It is hard to keep a secret

 Marcel Schwob’s preface to his Vies imaginaires makes a plea for the vita as art, instead of history. History, Schwob writes, aims at the general, and puts the stress in the meaning of human lives in their connection with greater events. For history, “all individuals have value only because they have modified events or made them deviate.” Art, on the other hand, “doesn’t classify; it de-classifies.”

The preface carries out the argument, such as it is, with brio. But the imaginary lives do not all carry out that de-classifying imperative. The life of Herostratus, for instance, distinctly lacks a certain detail – or rather, Schwob lacks a certain wonder at this detail.
Herostratus was famous, or infamous, for having torched the temple of Artemis in Epheseus. Schwob does an interesting, proleptic thing about Herostratus by describing him from the beginning in terms of the tortures to which he was subjected after his act. This proleptic magic act is nice. I applaud it. But then, when we read the end of the life, we get this:
“The twelve cities of Ionia forbad, on penalty of death, the announcing of Herostratus name to future ages. But the murmur has come just as far as us. The night when Herostratus torched the temple of Epheseus, Alexander, kind of Macedonia, was born.”
For those of us more historian than artist – or who reject Schwob’s division – there is much lost in that “murmur.” How is it that, somehow, the agent of this particular fait divers was able to avoid a suppression that seems, given the time, the lack of news save by messenger and singer, and the penalty, to have more appropriately submerged that pyromaniac fameseeker?
How do secrets get passed along?
Pessoa wrote an essay on Erostratus in English, which was discovered, like much of Pessoa’s work, after his death. The English is a bit brushed up and too too British, but Pessoa makes a deep remark about Erostratus’s, so to speak, existential figuration.
“His act may be compared, in a way, to that terrible element of the initiation of the Templars, who, being first proven absolute believers in Christ – both as Christians, and in the general tradition of the Church, and as occult Gnostics and therefore in the great particular tradition of Christianity, had to spit upon the Crucifix in their initiation. The act may seem no more than humanly revolting from a modern standpoint, for we are not believers, and, when, since the romantics, we defy God and hell, defy things which for us are dead and thus send challenges to corpses. But no human courage, in any field or sea where men are brave with mere daring, can compare with the horror of that initiation. The God they spat upon was the holy substance of Redemption. They looked into hell when their mouths watered with the necessary blasphemy.”
Pessoa no doubt read Schwob. The Templar story was, of course, a legend transmitted by way of the trials of the Templars, who were overthrown in a power struggle that sought justification, as so many do, in a courtroom padded with lies and crooked lawyers. But secret calls to secret – the initiation of the Templars was a secret kept within the group, and yet it forced itself out – a necessary blasphemy – to future generations.
It is hard to keep a secret. And it is hard to say why it is hard to keep a secret.

The atmosphere of fascism

“Are you a fascist, signore?”

“Not at all. On the contrary.”

“Don’t be offended. We are all, a little”

“Do you really believe that?” replied Laurana, amused and irritated at the same time.

-          To each his own, Leopoldo Sciascia.

Sciascia’s use of investigative fiction – from the crime novel to the detective-like essay – was a response to the problem of fascism. Fascism is founded on impunity. Now, impunity is a large thing – it can be the result of chance, or mercy. But when it is politically directed to exempt a person or persons from the rule that noone is above the law, we are in the atmosphere of fascism. An atmosphere that precedes fascism, of course; myself, I think of Louis Napoleon as an exemplar of proto-fascism in Europe, and the whole system of slavery in the U.S. and its criminal descendent in the ordinary expression of the legal system in America are other examples of the fascist atmosphere.

The dialogue I have clipped out, above, is between a man named Benito – after Benito Juarez, not Mussolini – and one of Sciascia’s investigators, the rather sad bachelor, professor Laurana. Benito is considered a bit lunatic by the people around him, for instance his maid, and acknowledges this reputation to Laurana before making the case that Peppino Testaquadra, a Communist politician with an anti-fascist past, imprisoned by Mussolini, is a fascist. “He is one of my friends, I repeat, an old friend. However, I can’t prevaricate, he’s a fascist: A man who finally is elevated into a little niche, even an uncomfortable niche, and begins to distinguish between the interest of the state and that of the citizen, between the rights of his elector and that of the citizen, between efficacity and justice. Don’t you think that one could ask him why the devil, then, in these conditions, he suffered from imprisonment and home arrest?”

It is that little bit of fascism that one sees, especially, in the culture, a culture that cultivates the superhero as saviour and thinks it is being ironic and hip when it elevates the bank robber and the hit man.

Sciascia was extraordinarily sensitive to this moment, and repeats it time after time in his narratives. There is, in his Sicily, always a bit of Nemesis – of that popular justice named “envy”, and of that struggles with Nemesis named “justice” in the organizational sense – that is, the just detective or policeman or judge – the judge being in Italy and France entrusted with the power to order an investigation.

In a plutocracy, of course, nothing is more banned, more condemned than Nemesis – that is, a sense that disproportionate gain is itself criminal. That there are limits to use, to exploitation, to wealth, even to happiness and the “positive” emotions. Envy is always marked with the black spot, while greed is always treated cautiously, a sort of tooth fairy.

From the tooth fairy to the Aryan prison gang boss whose reign shows, as the New York Times likes to put it, a “rightward shift” in American politics – it has all been prepared for decades. And now we are enjoying the feast.

Sorites and the mean - not for the fainthearted

It is said that Chryssipus the Stoic held that there were, for all problems, true solutions. But he also held that at times, we can’t see them – and those times called for a morally disciplined silence. It is in this spirit he approached the paradox of the heap – the sorites. The paradox is as follows: if we construct a heap from seeds, say, we can, by adding seeds successively, reach a point where we might say that we have a heap, and identify that with the number of seeds we have used – say, 200. And yet, when we subtract one seed, we are disinclined to say that we no longer have a heap. Given that fact, we might play the game by claiming that we haven’t reached a heap no matter how many seeds we use in order to avoid identifying the heap with a certain number of seeds – but then, paradoxically, we will never achieve a heap. In fact, we don’t really seem to be able to quantify a thing like a heap; neither do we want to say that the heap is a quality when clearly it can be analyzed into its separate parts. To borrow a term from contemporary logic, there is no “heapmaker” – so how can there be a heap? Chryssipus, according to Sextus Empiricus, recommended that “when the Sorites is being propounded one should, while the argument is proceeding, stop and suspend judgement to avoid falling into absurdity.” Analytic philosophers, such as Mario Magnucci, who wrote a seminal paper on the stoic response to the sorites, have attempted to incorporate Chryssipus’s response into standard Western logic. To me, the stoic response is closer to the notion of Mu in Rinzai Zen. The famous Mu Koan goes like this: a disciple of Zhaozhou, a Chinese zen master, asked him if a dog has the Buddha nature. Zhaouzhou answered Wu – Mu in Japanese – which means no, empty, vacant, and – it is said – applies in different ways to the question: that there is no dog, that there is no Buddha nature, that the dog does not have Buddha nature, and so on. In other words, the answer is meant to break the mental habit of thinking that the way of assembly – where distinct parts are put together – and the way of disassembly, where distinct parts are separated, are grounded in the real. Indetermination is neither a fact of the real nor not a fact of the real.

My friend Owen Goldin has pointed out that the Aristotelian response to events like the heap - events that seem to defy any natural division into parts – is to postulate threshholds. In Eubulides, Aristotle and the Sorites, Jon Moline claims that Eubulides first developed the sorites paradox. Eubulides was taught by a pupil of Socrates and disputed (successfully) with Aristotle. According to Moline, the ancient tradition put the sorites in opposition to the Aristotelian concept of the mean. Moline quotes a second century figure, Aspasius:

“For it is no different with any other sensible thing from which they arrive at Sorites. For at what point is a man wealthy? When he has deposited ten talents, they inquire? And if one should take away a drachma, is he no longer wealthy? And if two? For there is no one of such things, since it is a sensible thing, which it is possible to define accurately, whether a poor man or a rich. And concerning the bald man they ask whether by one hair one can become bald, or by two, or three? Whence the arguments said that bald men were also Sorites. For concerning a heap (soros) they ask the same thing, whether by one grain of wheat the heap is made smaller, and then whether by two, and so on according to the pattern; and it is not possible to say where first there is no longer a heap because no sensible thing can be understood accurately, but only broadly and in outline. Thus this holds even of actions and of feelings. For it is not possible to say by how much anger one attains a mean in anger or surpasses it or fails to come up to it because of deviation towards too much or too little. Wherefore there is need of practical wisdom for discovering the mean in feelings and in actions.”

Moline constructs a plausible version of a Eubulidian argument regarding, say, generosity, which uses the heap method to show that what is generous can be reduced to what is extremely mean if we do not grant an autonomy to the quality in regards to the quality.

“For suppose the man of practical wisdom in my circumstances would give n drachmas. Giving just so much as the man of practical wisdom would give and would declare to be the mean is, you would say, generous. But it is not. For suppose I give just one obol less. Is my gift not generous ? Surely you must concede that giving just one obol less than the generous amount is generous, for an obol is a trifle. Yet if we apply the principle you concede a sufficient number of times, it follows that it is generous to give nothing. But this, clearly, is not generosity, but the extreme of meanness. And suppose that I give one obol more than the mean as specified by the man of practical wisdom. I am giving one obol more than the generous amount, but surely my gift is still generous, for again, an obol is a trifle. But if we apply a sufficient number of times the principle that giving one obol more than what is generous is generous, it follows that it is generous to give not n obols, but one's entire fortune. And this is not generosity, but the extreme of prodigality.”

It in this way that the Stoics attempted to drive a wedge between what Vico would call geometric knowledge and discursive knowledge.

Myself, I think this has particular pertinence to a pattern in historiography: the rise and fall arc. Too often, disputes among historians about the rise or decline of some historical property fail to acknowledge that rise and fall are sorites. Hence, arguments become very vicious about what the risemakers or the fall-makers are, and when they occur. Accepting that historical narratives have a sorites paradox at their center helps us clarify the half-fictitious nature of the business. Even if one doesn’t stop and fall silent, like Chryssipus, one has to accept the possibility that finally, withdrawal is the correct response.

Joseph Roth and the dialectic of nationalism

 As Stephane Pensel has pointed out, Joseph Roth seems to be a writer absolutely opposite to W.G. Sebald. Sebald wound his writing around his reading – books came to life in his demi-fiction, much as lines came to life in Paul Klee’s painting. As Klee said, an active line”, a freely drawn line, goes out for a walk. Sebald’s fiction is about taking the author, with a universe in his head, out for a walk. Roth, by contrast, often spoke about the virtues of reading little: “Please understand”, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I don’t read. I hold with the good words of a man I otherwise don’t value, Karl Kraus, who wrote: A poet who reads is like a bartender who drinks.”

Yet there is a relation between Roth and Sebald that comes out in Sebald’s essay on the former. Sebald deals sympathetically with Roth’s notorious nostalgia for the Habsburg empire. I think Sebald, also an exile of a kind, understood the political gesture under that nostalgia. It was aimed at the onslaught of ethnic nationalism that came after the Empire’s breakup. Roth rejected both Naziism and Zionism for the same reason: the claim that the nation is founded on a privileged people. Ethnos taking the place of ethos was, to Roth, the great danger we face. Sebald gets this right, I think. Of Roth’s image of Austria – the Austro-Hungarian empire – Sebald writes:

It is an image of something that lacks any will to power, any imperialist drive, I think. This is the motive of Roth’s Austrian model, which was one of the clearly lost opportunities of history. Perhaps, as the old Herr von Maerker opines at the end of the Stummen Propheten, the opportunity had been really present in his time, “out of ... the Monarchy to make a home for all. It would have been the small prototype of a larger future world. The emphasis lies, here, not on the larger future world – for this Roth had long given up on – but rather on the „small prototype“, illuminated by the radiance of the past.”

Roth died about 85 years ago. He suffered, in his life and in his work, from the terrible virus of nationalism that was codified in Woodrow Wilson’s white supremacist doctrine of the “self-determination” of peoples, which was the guise under which the American liberal contested the American isolationist. We are presently at a dialectical inflection point in that long struggle – a president as racist as Wilson, and contrary to Wilson an advocate of autarcky, who is searching to resurrect an international of white states.

I think Roth would understand exactly how this moment, bookmarked between the mass murder in Gaza and the mass murder in Ukraine, became the station we have stopped at.

Lucky Charms

 I wrote an account of opening a cereal box – what is known, in the industry, as a billboard box – in 2022. Three years later, as the racist band of malcontents, led by Trump, Mr. Measles, and Mr. Bucket Shop, have decided to break America’s spirit and the world order, this account seems hopelessly nostalgic, a point to which we will only return in some phantasmal next stage of our neoliberal breakdown, our global shakes.

This is the account, a little edited by my grim future knowledge.

Breakfast cereal is an emblem of the industrialized food system. If the system had a totem, surely the faces of Captain Crunch, Tony the Tiger, and Snap, Crackle and Pop would be displayed on it. Or the Leprechaun on my son’s favorite cereal, Lucky Charms. Which, incidentally, you can’t find in Paris – or rather, you have to search for among those stores that sell American goods to the expat community, which have recently become fewer. The cereal box that lies open mouthed in our cupboard is precisely the Lucky Charms with a pitiful moraine of marshmellows and triangular shaped cereal bits at the bottom of it, less than a bowl of cereal. The picture on the front cover shows a Leprechaun with big eyes and a big smile, a green hat on his head and, of course, a green fourleafed shamrock stuck to the band, juggling a rainbow of marshmallow bits, which are helpfully color coded on the back of the box in English and Spanish. A veritable diversity initiative. The Leprechaun looks a bit crazier on the back cover, and his arms are stuck on him in a funny way at the side of the box, his mouth gaping in a smile that emphasizes his teeth, a uniform curve of white, no distinction between one and the other. Liena Tu Mundo De Magia, it says under him. The dietary information is printed on the side of the box – from which we learn that the cereal has “140 calories”. I imagine this refers to one serving or “cup”. In France, instead of Spanish, one often finds the printout of “ingredients” and ”nutritional facts” in English and Arabic. For instance, Honey Crisps are somewhat vaguely routed or controlled by the Kellogg’s office in Casablanca. Our Quaker Oats come to us via a Pepsi distributor hq-ed in France. And so on.

This box is a marvel as well as, given the ecological tragedy of agribusiness, a horror. Marvels and horrors are the familiars of my ordinary life – and no doubt yours, reader. We flip between them with every app and every birdless sky.

The world of commerce, the system of global production and circulation which brought that box to my kitchen (with a little help from my friend Tom, who actually brought it over from NYC) seems, sometimes, to fill the world. It depends, however, on the act of giving. I give the cereal to my boy. My friend gave his time and money to go out and get the box and put it in his bag and bring it to us across the Ocean.

Time and labor that are not registered in any Excel sheet. My definition of neoliberalism is that cultural regime which attempts to completely embed the social in the economic (defined narrowly as capitalism, a market based system of goods and services controlled by capital); however, it is always limited by the fact that it depends, fundamentally, on what Georges Bataille called the “general economy” – the economy of unexchanged energy, generosity, and giftgiving. The further neoliberalism digs into the general economy, the more it undermines itself. In this contradiction, myth is generated.

At least this is one way to locate myth. I cannot decoding a cereal box or an advertisement for cereal without falling, somewhat, under the spell of Roland Barthes mythologies, those essays on the quotidian that assemble various decodings of certain bourgeois patterns of recognition, or styles of representation, all themselves under the pulses of the mythic . Barthes wrote them in the fifties, when he was still using an impressionistic technique. He didn’t quite have together what he meant by myth. His latter essay on myth is confusing, I think, because he retrospectively tries to cast what he was doing in the armature of a more fully developed semiotics. Still, each of those essays has an exhilarating air, as though he were an alien among these ads, sports events, strip shows and automobiles.

Myself, I can sit pretty, given such predecessors as Barthes and a thousand others. Yet I still don’t have the categories to quite understand, for instance, the glue, or – I suspect – starch based adhesive that gives the box its use and mystery. The top of the cereal box is a familiar rectangle divided into two rough triangles traced out by impressed creases. One of the triangles slots under the other. However, to get to that organized state – which we will call the OPENED cereal box – I have to make it so – because the box is eminently closed this morning. It comes closed. It is closed when it finishes its transit of the assembly line. The box is lightly sealed because the contents of the box have to be protected from spills and damage. The cereal, in other words, is very much conditioned not just by the fact that its end use is to be digested, but also by its circulation – its storage, transportation, and distribution on top of shelves in a store. Due to the necessity imposed by the truck, the store manager, and the stock person, I am confronted by a sealed box top. A helpful site named “allpack china” provides a picture of the machine that does the box sealing, from which I quote:

“This is also known as a bag-in-box machine and it packs different pouches inside the box or cartons. This instrument is the first choice of manufacturer for boxed cereal packaging. It also packs cereals directly inside the boxes that are lined with plastic or paper liners. Top load and End load cartoners are used in cereal packaging.

Working Principle

First cardboard is placed in the bag magazine from where the grippers pick the cardboard, one piece at a time. Via gripper, it is transported to the folding and gluing area. At this station, the left and right edges of the carton are folded while the glue application applies adhesives at the bottom and sides of the carton to firmly close it. Then, this folded carton is covered with a liner, and cereal flakes are introduced inside the lined box. Finally, after a precise filling top seam is sealed using glue.”

I and millions of consumers am up against this machine at least one morning a week.

The potentially separable triangles that make up that box top are glued to two interior cardboard flaps. As an American bred and born in the 20th century, know just what to do: I must deflower this box top. But from long experience I also know that I can make a mess of it. Too much pressure and you tear the thing, destroying the ideal symmetry that would insert the slot snugly under the mouth of the other triangle. If I exert the right pressure, I can break the adhesive bond and the box top will tent perfectly over the contents, which are, as well, protected by being stored in a little wax paper embryo inside. That wax paper, too, I will have to force open – and for that, scissors is your best friend. That is, if they are at hand. Of course, scissors are all too often an afterthought, as I grip the two sides of the bag and pull on them to burst the seal. Comedy can ensue, has ensued, with too much pulling – cereal everywhere! The same elements conspire against me with the box top triangles, for my experience is that the sealant is a little too tight to make it easy to unseal, manually, these tabs. They will rip, and instead of tenting the contents, they will raise up, irregularly torn, revealing the grayish paper under the beautiful red die. Every time, then, I open the cabinet and take out the cereal box, its ruinous state will reproach me. This reproach will attach, like fine starch adhesive, to my thoughts about the cereal – I will be inclined to want to hurry up its consumption, and might well toss the box before it is completely void of honey smack pleasure, in the way one hides things one is ashamed of.

This is doubly bad, since not only will the box and the wax paper embryo eventually be tossed into the garbage can, from when they will go to further litter the earth and foul the water, but at the same time I will be wasting food, organic matter, which is even worse.

Thus, much depends on my successfully applying a degree of force: my shame, my eco-citizenship, and my sense of being a good housekeeper.

The need to seal and break a seal – that is, to have adhesives that both adhere and break apart proportionate to the human force brought upon them – is an old old story, going back to myths of seals of wax that lock away vital messages – as for instance in the case of Bellerophon, who was entrusted with a message that, under its seal, instructed the receiver to kill the messenger. That is one mythic facet – the other facet is that of the trap. The cereal box is, among other things, a trap – a devise that closes on an animal and allows the trapper to open it and capture the animal. Traps are part of a technology that goes far back in human pre-history, like fire and writing.

So much depends on that starch based adhesive.

My son opened the Lucky Charms about a week ago. He is already a breaker of seals, a bearer of messages. But living in France, he is not as utterly at home with this kind of box as I am, as I remember cabinets of cereal plenty when I was a kid with four brothers and sisters. Four cereals at least, one of which would almost always be Rice Krispies. A family favorite. Lucky Charms was always an eccentric cereal – one that, with those marshmallows, was not meant for everyday, everyweek, everymonth use. The kind of cereal that can become a favorite only as an unusual cake frosting – say strawberry – can become a favorite, in as much as it is the less frequent frosting or with Lucky Charms and Captain Crunch a less frequent cereal against the rice pops and cornflakes. This is the syntax of boxes that I have dealt with all my life.

Habit makes the habitus. The cereal box is a monument, among other things, to packaging waste. I know this. Yet it is also a nostalgia object, deeply embedded in my childhood and the childhoods of all the kids I knew, the ones who survived into adulthood, the ones who as parents, inevitably, took on the burden of feeding their kids in the morning. Our civilizing task.

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6Eleanor Courtemanche, Eduardo Gonzalez and 4 others

Does a market economy generate a market culture?

 

Does a market economy necessarily generate a market culture?  Frank Cunningham wrote an interesting article on this topic that appeared in the Journal of Social Philosophy in 2005. Clearly, Cunningham was a student of Karl Polanyi He quotes a pertinent passage from one of Polanyi’s essays:

“This institutional gadget, which became the dominant force in the economy—now justly described as a market economy—then gave rise to yet another, even more extreme development, namely as a whole society embedded in the mechanism of its own economy—a market society.”


This may seem like an esoteric theme, but, in actuality, it is the central problem of our time. If the one always leads to the other, not only is liberalism sunk, but the ability to meet the enormous environmental challenges that are even now building in the oceans and the heavens is doomed to failure. That will then doom to failure whole swathes of the planet. For instance, the melting of the glacial system in the Himalayas will essential drain the source of water for around 400 to 500 million Indians and Chinese. Although the libertarians, Randians, Trumpians and other fine purveyors of superstition probably don’t know this, without water, people die. The Randians, et al., would probably answer that at least they would die in freedom, able to freely exchange their whole life savings for a couple of cups of water before expiring. And think of the enormous flexibility this would put into the labor market!

But these people are crazy. Unfortunately, at the moment they govern the planet, write the newspapers, and release the bombs. To use the word in the proper sense, they are the terrorist class.

This is my hook to Cunningham’s thesis.

Terror, or fear, is, according to Cunningham, one of the great connectors between a market economy and a market society. Cunningham makes the case that what is commonly viewed as greed – that insatiable avarice for more money driving the ideal type capitalist (he quotes John D. Rockefeller’s response to the question, how much do you need, by saying – “just a little more”) is actually driven by the fear that is promoted by one of the mechanisms of the market – its efficiency. That efficiency depends, in good old capitalist fashion, on removing ‘unnatural’ restraints to the pricing of commodities.

“Still, market economies are characterized by expansion of the market into all domains. Part of the explanation for this is greed for profits, but I suggest that at a more primordial level expansion derives from insecurity or, more precisely, fear.

Competition among producers and retailers promotes efficiency by prompting them to make and distribute things that people want and by keeping the costs of those things down—this is the key premise of free market economic theory. But at the same time, competitors must fear each other. Employment of wage labor with the omnipresent threat of dismissal keeps wages down, thus reducing this cost of production or distribution. Privatization of publicly needed goods provides captive markets. From the side of working people and consumers, market economies are also fearful places. Wage laborers must fear dismissal. Market transactions may signal consumer preferences, but they do not guarantee that goods produced in response to those preferences will be affordable.”


Cunningham’s point is that fear is what turns the relation of the economic and social around – in Polanyi’s terms, what makes it the case that, in capitalism, the economy is no longer embedded in social relationships, but social relationships are embedded in the economy.

And how we see how fear and panic are used to drive even the craziest and most marginal capitalist ideas.

To dispel fear itself – that is the center of Rooseveltian liberalism. We have to get back to that.

The 21st century "left"

 A little thought experiment-y thing occured to me as I walked to Le Progres, my little neighborhood cafe. If Churches were abolished, I thought, if there were no churches, neither Catholic nor Protestant, would there be Christians?

I think there would be. In my counterfactual, the wiping out of churches would occur after they had existed, and after Christianity had spread.

But the Christian who still existed would have apol dilemma, in that their identity would be only quasi-institutional. It would be an identity of belief without a corresponding instutional object in which to perform that belief.

This, I think, is how I think of the "Left". The fall of communism, everywhere, has left the Left with a belief system but no institutional object in which to perform its identity.

As a lefty myself, I often run up against the fact that my political performance is within an almost comically distorted image of the left, which is the moderate left parties. And those parties, everywhere in the world, are not only divorced from any organized global labor movement - the international - they are one and all opposed to such a thing. The thing that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, defined the "Left".