The rise and fall of tacit knowledge

1.

In the post-fascist period of the great Anti-Communist century, which I’d locate between 1945 and the mid 80s, the liberal intelligentsia of the capitalist side engaged in a struggle with the socialist bloc on my fronts, from documenting communist atrocities, increasingly under the sign of universal human rights, to challenging the very basis of central planning as a socio-economic program.

The latter, intellectually, was a more fundamental struggle. In the face of the spike in the GDP of the Soviet Union in the fifties, it seemed urgent to show that not only was the capitalist system more prosperous in the long term, but, as well, that the communist system was inherently mistaken in the means it took to ensure its goals.

It seemed, in the fifties, that socialism could succeed in transforming the surplus labor value produced by the working class into an articulation of socio-economic needs – an egalitarian system of healthcare, education, and manufacture that returned to the laborer the goods and services necessary to maintain his or her human worth. It was easy to point out that this system did not encode the basic democratic freedoms – but this was a more difficult point to make in the light of the empires that the liberal – capitalist powers had spent hundreds of years constructing around the world. It was difficult to maintain that Holland had democracy in mind in its Indonesian colonies, or Britain was ruling the colony of Kenya according to any system of elections. It was also difficult for the United States, with its Jim Crow, to claim to be democratically spotless.

Still, the liberal intellectual in the “Free World” needed to make the point that democracy and a capitalist system that distributed the social dividend on according to a grossly unequal system was the best of all possible systems for the population as a whole. “Best of all possible” took on a less abstract aspect when the Western democracies and the Socialist bloc wielded the missiles that, in the event of war, could extinguish all human life on the planet. What was, for Leibniz, a theological position was, for the Pentagon and the Kremlin, a practical situation that could ensue in the near future.

2.

Among the intellectuals that leaned Tory in the 50s and 60s, there was a phrase that came to stand for a whole program of resistance not only against Communist central planning, but against the state’s intervention in the so called “private” economic sphere in the West – an intervention that included regulation, social insurance, nationalized industries and other elements of the post-war lurch to the Left:  “tacit knowledge”. The phrase is associated with Michael Polanyi, the second half of whose book, Personal Knowledge, is dedicated to the “tacit dimension’.

It seems to me, in the light of our situation now and our general forgetting of what conservatism was in the Cold War, that a brief discussion of the rise and comparative fall of tacit knowledge would be interesting. Even fun! For those who find this kind of thing fun, that is.  Besides, in the family tree that arose from “tacit knowledge” there is a large group of concepts that land squarely in the New Left area.

Polanyi – brother to the more famous Karl – was a chemist with a metaphysical bent. Tempered by the experience of the soviet briefly established by Bela Kun in Hungary in 1919, and the subsequent semi-fascist governments under Admiral Horthy, Polanyi was already a celebrated anti-communist when he met Hayek at the Walter-Lippmann Colloquium in Paris in 1938. Hayek, whose notion of spontaneous organization is often associated with Polanyi’s idea of tacit knowledge, is not mentioned in Personal Knowledge. This is partly because Polanyi became disillusioned with the positivist turn of the Mont Pelerin society, as he saw it, which abandoned one of the keystones of conservatism: tradition. Polanyi’s sense that a new legitimation of liberalism had to encompass a strong sense of tradition and the transmission of the cultural heritage. Polanyi, who had much more experience of the practice of science than someone like Popper, was distressed that a Popperian approach to science was increasingly part of the Mont Pelerin package.

“Tacit Knowledge” was Polanyi’s idea of the fundamental epistemological base not only of modern society, but of all society: it even, in his view, was the basis of primate behavior, with its emphasis on mimicry. For Polanyi, scientific Marxism ignores the non-calculative aspect of the human unit. In place of the alienated laborer who is simply waiting for the right 5 year plan to find all happiness, Polanyi proposes something like the craftsman as the central emblem of the human – the artisan. The experience of the artisan – which goes into the transmission of artisan knowledge – is not originally expressed in a series of linear steps. Later on, rationalization might diagram a craft in a clear series of steps, but it begins as a series of hunches and feelings of the appropriateness or not of certain routines. Later in the eighties, the vocabulary of complexity theory will call this the emergent features of a complex system. Such systems are not linear. They are sorites-bound.

This vision of social and economic activity made for a different view of the bureaucratization of economic activity. Management, instead of being a linear-directed activity, is itself a craft, filled with hunches and jumps. The system must give as much freedom as possible to such activities – which means it should free itself from short – sighted unions and government regulators. Freedom is, in this sense, closely tied to the capitalist system. The inequality in wealth that results is a sort of side-effect, which is condemned to ephemerality, as new hunches and innovations will raise others and cause the downfall of those who have routinized their fortunes – mere rentiers.

3.

 

Personal Knowledge was published in 1958. Polanyi was recognized in certain conservative circles, but in general he was overshadowed by Hayek, who had a trans-Atlantic career.

But tacit knowledge, I think, had a more interesting career in the non-Stalinist New Left. If we look at Foucault’s tendency to blame the total societies of the school, asylum and prison to a certain totalizing mindset, missing the liberatory moment charted by writers like Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot – the moment of the Other – we can see how Foucault ends up focusing on a souci de soi which is not unlike tacit knowledge as Polanyi envisions it. We can see this tendency most clearly in the work of Richard Sennet, Foucault’s American student. Other New Left tendencies – for instance, the anarchism of James Scott in Seeing like the State or David Graeber in Debt – have a very strong element the binary between state regulation/tacit knowledge. And of course complexity theory is a strong theorization of non-linearity – a position against scientism that Polanyi would no doubt have approved of.

4.

On the right, in the post-fascist phase of anti-communist struggle, Polanyi and Hayek were one variety of conservatism. But by the mid eighties, their version had been overtaken and submerged by Schumpeter’s defense of the entrepreneur, not as a transmitter of tradition but as a disruptive hero, creatively destroying, with distinct echoes of the fascist cult of the hero. In the 50s and 60s, conservative intellectuals valiantly tried to separate themselves from the social Darwinism of their forbears, which seemed all too ominously to lead to fascism. By the eighties, however, these worries and the reasons for them were becoming anachronistic. The Darwinian struggle for survival, properly colored, regained its narrative value, and the softer notion of a freedom carved out of the social forces institutionalized by the state to give the fullest extent possible to tacit knowledge was given mere lip service – it was the man in full to which the conservative intellectual heart was given. And thus, as the communist side was defeated in the late eighties, the stage was set for the wedding of a computer culture and the Right. The Right’s embrace of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, today, is a strong marker that the traditional toryism invented in the twentieth century as a political contender against socialism and the mixed economic models of Liberalism, a contender that never had a serious political program but did have some ideological reach among the conservative intellectuals, is as well and truly buried as its centrally planning enemy, dead lions all.

 

 

 

 

 

2 Rejection Letters

1.

The First Letter

Rejection letters are rarely memorable. The writer who receives one, outside of certain masochistic or indignant cases, certainly does not want it hanging around, and the person who writes it writes it, in part, in order to cut the tie with the writer – to forget the writer while moving on to other business. It is, in other words, a sub-genre (like the suicide note) that rarely rises above its occasion. Even so, there are always exceptions to the rule in the larger world of politics, aesthetics and risky business. Take, for example, Adorno’s rejection of Walter Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire in 1938. Adorno is operating as the editor of the Journal of Social Research. It’s a good gig. After all, it was by showing that he had a contract with the Institute for Social Research that Adorno got his visa for the United States.

Thus, we get the perhaps most famous rejection letter of all time. Famous enough to be translated into English and thrust into various anthologies devoted to “critical theory”. Famous enough to be taught, itself, in the classroom – though oddly enough hardly ever in terms of its genre as a rejection letter.

Here’s the most, to my mind, jazzy part of the letter, even as it is emitted by Mr. Unjazz himself:

“This sort of immediate - and I would almost say again ‘anthropological’ - materialism harbours a profoundly romantic element, and the more abruptly and crudely you confront the Baudelairean world of forms with the harsh necessities of life, the more clearly I detect it. The ‘mediation’ which I miss and find obscured by materialistic-historiographical evocation, is simply the theory which your study has omitted. But the omission of theory affects the empirical material itself. On the one hand, this omission lends the material a deceptively epic character, and on the other it deprives the phenomena, which are experienced merely subjectively, of their real historico-philosophical weight. To express this another way: the theological motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one wanted to put it rather drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched.”

Others, with more jazz in their soul, might want to lead everything to that crossroads. Far from being bewitched, it is the best spot in the house, the one from which you get the best view of the revolution to come – or the reaction, depending on what is on the schedule for tonight.

2.

Benjamin, of course, was trying to learn his instrument in those Baudelaire essays, and in the vast assemblage of notes for the Arcades project. The instrument was the inferential juxtaposition, which had been hoisted up by the surrealists as the only guide to the city of yesterday and tomorrow. It was dialectical materialism sieved through the obsessive compulsion disorder of the collector: kinda Marx, kinda Eduard Fuchs. And this duo were not, it turns out, the odd couple, in as much as Marx was, himself, a collector, a massive collector of reports on Industrial processes and working class disorders, with the collection eventually toppling over into three volumes (two of them sewed together by Engels after Marx’s death) meant to exhaustively map the possibilities at play in the political economy of the post-Malthusian world.

3.

I myself like the image of magic and positivism at the voodoo crossroads. Jazz is at the bottom of it.  Adorno’s scorn for magic is part of the package of his own high modern provincialism. Benjamin’s method, or madness, is a high calling – methods are high callings – which Benjamin’s Arcades project, in its final state of gigantic ruin, map and mopes over. It is a kit full of routes of escape that all turn out to be blocked. Which is a metaphor that can bite you in the ass when the geopolitical reality is all about finding an escape route.

I’ve been reading some of the fragments contained in volume 6 of the GW, and it is an interesting, rather vertiginous experience, as is any experience in which one finds oneself continually stumbling, continually knocking against the cracks. For instance, the fragment entitle On Marriage, which begins with a wonderful juxtaposition of the mythical and the tabloid:

"Eros, love moves in a single direction towards the mutual death of the lovers. It unwinds from there, like the thread in a labyrinth that has its center in the “death chamber”. Only there does love enter into the reality of sex, where the deathstruggle itself becomes the lovestruggle. The sexual itself, in response, flees its own death as its own life, and blindly calls out for the other’s death and the other’s life in this flight.  It takes the path into nothingness, into that misery where life is only not-death and death is only a not-life. And this is how the boat of love pulls forward between the Scylla of Death and the Charybdis of misery and would never escape if it weren’t that God, at this point in its voyage, transformed it into something indestructible. Because as the sexuality of love in first bloom is completely alien, so must it become enduringly wholly non-alien, its very own. It is never the condition of its being and always that of its earthly endurance. God, however, makes for love the sacrament of marriage against the danger of sexuality as against that of love.”

 

One has to pause here. First, to listen to what Benjamin is doing – juxtaposing the prose of the “death chamber”, which comes from Police Magazines and tabloid newspapers of the 20s and 30s  - photographically adoring the rooms where the bloody corpse of some victim was found and, as well,  the gas chamber or electric chair where the murderer was murdered by the state – to Greek myth, and then to a very Biblical God. And then one has to ask whether, indeed, death more often befalls lovers than befalls wives and husbands. Here a bit of positivism, a bit more tabloid knowledge, would relegate the Wagnerian Tristan and Isolde to the margin, and the more common family murder to the front. For the marriage that “God” gives us against the unleashed forces of death and sexuality is all too often a scene of violence. Engels definitely knew this. Benjamin surely, in part of himself, knew this too. The criminologists, who now call it “intimate partner homicide”, were on the case in the 20s and 30s. The mythological correlative is not Homeric, but rather the Maerchen of Grimm, where intimate partner violence is a constant companion of princesses and peasants.

So here I am, Adorno-like, dispuing the point from the positivist, statistical viewpoint, and then here I am, in thrall to the motion of the fragment, to the evocation the forces of sexuality and death, from the magical viewpoint, or the surrealist genius of seeing the “death chamber” – where the corpse lies, where the blood spatters, on the one end, and where the convicted murderer is beheaded, or as the Americans do it, fried, on the other end, and superimposing over this the myth of the labyrinth. In the end, we get the palimpsest subject, in the best high modernist tradition, the archaic imposed on the modern which imposes on the archaic, the synchronicity of newspaper stories creating that new and alien temporal modality of the contemporary in which we all wiggle. Critical theory – oh, so critically – is discovering the political texture of allochronism – that long colonial time – posits the stone age and the modern on an objectively flat time line.

But to rescue the archaic by turning to the God of our Fathers means succumbing to a fundamentally reactionary impulse, which fails the test of historicity, and locks marriage into a form that it can’t sustain.

All of this in one fragment. Is there ever going to be a reader rich enough in time and reference to go through it all?

4.

The second letter

In 1944, George Orwell submitted his novel, Animal House, to T.S. Eliot’s publisher, Faber and Faber.  Orwell wanted a quick response. Eliot wrote him one, rejecting the novel as being too completely out of synch with the public mood in Britain. It was rather transparently anti-Soviet. And, as the Soviet Union, in alliance with the British and the Americans, were fighting the Axis on the Eastern front at enormous cost in men and materials, ill-timed.

However, Eliot’s objection was more than a matter of bad market timing.  

“I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing,” wrote Eliot to Orwell. “And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

Eliot’s rejection letter does not bear the weight, as Adorno’s letter to Benjamin does, of a massive secondary literature. When it was released by Eliot’s estate in 2009, there were a flurry of articles highlighting Eliot’s “bad judgment” in rejecting a “classic”. There is, for the newspaper reader, something heartwarming about the thought that the great mandarins in the publishing houses also make mistakes. It was a schadenfreude story, made all the richer by the fact that many a middle school student of the generation that grew up during the Cold War has dutifully written an assigned essay, or a book report, or a class presentation on Animal Farm, marked by the words “allegory” (define) and “totalitarianism” (define) and “Orwellian” (define).

Orwell, of course, did find a publisher for Animal Farm, Secker and Warburg. It was published two weeks after the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima. After the defeat of the Axis powers, the   alliance between the Western powers and the Soviet Union rapidly unravelled, and the Free World resumed their efforts from the 20s and 30s of defeating Communism on all fronts. Orwell’s Animal Farm was as great a help to the anti-Communist battle as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress had been to the cause of anti-Catholicism.   

Looking back, one can see a certain dialogue between Eliot and Orwell, with the rejection letter and Eliot’s advocacy for the Pigs being taken up, in a way, by Orwell’s 1948 review of Eliot’s book, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. Both Eliot’s letter and Orwell’s review can be seen as aspects of the proto-history of meritocracy – that is, rule by the best trained pigs.

Orwell begins his review of Eliot’s book on a characteristic note:

In his new book, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Mr T.S.

Eliot argues that a truly civilised society needs a class system as part

of its basis. He is, of course, only speaking negatively. He does not

claim that there is any method by which a high civilisation can be

created. He maintains merely that such a civilisation is not likely to

flourish in the absence of certain conditions, of which class distinctions

are one.

This opens up a gloomy prospect, for on the one hand it is almost

certain that class distinctions of the old kind are moribund, and on

the other hand Mr Eliot has at the least a strong prima facie case.

 

Orwell, in the late forties, always begins by conceding the gloomiest view. Nuclear war was in the near future. Either Soviet totalitarianism or American barbarism was going to dominate the world. The capitalist economy, stuck in the Great Depression, would never recover. And so on. The Orwellian gloom coexisted with a surprisingly optimistic socialism, in which the problems of working class oppression and colonialism were going to be dissolved, once and for all. This was officially a case to rejoice over, yet Orwell saw that dissolution as involving the liquidation of everything he was “for” in the aesthetic sphere. The plebes would break the Sevres vases for sure. Yeats’ verse comes to mind:

“Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.”

Orwell wants to say: good riddance to the rubbish! But he can’t quite, because he has to admit, they were ingenious lovely things.

Class, for Orwell and for Eliot, meant something very English: the division of society into the aristocrats, the middle class, and the working class. By shorthand, Eliot’s defence of class meant the defence of the upper class. Which, by a codicil that Eliot did not spell out, particularly, meant the class of patrons. Patrons operate outside the laws of monetary gain and loss, although of course they are the massive beneficiaries of the laws of monetary gain and loss in terms of investments in land, stocks and bonds.

Orwell points out something that has been all too overlooked in the history of Western institutions, which is that the Church from the beginning has played the role of being a silo for upward social mobility.

“Hereditary institutions—as Mr Eliot might have argued—have the

virtue of being unstable. They must be so, because power is constantly

devolving on people who are either incapable of holding it, or

use it for purposes not intended by their forefathers. It is impossible

to imagine any hereditary body lasting so long, and with so little

change, as an adoptive organisation like the Catholic Church. And

it is at least thinkable that another adoptive and authoritarian

organisation, the Russian Communist Party, will have a similar

history. If it hardens into a class, as some observers believe it is

already doing, then it will change and develop as classes always do.

But if it continues to co-opt its members from all strata of society,

and then train them into the desired mentality, it might keep its shape

almost unaltered from generation to generation. In aristocratic

societies the eccentric aristocrat is a familiar figure, but the eccentric

commissar is almost a contradiction in terms.”

 

Eliot didn’t, however, argue this. Orwell scores a distinct hit here, it seems to me. Including the idea of the eccentric commissar – we know now that commissar’s came in all types, not just the pigs of Orwell’s imaginary, and some of them believed in tantric sex, and others believed in poetry. Stalin himself made Pasternak dance, but kept him from the Gulag – acted, in fact, as a patron. The Communist Party in the Soviet Union did function as a silo for upward social movement. Orwell didn’t have any special knowledge of the Catholic Church or the Communist Party in the Soviet Union to see this: he could see it in the forms of their organization. He could imply these things from his own experience of English public schools and the social forms that developed in the British colonies. He could infer.

Back, however, to the topic of public spirited pigs. Eliot’s book gives them another name: elites. And it is here that Orwell zeros in:

“He would like, he says, to see in existence both classes and elites.

 It should be normal for the average human being to go through life at his predestined

social level, but on the other hand the right man must be

able to find his way into the right job. In saying this he seems almost

to give away his whole case. For if class distinctions are desirable in

themselves, then wastage of talent, or inefficiency in high places, are

comparatively unimportant. The social misfit, instead of being

directed upwards or downwards, should learn to be contented in his

own station.

 

Mr Eliot does not say this: indeed, very few people in our time

would say it. It would seem morally offensive. Probably, therefore,

Mr Eliot does not believe in class distinctions as our grandfathers

believed in them. His approval of them is only negative. That is to

say, he cannot see how any civilisation worth having can survive in a

society where the differences arising from social background or geographical

origin have been ironed out.”

Reading Eliot’s rejection letter and this review casts an interesting light on the postwar state of intellectual life in Great Britain, which was confronting a vast change in the social conditions ushered in by the war and the Labour government. The order that was set, then, still holds, to a degree. But the intellectual legitimation of that order, its assimilation of the “culture” of the past, has never been untroubled; in particular, public spirited pigs, it turns out, have their own ideas about who should own what, and how the rest of the animals on the farm should be educated, given health care, and all the rest of it. As one pig generation dies out and another succeeds, nepo pig to nepo pig, we seem closer to having both a rigid class defined society and one with an animus against culture at the very top. Patrons and patronage, which are motivated by an obscure sense of duty and glory, have become, as it were, digested into a pig ethos of maximizing present opportunities for short term gain.

Which gets us far, very far, from Eliot’s wan hope for public spirited pigs, and Orwell’s hope for a society in which class distinctions disappear. We sit, “privileged” in the Free World, with the uneasy feeling that something has gone seriously wrong. This dialogue, as it were, between Eliot and Orwell casts a bigger shadow than was realized by the writers of articles under their schadenfreude headlines when the Eliot’s rejection letter was published.

 

 

From crime to class to "white collar criminal" to our present state of bliss

It is a fact that is too little noted that Karl Marx’s theory of class conflict was born out of his reporting on wood theft in Cologne in 1846, when he was struck by the fact that the crime was invented, in contradistinction from the way he had been taught the logic and rationality of the law. The real, here, was not  the rational, but bent instead to the rapacity of the propertied class – who were willing, even, to redefine property to their own benefit.

In the annals of criminology, Marx’s discovery was, for the most part, overlooked. The criminologist who assisted at international police conferences and caressed the skulls of murderers who had been oh so justly executed for their crimes were much more impressed by Cesare Lombroso and floating theories about degenerate populations than with class structures.

It took the Great Depression to bring into the world of criminology the convictions that were givens to the tabloid reporter, and the person who did it was Edwin H. Sutherland. It was Sutherland who, in  the 1930s, began looking at crimes committed by people other than the urban marginals and degenerates who were the almost exclusive focus of criminology. He was struck by the inability of prevailing theory to capture either the practices or motives of those who committed fraud or malversation on a higher level. The wood thieves around Cologne in 1846 did not think of themselves as thieves, but as the gleaners of wood in the same vein as their mothers and fathers before them, holders of a right going back to feudal times. How, Sutherland wondered, did the criminals and even businesses that violated the law understand their own actions?

 Marx, of course, began to understand class out of the invention of crime, and soon went on to devise a vast theory about the way class conflict was shaping the society of capital. Sutherland did not go so far. But where he went is of interest.

The reason Sutherland started investigating “white collar crime” (indeed, he coined the phrase) had to do with his Deweyian theory that crime was a learned activity. The criminological paradigms of the 30s, inherited from the 19th century, attributed crime to inheritance, degeneration, poverty, broken homes, or individual viciousness. Sutherland’s theory, which he called differential association, was that crime was learned through the symbols and uses of groups. Not gangs, not groups that are composed of people personally acquainted with each other – although these, too, are groups – but groups in the larger sense of members who identify with some collective. It is in these groups that the inhibition or disinhibition to crime evolves.

Here’s an example, from the recent past. In 2016, Brock Turner, a Stanford University athlete, was actually caught physically raping a passed out woman. He was convicted of this rape. The sentence handed down by Judge Aaron Persky was six months. Three months was shaved off, as time already served. In his statement about the punishment, Persky said that sentencing Turner to prison for a long time could have a “severe impact” on him.

That phrase “severe impact” reveals an abyss of assumptions about class in the U.S. – and, in particular, the assumption that certain members of the group of the affluent and educated have “futures” that must be preserved. Persky, to use Sutherland’s phrase, was differentially associated with Turner.  Certain crimes that would be severely repressed by certain members of certain groups – for whom the “severe impact” of the penitentiary is designed – are treated much more softly when committed by members of other groups. This is not simply a statistical fact, but a passed around piece of knowledge – in the group, this is known. Impunity is a social bond.

Sutherland, however, is not concerned so much with class as with his theory, which, remember, is in opposition to the ruling criminological theories of the time – and of now. Criminology has not changed that much, and if Hilary Clinton was comfortable talking about “super predators” in the 90s, and the NYT opinion page is a reliable source for talk about the “underclass” now, it is due to this paradigm.

Sutherland, thus, turned to the upperclass. He compiled a list of the seventy largest publicly traded corporations, and went over 45 years of court records. Here’s what he found:

"This tabulation of the crimes of the seventy largest corporations in the United States gives a total of 980 adverse decisions. Every one of the seventy corporations has a decision against it, and the average number of decisions is 14.0. Of these seventy corporations, 98 percent are recidivists; that is, they have two or more adverse decisions. Several states have enacted habitual crimlnal laws, which define an habitual criminal as a person who has been convicted four times of felonies. If we use this number and do no limit the convictions to felonies, 90 percent of the seventy largest corporations in the United States are habitual criminals.”

 

 

Now I have to admit something. I have rather extended Sutherland’s original point. Sutherland really believed that criminal behavior is taught – one thief teaches another. My more fuzzy interpretation is that within a group, what is taught is one’s identity as not the kind of person who commits crimes. It is this which is often the preface to corporate crime, as well as to the judicial and legislative response to crime.

I’d like to mix this take from Sutherland with Orlando Patterson’s notion of “social death”, which is the way in which Patterson wants us to think about slavery. I think that if we think of a social hierarchy as a matter of apportioning social death – of identities being created, in the eyes of judges and legislators, out of some fraction of social death – we have a sense of what inequality, the fundamental inequality that practically grounds law and order in the “democracies” that arose in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, is about.

That inequality is lied about – in fact, massively lied about. The one place equality supposedly rules is before the law. Nobody is above the law. All are equal before the law. Etc. This is all, frankly, bullshit. Bullshit, in journalistic and pundit-speak, is called an “ideal”. We fall short of the ideal, from this p.o.v., but we keep striving. In fact, though, we don’t fall short of the ideal, the ideal is kicked to the curb in our practical socio-economic life as an impediment to order, and is clubbed to death by the cops if it gets up on its hind legs and protests.

White collar crime, I’d argue, takes white collar enablers.

Let’s use an example, a plain vanilla example. Let’s use Allied Signal. Here’s a Dead Kennedys song about the Kepone Factory case, whichfills in the basic facts.

Allied Chemical made a contracting arrangement with a company named (amazingly) Life Sciences Products. As you would expect, when a corporation names something life sciences, it is all about producing deadly toxins -and so it was with this small factory in Hopewell, Virginia. It made kepone, an insecticide used on fire ants. The toxic ingredient in kepone is chlordecone. It is a very water soluble substance, meaning that it is rapidly spread throughout the organic body. It is a neurotoxin, and one of the rare pesticides which, apparently, exhibits in rodents like it exhibits in humans. Here’s a list of what overexposure can do to humans: nervousness, tremors, chest pains, weight loss, blurred vision, deterioration of fine motor skills. The children of pregnant women exposed to it also experience motor skills deterioration which seems to persist. It is left as an exercise to the reader to compare these effects to crack, which so shocked our legislatures in the 80s that they instituted a witchhunt against (African-American) women who smoked crack.

Life Sciences Products set up their factory and produced the world’s kepone, on a contract from Allied Chemical, from 1974 to 1975. Here’s a description of what was going on in the kepone factory:

“There were usually about 20 men a day working for about $3.75 an hour at the Life Sciences plant over the busy two shifts. Overtime pay was easy to come by, and turnover was high, probably because of the health problems. The workers talked among themselves about their symptoms — including involuntary shaking, vision problems and joint pain — suspicious that the chemical was causing it. But the factory owners were almost never there, so there was no one to ask about it. Most of Life Sciences’ workers weren’t college-educated and had families to support — the job paid too much to quit.”

The men were not equipped with any protection from the kepone – no respirators, no gloves. None were, of course, required.

“Doctors and others accused the men of being drunks. “They thought we was alcoholics,” Dykes [a worker there] remembers. “You know how somebody [goes] into DTs? They accused us of that, said we were nothing but alcoholics. Then the state … pulled those blood tests and found those high levels of Kepone in us.”

All good and profitable things come to an end. Life Sciences made about 3 million pounds of the stuff, and about 200,000 pounds got into the surrounding environment, including the James River.

“After quick meetings with a state deputy attorney general, the next day, July 24, 1975, the Life Sciences plant was closed by order of the state Health Department. At around the same time, the Hopewell sewer system malfunctioned, sending raw sewage into the James River. Some mystery chemical was preventing solid waste from breaking down in the sewage systems’ digesters, special tanks that accelerated decomposition of solid waste. The situation was later thought to be caused by excess Kepone being dumped down drains by Life Science. State Water Control Board officials had already found massive amounts of Kepone in the Hopewell sewage system in winter 1974, but nothing was done about it. (Besides dumping excess Kepone into the sewage system, Life Sciences workers also disposed of it by dumping it in a big hole in a nearby field, Dykes says.)”

Of course, closing down the James River, preventing fishing, and poking around the neighborhood of Hopewell, looking for shakers, was bad for business. Even worse, this being the seventies, the government even prosecuted the company.

So what is a company like Allied Chemical to do?

Well, it had to operate on two fronts. Technically, in the courts, it had to make sure that it wasn’t charged with anything criminal – the way an individual who poisoned his neighbors would be charged with something criminal. And it had to make the fines it would be assessed go down. On the other front, it had to find scientists to pooh pooh the toxicity of kepone. That was the easier task. Any scientist who wants to live the good life – in academia and out – had best accommodate pesticide companies. Otherwise, your grants tend to get the shakes – like a person poisoned by kepone – and wither away.

In the first stage of the court spectacle, a “respected judge”, Robert R. Merhige Jr. , finally assessed a fine of 13.2 million dollars. This was considered a wickedly high sum. In the second stage of the court spectacle, Judge Merhige ruled that two Allied execs charged with felony (a conspiracy to disguise what was going on) were innocent of the charges. He allowed Allied to plead no contest to 1000 charges against them.

There was a conference about the case twenty years afterwards, and the Judge talked rather frankly about the whole thing. It is a fascinating document, especially given the theory that crime involves a group that learns to commit crime through a complicated exchange of symbols and setting of expectations. This is what Merhige said:

“I explained to the people (who didn't need explanation) it was a corporation that we had and that it was tantamount to a guilty plea. In any event, they were found guilty of 940 counts. Then I got a presentence report, as I was supposed to do. It turned out that Allied, and I said this from the bench, had been a pretty good corporate citizen in Virginia. They had done a lot of good. They were not bad people, but there were a couple of people there who took short cuts and were throwing all this dirt like they owned the James River and they poisoned it. At the same time the state had some kind of a claim against them. While I was waiting for the presentence report, other suits were developing, about fifteen or sixteen of them. We thought the original group of people who had been allegedly injured were horribly injured. There were reports that their reproductive capacity had gone. In any event, the case was settled well before we realized or got the reports from the doctors that the injuries were nowhere near as bad as we had first anticipated, thank God. That was one of the happy things.”

The pretty good citizen part is crucial. It is unexplained, but we can sort of suss it out: they had executives in the Virginia area who were white, who paid their taxes and sent their kids to good schools, and probably – some of them – coached little league.

To use Aaron Persky’s invaluable phrase: to jail people like that or throw them out of work would have a “severe impact” on them. And, after all, the workers at the factory where all this dirt was being produced made 3.25 per hour, and surely did not suffer too much if they went through a modest period of blindness, shakes, pain and the like. Might have been unable to find work, but those kind of people – well, that is where you find your alcoholics and freeloaders.

In the event, the 13.2 million was for the suckers. Merhige eventually cut it down to 5 million. And to keep that money from going to Washington, and to benefit the James River fishermen, Allied set up a trust. With the finest people on board!

“I asked Mr. Cummings to get on because I knew he was thoroughly familiar with the case, and I didn't want any of the funds used to help Allied buy off their civil liabilities. He accepted. As I recall, I appointed Judge Henry McKenzie, who was an avid sportsman and very much interested in our environment; Admiral Ross P. Bullard, who was the Coast Guard Admiral in charge of the navigable waters around the Chesapeake Bay and the James River, so he was thoroughly familiar. Then I was fortunate enough to get Sydney and Frances Lewis, whose name may be familiar to you, who knew how to spend money from what I read in the paper. Then finally a banker. I thought we needed a banker. George Yowell accepted it. They were a great board.”

As a p.s. to this story: the 8 million dollars Allied donated to the environmental trust was not an entirely bad deal for Allied, as they took a 4 million dollar tax deduction for it. All is well that ends well in the world of white collar crime.

 

 

The Murder of Fred Hampton: lessons for the ICE age

I saw the Stanley Nelson's The Black Panthers: vanguard of the revolution documentary last night, and thus have the police death squads of the 60s and 70s on my mind.

In the case of the murder of Fred Hampton, the D.A., Hanrahan, who gave the orders that lead to the "raid" on Hampton's apartment by that act ruined his career. Hanrahan was being groomed by the Daley machine to become mayor of Chicago. He didn't. He did become a defendent in a trial for conspiring in the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The trial took place before a Daley-ish judge named Perry. Perry basically used his power as a shield for Hanrahan. The trial ended in a hung jury. Judge Perry then fined, actually fined, the plaintiffs.

But the People's Law office wasn't through. They appealed. The appeals system worked slowly, but in the end, this happened (from the People's law office site):

"In April 1979, the Seventh Circuit issued its opinion in Hampton. In a landmark decision authored by Judge Luther Swygert, the court reversed Judge Perry’s entry of directed verdicts, found there to be substantial evidence of a conspiracy between the FBI, Hanrahan, and the police to murder Fred and destroy the Panthers, found that the FBI had obstructed justice by suppressing 200 volumes of documents, and reversed the contempt citations against Flint and Jeff. Soon thereafter, Judge Swygert received a “Right on Luther” tee shirt, compliments of the People’s Law Office.

After the case was sent back to the District Court for trial it was assigned to a new judge. Utilizing the powerful Court of Appeals decision, we sought sanctions against the defendants for their obstruction of justice and fabrication of a second informant, complete discovery, and enforcement of the Court of Appeals’ finding that our evidence had proven a conspiracy among the defendants. Given these new realities, in 1983 the City, County, and FBI combined to provide a $1.85 million settlement."

Now,we will see how serious the opposition to Trump[ is. Will ICE agents and their command end up in court? I think a very good case could be made against them, particularly in the Abrego Garcia case. The Dems in Congress are much too chickenshit to stop the birth of our incipient Gestapo. Maybe, though, some law firm out there might try their hand.

Like

Comment

Send

Share

Two errors in the reading of Marx

 Nothing reminds me so much of Swift’s Tale of the Tub as the disputes between different schools of Marxism.

I have an idea that the schools, when they go wrong, go wrong in two ways. One way is this: they take some thesis about Marx – say Althusser’s thesis that Marx dropped his ideas about alienation in order to make an epistemological break in Capital – without inquiring about the larger picture, our very motive for reading Marx. So, even if Althusser was correct, is alienation still a viable concept in the social sciences? While the Althusserians and the Thompson-ites were slugging it out in England, I think Arlie Hochschild showed that, yes, alienation can be revived to explain a very important feature of our social life as workers, emotional labor. Myself, I don’t think there was an epistemological break in Marx, but rather an increasingly complexity within the outlines of what he wrote in the forties. I’m anything but an Althusserian. But if Althusser was right, tant pis for Marx – alienation is still an important heuristic in understanding capitalism.

The second way is to put Marx in dialogue solely with a very narrow group of academics. Hence, the interminable study of Marx and Hegel. This seriously mischaracterizes Marx. Even at the height of his financial misery in the 50s, Marx never – to my knowledge – thought about teaching. He departed from academia quite early in his twenties. Just as Baudelaire’s poems came from the poet’s experience of the city as much as from Poe or Saint-Beuve,

Marx’s method and ideas, I think, clearly came from reading newspapers, meeting disgruntled tailors in smoky tavern rooms, and his larger awareness of the science and technology around him that he used, or observed. As a man who edited one paper and founded another, and as an agitator who used the railroads quite a bit, Marx was well aware of the changes wrought by communication and transportation technology. In the German Ideology, although there is a certain underdevelopment of the notion of communication, Marx’s model of manufacture – pressed onto the ‘spontaneity’ of ideas – comes as much from seeing how, in front of a piece of paper that you have to fill up to make a deadline, “ideas” come obediently forward, like parts of the pin in the pin factory, as it does from correcting the mistakes of the critical critics. Marx never totally lost his grad student style from his Berlin days, which combines smartassery and pedantry in large doses. I can’t blame him – I combine the same things. But one shouldn’t read him as a pedant.

between the influencing machine and the public toilet

 The recent revelation, obliquely nudged into the limelight by Trump, that Biden was executed by unknown persons and replaced with a robot double should make the old Freudians among us ponder the old old story of a classic paper by Victor Tausk, one of Freud’s rebellious disciples: On the Origins of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia. His paper first appeared in the International Journal of Medical Psychoanalysis in 1919. It has since had an interesting history, in tandem with the often disputed facts in the Tausk case.

In the 1960s, Tausk was discovered by a man named Paul Roazen, who then wrote a very 60s book about him, Brother Animal. This book, in turn, provoked the entire Freudian establishment in the U.S., led by an analyst named Kurt Eissler, who at the time had incredible institutional power. Eissler wrote an entire book about Roazen’s book, a massive refutation of Roazen’s thesis that Freud was “responsible” for Tausk’s suicide in 1919. The stakes, for Eissler, couldn’t have been higher – he took it upon himself to defend Freud, a “genius”, against Tausk, a mere “talent”, proving conclusively, at least to his own satisfaction, that Freud wasn’t responsible for Tausk’s suicide.

Looking back at this from a distance, what was most noteworthy was not the sad trajectory of Victor Tausk but the court politics in the highest circle of Freudians in the Anglophone world at the time, with these disputes as distant and unimportant as the disputes between the Green and Blue factions in Byzantium. At the time, however, the Roazen versus the Freudians conflict seemed to creat alignments between most of the intellectuals in New York city.

Ah, for the days when there were intellectuals in New York City!

To return to Tausk’s essay: in his clinical work, after the war, Tausk had come upon a patient who had a very vivid sense of being influenced by a machine. In 1918, at the end of the war, as the ancien regime was crumbling in Central Europe, the movie industry was making giant leaps, attracting an audience of peasants, villagers and urbanites. Caught in the synapse of the moment, Tausk’s patient described a machine that was influencing her mind, and the minds of others, that was a bit like a movie projector – at least in as much as it created two dimensional images on walls and windows.

Or, to quote Tausk’s paper”

“l. It makes the patients see pictures. When this is the case, the machine is generally a magic lantern or cinematograph. The pictures are seen on a single plane, on walls or windowpanes, and unlike typical visual hallucinations are not three-dimensional. 2. It produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces which the patient's knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain. In such cases, the machine is often called a "suggestion-apparatus." Its construction cannot be explained, but its function consists in the transmission or "draining off" of thoughts and feelings by one or several persecutors. 3. It produces motor phenomena in the body, erections and seminal emissions, that are intended to deprive the patient of his male potency and weaken him. This is accomplished either by means of suggestion or by air-currents, electricity, magnetism, or X-rays.”

If Tausk could be magically resurrected from the Central Cemetery in Vienna where he was buried and hurried through the streets of Paris, or any city, today, he might be amazed by the fact that some such machine is being held in the hands of one out of ten pedestrians, busy flicking through Instagram as they negotiate the traffic.

This is an old person’s impression – my impression, who remember life before the cell phone.

In the collective subconscious, however, I think this is more than an old person’s impression. The idea of an influencing machine, a mind control machine, which somehow gets into the body – maybe through vaccines! – has become itself a machine in the right wing system of paranoia, with its representatives as the secretaries of most of Trump’s cabinet today.

The image of the executed enemy – Biden – who is replaced by a robot is an almost perfect dream image in the classic Freudian style, in which the image condenses over a contradiction it can neither avoid nor tell. Who executed Biden? The logical answer is that it was Biden’s enemy. But Biden’s enemy is the conspirator him or herself. In dream logic, this answer has to be avoided at all cost. Luckily, we have an influencing machine to guide us. Artificial intelligence is the House, y’all!

A classic Freudian would, at this point, look around for the sexual desire. Here I think we have a clue to the odd importance accorded to gender, and especially those who have transitioned. The site of this issue is, precisely, the bathroom. The bathroom is a tremendously important place in the American political unconscious. Who gets to go into the bathroom, the public bathroom, takes up an extraordinary amount of space in your American burger’s day to day thought processes. That black people, that illegal immigrants, can be in the next booth, just shitting freely and emitting their noxiousness and assaulting your Aryan nostrils, drives this burger to the voting booth to elect those who will stop all this. And perhaps stop shitting all together, so that we can live cleanly, no excrement allowed!

The impossible desire for an absolute cleanliness, a purge to overshadow all purges, allows contradictory figures to emerge - people who engage in statuatory rape, or pay porn stars to fuck them, becoming the crusaders for this dream. In the rightwing dream time, the more criminal, the more coplike our leaders become. Top cops every one of them.

The influencing machine and the public toilet are two poles of the Trumpian moment. What this tells us about the strategy we can use to overturn that moment is an exercise I leave to the reader.