant salmon, it was the Business school’s discoveries: for instance, that the upper management could never be paid too much. You see, the CEO isn’t in anything so vulgar as a labor market – no, he was a conquistador, or an entrepreneur, and thus amply deserved the hundred mill comp package. The use of management as a pillaging device, true, goes back a long way, and achieved its present for in the LBO years of Reagan: but the moral smugness, which is the true cultural content, stemmed from the HBS. And then, suddenly, social media moguls, and moguls of all types ,nepo sons and daughters, swarmed out of the Ivies and into our administrations and businesses, our Silicon Valleys and K streets, and life and its dreams visibly worsened.
Exhibit one: teen tv series. Adam is now eleven, and he has suddenly, and I suppose rationally, fixated on the teen rom com. Now, I remember the teen series from my youth, vaguely. It was very oriented towards the blue collar – the descendants of the Honeymooners. That is no longer the case. A stereotypical plot device, used over and over, is some California high school students dream of Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford. The viewing audience is supposed, evidently, to sympathize. Not that there aren’t a few outliers about, say, community college kids, but these people are comic fodder, of course. The college acceptance letter scene now looms larger than the first sex scene – it organizes our disappointments and surprises. And yet, never has there been a phonier representation of high school. The percentage of people who care if their darlings get into the best schools of all times is equal to the percentage of the population who owns more than they are in debt. Okay, equal to the percentage who owns more by 2 or three times that quartile that just barely owns more than they are in debt. Apparently, a lot of producers and writers of tv shows are among those vomited out of the Ivy League and laying around the beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu, entertaining peak tv dreams.
It is no coincidence that the era of Ivy-ization and the era of monopoly capital trek each other. Any trustbuster from the good old days – I’m talking about 1890 – would recognize the university situation for what it is: a congery of monopolies that should be broken up. But no: regulation of private colleges and universities is shockingly absent. This regulatory vacuum has been filled up by the swinish ways of overpaid, way overpaid, just way way overpaid freaks and failures like the president of the University of West Virginia, a flameout named E. Gordon Gee who, like an academic Jack Dunlap (oh, my references age me!), is well on his way to undermining his third major university. It is like Elm University hiring Dutch Elm Disease to be its president.
One of the unexpected features of neoliberalism is that it flips quite placidly into neo-fascism. I didn’t see that coming! But as we allow an aristocracy of the wealthy to take over our policies, fuck up our atmosphere, decimate our land, and cheer our wars, I guess it makes sense. We’re fucked. Now, who wants my Yale Tshirt?Like

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