Hypercapitalism, the assassin of culture

 

I saw The Studio episode last night entitled Golden Globes, in which one of the running jokes is that nobody goes to movies anymore. Buying a ticket and going to see a movie in a theatre, the joke implied, is becoming a rarer and rarer experience.

Then, this morning, I read the totally Fruit loops article about the AI epidemic at colleges in New York magazine.

And then I thought about the American territory I grew up in, metro Atlanta, and about where I live now, in Paris.

Where I live now, I can walk to at least twelve to fifteen book stores within fifteen minutes. I can walk to a similar number of movie theaters. And I can do this partly because the French government, through its taxation system, among other things, supports the cultural infrastructure.

In Gwinnett county in Georgia, by contrast, I can drive from my brother’s house to about three bookstores that I can remember – all of them used book stores. Looking it up on Google, I notice with satisfaction that there is still a barnes and noble in Snellville. And of course there are about four Christian bookstores.  As for movie theatres – there are approximately three, all megaplexes. The idea of the art movie theatre – one is just around the corner from me here – has almost died away in the U.S. When we lived in Santa Monica in 2012-2016, I was astonished that the art house cinema was on the verge of extinction in the very epicenter of the movie industry.

The point here is that movies and reading and writing are not separate little reservations in a culture – they all come together, and when they start to die out on the street, they are sooner or latter going to die out in the classroom.

The article on AI in the New York magazine did not at all emphasize, I think, the main thing, at least for me. When I was a teaching assistant at U.T., the emphasis even then was on grading and making good grades “hard”. This never made any sense to me, from the perspective of education – but from the perspective of college being an adjunct to corporate HR, it made total sense. The old hippie 70s notion that grading should be abolished – the Reed College model – was still at least a phantom in the cultural memory back then, but now it seems to have entirely vanished. The logic here makes perfect Hegelian sense – the classroom experience is grade driven to give us an indexical sense of the students, some of whom go on to make AI, which then empties the grade of any meaning – and the classroom experience too.

Bring back Reed.

From Bush era Testing to Trump era AI: your child's education in the hands of elite shitheads

 A teacher named Dorothy de Zouche, in the winter of 1944-5, wrote an article urging the obsolescence and harm of grading that, to my mind, grows ever more unanswerable as AI puts grading into doubt: "The Wound Is Mortal": Marks, Honors, Unsound Activities

De Zouche urges the end of grading for a number of reasons: its irrationality, the wound it inflicts on “inferior” students (those who get inferior grades), the wiliness and disconnect with quality it encourages in “bright” students, etc.

But de Zouche is after the whole competitive rationale that underlines grading as well.

“If we should spend even one tenth of the time teaching people to cooperate that we spend teaching them to compete, we should have a happier and more decent world. From the time a child enters first grade until the time he finishes college we pit him against his fellow classmen. For grades may not be meant to be comparative, but they are comparative. Some of us may not give them upon a comparative basis, but children accept them that way. Alice who made an M in algebra is hardly ever dissatisfied until the moment she discovers that Marguerite-across-the-aisle, who is no smarter than she, made an S. If as adults we could come to realize that the real and permanent satisfactions in life are the satisfactions that come from doing things for the sake of the things themselves, and not for the reward tacked on, we might be able to sell our young people on the same idea, and we should have a less ugly, jealous, vicious world.”

De Zouche, I hear you! What the now famous New York article about AI so clearly and painfully shows is that the grading system, which has long been an archaic and misleading method of teaching children, adolescents and young adults things, has finally been superceded by an instrument that binds together the substance and the mark without any mediation.

In 2016, Counterpoints published an issue entitled: De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization. The issue brings together the critique of what has happened in public education in the U.S. – the U.S. system being the main object of the authors – as it fell prey to what Lawrence Bains and Rhonda Goolsby -Smith aptly named America’s Obsessive – Assessment Disorder.

“As testing has become pervasive, the daily routines of schools have become little more than an endless cycle of test preparation sessions. Of course, the compulsion to repeatedly assess often causes distress in children, but testing also disrupts a fundamental, recently neglected purpose of schooling, namely, learning.”

I think that there is an elementary dialectical relationship between the era of intensified testing, which was the whole Bush educational philosophy, and our present era of AI “cheating”. Both are based on a fundamentally perverse idea of learning – which is that all learning boils down to rote learning, and rote learning is the best learning because it can be tested. The test, here, precedes the subject to be tested. It is one of those typical late capitalist inversions that we all swallow with the morning news and our dose of Instagram photos. But swallowing shit over a period of time causes a certain, shall we say, poisoning?

Cooperation, learning, un-grading – something that has been suggested again and again by progressive, Dewey-influenced teachers, and something that is rejected again and again by Milton Friedman-influenced administrators: this is the one way forward as I see it.

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Lighting out for the territories

 
There are certain phrases that ring my chimes, and have wrung em since childhood.

Among which I place Huckleberry Finn’s “lighting out for the territories”. 

This is how I used to think of the Great American space: an expanse of escape routes, a vast hide n seek imperium, a second chance, third chance fourth chance quick change theatre, a down river up river gamble. 

And this was how, in adolescence, I used to think of bohemia – artland, fuckland, poemland, desperateland – too. Always, of course, in opposition to where I was, which was subdivision land. By its very sound it is judged: to live in allotments, in suburban houses on suburban lawns, seemed to me to be a very low estate indeed. Instead of guitars and rock n roll, this was a place where the angels wings were clipped, and Blake died. Died for all our sins.

As Emerson observed in Circles, more or less: what goes around comes around. Here we are, living in an apartment in Paris, and my son’s image of heaven on earth is to live in a subdivision in Lawrenceville Georgia, with all the fixings: a state of the art entertainment system, a big tv, and food piped in from the nearest McDonald’s.
My notion of the territories, those ambiguously legal appendages to the State – where no one is a slave and the mind forged manacles are parked at the sod house door – was consistent with the things I read as a teenager about the amazing garrets of Paris and New York City, where you died young for beauty itself, or some semblance of it. Though age has drained most of my teen day dreams, I’m still one with that awkward manboy in having an enormous nostalgia for the bohemias of the past. I realize that much of the writing of the twenties was financed by trust fund babies, who have now moved in and taken over the bohemian dream vide the NYT style section. It is sad to think of that ratty utopia fallen into nepo hands, but there are much sadder things, of course. Sad for me.
Still, I think social media is bohemia’s distant heir. When I read the bitching about it, as a general proposition, I have to laugh: isn’t this what all of education is for? Isn’t the dream of every teacher in the past one in which the students actually want to write things? Whose message from the homework assignment is: hey, this is flying? Yes, they mansplain away, they whitesplain away, they say the dumbest things imaginable, but underneath the enormous cretinism, just as underneath the streets of Paris in 1968, there’s the beach. Or in my case, the territories.
Lighting out for the territories is still an ethic and aesthetic that generally presides over all my dumb opinions since I stumbled upon the Adventures of Huck Finn.
 

The ludicrous: now more than ever!

 

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 career here. 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 the classical and neoclassical economists know with all their bourgeois hearts, 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, beautiful, 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 (there’s a head to head for ya)  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.

The ludicrous, latter encrypted in dialectical materialism – its secret sharer. 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 Inspector 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.

On the Great Pattern: Children are put to bed and woken up by their parents

We know, from our childhoods, the Great Pattern: Children are put to bed and woken up by their parents.

Yet, we also know, from our childhoods, the lacuna in the Great Pattern: the adults nap while the children are awake.

In Chekhov’s The Steppe, a boy, Yegorushka, is travelling in a cart across the Russian steppe with his Uncle, Kuzmichov, a merchant, and his Uncle’s partner, a priest, Father Khristofor. Yegorushka is going to school, and enters the story in tears, as he is going to be parted from his mother. But the ride in the brischka – “one of those antediluvian carriages in which only merchants’ clerks, cattle dealers and impecunious priests travel in Russia these days” – soon folds in Yegorushka’s attention. A ride like this is an event for the boy, in a way that it is not for the men or the driver, for whom the routine is under the sign of functionality. The ride is a “between”, a means: while for the boy it is a sort of living thing, its own thing.

They come, in the afternoon, to a place where there are a few trees, a spring, and a pond. They have the coachman, Deniska – who is really a teen – stop, spread out rugs, eat, and tell stories. And then, magically, it is time to nap.

“Silence fell. All that could be heard was the snorting and champing of the horses and the snores of the sleepers. Some way off a solitary lapwing wailed and there was an occasional squeak from the three snipe that had flown up to see if the uninvited guests had left. The stream softly lisped and gurgled, but none of these sounds broke the silence or stirred the lifeless air – on the contrary, they made nature still drowsier.”

Here we are briefly plunged in the lacuna. Here Yegorushka is the one awake, the one on guard, so to speak, the one who is solitary.

The Steppe is not structured so as to clobber the reader with symbols. It is structured around a certain animism that takes in humans, horses, water and the “ride”. The nap of the adults is, as well, a living thing quite apart from the contingent property of the adult travelers.

Myself, when I was a child in a house full of children and two adults – the house I grew up in in Metro Atlanta – I was quite familiar with adult nap time. I can look back on the my old man in the living room – which is sometimes where, say on a summer Saturday afternoon, he might have stretched himself on the rug – and recognize a few facts. Facts that I see now, as a man myself, one older than my Dad taking a few zzzs as the sunlight and the little circle of a road around which which our house and lawn clustered with other little suburban houses and laws did its thing. Heat, a blue sky with white billowing clouds crossing it, the cars in the driveways, and the contrast with the temperature control in this room, in all the rooms, and the heat which we kids knew from our feet, even, when we would go out barefoot and hop on the asphalt of the road and which made one of the ecological differences between the metro Atlanta of the Jim Crow/Dixie times of porches and heat and the Dekalb County of draped windows and the A/C humming away, with the unit usually in the back yard in that epoch of the South joining modern times.

I can’t remember what the rug looked like in toto, but I do remember its feel, a bit itchy, on my face as I lay down on it too. My Mom, Dad, and us kids – although what we were really there to do is not nap as much as bug my parents. Eventually, we would tire of this and do something else. There was pingpong to play in the basement, or darts, or there was swimming to do at the neighborhood pool (hence the bare feet on the hot pavement, or flip flops or sneakers without the socks), and like Yegorushka we had a vaguely animistic feeling about the whole surround. The street was alive, the cars were alive, the games were alive, in some way.

My parents are both dead now. And I, as a father, can appreciate much more than I did back then that life was exhausting. Five kids, with five incessant needs – for food, clothes, shelter, birthday and Christmas presents, school supplies, and all the intangibles: love and affection, attention, the need to talk, laugh, argue, push, pull, throw, compete… And the two adults having a nap time in a living room that symbolized, in the America of 1969, that life was getting better. All that structure! On affordable mortgage payments!

Of course, now that structure would be regarded, in America, as intolerably small. Houses have grown much bigger, the price of houses has gone through the roof of said houses, the cars cost as much, now, as the houses did back then, and the ability to raise five kids on a median income is a rare magic trick. The house where I grew up in the neighborhood where I grew up all downscaled drastically. The last time I drove by it, the house, which had evidently been rented by a meth dealer, was a blackened ruin. There were no ghosts napping in the living room, as the living room didn’t exist anymore, save as a charcoaled stub. And my boyhood animism is, if not gone, a very attenuated thing – although sometimes, sometimes walking down the street with my boy, sometimes I feel it out there, around me, saving me from a numbness that I fear could get me in its grasp, could take the ridiculousness out of me.

And what is more ridiculous than a ridiculous man without ridiculousness? It is a common type, and the curse of our times.

 

the forgettery

 The forgettery

1

The first time I thought of the forgettery – thought of forgetting as an active organ in my body and experience – I was on a bus in Austin Texas. What I was thinking of before, what I did afterwards, what my stop was, what my day’s purpose was – these I don’t know. These have been blanked out, and I only know they existed by inference, with myself, my living self, as the inferable remnant. But I do remember thinking: forgettery!

I remember that I thought I’d have to remember that name.

We do have amnesia. Yet amnesia is a medical name, a name for a disorder. The forgettery is not a disorder, any more than the shadow you cast is a disorder.

Having thought of this term, having in one moment connected the forgettery to the memory as an indissoluble bond, I rather forgot about it. At intervals, though, I would remember it. When the internet came alive, and the meme became something other than a Dawkins neologism, I sometimes thought: I need to meme forgettery. When I die, maybe I could be remembered by a grateful posterity for meming forgettery.

But my delusions of grandeur on this account would stumble over my sense of the ridiculousness of my delusions of grandeur, and so it happened that the forgettery has fallen, a still birth meme, on the ungrateful world.

2.

In my experience, memory has two directions. That is, when I remember, the direction memory seems to take is either straight, direct, or lateral. In the former case, I am like a fisherman casting a line – I cast my mind back and hook my object, that thing or event in the past. Or I don’t. When I don’t, it means I have either forgotten it or it didn’t exist. Psychologists have shown that it is a rather simple matter to create fake memories, in which case what was never there is remembered anyway. But regardless of whether the object is absent, non-existant, or forged, the direction of memory, here, is direct. It is analogous to double book accounting, where the column with the object and the column with the memory are on one plane, side by side. Lateral memory, however, is a different thing. It is about connotations and associations. Memory here is something that emerges without, at times, my having made any effort to remember. I will, instead, suddenly remember. This suddenness has something of the character of waking up – it speaks of two very different states of consciousness. And yet, just as I can wake up feebly, and fall back to sleep, so too I can suddenly recall a thing and then it will slip away. I will forget what I just remembered, or rather, the memory that was forced upon me. If it was something that I wanted to note down, or something that I remember in the moment of remembering that I was supposed to remember, I’ll mentally rummage around. The direct method here fails me, because though I can directly remember the event of suddenly remembering, the object here, the event, is wrapped around something I’ve forgotten. To find that content, I often resort to association – to trying to construct what I was doing when the sudden memory hit me. Or, having a sense of what the content of this sudden memory was – having it on the tip of my tongue – I’ll try to find associates with it – I’ll play a sort of guessing game.

For instance: let’s say I am trying to recall the sum total of my experiences with Leonard Cohen’s The Stranger song. I’d have to recall putting the album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, on the bulky fake wood stereo my parents bought at some fortunate point when I was twelve or thirteen, a purchase that informed my entire musical life. I would have to take a memory glimpse at that stereo, which had sliding panel doors underneath the record player – needle combination to provide an album height space in which I stored my albums, it being the case then that music on an album was optimally preserved by putting the album upright although now that I think of it why an album would lose its definition if it was stacked on its side is beyond my knowledge of vinyl. In any case, I would have to think about the storing of albums, how they lean thinly one against the other, how they might be sorted by name or something. I would have to think of album art, which at one time had an importance that is now entirely fabulous, since it has no popular existence. It exists now as a small icon on a screen. I would have to remember the album, where I purchased it – without doubt some pre-Walmart emporium on Memorial Drive, one of which was actually named Treasure Island – and the way Leonard looked not at all pop on the album, with no rock n roll glamor, but rather pleasingly like some poet in some fabulous coffeehouse I could only dream about, not knowing that in thirty years there would be franchise coffeehouses in every hick burg.

And I’d have to remember that I did, over time, get by heart the words of that long long song. Then, the first time I saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which begins with the Warren Beatty character, in a bearskin coat, riding on a horse through the wilderness – a vision and a sound that shot through me and gave me, and still gives me, the sense of an expanded existence in the wilds of America, a sense that has always remained with me and makes me, in spite of the old tired racisms and idiocies that issue from that country continually, know the country in terms of a crush I will probably never get over. I would have to think about how I instantly recognize the guitar fingerings that introduce that song, which I believe was the first song on the second side – unless that was the Master Song. I’d have to remember the distinct small scratch of putting the needle on the groove that starts that song, that static which after a while becomes part of the song itself. This is of course a teen memory, the teen slowly dying over the years until it is a mere whisp, like a dead warrior in the Greek afterlife, a summonable being. And then the memory would have to take on my singing of that song, which I have done frequently, especially when driving a car or riding a bicycle – which to me are occasions for singing to myself. More than a shower, a shower is a more pensive adding up things I have to do experience. And this singing would bring up travels – for instance, driving from Atlanta to Santa Fe. And so on.

This kind of lateral memory structures, if given its full power, the memory dream with its suddenness and its frustrations as to the exact details of the remembered and its narrative pulls and pushes. The memory dream is like that thing which, I feel, is fading in our over-media mediated lives, the daydream. The daydream requires an inwardness that is too quickly made into an outwardness on Instagram and tik tok. The usual academic way of saying this is that it is “commodified”, which touches on one facet of it, but not on other facets – for instance, the loss, over the boundaries of the commodified item, of a certain childhood hope. The death of utopia on the screen, so to speak.

3.

To return to the forgettery – it is most present as an actual faculty when one is engaged in the memory dream. Like a magician pulling item after improbable item from his top hat. Here’s the stereo in the living room in Clarkston Georgia, here’s the album reappearing in my brother Dan’s collection of albums in one of his apartments in the metro Georgia area, here’s the day I rode in the rain on a ratty bike up the slope of Mount Bonnell in Austin Georgia, singing the song in my most self-pitying voice as I wondered how my life had led to this moment, and so on. I can’t, honestly, place that bike – where did I get it? Was this the bike that the editor of the Austin Chronicle book page gave me after he had been enlightened by a peyote vision in Northern Mexico? Or was that after?

4.

Oh, the forgettery. Some day you will have my all.

On the oracles - Karen Chamisso

 

The oracle is bored, finally, of the future

Ablution in the cold water of the spring

Autopsy of the victim, the signature

In the disposition of the organs, fate’s writing.

 

The wisecracks from all the golden codgers on the wall

The epsilon, the laurel wand,

moving down the hall

to the chamber where you get your meds and electroshock.

 

So little and so much makes a poet

to whom the gods have decided to souffle their lies.  

Just as the city’s sack is found where nobody knows it

In the spilled guts of the sacrificed ram.

 

Oh Popeye when you play upon your guitar

Do you play the things that will be or that are?

She sees ambiguity shaped by ambiguity

and that wisdom is hidden in a children’s joke

 

or in some stray, scrawled obscenity

in a jakes, or toted in a poke.

To pose riddles and not ever guess her own

Has turned her voice into a frog’s voice,

                                                                                her heart into a stone.