Clinamen and a flush

Kant mentions, in his Anthropology, one of the favorite card games of the eighteenth century, pharaon. In Thomas Kavanagh’s essay, Libertine’s Bluff: Cards and Culture in Eighteenth-Century France, Kavanagh contrasts pharaon with the century’s other favorite card game, brelan. Pharaon was, it appears, even banned in France for a time in the 18th century, but brelan was not. In his article on brelan in the Encyclopedie, Diderot wrote: "it is most enjoyable, that is, most ruinous when there are three or five players." In fact, the amounts won or lost by brelan were legendary. Kavanagh, however, wants to get past the anecdotal and point to the central social symbolism of card games for the French – and, in general, the ancien regime’s – aristocracy, and he wants to draw a contrast between pharaon, which was a game of chance, and brelan, which was a game of strategies that became part of the pool of metaphors that informed the libertine vocabulary of seduction. Is it right, in fact, to call these metaphors? The connection between brelan and seduction as a game was, on Kavanagh's account, pretty tight.

First, though, I will quote his description of brelan:

“The best three-card hand a player can hold is the "brelan" in the other sense of that word which French retains today: triplets, or three cards of the same value, such as three aces or three kings. If, as was most frequently the case, no player held a brelan, the winner was the player who, at the end of the hand, held the highest aggregate point count in a single suit. In making that count, aces were worth eleven points, all picture cards ten, and the other cards their face value. The most important feature of the game and the guarantee of real risk for all players was the fact that this count was made only after all players remaining in the game after the betting and raising had placed their cards face up on the table. At that point, those holding the highest card in each suit removed from their opponents' hands and added to their own all the lower cards in that same suit. Once this capture by the highest card in each suit was completed, some players held more than their original three cards and some fewer. The one additional feature of the game was that, after the betting and exposing of the three-card hands, one additional card, la retourne, was then turned face up by the dealer. That card could then be claimed either by the player holding three cards, a brelan, of the same value or, if there was no such three of a kind, by the player holding within her original three cards the highest card in that suit.10 In sum, brelan could be described as a simplified form of modern poker, a variant where only triplets and flushes count.”

La retourne. The dealer’s card, the author’s card, the philosopher’s card.

Here, by contrast, is pharaon:

“In pharaon, players have only one decision to make: the amount they will bet. Whether they win or lose has nothing to do with the cards held by the other players at the table or with the bets those others make. In pharaon each player receives a livret of thirteen cards and uses one or more of them to bet on the values from ace to king with suits being irrelevant. Once the bets are made, the banker staking the game begins to turn over one by one the cards from the shuffled deck he holds in his hand. The banker wins all bets made on cards matching the first card he turns and all other odd-numbered turns. The players win when they have bet on cards matching the second card the dealer turns up and all other even-numbered turns.”

Perhaps Kant’s description of the rational man at cards is so stripped of any strategy, and so fixed on the ‘turn’ of the cards, because it excludes the bluff and deception that, as Kavanagh points out, made brelan a school in lucretian strategy. Kavanagh connects the card game to the general philosophical atmosphere of libertinism:

“The libertine and the gambler share a fundamentally Epicurean vision of the world. The same Democritian atomism presides over their convictions as to the con- stant possibilities and unanticipated encounters provided by life in society and by the dealing of a deck of cards. This Epicureanism implied not only a privileging of plea- sure in all its forms, but the conviction that events, what took place and the way things turned out, were guided only by chance. Imagining life as following the model of atoms falling through space until their course is deflected by the random collisions of the Lucretian clinamen, the gambler and the libertine saw the same chance at work in the movement of cards being dealt from a deck and of men and women intersecting within the whirl of social life. Life and desire become a succession of random encoun- ters following one another with no more coherence and no more significance than dealing a jack after a queen from a well shuffled deck of cards.”

Kant and gambling, 2

I’m back from viewing wilderness and… well, from the deep reaches of love. About which you will hear not hear me make a sound, since love has a bower bird’s instinct for building the most elaborate nests to hide its secrets in. …

Instead, I’m going back to where I left off – that is, with boredom’s fit into the system of wants and ‘needs’. A fit that that comes, in Kant, with a scenario that seems to haunt not just the grand seigneurs, but all of art as well. To repeat the last graf of my last post:

“The division between the game as a whole – which is played for the sake of being played – and the different moments of the game, the hands – which are played to be won – gives us, then, an activity that isn’t ‘serious’ – and yet one that fools boredom, playing its own game in the margins.”

Recognize, here, purposiveness without a purpose - wrenched from its place in aesthetics - and taking on another form in the world formed when the chief motivation is not need, but the lack of need – that is, escaping boredom’s mysterious pain. Thus, the gambler plays each hand to win, and plays ultimately to play. Kant was never such an example of cosmopolitanism as in the fact that he never traveled anywhere – like Deleuze’s nomad, he achieved a perfectly stationary position in which everywhere threw itself on the floor before him. Surely, then, he knew of the casinos of Venice and the mad English mania for betting on anything, and knew that many would disagree – many would claim that the whole point was to win a fortune.

But perhaps Kant caught the dry cough in the shuffle of the cards that announces the death instinct at its perpetual repetitions.

points west - fleeing all responsibilities

Bloggin' is going to be irregular - as I'm going on the road to points west tomorrow. To a secret destination - after passing through Marfa. I'd appreciate any suggestions for music, places to visit between Marfa and Santa Fe, etc. Desert music.
On the model of this: Buffalo Skinners.

kant on boredom and gambling

“The question of whether Heaven and not been more provident in caring for us by providing us with everything so that we didn’t have to work is certainly to be answered no; from men demand activities (Geschaefte), even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, they would have done nothing but sat together and sung arcadian songs and observed the beauty of nature. Boredom would certainly have martyred them as well as it does other men in similar positions.” - Immanuel Kant's sämmtliche Werke: Th. Metaphysic der Sitten, in zwei Theilen, 405, my translation

Boredom in the Metaphysics of Ethics appears as a theme and a term (Langeweile) in the context of ‘play’ – and notably, playing cards.

In a more extended consideration of the sources of playing in the lectures collected in Menschenkunde oder philosophische Anthropologie, Kant connects up the notion of Edenic contexts, work, play, and boredom – for it turns out that, in circumstances where our needs are abundantly satisfied, boredom comes into play as the motive pushing us to work or to certain forms of play. It complicates an old equation that posits lack, or need, as the driver of work, or productivity – since boredom is not the same kind of lack as other lacks. What it is, however, is hard to say. “Boredom is the quintessence of unnamable pain.”[Langeweile ist der Inbegriff des unnenbaren Schmerzes.”]

Kant begins with a cultural universal that reaches all the way into the Canadian wilderness:

“The passion for play [zum Spielem – gambling is implied] is met with in every nation, even the Canadian savages like to play, while Chinese are given over to play to the point of mania, so that they bring their wives and children and even themselves into slavery through play. The interests [stakes] in play serve to enliven it and contain therefore such great charms that it constitutes the pastime for most of our society. The cause is that fear and hope continually change places in play…” [257]

The reasonable man, for Kant, then, plays with that alteration of fortunes in mind.

“A rational man, who sets down to play, can not have gain as his intent [Absicht], but he must believe, that he at least in the end must be paid for his stakes. Therefore his intention must be something else other than gain. During the play his intention is, of course, only to win, but he did not undertake participation in the game to do so. Here it is a purely a question of hope and fear, that are fundamentally vain; but one is distracted during these circumstances, and has distracted oneself from the one that one calls boredom. Such an evil, which is what boredom is, one commonly doesn’t know how to name, nor what countervailing means to apply to it. This evil of boredom springs out of the lack of activity.” [258]

The division between the game as a whole – which is played for the sake of being played – and the different moments of the game, the hands – which are played to be won – gives us, then, an activity that isn’t ‘serious’ – and yet one that fools boredom, playing its own game in the margins.

Out of the mouth of the old order

“In 1619, male and female far servants (karler and piger) in Denmark who were dissatisfied with their wages or terms of employment could immediately be put into irons and sent to a public works or to a spin-house. Stavnsband, a compuslsory residence system for males aged between 18 and 36 (intended to secure the supply of soldiers and labour force), was extended in 1742 to cover peasant boys from eight years up, and two decades later the lower age limit fell further to four years.” [Centuries of child labour: European experiences from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, 55]

We forget how often our nineteen century ‘thinkers’ lived in the aftermath of the hot breath of the ancien regime, which had burned their parents and grandparents. This was especially the case with Soren Kierkegaard, who carried within him the anguish of his father, Michael – or rather, Michael as the boy Soren never knew, one of the karler, a shepherd boy who cried out in the harsh night and loneliness of the Jutland plain.

The divide between Western Europe and Eastern Europe in the 18th century was deepened by the fact that in the East, serfdom was strengthened, and continued to be the dominant mode of production for the agricultural sector, while in the West, serfdom was more and more reduced to a series of symbols, which were themselves under attack. Denmark stands out in this picture because – though by position and by its bourgeoisie – it should have been a western nation, its serf system kept getting harsher. Nearly destroyed in 1660 when the Swedes overwhelmingly defeated the Danish armies, Denmark reconstructed itself on the bones of aristocratic power. The king, siding with Copenhagen’s Bürger, took on ‘absolute’ powers and – as was the 18th century pattern – gradually commodified space and labor.

“The events of 1660 led to a radical transformation of the government of Denmark: the administration was modified and in all the general situation of the state found itself ameliorated. From the social point of view, this did not have all the consequences one might have expected. Assuredly the inequality between classes was diminished and the bourgeoisie came closer to the landed nobility. The noble lands ceased to be so much charged with taxes; the fate of the peasants were not modified at all; on the contrary, their situation worsened.” [Histoire générale du IVe siècle à nos jours, Volume 6 by Alfred Rambaud, 618]

Brandes book on Kierkegaard, one of the first major studies, rightly begins by emphasizing the relationship between Michael and Soren, which – like all intense family relationships – sucked in the surrounding history, and carved out a past for the child to carry:


Soren Kiekegaard was the child of old parents; he was born old, he grew up as an old-clever child, who began to brood over himself at such a young age, that it came to him in later life as if he had been neither a child nor a youth, that is, neither without a consciousness nor a care. “My unhappiness,” he said with one of those twisting phrases that he loved, “ was, both from birth and strengthening into my education: not to be an adult man.” He meant by this, that he was a spirit, a very inordinate and comprehensive expression, in order to say something particular about one individual. … in old barbaric times one might perhaps have found this all to unchildish kid to be a changeling, that the fairies had laid in the cradle.”

And so it happens that one shepherd boy in this culture that has long operated as a Moloch to such shepherd boys – one that has long made them the object of suspicion and accusation (literally – contemporary researchers have been surprised, mining the criminal archives of Europe, that bestiality outranks sodomy in those files, and the shepherd boy is often accused) – gets an opportunity. Much like a character in Balzac, he is the beneficiary of the attenuated but still active family network that connects the country to the city, the pious harsh Jutland peasant to the drygoods store in Copehagen. It was wool and the small colonial commodities (the song of sugar, spice, tobacco all over again – our familiar spirits) that made Michael Kierkegaard a relatively well off man.

But – according to his son – at the center of that story of upward mobility is a small boy cursing God on a Jutland Heath.

I want this rural background, since the next threads – mostly about Kierkegaard and boredom – are going to be very urban. We forget that rural sorrows and terrors are carried to the city as much as the city reciprocates with spices and money.

Pareto and the libertarian myth of the just Other

In his General Sociology – I’m using the French version – Pareto writes of two categories of “new” man in the ranks of the governors. The one consists of those who spend nearly as much as they gain, and the other is “constituted by those who take away from their gains not only the amount needed for supporting their great expenditures, but still more, what they have constituted for their patrimony.” And he observes how the modern economy works in Italy: “in Italy, one can observe that almost all the great, recently constituted patrimonies come from government concessions, the construction of railroads, enterprises subvented by the state, tariff protections, and that in this way a number of people have elevated themselves to the ranks of first honor in the state.” (1471)

Although Pareto is the idol of the classical liberal school a la Hayek, his observation rings much truer than Hayek’s fantasy that there existed a golden liberal period in which the great fortunes were constituted by some pure operation of grace in the private sphere, ‘without Government interference.”

Of course, Pareto believed these new men were violating his optimization principle – which is why he could call down upon them the wrath of the economist, rather than the moralist, scorned. But from the political point of view, Pareto starts a unique and little followed critique of democracy by pointing out that democracies don’t, in fact, interrupt the process by which the governing class operates to aggrandize its position. Here, I think, our experience makes us think that Pareto must be right. As – to use the terms of Donzelot – capital lost its place as the distributor of all the world’s evils in the 1970s, and was succeeded by the “state”, an international democratizing movement sprang up, flowered, and, in the 2000s, experienced its decadence: for it was in the 00s that we discovered that bringing democracy to others had to be done, regrettably, by strangling it at home. And thus was completed the second moment of a-politicization of state functions: first, in the 90s, the state suddenly had no business ‘interfering’ in business; and second, in the 2000s, the citizens had no business in ‘interfering’ with the executives right to make and continue war. The disempowerment of the people was accompanied by a politics of scandal that intensified the feeling around meaningless symbols and incidents, crimes with no real scope, the chance remark captured by the open mike, etc.

Pareto’s idea of what might be called the position creep of the governing class is expressed like this:

“We see that, in sum, whatever be the form of the regime, the men who govern have on average a certain tendency to use their power in order to maintain themselves in place, and to abuse it in order to obtain advantages and particular gains, that sometimes they do not distinguish from the gains and advantages of party, and that they almost always confond with the advantages and gains of the nation. It follows from this: 1, that, from this point of view, there will not be a great deal of difference between different forms of regime. The differences reside in the background, that is to say in the sentiments of the population: there where the latter are more or less honest; 2 that the uses and abuses will be all the more abundant as the intromission of the government in private affairs is the greater; in the degree to which the matter to be exploited is augmented, what one can take away is augmented too; in the U.S., where one wants to impose morality for the law, one sees enormous abuses, errors which emerge where this constraint does not exist, or exists in the lesser proportions; 3 that the governing class tries to appropriate the goods of others not only for his own usage, but also for sharing them with the governed class which the governing class defends, and which assures the power to do so, be it by arms or ruse, with the support that the client gives to the patron; 4 that most often, neither the patrons nor the clients are fully aware of their transgressions of the rules of morality existing in their society, and that, even if they perceive it, they easily excuse it, be it that in the end, others do the same, or under the commodious excuse that the ends justify the means.” (1474-1475)

Pareto’s mixture of logic and history here is surely peculiar, as – if we concede that he is correct – it would seem to put into question just what are the ‘goods” of “others”. They would seem, in the end, to result from previous generations of government in which the same logical force applied. And so they are sanctified as private goods after a decent interval has dulled our sense of them as public thefts.

Around this corner, of course, we come to the idea of how those private goods are earned synchronically – and to Marx, with the idea of surplus labor value.

Of course, once one concedes that these 4 moments occur under every regime, throughout the existence of human society, we are less inclined to find the moral argument for not appropriating the goods of ‘others’ to the governed class – that mass of clients. And given that the making of wealth so often is the result of government concession – Pareto’s examples can be multiplied a thousandfold in today’s world of inflated and bogus IP – the virtuous others become such a shrinking part of the total that they are like the legendary hidden dozen just men that keep God from punishing the world – an invisible mass in the world’s visible masses.

Pareto and petit bourgeois nietzschianism

“His belief in man's freedom of thought and action, whether in the marketplace, in the press or in the university lecture halls remained unshaken till the end of his life. His economic liberalism was similar to that of the classical school; he upheld the freedom of markets, defended the merits of a free competitive system and was responsible more than any other economist for turning economics into a positive science, devoid of ethical considerations.”

Such is the summing up of Pareto’s work by one of his modern admirers, Renato Cirillo. The last phrase, with its combination of the petit bourgeois and Nietzschian grandiosity, is meant seriously. But of course it is nonsense: you do not uphold the ‘freedom of the markets”, or think that “freedom” even has a meaning in relation to ‘markets’, unless you are jammed full of ethical considerations, unless they dictate your whole view of the social hierarchy.

Pareto optimization, or “efficiency”, has been enfolded in the neo-classical tradition as something like a law of economics – or at least that branch which deals with ‘welfare”. Now it may seem that efficiency has little to do with needs and satisfactions except as, at best, a measure of the number of steps involved in performing an action. But efficiency has been elevated from humble origins far above the other conceptual gods by the economists, who have found in it a mantra to defend every kind of inequality and turn the tables on the carpers. The classical formulation of the Pareto axiom is this, from Alan Peacock and Charles Rowley: “if any change in the allocation of resources increases the social welfare of at least one person without reducing the social welfare of any other person, then this change should be treats as improving total social welfare.”

It is a dog’s body of a formula, but of course one can see at a glance that – skipping lightly over the exploitation of labor, which we will now pretend never happens and has nothing to do with value – from a neo-classical point of view, this is nearly heaven. To justify the enormous fortunes of the wealthy on the grounds that they somehow earned it runs into the absurdity of ‘earning’ millions for sitting at a desk and making decisions, or for having come up with a nifty device once upon a time in one’s youth, etc. Far better, then, to derail the whole critique by boldly claiming that the rich not only harm no one, but improve the total social welfare every time the dividend check comes in the mail.

Pareto’s own formulation of this maxim is heavily mathematical, which is, of course, another strike in its favor. Mathematizing relations is a very handy way of avoiding the conceptual analysis of same.

Otherwise, of course, this oracular pronouncement seems unlike to help us understand almost any real situation of “allocating” resources.
Let’s go for the first and most obvious problem, which is the presumption that the social welfare is defined in terms of positive gains. As anybody knows, though, this is simply not a general rule for life. In fact, it is often the worst rule to follow. If the allocator of ice cream at the party allocates me a bowl and my friend, Mr. Cardiac Arrest, a bowl, his social welfare would be improved if I stole his bowl of ice cream. Such situations of limits and overindulgence, writ large and small, are all over our “social welfare”.

Which, of course, gets us to questions of the allocator. The allocator is a strange beast, having no self interest of its own, but begin able to read exactly what the self-interest of all individuals in the collective are. Even the neo-classicals back away from this idea – which is why they prepose the much more wooly idea that interest and aggrandizement of goods is the same. Of course, this shreds into little synchronic strobe lit bits the true temporal dimension of the social. That x get wealthy and I don’t may, at time 1, seem to be no skin off my nose – but it is one of the funny things about wealth that you acquire it to acquire power. Wealth is as much a part of a position vis a vis others as it a quantity of purchasing power. This means that there exists a distinct possibility that, at some time in the future, the wealthy man will use his wealth to raise the bar to entry for the non-wealthy man.

How, of course, is our magic allocator to know this? The neo-classical solution, of course, is to pretend that this allocator is dumb to such things, and make a virtue of that dumbness. It is dumb because the future is uncertain! This distributor of cards, this dealer behind the curtain, turns out to be, of course, the market. The, as they like to say, “free market”. And furthermore, we are to believe that this free market is exquisitely sensitive to our needs and wants. Like a tongue tied beau, it woos us with poetry. The market’s poetry happens to be prices.

Even granted that something like “a market” can be extracted from the thousands of real markets in existence in this world – which, I confess, I doubt – the idea that the market is extremely smart and extremely dumb at the same time is curious. In fact, as one of Pareto’s commentators sheepishly admits, Pareto just assumed Say’s law – that markets always clear. Say’s law is the black sheep of neo-classical economics – it dare not speak its name, but – of course – it is believed with the ardor of true love among their ranks.

To be continued