The Great American Novel - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

1.

The black out man, the white out man

All the muses of the Company

Busy

 

Forgetting the nation’s memory

In our hidy holes, we eat the reports:

who was who and who was where

When the torturer took the stair

To the top of the tower with the cash in his

Pocket

 

And assassinated the president

(name redacted) of the country

(name blacked out).

This, too, is happening .

Oh oblivion my darling

Principle Researcher: (name blacked out)

“he also prepared a paper on the magician’s art

and the covert communication of information (mind-reading).”

 

2.

When your electronic veils all come undone

and nobody’s left for your kinda fun

take a (redacted) pill in the noonday sun

your mind to stun.

 

3.

“I can feel a calmness on the sidewalk—where before I felt a defiance only”

He sez, speaking for me, me, me

Though I look like a million bucks today

And have the coat to prove it.

I put my calmness in a cute little Benz and drove it over

The bones over the bones of the road

Built on an old Indian hunting trail:

As per Uncle Dunny’s table conversation.

 

“The liquor laden car he was driving

Plunged from the road” - and into the gnatter

of insect splatter

on the windshield of our family memory.

4.

I was born too late to be a poet who writes “all”

And means it through sermon and circumstance

Until I’m mummified among grasshopper and vine

 

- My all’s a smaller thing, all mine

and has its America, its hurricane glass

Its anecdotes of life in 1999.

It thinks that driving across the country will be

An exercise in all-creating liberty

 

signed and sealed by polaroid

like Ed Ruschka’s or Warhol’s

of the whiteline insignificant that haunts

every all with its tics and taunts.

 

My all is out of whack today

My all has drizzled quite away

My all is in drops and droops its head

My all is the lights out of the dead.

On Kissing

 

Daniel Harris’s “The Romantic”, from 1999, made the surprising argument – or rather, exhibited the surprising implication – that the Production Code, the Catholic-generated censorship manual for movies in the era between the beginning of the talkies in the thirties to the late fifties – actually encoded a device that pornographers now generally use.

“During the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, the cinematic kiss was not a kiss so much as a clutch, a desperate groping, a joyless and highly stylized bear hug whose duration was limited by official censors who also stipulated that the actors' mouths remain shut at all times, thus preventing even the appearance of French kissing, which was supplanted by a feverish yet passionless mashing of unmoistened lips. This oddly desiccated contact contrasted dramatically with the clawing fingers of the actresses' hands which, glittering with jewels, raked down their lovers' fully clothed backs, their nails extended like claws, full of aggression and hostility long after the star had thrown caution to the winds, abandoned her shallow pretence of enraged resistance, and succumbed wholeheartedly to her illicit longings. … The stiff choreography of this asphyxiating stranglehold suggests apprehension rather than pleasure, the misgivings of two sexual outlaws who live in a world in which privacy is constantly imperilled, in which doors are forever being flung open, curtains yanked back, and unwanted tea trolleys rolled into occupied bedrooms by indiscreet maids.”

I am not sure I find the “desperate groping” and the “clawing fingers” of the beringed femmes fatales as joyless as does Harris. Desperation and joy are not enemies. But I like it that Harris throws himself into a matter that has long fascinated anthropologists: the culture and cult of the kiss.

An Italian semiotician, Marcel Danesi, in his History of the Kiss! (the exclamation mark strangely kissing the sober title, in effect raking its back with clawing fingers), makes the immodest claim that kissing today is an artifact of the literature of the middle ages. Or, perhaps, the literature of the middle ages, like a seismograph, recorded the surge of kissing as the patriarchal household, where women were the chattel that sealed alliances, started to collapse. Along the way he gives us such fascinating facts as this: that there is a science of kissing and it is called philematology. This is crossword puzzle knowledge gold. Plus, now, when I am asked what I do for a living, I will reply, serenely, philematologist, and give the questioner a daredevil look while I glide away like Groucho Marx with a rose in his teeth.

In actuality, to return to the subject of desperate kisses, the Legion of Decency permitted only three seconds. I must admit, I don’t recognize that desperate groping in, say, the kiss Grace Kelly gives Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window.” Was Hitchcock breaking the rule? But there is something to Harris’s vision in the kiss that Rita Hayworth gives Orson Welles in the San Francisco aquarium in Lady From Shanghai. “Take me quick”, she says, and quick it is – although the three seconds are cleverly extended by a cut away to the unwanted presence of a group of school children, who in that instant come around the corner and see them. This kiss was long in coming – at the center of the movie is a fight between rich plutocrats aboard the yacht of Hayworth’s rich, crippled husband, which was followed by a song from la belle Rita with the sign off line: “don’t take your lips or your arms or your love … away”. This is a case of illicit longings indeed, with the camera lingering on Rita’s lovely unkissed lips.

Even if I don’t take Harris to be accurately describing the entirety of the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, he is onto something in the censored administration of a kiss.

“Hollywood kisses are carefully arranged compositions that invite the public, not only to approach the necking couple, but to slip between them and examine at close range every blush and gasp of an act that, on the one hand, optimizes the conditions for viewing and, on the other, makes a bold pretence of solitude, of barring the door to the jealous intruder and excluding the curious stares of gaping children who stumble upon adulterous fathers while seeking lost toys in presumably empty rooms. Lovers are frequently filmed in stark silhouette against a white background so that, for purposes of visual clarity, their bodies don't obscure each other, a bulging forearm blocking from view a famous face, the broad rim of a stylish chapeau a magnificent set of wistful eyes brimming with desire - a cinematic feat of separation similar to that performed by pornographers who create a schematic type of televisual sex by prying their actors so far apart that they are joined, like Siamese twins, at the point of penetration alone.”

Harris has, I think, definitely read his Robert Coover.

Ah, the cathected interdiction, the fetishized prohibition! Bataille’s insight, which was taken up by Foucault, was that here, sexual desire is secondary to its interruption. Power is not repressive so much as productive, a maker of the perversions it spends its times blotting out.

However, Harris’s promising start on the kiss as spectacle devolves into a romantic view of realism that seems to me to have no historical basis whatsoever:

“The exaggeration of privacy in a culture that has become, relatively speaking, morally lenient is symptomatic of the distortions that occur in novels and films when artists can no longer satisfy the demands of narrative by drawing directly from their daily experiences, since actual behavior and its fictional representations are drifting further apart.”

They seem to have been drifting apart since Moses was a pup. In fact, of course, this account of some realistic paradise in which artists satisfied the demands of narrative – a curious phrase, as though narrative were some hungry domesticated animal – with their “daily experiences” curiously trashes the idea of the imagination. The aesthetic trend of the post-code era – of the sixties – encouraged the idea that “daily experience” was equivalent to the authenticity that would allow us to enjoy imagined stories and poems without being accused of being childish and non-productive. At a same time, a response to this notion of authenticity formed, under the slogan: eat the document. Thus mixing our sensual and ideological categories.

But let us not kiss off the kiss like this. Danesi quotes the evidence that is often used to claim that there is something unique about the Western cult of the kiss. For instance: Sheril Kirshenbaum writes: “In the Vedic texts no word exists for ‘kiss,’ but the same word is employed to mean both ‘sniff ’ and ‘smell,’ and also has connotations of touch.” I find the deduction from the lack of a word a little suspicious, since a “word” is not the only designator of a “thing”. A phrase can obviously have the same weight as a word. In the Kama Sutra, there is a chapter on kissing that is much more extensive than any comparable text in the West.

“The text goes on to describe four methods of kissing—moderate, contracted,

pressed, and soft—and lays out three kinds of kisses by a young girl or virgin: nominal kiss (the girl touches lips with her lover but does not herself do anything), throbbing kiss (the girl, setting aside her bashfulness a little, responds with her lower but

not upper lip), touching kiss (the girl touches her lover’s lips with her tongue, closes her eyes, and lays her hands on her lover’s hands).”

This is not the letter of the Code, but it is the spirit – directives that choreograph kissing.

Danensi quotes enough evidence from the Bible, the Greeks and the Romans to cast doubt on his thesis. But I find the thesis interesting anyway:

“Because the kiss originated as a need to subvert the extant religious and patriarchal order in medieval Europe, it acquired great appeal wherever it was introduced through narratives, poetry, and visual art.”

Although this might be overstating the case, the idea that our set of romantic behaviors is transmitted through narratives, poetry and visual art has a lot of appeal for me, getting us outside the notion that “experience” and these aesthetic forms can be usefully reified as antitheses.

This is, I think, where the moment of realism comes in. Contra Harris, the ideology of realism is always a matter of showing that daily experiences are always drifting away from narrative – from the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Julian Sorel, the “realist” hero par excellence, gets his narrative about himself not from his daily experiences, but from his reading of Napoleon’s memoirs. The “demand” of narrative is actually the demand of the narrator, who, grammatically and existentially, is the one who can demand. Encoded in this idea of some fatal drift between the daily experience of the artist and the art is the sovereign consumer, the hero of neo-classical economics, whose choices have an unimpeachable logic, follow Arrow Debreu’s theory of preferences, and has no personal tie to limit his only reason for existence – accumulation.

Still, outside of this detour through my pet peeves (and the image of art and experience as kissers caught in the moment of separation, lips coming off of lips), I have to give kudos to Harris for seeing that the cut and edit of the kiss scenes in classic Hollywood cinema could accidentally give rise to to the loops of porno films: which, although seemingly all about unending coupling are, in reality, as time constrained as Rita Hayworth’s kiss. Once one begins mapping sexual desire to the time of its representation, sexual desire becomes another factory made assemblage – a matter of intentional efficiencies. Kisses roll right off the assembly line. Is there, in the behavioral sciences, a basis for the three second kiss metric? I wonder. But its arbitrariness creates a basis for further metrics and transgressions of metrics. For instance, Hitchcock, in Notorious, got around the three second by having Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss for two seconds, stop, then kiss again, and so on.

How this influenced the natural history of kissing in America is a curious question I leave to all of you philematologists out there.

 

The high modernist zen masters

 

There’s an anecdote in Ellman’s biography of James Joyce that I really love, since it shows Joyce to be a master Jesuit after all:

“… one day he dined with Vanderpyl and another writer, Edmond Jaloux, at a restaurant in the rue St. Honore. As they drank champagne and Fendant de Sion, Jaloux, who happened to be carrying a copy of Flaubert's Trois Contes, began to praise the faultlessness of its style and language. Joyce, in spite of his own admiration for Flaubert, bristled, 'Pas si bien que ca. II commence avec une faute.' And taking the book he showed them that in the first sentence of'Un Cceur simple,' 'Pendant un demi-siecle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l'Eveque envierent d Mme Aubain sa servante Felicite,' envierent should be enviaient, since the action is continued rather than completed. Then he thumbed through the book, evidently with a number of mistakes in mind, and came to the last sentence of the final story, 'Herodias,' 'Comme elle etait tres lourde, ilss la portaient alternativement.' 'Alternativement is wrong,' he announced, 'since there are three bearers.”

 

Oh that High modernism! So elegant, so intelligent. What Joyce does to Flaubert here is what Flaubert, in his letters, did to Balzac – he trumps the master.

Masters. Zen masters, really. Who could hear the sound of one hand, clapping.

The implication is that a literary text is something made with precision. A word Robert Musil liked too. Soul and precision. It is like a sailing ship, where every plank must be tongue-and-grooved closely with every other plank to resist the elements.

Yet put this way, it seems wrong. Shouldn’t the novel seek, instead, to be penetrated by the elements? Or at least to reflect them – as per Stendhal’s image of the mirror walking down the road. Isn’t the mistake in Herodias, in fact, related to the fact that the description – the mirroring – involves three bearers?

Of course, Stendhal’s mirror shows up in Ulysses as the cracked looking glass of a serving girl. The crack is not simply a matter of distortion, but a reminder that the mirror’s smooth surface doesn’t really model what is happening in writing. Writing has parts and dimensions – words and sentences and paragrahs and chapters, among the parts, and denotation, sound, connotation and history, among the dimensions. I look at the page and see a smooth surface that I recognize as the printed page, but when I read, when I am initiated into what is going on, the surface breaks up. Joyce, that Jesuit, saw the old Latin alter in alternativement. It was the kind of second hearing that Flaubert had, too. But for the novel to work, one hand must clap, I think. Impossible to the secular ear, but not to the ear inside the ear.

Still: the ship metaphor that I used seems not to capture what is going on here, although it does suggest that the text resists – it resists first. But that resistance must not be so great that it doesn’t move. Joyce might correct Flaubert’s French, but recognizes that these corrections grow out of the spirit of Flaubert’s scruples.

But I don’t want to discard the ship image just yet, because it leads me to one of my favorite passages in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Here, too, the story becomes an image for a view of language and its effects:

“Le vaisseau Argo ~ The ship Argo

A frequent image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form. This ship Argo is highly useful: it affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions (which cannot be caught up in any mystique of creation): substitu-

tion (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one and the same name, nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.”

Argo is, ultimately, a variable.

I think Joyce would have been intrigued by this passage, but I don’t think he would have quite agreed with it. Make Argo too much of a variable and you will forget what you are doing with it: going to find the very specific Golden Fleece.

And yet, couldn’t one say that the infinite circularity of Finnegan’s wake leads us to Barthes conclusion? There, in a dream language precision driven crazy by the latin roots of alternitivement, movement is always back to where movement started.

 

Untitled - Karen Chamisso

 

In the deadpan of poetry

Like any other mutant in the American grain

“speakers do not mark prosodically punch lines or jab lines”

But let it all sink to the bottom.

Bottom’s up! Such is the burden of the song.

And sometimes this can go on all night long

 

When the pills don’t kick in and the street noise interferes

With the dreams that are buzzing around my ears.  

Horror: genre and politics

 

 

“We read in the Salut publique de Lyon: an English photographer, M.s Warner, had the idea of reproducing on the collodion the eye of an ox some hours after its death. Examining that assay with a microscope, he distinctly perceived on the retina the lines of the paving stones of the slaughterhouse, the last object that had affected the vision of the animal, bowing its head to receive the blow of the butcher’s knife.” – Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

Since the Revolution, terror has had a leftward aspect. The Right (for instance, Edmund Burke and Joseph De Maistre) had a strong consciousness of the sublimity of putting the royals on the chopping block, as well as dissolving the very names of the nobility. Terror and shock, in various guises and platforms, was long the effect sought by anarchist and socialist. A healthy shock to the system, for the union leader, and for the poet, an amassing of dynamite underground. The poet-anarchist Laurent Tailhade produced a famous slogan at the time of the bombings in Paris in the 1890s: “Qu'importent les victimes, si le geste est beau!». In due time, those numb to beautiful gestures like to recall, Tailhade himself lost an eye to one of the bombs.

The working class culture of anarchy seems to have died, although its memorials are lovingly preserved on many sites on the internet – see, for example, the Maitron site (https://maitron.fr/). Where once we sympathized with the terrorist, we now – we the entertained – turn to horror for our sublime.

This is usually an intro to some meditation on horror as the defining effect of various fictions. My own sense of things is that horror as a genre can’t be understood without understanding horror in fact, from urban murders to concentration camps, that span the “modern period.” Foucault’s description of the drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens, which of course happened in a public space and was meant as punishment and spectacle, could easily be fitted in an anthology of horror. Even at this time, though, there were enlightenment philosophers that were doubtful of it as punishment but, as well, as spectacle. Napoleon, famously, banished abattoirs to the extremities of Paris because he did not like the populace being dulled to the spectacle of execution – given the populace’s actions during the Revolution. Yet as the spectacle of execution was confined more and more to state enforced restricted areas, printed media was invested in the grotesque and the horrid.

A lot of the literature on horror is devoted to horror as a genre. It is a genre, but what happens when the genre wall comes down is that one misses the capillary connection between the genre and the world outside the genre. Literature – and film and song and painting – are in the street and in the newspapers and the laboratories. Horror as a genre is stylistically marked, so often, by upfronting the capillary source. Poe, for instance, used mesmerism a lot, which made perfect sense in his struggle with the transcendentalist culture of New England. In England, de Quincey’s The art of murder was not just the beginning of modern true crime, but was a way of writing horror that fed on the Newgate tradition of reported crime. Poe’s followers in France picked up on the peculiarly capillary adaptedness of horror. When, in Villiers de L’isle-Adam’s story, Claire Lenoir, the narrator, a horrid savant named Tribulet Bonhomet describes himself as a “Saturnian of the second epoque”, which, as the Pleiade editors have pointed out, is a direct lift from a manual on handreading, Les mystères de la main révélés et expliqués, by Adolph Desbarrolles, which is still in print today. When, more currently, Stranger Things looks for its jump scare, it attaches to the very real MKULTRA program of the CIA, which supposedly ended in the late 60s – but actually just changed its name. To my mind, one of the great resources of genre is this capillarity. It is why it often feels more current, more plugged in, than the mainstream literature forms. The modernist device was to embrace that capillarity – which you see in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ullyses, Mrs. Dalloway, etc. The Lyric Realist homing in on the upper middle suburban or urban household is as wary of this inlet from the outside as the upper middle class burger is of crime.

Social utility of fat cats

 

Social utility of fat cats: the use and limits of wealth

 

We need to discuss the social function of rich people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, and the rare inventor, I see two functions: administration and investment.

The social cost of administration has gone up considerably since corporations changed their nature, breaking the old postwar pact between capital and labor. Here, I am going to put to one side the growth of LBOs and private equity firms that developed new forms of looting corporations in the eighties in order to concentrate on the radical elevation in compensation for the highest levels of management. This took off in the 80s. The explanation for this, from the point of view of intellectual history, is that neoclassical economists provided a model that justified it. Then, as an institutional addendum, business schools saw in this issue a chance to create an alliance with a trend in corporations that would pay great benefits: expanding its presence both on the campus and in the world of business. Harvard Business school in particular boasted a team of scholars who cheered on the insane compensations of the new class of CEO with arguments having to do with “aligning” the interests of the organization and the management: the famous principle-agent problem, the solution to which was to massively bribe the leader.  The rationale for this was paper thin – one had only to compare the compensation for Japanese upper management in the seventies to  Americans in the eighties to see that corporate productivity and return on investment did not depend on giving the CEOs carte blanche and stock options.

One must keep in mind, from a political point of view, that the lowering of the marginal tax rate as a result of bills passed in Reagan’s first two years in office was the necessary but not sufficient condition for the subsequent explosion in upper management compensation. The gesture normalized the transgression of the post war pact, which saw the worker in some relation to management. It gave boards of directors a material reason for allowing and even encouraging a practice that, at one time, would have looked like gouging or an exercise in contempt for the stakeholders in the firm. The normalization worked: in the nineties, Clinton Dems showed no inclination to take the punchbowl away from this party, thus cementing the new norm. Rich upper management types – donors! – were now consulted as oracles instead of targeted as moneybags. This, crucially, paid extra dividends once one was out of office. The shadow side of neo-liberalism was the creation of a whole new strata of well paid consultants, lobbyists, and general wheeler dealers. If corporation X could not bribe Senator Y, Senator Y’s children or spouse could perhaps be hired at excellent salaries to lobby, or perhaps to think hard at think tanks, which like business schools experienced a true boom in the eighties. These think tanks were being bankrolled by wealthy philanthropists, who, in time honored fashion, used this instrument to avoid taxes and exert power. As the CEO class became more and more entitled, there was considerable trickle down to the political class, which became abettors and scroungers at the till. Similarly, the CEO model spread to non-profits. College presidents and museum heads were soon being paid astonishing sums to do what previous college presidents and museum heads had done for considerably less. There was no visible increase in the quality of colleges or museums, but this didn’t matter: that standard was obsolete at this point.

Thomas Picketty, who studied changes in the source of wealth along with Emmanuel Saenz, targets the income derived from administration as a major driver of income and wealth inequality in his book Capital. For a quick rundown of this, I’d recommend Mike Konczal’s excellent essay in the Boston Review in 2014.

Even so, if the exorbitant sums paid to administrators had resulted in a great increase in the pay to the median worker, it might be said that, on some level, it works. But this hasn’t happened.   The very wealthy have seen their income growing by about 6 percent per year since the seventies – in fact, the starting point seems to be 1973. The middle has grown, if at all – it flatlined during most of the 00s – by one percent per year.  The workers who comprise the lower eighty percent have seen their wealth, in Piketty’s phrase, “collapse”. This reverses the trends from 1945 to 1973, when it was just the opposite, with the wealthiest having less percentage gains than the middle.

The left argues that we have no reason to pay these exorbitant costs for administration. There’s no evidence that these costs have been worth it to the average worker in developed economies. On the contrary, they’ve decisively shifted power away from workers. This power is not just reflected in flatlining wages and increased debt: it is, as well, a matter of expectations, of seeing the future of one’s society as something in which one can expect justice, exert political influence, and enjoy the fruits of our greatly increased national product: making our lives more comfortable, but allowing us, too, to take risks without facing the chance of being kicked out on the street. And so on down the generations, ad gloria mundi.

Along with administration, the wealthy play a positive social role by making investments. The argument here is, it is true, circular – we need to the wealthy to invest, and that investment makes them richer, making us need them more – but it isn’t bogus. Investment means that credit is available to the masses; the making accessible and available credit to workers, beyond the mingy terms of the company store, was one of the great capitalist victories of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union died for many reasons, but one of the unheralded ones was the persistent refusal of the Soviet planners to create an internal source of credit. This devastated the economy that recovered very well from World War II, but that, by the sixties, was in desperate need of credit to renovate and take advantage of the efficiencies offered by technological progress.

So there’s that. One can accept that the sphere of financial circulation is necessary, however, without accepting the premium that is now being paid for investment is necessary or efficient  – or accepting the massive shadow banking system that has developed according to a logic of its own. The proliferation of financial instruments whose sole purpose is a quick return – basically, the casinoization of the banking system – has only been a bad thing. Although it has been an excellent thing for the very rich.

Our tax system mirrors the priorities of the very wealthy – hence, the flat tax on capital gains. This is a scandal, and everytime it is pointed out that it is a scandal, everyone is scandalized, and the moment passes. Here, the wealthy have been very successful at telling a story that is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx told. It is perhaps the most successful propaganda ever to spread in America, if we discount the pseudo-science flogged by cigarette companies to keep regulation from happening in the fifties and sixties. The success of the cig companies can be measured in the obituary columns and the hospitals year after year. The success of the entrepreneur myth can be measured in bankruptcies, debt, and the decline in public investment is occurring not only in the U.S., but everywhere in the developed world save China.

The story made up by Schumpeter, and other conservative economists, went like this: wealth comes about because some risktaker seizes on an idea – a new invention or service, or a common one that can be done more efficiently, etc. – and founds a company. The company hires people, meaning that our risktaker is spreading the wealth. We need this person! And so the richer he is, the more he deserves our gratitude for graciously making such wealth for others.

This fairy tale is very popular on the right, and hardly disputed anymore on the left. Yet it is simply bogus. The wealth of the risktaker depends entirely on the services and commodities produced by the workers. The rightwing tale completely and neatly inverts reality. There’s no Gates, Jobs, or Bezos without the workers that embodied and carried forth the tasks that made them rich. All honor to their ideas – but they are ideas built on the labor, services and ideas of others. The indispensibility of the entrepreneur isn’t even believed by the banker class, which mouths this propaganda. As any glance at the history of the tech industry – where the myth of the wealthmaking wealthy is particularly strong – shows, when the idea of the risktaker becomes an actual company, his funders  – those VC angels – in the majority of cases replace him. The VC angels have no sentimentality about the “entrepreneur”. They know he’s a replaceable cog. Unless, of course, it is the man at the top of some Venture Capital company – then he’s an irreplaceable genius.

So, to put it in one sentence: the entrepreneur myth inverts cause and effect, for the malign purpose of justifying an unnecessary premium to the administrator.

But to return to the social function of the wealthy, it is at the convergence of administration and investment that we see the need, such as there is, for a wealthy strata. That need is not, however, for an uber-wealthy strata. We need to allow a premium for investment and for the higher administrative tasks. At least, given the present form of our economic system. But a premium can really be limited, and its limits should be defined empirically, not with an ideological elevator speech about freedom. In the fifties, the wealthiest level of Americans, the top 1 percent, owned 9 percent of the national wealth. They now own 35 percent. The bottom 80 percent own ten percent. This has happened in my lifetime. In my son’s lifetime, if global warming is seriously addressed and there is an America left, we can correct this. In my utopia, the top 1 percent would own five percent of the wealth, and the bottom 80 percent would own at least 50 to 60 percent of the wealth – leaving the next 19 percent with the spoils. That 19 percent is composed of administrators, professionals and people in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sectors.  These people have seen their incomes and wealth grow, but not in proportion to the freakishly wealthy upper 1 percent. That one percent – and even more the .01 percent – dominate the chart.

I’m conceding to the social function of the wealthy much that depends on the current system. That system itself has to adjust in a major way to the catastrophe it has generated and refused to confront – and who can predict just how that adjustment will be accomplished? But it should be pointed out that ecocide is not just a capitalist product – there was no country and system more devoted to ecocide than the U.S.S.R. As long as we refuse to rethink the treadmill of production, we will keep going the way of the Dead Planet. However, the acceleration in ecocide coincides, and not accidentally, with the increase in wealth inequality we have seen around the world. Economists, bizarrely, love to brag that really excessive poverty is decreasing, as if they had anything to do with it. This means, basically, that there are more families living on more than 2 dollars a day. Victory! But one can ask whether the price – a .001 percent that are living on 50 million dollars per day – is worth it. I for one say no. Inequality and the present system of industry are both factors in the same death march. One we can stop. And we can do that without rich people missing a single ten course lunch. The right will always complain it is a choice between the billionaire and the Gulag, but that is a false choice. We can choose to keep the wealthy without creating a wealth aristocracy. That’s the real choice.

wokeness - a political anthropology

I had one of those discussions last night in which the word “wokeness” wandered around like an uninvited guest at a birthday party.  “Wokeness”, at this moment in France, as a demonized thing that the Zemmourist right has decided is their ticket to ride. But for me, mostly, it is a fashionable phrase that will disappear in due course.

But then, as I was falling asleep, I had an odd thought: what if I’m… wrong?

1.

I grew up in a world in which the terms of political anthropology were clear: there was the left, and there was the right. One could draw a primitive graph showing American liberals a degree to the left and American conservatives a degree to the right, and that seemed to correspond to what we understood to be the stakes, which was about the working class and its consciousness and the owning class and its consciousness.

2.

Class has by no means disappeared, but consciousness has shifted, and with it the terms of our political anthropology.

I like to think of neoliberalism as a general term for a certain culture, and not just a certain political economic arrangement in the age of globalized capitalism. As a culture, it does work against the old solidarities by emphasizing the (false) dualism between the state and “private enterprise”. To put my cards on the table, I don’t at all buy this picture. The real question of governance is about alliances between something called the state and other entities, like multinational corporations. The upper echelon of both is on the same side, aiming for the same ends. However, putting this to one side, under neoliberalism the self is contoured more by the ecology of “private enterprise” than by the “state”. For example, Ferguson Missouri, which was subject to a massive study by the justice department, is a city where the police force, from outside, plays a massive role in controlling the mostly black population, but that population is almost completely plugged into businesses, small and large.

However, the political economy here is a culture in as much as this contouring of lives occurs in the absence of old solidarities – like an organized working class – and in the presence of a hyper-sensitive and sensational culture – a culture of affects. And this too is neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, the old successes of the civil rights movements of the late twentieth century are as important to the neo-liberal self-consciousness as “private enterprise”. Neo-liberalism is a synthesis of these two things.

Thus, when a neoliberal exults in breaking the glass ceiling (like Hillary Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg), this is not some cynical ploy, but the neoliberal culture in action. To my eye, feminism is about breaking the patriarchy, of which the corporation and the state are products – and thus, putting women in the CEO position is precisely as liberatory as replacing the guards in a prison with “screws” among the prisoners. Still a prison, my droogs and droogesses! But where I see putting a human face on an oppressive system, the neoliberal feminist sees my objection as a male reaction to female power.

3.

However, wokeness is proving to be as irritating to the neoliberal feminist as it is to the standard issue suit. Which says something about the position vacated by the decline of the left.

The shift towards individualism of a purely formal type has been followed by a shift towards living individualism. The individual lives, it turns out, and doesn’t just consume. Living involves memory. It involves the passions. It involves affect.

The “affect” effect, from the old Left point of view, is hokum. I think it isn’t, but I also think this kneejerk reaction has to do with the fraught history of affect discourse.

The old program of taking power from the capitalist and giving it to the producers has been dogged, on the right, with a long discourse about “envy”. It was fought against as not just bad for the economy, as conceived by the economist, but also as a bad feeling, akin to the sins of the pre-French Revolutionary days.

In fact, the program of the right, since the Revolution, is keenly attuned to the culture of feeling. In an ordered society, that culture produces the right feelings – in a disordered society, one for instance in which the producer somehow ends up in the governor’s seat, it produces hate and envy.

As it turns out, however, when capitalism triumphs, globally, the discourse of affect is retranscribed. What results is that the old rightwing position, which relied on a monopoly of guilt, is shaken, and the woke position as it were seizes the right to make guilty.

4.

I am  not happy about the current state of our political anthropology, but I do take it as a given. My hope is that wokeness is a necessary but insufficient condition for the making of a better, juster, and even happier world. That is the world I, wee little pea that I am, think is not only possible, but necessary if we are to  survive the catastrophes we have visited upon ourselves.