A Sinead O'Connor song that reminds us of what is happening in Gaza, God forgive us. All of us, just looking away.

And to the spiirits of the 1500 slaughtered by Hamas, all we can do is beg and beg forgiveness for the slaughter of 20,000. We apparently need to learn the elementary things, for instance, the prohibition on human sacrifice.

And to the 22,000 slaughtered, the 50,000 injured, the 7,000 missing - there is nothing to say. How can we, the abettors, say anything? But of course we will, we are all big talkers, me too. Talk talk talk. Blah blah blah.

plagiarism - from pickpocketing to cut and paste

 

Everything converges in plagiarism. At least in the recent news. Plagiarism, to my mind, always makes for comedy – in that respect, it is like marriage, which traditionally falls at the end of comedy.  But the unlike minds, or like minds, that are yoked together in plagiarism struggle with quotation marks and intellectual property and fail the test of divorce and separtion, making for a mirror image of the marriage comedy. Plus, to me, quotation marks and IP - two of the golden themes of Derridian deconstruction, as a matter of fact - what is not to like in these tales?

Shakespeare, of course, had no pickpocket anxieties on this point. He could take North’s translation of Plutarch’s Life of Anthony and see how the passages about Cleopatra were eminently boostable, and boost he did. This was the lay of the land for some time. No educated person in Shakespeare’s audience would be likely to miss the North reference, transformed and made more glorious by the sun of Shakespeare – to quote another Shakespeare character.

But textual institutions eventually were pulled by the notion of property. Adrian John’s go-to book, Piracy: the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates gives us a pretty lively history of the tangle between Protestantism, early liberalism, and property law that arose from one of those great opening moments: when, under William and Mary, and by the advise of John Locke, allowed the Press act, which required all written texts to be licenced by the Stationers, to lapse:

“It was not the first time this had happened, but the political circumstances were different now, and the law was destined never to be revived. John Locke, whose arguments played a major role in the Commons’ debates surrounding the act, repudiated it not only for imposing licensing—which he, like Milton, saw as a legacy of popery—but for fostering monopolies for both individual booksellers and the company at large. In rejecting the statute, Parliament therefore saw itself as upholding Protestant liberty and countering monopolies. But it made no alternative provision for the Stationers’ register itself. Suddenly the book trade found itself in a situation in which infringers of registered copies would face no legal sanction whatsoever. And at the same time it became legal to print and publish without being a member of the company at all. Internal regulation might have succeeded to keep booksellers and printers in line in the past, but now, in the speculative and entrepreneurial environment of 1690s London, it was never likely to prove sufficient. This was an environment in which new moral principles seemed to be advanced with every clutch of ambitious “projects”—and those projects soon pervaded the world of the book.”

These openings of the frontier – succeeded by rushes – are part and parcel of capitalism. And those who are most successful on exploiting this opening are likely to be the first to call for regulations, shaped to their own requirements.

For plagiarism to exist, one must have some standard idea of copying. Johns digs up the history of AI automata – which go back to the golden age of clockwork mechanisms. In particular, he describes one called the Microcosm – such a Silicon Valley-ish phrase! Yet this thing was built in the 17^th century by Harry Bridges. It was a complex of different machines:

“Built in the form of an ornate Roman Temple, in its fabric it contained musical automata, models of a carpenter’s workshop and landscapes with realistically moving figures, and accurate rotating mechanisms showing the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. It also boasted an orrery for the moons of Jupiter. It played music specially composed for its internal organ—or spectators could ask it to play their own. In all, it combined in one mechanism the principles of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and astronomy.”

To these principles were soon joined writing. All of these arts were under the possible sway of IP law, of course. Just as with our current new toy, ChatGPT, observers found the Microcosm a bit disturbing:

“The question became not the nature of original authorship, but the nature of copying. A machine this complex posed the question of what, exactly, the act of copying—of pirating—actually was.”

Ah, behold what a glorious legal thing the quotation mark is – I apply them and presto chango, instead of plagiarism I advance, on the great legal boardgame of life, to “fair use”!

Quotation marks, as we all know, falleth as the dew from heaven – and sometimes in the process of re-write they melt away. For underneath the words themselves are, supposedly, the ideas. Which the law must pursue as well – ideas, too, can be copied. Or can be generated concurrently. We all know the fierce academic battles – often taking on the hues of other social battles – that can arise from the claim that an idea is copied. In fact, it is hard to see how an idea could not, on some level, be anything but copied, since ideas need to breathe the communism of all that is mental and social in order to be. Yet we have, still, an idea of the original spirit, of inspiration, of genius, of all the old haunts, for say what you will, human life is unimaginable without haunting. And with haunting, exorcism.

It is an interesting thing, from the French perspective, that the whole idea of the dictée has dropped out of the American educational system (I know too little about the British one to comment). It is a puzzle to the Protestantized Yankee mind, such as mine, that the French teacher is  content to read, say, a passage in a Voltaire that the students are required to copy – as if literature were, after all, music and you need to play the scales. I think this tradition is petering out – although Adam, my boy, still does some dictée in his French classes, according to what he just told me. But copying is the one frowned upon, awful sin in the American curriculum. There’s a wonderful bit, in The Squid and The Whale, Noah Baumbach’s bittersweetbitter comedy, where the troubled teen son listens to Pink Floyd’s Hey You, copies the word and the tune, then presents the song as his own to his parents and eventually to a talent show, where he wins a prize – and then has to give it back when someone presumably younger than the fifty-ish judges points out where the song comes from.

This leads to the son – Walt – being remanded to therapy, where the therapist asks why he did it. He responds: “I felt I could've written it.”

“Therapist: So the fact that it was already written was kind of a technicality. I see.”

Incidentally, to find that exchange, which I remembered from the movie, I went to google, found the script of The Squid and the Whale, and cut and pasted. We have the instruments to destroy our institutions of intellectual property at the heart of the machines that are ‘protected’ by our intellectual property laws. Walt not only copies the song and performs it, but he has recorded it on a tape recorder and learned it by stopping the tape, and rewinding it – copying a perhaps illegal copy.

Everything converges in plagiarism.

 

 

 

Autofiction: mothers and daughters

 

According to Philippe Gasparini, the term autofiction first popped up in 1977, used by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his novel, Fils:

« Autobiography ? No, that’s a privilege reserved for the world’s notables, in the evening of their lives, and in a pretty style. Fiction, events and facts strictly real : if you want, autofiction, to have confided the language of adventure to the adventure of language, outside of wisdom and the syntax of the novel, whether traditional or new.”

Doubrovsky’s view of autobiography is, of course, meant as a critique of the ever irritating bourgeoisie, but it folds pretty neatly into a bourgeois division between the notables and the rest – thus ignoring the celebrity, and its offspring – the influencer, the gossiped about, etc., etc. However, the term itself fell into all of our laps, and as we learned to take selfies and put up our marriage photographs on Facebook, we began to want a different type of fiction.

Yet how different is it? There’s an interesting relation, here, between two of the most famous French novelists – Colette and Annie Ernaux. Both present their own selves boldly in their novels. Both are rather obsessed with the mother-daughter relationship. Both are photogenic authors, both are able to straddle, as few can, the demands of a referentially high cultural strata and the relentless demands of fandom, self-help, music hall entertainer and activist.  The hierarchies, it must be said, in literature are a game of pick up sticks – high and low is always a rigged up and ephemeral structural principle that falls like a curse on those paper products – texts.

Colette wrote a piece for the October 30, 1937 Figaro entitled My Ideas about the Novel, which begins:

“I am sure that I have never written a novel, a real one, a work of pure imagination, free from all the sludge of memory and egotism, purified of myself, of my worst and my best, of, finally, resemblance. What I call real novels are those that I read, and not those that I write. The latter I write slowly, with care, as I can; the former I read with a passionate rapacity which neglects nothing, which forms itself as a kind of violence.”

Her notions of the novel are at once modernist and counter-modern. In 1937, surrealism was already, for a school, long in the tooth – and the surrealist assault on the novel had passed. But it passed by jimmying loose the subject in the novel. The surrealists, above all, doubted character. But Colette held to the long oral tradition of the hero, which surrounds the hero with a sort of magic – what I would call a soundtrack.

“I know all too well, from experience, that the heroes of novels, patiently and piece by piece accountered with the traits of character, from their faces, their crimes and virtues, only wait on the pleasure of the author, and her decisions, up to a certain point. Past this point, they are big enough to behave on their own. This is the revenge of the phantom on the free thinker, of the automaton on the imprudent magician.”

This I call the oral tradition – a tradition in which the speaker, telling the story, is well aware that it is formed between himself and the listener, or listeners. That moment of surrender is hard to face – one gives oneself away. Much of the Flaubertian theme in the novel is about distancing that apocalyptic embarrassment – the embarrassment of doing the thing at all. Colette, however, knowing all this, comes up with her own strategy of never quite writing the “true” novel. I absolutely believe her. What the author of the book thinks of his or her characters, curiously, can only be taken seriously to a certain point.

This is why male writers writing female characters, white writers writing black characters, straight writers writing gay characters, need the vice versa, the female, black, gay writers to free themselves – and vice versa then comes for the latter. Literature encodes the kind of game Roger Caillois calls ilinx – games of vertigo and disorientation, voices that possess the voice we mistakenly thought was our own, when it was just borrowed ad hoc from social and corporal circumstances. And will have to be given back in the end.

Literature will be revolutionary or it will not be at all.

wendell kees, phyllis diller and a very happy unhappy new year

 Weldon Kees, the great poet – one of the “minors” who Ashbery made, by a magisterially shy stroke, his predecessors – was an art critic for the Nation, succeeding the ever surly Clement Greenburg. He did his bit, and then left NYC, like many an other, in 1950. The New York City scene, he wrote, was trauma-torn, soot-ridden and neurosis-nagged.” To my mind, this is high praise – my retired boho heart leaks nostalgic gravy over those words! – but Kees, apparently, could only take so much of the atmosphere Gaddis chronicles in The Recognitions. Before the tribe of Kerouacs descended on San Francisco, Kees planted himself there. James Reidel, the Kees biographer (the biography had the spoilers title, Vanished Act) had the fun idea of tracing the poet’s peripeteia, which ended, as is well known, either in a leap from the Golden Gate bridge or a lifelong fugue to Mexico – depending on who you believe.

Here’s a fun fact for those who like the snake-eyes thrown up by the American dice: Weldon Kees played the piano and helped produce a cabaret-vaudeville-burlesque called "The Poets Follies," along with, among others, a guy named Lawrence Ferling, who poeticized his name to Ferlinghetti. They rented space at 1725 Washington Street in a “beautiful Maybeck building” and advertised for actors and actresses, attracting a Sausalito housewife who’d been bitten by the showbiz bug. Her name: Phyllis Diller. In my youth, Phyllis Diller was a complete cornball act on late night TV, a puzzle to me – why did adults find her funny? But life likes its little jokes, and Weldon Kees was instrumental in making that Sausalito housewife’s dream come true.

The American cross-grain. I love it.

One of the gags of the cabaret was a reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – or on some tellings, one of the Four Quartets – by a stripper named Lyn Ayers. Ha ha, the boys all laughed. This was long before it was recognized that strippers are, on the whole, more erudite than your average Silicon Valley tech bro-gul. In any case, Kees and Lyn Ayers were photographed together for the poster advertising the place.

According to Reidel, Ayers didn’t like the gig, which she did gratis. Cheapskate poets, she said. She was even forced to buy a copy of Kees’s poetry book.

From whence this poem for the New Year.

THAT WINTER

Cold ground and colder stone

Unearthed in ruined passageways,

The parodies of buildings in the snow –

Snow tossed and raging through a world

It imitates, that drives forever north

To what is rumored to be Spring.

To see the faces you had thought were put away

Forever, swept like leaves among the crowd,

Is to be drawn like them, on winter afternoons,

To avenues you saw demolished years before.

The houses still remain like monuments,

Their windows cracked, For sale signs on the lawns.

Then grass upon those lawns again!-and dogs

In fashion twenty years ago, the streets mysterious

Through summer shade, the marvelous worlds

Within the world, each opening like a hand

And promising a constant course.-You see yourself,

A fool with smiles, one you thought dead.

And snow is raging, raging, in a darker world.

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.