notes on paris

So: I walk down rue Rambuteau past the Beaubourg to a Lebanese sandwich stand; I buy a chicken Shawarma to go; I notice, with pleasure, that they have put the fries inside the sandwich, like I like it; I pay for it and press on with my quest to find a bike stand, all the while eating my sandwich and feeling an immense satisfaction that I am walking, this morning, in Paris.



Heres’s the thing: I am, for once in my life, impressed with myself.



Here’s the other thing: I realize that this feeling is quite absurd. I have stuffed my mouth with sandwiches in other villes – in Santa Fe, Austin, New Haven, New Orleans, Atlanta. But Paris is different. The difference, no doubt, is due to the fact that I stuffed my head with literature and Paris since I discovered serious novels and masturbation, when I was 13. Or perhaps I discovered serious novels second. If I hadn’t read Pound, Baudelaire, Stein, Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Balzac, perhaps I wouldn’t feel the ordinary sights beat down upon me like emblems I have somehow re-discovered, emblems of the thing I tried to build up in myself, painfully and – after a while – more out of habit than of any intention. That thing – the cultivated man.



Perhaps if I was a certain type of singer and came to Austin, I would feel the same way, walking past Antones, as I do biking past the Hotel de Ville. And in Austin, I did feel a certain well being on a Saturday afternoon when I sat down with a book, or some editing work, in Whole Foods and drank my coffee and looked about me and almost feel in love with the health and wealth of my fellow Americans, stocking up all around me. I loved their air of ambition, sitting at the tables in that part of the store where we all came to eat lunch, - whether aspiring for serenity through Native American massage or aspiring for hits creating a website for some upscale sports shoes store. But really, for the most part of the past eleven years that I spent in Austin, I mainly felt that something had gone seriously wrong with me and the country, and much as I tried to love my aspiring neighbor, I fell into the bad habit of condemning him for the rape of Falluja in my heart. Me and the country were both going through a personality change that felt like a nervous breakdown. The Bush years scraped its fingernails on the blackboard 24/7, and I couldn’t get enough of it, couldn’t wait to poison myself with the next day’s headlines. I responded to all this with a piece of internal terrorism all my own: I blew my brain up. So the happy ambitious people bugged me, seriously. For the one thing they didn’t aspire to was getting the country back.



My own personal breakdown was compounded by the multiple ways I failed as a writer during the Jr. years. I failed, most notably, in the one critical test that any writer must pass: I failed to get anyone interested enough in my writing to pay me money to get more of it. Besides, that is, the freelance dribs and drabs. Samuel Johnson, who had the soul of a union boss, famously said that nobody but a blockhead ever wrote but for money. This is a pretty exact statement of the case. This doesn’t mean the blockhead writer is necessarily bad, but it does mean he or she is a blockhead. That was the group I fell into. I could even feel the block attached to my neck some days, and some months, whole months, I’d have a crick in my neck. Block heads are bad for the neck and back.

I can’t say I fled to Paris to escape the seasons of down and out. No, my life got better, and my head was freed, before Paris. This was because I fell in love and finally figured out – or, rather, some collective unconscious inside me, emanating from the dearest wishes of every cell, be it of toenail, spleen, or heart, figured out - how to be loved. To be loved may be a passive form of verb, but I can assure you it is existentially active. Don’t mistake the accidents of grammar for descriptions of the world – otherwise, you are so fucked.

But this is another story…

another 30 and we're done!

There is a crap statistic that is often passed around on the right about taxes, summed up in this headline form Heritage Foundation: “The Top 10 Percent of Income Earners Paid 71 Percent of Federal Income Tax.”
I am always tickled by this meme, because at the same time, when the Right isn’t thundering about taxes, they will also crow about the benefits of the American economy in the age of freemarket globalisation – among which is the enormous increase in wealth of the top ten percent. Or, as the right likes to put it, the normalization of the millionaire next door.

Put these two memes together and it becomes obvious that the wealthiest can pay 70 percent of the U.S. income tax without breaking a sweat. Their enormous engrossment of higher and higher percentages of the national wealth – the latest figures show that the top 1 percent control some 36 percent of the national wealth. This is a stat from the uber-right Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent hold an astonishingly small 25 percent of the national wealth.

These stats should be carved into the liberal mind with a power drill. Because – alas! – the liberal mind keeps thinking that the bottom 90 percent is going to have to pay more taxes for, well, something – Medicare, social security, our wonderful war machine.

The usually level headed Digby quotes with approval a journalist who is proposing a ‘left’ alternative to the Ryan budget to get rid of the deficit. Special gold stars for those who notice what is wrong with this proposal:
“An equally extreme proposal on the left would balance the budget, first, by raising new taxes--on everybody and, most likely, with particular levies on carbon.”

This is simply nutty.

Here’s what an equally extreme proposal on the left would look like: lets balance the budget by raising taxes on the richest ten percent alone. Let’s raise those taxes so that they pay 100 percent of the income tax in America. Let’s drop the federal income tax load to all individuals in the bottom 90 percent to approximately zero.

That’s right, zero.

This would not dent the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. They would still be as rich as fuck. However, if you wanted to do one thing to create instant wealth in households all across America, that one thing would be simply getting rid of the delusion that taxes are like church tithes. They aren’t. America doesn’t need the widow’s mite. America needs the hedgefunder’s billion.

I find it puzzling that liberals have not figured out that the shift in the composition of wealth in this country gives them an extremely popular issue. Instead, liberals think of themselves as the spinach party. I say no in thunder. I say desserts for the masses. I say let us eat cake. Why raise taxes on everybody? There is no reason that the household making 50 thousand dollars should pay a penny more in taxes at any level - their taxes should be heading downward. If we are really going to all "benefit" from globalisation, the simplest way to do so is to redefine what it means to be rich. To be rich should mean not only engrossing an absurd amount of the national wealth, but paying all the national taxes, save for FICA. Every bit. The right has inadvertently shown the way, here. We have merely to follow.
But how about the Galtian thesis. They might move? I'd love it. Then we could get into serious wealth taxes on the assets they have in the U.S. But in fact they aren’t going to go anywhere. Wealth, we are assured, is extremely sneaky peteily fast. But as we all observed in the crisis, when the crunch came, the rich had nowhere to hide. If it wasn’t for Uncle Sam loaning the banks their little dribs and drabs of billions (adding up to 9 trillion loaned at 0.07 interest between 2008 and 2010), the rich would be out there doing real work, cleaning plates and putting the white stripes down the center of roads. When taxes on millionaires were at 90 percent in the Eisenhower era, there's no evidence that millionaires were buffaloing it to Batista’s Cuba and Ireland. They will moan, they will groan, they will find loopholes. Others who want the millions (and realize that when tax time is over, they still have millions) will take their place. Social mobility, quoi? Survival is to the fittest, and we do want to breed the finest, Galt-ian wealthy. Over time, they will buy enough politicians to lower their rates once again, and we will have to revisit this. Such is history.

Taxing the rich isn't complicated. Let's do it under the slogan: ANOTHER 30 AND WE’RE DONE!

The Nietzschian we

As I wrote in the last post, Nietzsche’s preface to Daybreak begins on a note of anaphoric ambiguity. Although the English translators have decided that the subterranean is a subterranean “man”, the German is not so inexorable – in fact, it seems to softly bore its way back to the animal, to the mole.

The mystery of the pronouns, here, is not confined to the first paragraph. To make my next move in uncovering the logic of the subterranean, I need to reference a few lateral ‘philological’ issues to show that the pronoun has a philosophical weight.

In one of the most famous essays in linguistics, Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb, Roman Jakobson presented a schema of four reflexive relations between code – some particular symbolic form – and the message – some content or signification: 1) the message that refers to the message - which gives us all kinds of reported speech; 2) the code that refers to the code – which gives us proper names; 3) the message that refers to the code, which gives us “any elucidating interpretation of words or signs”; and finally 4) the code that refers to the message, which gives us the shifter.

The shifter is one of the most interesting and often written about category of code/message relations. This is because the code that refers to the message – the fact that a message is an act of enunciation – gives us, among other things, our persons. As Jakobson wrote, the mystery of how to define the “I”, which seems empty of any absolute reference, is solved when one sees that the reference is not to something the I represents outside of the enunciative situation, but must refer, instead, to the status of I as an indexical symbol. Jakobson remarks that the shifter has a special place in the onto-genesis of language: ‘The indexical symbols, and in particular the personal pronouns, which the Humboldtian tradition conveives of as the most elementary and primitive stratum of language, are, on the contrary, a complex category where code and message overlap. Therefore pronouns belong to the late acquisitions in child language and to the early losses in aphasia.” As Jakobson points out, the child often has to negotiate the use of I and you, and figure out how to substitute the I for his or her own name: “This attitude may persevere as an infantile survival. Thus Guy de Maupassant confessed that his name sounded quite strange to him when pronounced by himself.”

Roland Barthes saw that this childish insecurity was the mark of the writer. In an essay on Proust, Barthes remarks on the fact that Brichot, one of Proust’s characters, is reproached with using “I” too much in his articles on the war, and responds by changing the ”I”s to ‘ones”(ons)

“… the problem, for the writer, is not in fact to express or mask his “I’ (Brichot naively does not succeed in doing that and in fact, besides, has no desire to), but to shelter it, that is to say, at the same time, to protect it and lodge it.”

Taking up the thread from Jakobson’s comment about the enfant and the aphasic, Barthes includes in this low company the writer:

In the second degree, which is always that of literature, the writer facing the I is in the same situation as the infant or the aphasic, accordingly as he is a novelist or a critic. Like the child who says his proper name in speaking of himself, the novelist designates himself across an infinity of third persons, but this designation is not at all a disguise, a projection or a distance (the child is not disguising himself, nor is he dreaming or distancing himself); it is on the contrary an immediate operation, carried out in an open fashion, imperiously (nothing is clearer than the “ones” of Brichot), and of which the writer has need in order to speak of himself across a normal message (and no longer “straddling” it [via a shifter –R], fully issued from the code of others, in such a way that to write, far from referring to an expression of subjectivity, is on the contrary the very act which converts the indexical symbol (a bastard) into a pure sign. The third person is thus not a ruse of literature, but it is an act of institution preceding any other: to write is to decide to say ‘he” (and to be able to say it).”
The Nietzschean paradox is that Barthes’ “he”, burrowing towards the surface, does not know if it is a man or an old mole.

And this paradox is derivative of another textual trait: the Nietzschean “we’. Daybreak was finished by the end of 1881, while the preface to it was attached in 1886. During this period of time, Nietzsche developed an affection amounting to a mania for a certain kind of “we” in which he could, as Barthes writes, shelter. But what kind of shelter is this?

In the preface, for instance, there are the following we-s: wir Philosophen, wir Deutschen von heute, wir Pessimisten, wir Menschen des Gewissens, wir Immoralisten, wir Gottlosen von heute. This leads us to the beginning of the fifth section, which begins with a drumroll of we:

Zuletzt aber: wozu müßten wir das, was wir sind, was wir wollen und nicht wollen, so laut und mit solchem Eifer sagen? Sehen wir es kälter, ferner, klüger, höher an, sagen wir es, wie es unter uns gesagt werden darf, so heimlich, daß alle Welt es überhört, daß alle Welt uns überhört!

(But at last: why do we have to say, so loudly and with such eagerness, what we are, what we want and don’t want? Lets look at it colder, more distantly, more cleverly, at a greater height, lets say it as it must be said among ourselves, so stealthily, that all the world overhears it, that all the world overhears us!”

The first thing to point out about the Nietzschian we is that it is vatic – it prophesizes a place for the speaker among a certain community. The prophesy has been so completely fulfilled, since 1886, that one does not blink at Nietzsche including himself among the philosophers – or as in other texts, among the psychologists, or among the artists, etc. Of course, he was a professor of philology. What we don’t blink at betrays a certain hidden anachronism – we project Nietzsche’s future back upon Nietzsche’s present. In his “Dialogue concerning the fait divers”, Jean Paulhan points out that the trope of the hidden anachronism is one of the commonplaces of journalism - one of its more insidious traps:

M: In this regard, I read a very curious fait divers:

Noisy-le-Sec – The robber, Louis Verget, surprised by Mrs. Smith in the course of unpacking her establishment, strangled her. When Mrs. Smith breathed her last, the murderer finished stealing from her: he only found one hundred francs and a watch.

R.M. I only see the most ordinary, and sad things there.
M. Yes, everything is not in the pink in the life of a robber. But wait: I haven’t told you the headline: a murder for one hundred francs.
R.M. In fact, this is a singular headline.
M. It could be the most reasonable thing in the world: in being a murderer, Louis Verget only made one hundred francs (which is little).
R.M. Yes.
M. But isn’t it clear that this sense, which may be wise, is not the real sense.
R.M. I fear that it is not difficult to disengage the real sense. Grossly speaking, this is what I see: that it is more base and criminal to kill for 100 francs than for a million, I suppose.
M.Not perhaps more criminal, but certainly more disgusting. This makes our man a dirty brute.
R.M. But is he really such a brute?
M. Now we are getting there. If he had discovered a thousand francs, or ten thousand, do you think he would have left it?
R.M. No.
M: It is thus a question of the most implausible fantasy. Remark, however, that it seemed acceptable to our journalist, and without a doubt to his readers. Myself, I was caught.
R.M. We return to our illusions. It is enough that the adventure ends with the stealing of one hundred francs that we are naturally disposed – and nothing resists it with too much force – to admit that our murderer only had it in his head, from the beginning, to gain his one hundred francs.”[My translation, Paulhan, OC 2)

This slight but terrifying disconnect between what is before and after is among the things sheltered in the Nietzschian we. And it is also from that ‘intemporality’ that Nietzsche seems, in the preface as well as in many other texts, to oscillate between a slightly mocking claim to a community that, in truth, he was not a part of and a loneliness so lonely that he was dead in it – he was buried, he was a mole, he was gone down into the ground.

on translating the preface to Daybreak

All of the English translations of the preface to Daybreak begin with a simple decision that concerns the first sentence, “In diesem Buche findet man einen "Unterirdischen" an der Arbeit, einen Bohrenden, Grabenden, Untergrabenden.” This has been translated by Hollingdale as: In this book you will discover a 'subterranean man' at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines.” The simple decision here is to add “man” to Unterirdischen. This is a standard practice in translating from German to English, as the former language nominalizes certain adjectives that the latter language wants to return to the modifier/modified form. And yet here one feels that something has been slightly lost. For in the course of this paragraph, it is not at all clear that the Unterirdische starts out as a man, although he, or it, is definitely subterranean. It is impossible, really, not to show one’s hand in translating this sentence, if you translate Unterirdischen as the Subterranean, you must still decide about Bohrenden, et. all.
My translation of the paragraph is much less smooth than Hollingdale’s, but this is what it would look like if we retain the ambiguity of whether the Subterranean is a human or not: In this book one will find a “subterranean” at work, boring, burrowing and sapping. One looks at it – that is, if one has the eyes to see such work of the deeps, as it slowly, thoughtfully, with soft inexorability, comes forward, without revealing too much of the pain entailed by every long renunciation of light and air. It could even be called satisfied with its dark work. Doesn’t it seem like some belief leads it on, some comfort consoles it? For it will perhaps have its own long darkness, its incomprehensibility, its hiddenness, its riddlesomeness, because it knows, what it will also have: its own morning, its own salvation, its own daybreak? .. Certainly, it is turned around: don’t ask it what it wants under there, it will tell you itself, this seeming Trophonious and subterranean, when he becomes ‘a human’ again. One forgets the fundamental rules of silence, when one has so long, like it, been a mole, been alone…”

My idea, in translating this, is that Nietzsche wants, here, to suspend the moment in which the figure we are viewing “becomes a human again’. In that state of suspension between the human and the it, the human and the mole, the human and the spirit of the dead, the full force of the way this subterranean is defined – in terms of a burrowing and boring that exhibits, in that wonderful and rather disgusting phrase, ‘soft inexorability’- helps us understand that this underground will not be of the same kind as Dostoevsky’s. Where Dostoevsky counters the crystal palace with the sewer, Nietzsche counters the human city with the sub or super-human burrow.

We know, however, that the superhuman for Nietzsche is not a matter of burrows. Bataille, in his essay on ‘The old mole and the sur in surrealism”, justly calls Nietzsche an icarian. For some reason the mole in Bataille’s essay is connected to Marx and Hegel, but not to Nietzsche – Bataille ignores this preface, and presents Nietzsche under the aegis of Zarathustra’s creature, the eagle, rather than Hegel’s mole.

“In point of view of appearances and splendor, the eagle is evidently more virile. Not only does the eagle rise into the radiant regions of the solar heaven, but it is situated in permanence with a dominant prestige. The absolutely sovereign character of this virility is implied by the hooked and cutting beak, because sovereign virility cuts everything that enters intoi competition with it, and cannot be cut.

…
“However, reduced to the subterranean action of the revolution’s economic facts, the ‘old mole’ digs out tunnels in a soil that is decomposed and repugnant to the delicate nose of utopists.” (OC II 96)

Already, in this essay, Bataille has learned to manipulate concept-images from Nietzsche. These images are not exactly metaphors or similes, for the analogies they set up they are also part of – after all, the analogy to height and depth is not just an analogy to abstract concepts, but concepts that have been abstracted from physical height and depth, in which physical eagles fly and physical moles crawl. Like the hexagrams of the I ching, or like dream images in Freud’s theory, they cannot be easily purged of their lateral, connotative addenda, nor abstracted to a conceptual schema – since they put into question the process of abstraction, the fine, shedding arc from impression to idea.

While the underground of the mole or the dead spirit is, I have maintained, different from the underground of the Dostoevskian deviant, it is of course related to it. But it is also related to a more primitive moment in the modernizing process, one that is older than capitalism: the social remove from nature.

The Chiders and the Chidden

The Western world embarked on an experiment about thirty years ago, during the era of Reagan and Thatcher. After eighty years of a movement to mitigate the excesses of nineteenth century capitalism by putting in place a Guarantor state – which Karl Polanyi called the second movement in the history of capitalism, the first one being the installation of an industrial system linked to a market driven economy – the third movement began. The third movement consisted, frankly, of a politics that, while keeping in place the Guarantor system, deregulated industries – notably, the financial services industry – and lowered taxes for the wealthy in an effort to, as it were synthesize the Gilded Age with the Great Society.

Although privatisation and the crushing of labor movements were the surface phenomena of this third movement, it did not simply reprise the nineteenth century. Far from it. For one thing, the social movements of the sixties were transfigured, not erased, by churning ever more people – notably, women – into the labor market. This represented an advance in one way - the unpaid labor performed by women was translated into paid labor int he public sphere. On the strength of this new revenue stream, wealth accumulation and day to day living expenses were also transformed by being strongly attached to the credit market, which, in turn, being deregulated, found more and more creative ways to charge for debt and trade debt. The war state apparatus, which had been a prime driver of the social welfare programs of the 1900-1980 period, were sustained.

And gradually the orientation of the political elite was also altered. In 1980, that elite still legitimized itself by adverting to the well being of the majority of the population in some way. The old images of the past eighty years had still not lost their cultic force.

But over the years, as changes were wrought on the fabric of national economies, this reflex adherence to the principle of the well being of the majority sickened and died.

Among the political elite, for the most part, this sickness unto death dare not speak its name. But the latent conventional wisdom of the 2010s is that the economy exists not for the well being of the majority, but rather for the well being of the small majority of those who have benefited most over the last thirty years.

And it is this way that political issues are now ‘manufactured’ in the media and among the chattering class in D.C., London, Paris and Berlin. Behind the issue of the deficit looms the idea that we must not hurt the ‘savers” – that is, the small minority who have hoarded immense fortunes. Of course, when the question was one of loaning nine trillion dollars at rates close to zero percent to the representatives of the wealthy – banks, hedgefunders, mutual funds, etc. – the question wasn’t even posed. There was no headline about the politics of this form of redistributing wealth upwards in a slump. There was no discussion of it. There was complete agreement that it should be done. The release of documents from the Fed naming names and outlining the mechanism of this fantastically generous welfare program never took up the newspaper space devoted to Charlie Sheen.

How does the conventional wisdom become conventional? Of course, ultimately the ruling class, as Marx has written, exercises dominance over the discourse – but in a sense this is just saying that the ruling class rules. It is the mechanisms of dominance that are interesting.

Thus, I was fascinated by this bit in a post on Matt Yglesias’s blog. MY is a well known ‘progressive’ blogger who is extraordinarily good at absorbing conventional wisdom and extruding it as though it were contrarian. He adheres to the neo-liberal line of the last thirty years, garnished with Obama-esque policy nudges.
This was the beginning of one of his posts yesterday : “I met Brookings’ Isabel Sawhill one time at a conference and she chided me for being insufficiently interested in cutting Social Security and Medicare spending. So I thought she might be into Paul Ryan’s budget ideas, at least perhaps in a Jacob Weisberg contrarian kind of way.”

The “chided” is the part in this that fascinates. To chide implies a certain responsibility one is not living up to. That responsibility is not to the well being of the majority, but instead, to actually doubting that diminishing their lifestyles is a policy we should embrace. It is notable that the chiding isn’t that MY is insufficiently interested in cutting down the average household spending on medicine, or insufficiently interested in making sure that the wealth of the wealthiest country in the world is used to make retirement pleasant and easy.

If one is still caught up in the past, or even in the compromises of the past thirty years, Sawhill’s morality seems upside down. Surely the one thing the Clinton years taught is that deficits are pretty easy to handle if one raises taxes that are paid by the wealthiest – from the capital gains tax to marginal tax rates on those making above 250,000 per year. In fact, it would be quite easy to break out new tax categories that would not weld together the millionaire and the upper middle class in the category, 250000 to infinity. There has never been a problem so simple. But the key here is that the solution is the problem. Because the solution is to discomfort the minority, the wealthiest top ten percent, by taking away from them money that has an extremely low marginal utility for them. Edgeworth, a radical free marketer rather than a Marxist, showed, over a century ago, that the entire running of the state could easily be achieved by taxing the wealthy at a rate proportionate to the lower marginal utility of their fortunes. If, in the same state, there is a family making 50 thousand per year and a family making 50 million per year, true confiscatory taxes would consist of taxing the former family at a minimal rate – five percent – when the same revenue could be painlessly extracted from the later family, who would, in every sense of the word, remain rich before and after taxes.

With the rise of universal education and the technostructure of the contemporary economy, there is, in truth, less need for the wealthy than ever before. This was demonstrated by the collapse of the credit markets, which was entirely due to the rentseeking system by which the wealthy used their fortunes – not in order to gain marginal utility in their persons, but purely in order to gain power.

But this is not a chideable issue. The political elites have benefited enormously from the economic changes of the past thirty years, and, by their lifestyle and their nudges, are committed to the proposition that the state and the economy exists to benefit the top 10 percent. It is in that light that all law and all issues should be tailored. The republican representative who recently opined that the Banking committee in the House of Representatives was there to serve the banks told a particular truth that has a general application: this is the ruling class. Only by holding this truth firmly in one’s mind can we understand the Democratic Party’s “weakness”, or the ‘bi-partisanship” of Obama, or the “Big Society” of Osborne and Cameron, or the odd emotional phenomenon of the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Clegg, who feels evidently that the electorate should understand that the rhetoric of the election has nothing to do with the real issue at hand, to wit, how to run a nation so as to produce maximum benefit for its richest citizens. To think otherwise is to fall on the side of the chidden.

the killers and the non-killers: the animal underground

“Let’s remember the implicit code: in the abattoir, everybody does not kill, and this brings it about that there are a set of categorial disjunctions and tacit spatial ones. This code distinguishes the first two groups, the “killers” and the “non-killers” (the administrative personnel and the cleaners), and, at the heart of the group of killers, three sub-groups: the “true killers”, the “occasional killers”, and the “non-killers”. This is divided into different norms or implicit rules: the killers and the non-killers have each their own space; they enter the building by different doors; they never mix in the course of morning breaks; there can be mixed spaces, but the dirty section is forbidden to non-killers: the non-killers are not supposed to look at the slaughter; the killers are not supposed to penetrate into the working areaof the non-killers, etc.”
- From Catherine Remy, When the Implicit Norm is the motor of Normal Activity: deviance and social reactions in an abattoir

Catherine Remy’s article, taken from her fieldwork in a slaughterhouse, is explicitly a study of deviance, taken not in the sense of criminal action, but of non-normal action within a ‘occulted’ space: the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse is a sort of condensed sign, a dream image of the two removes that structure modernization: the remove from nature, and the remove from production.

We have had enough, for the moment, of our first underground, the one inhabited by Dostoevsky’s underground man, who in himself incorporates that ‘broadness’ Dostoevsky took to be the special Russian trait, the trait of the unformed that repulsed Europeans. Wave after wave of degenerates and deviants flow from his underground, existing, the sociologists and cops assure us, in parallel to respectable society and not within it – although the deviants and degenerates, along with Dostoevsky himself, would disagree. In a passage in his notebooks for The Raw Youth, from which I have already quoted, Dostoevsky wrote:

All the cries of the critics to the effect that I do not depict real life have not disenchanted me. There are no bases to our society … One colossal quake and the whole lot will come to an end, collapse and be negated as though it had never existed. And this is not just outwardly true, in the West, but inwardly, morally so. Our talented writers, people like Tolstoy and Goncharov, who with great artistry depict family life in upper-middle-class circles, think that they are depicting the life of the majority. In my view they have depicted only the life of the exceptions, but the life which I portray is the life that is the general rule. I pride myself that I've been the first to portray the real man of the Russian majority, and have for the first time revealed his distorted and tragic side. I alone brought out the tragedy of the underground which consists of suffering and self-immolation, of the awareness of that which is better and of the inability to attain it… The underground, the underground, the poet of the underground — the feuilletonists have repeated this refrain as though it were something I should be ashamed of. The little fools. It is my glory…”

…
The second underground is inhabited by an animal it, which identifies that underground not with the sewer, ultimately, but with the tunnel, or the burrow. It identifies it with an activity – burrowing. Burrowing is a frantic activity, or a stealthy one. And it puts the burrowing creature in relation to light, sunlight.

Such is the structure of the symbols I want to follow in Nietzsche’s preface to Dawn, one of the great texts of the second sort of underground.

In order to follow the social logic – the collective dream logic - of the animal underground, a note here on one of the way nature was ‘removed’ under the auspices of modernization. I have given a mini-history of the removal of the slaughter house and animal cruelty in a previous couple of posts, and so for the rest of this post, I will splice them together and copy them.
…
“Remember, Cridle, those oxen,
blonde giants, dumb, looking upwards to heaven
whilst receiving the lash: it seemed to me
like I was feeling it too – Oh, Cridle, our business is bloody.”

Such are the words of meat goods king, Pierpont Mauler, in Brecht’s 1930 play, St. Johanna of the Stockyards. Meanwhile, in Lyons, the mayor was welcoming a new invention in the municipality abattoir: a “pistolet de l’assomage”. The inventors of this instrument, Jean Duchenet and Karl Schermer, wrote a summary of the benefits of it for the patent office: “The present invention has for its object a system of using a downing pistol (pistolet d’abatage) of which the automatic function and enhanced security renders the usage very practical and completely inoffensive. The manipulation of this tool is completely harmless. Its maneuvering capability is easy, rapid, and its automatic functioning is protected from all accidental deterioriation. With this machine, the slaughter of animals becomes instantaneous. It gains precious time for the butcher, who can proceed immediately, conveniently, and without danger, to stripping the animals.”

Catherine Remy, from whose article I am quoting, explains: if one pushes the idea a little, it is the idea of a combat, or at least of a dangerousness of the animal, that is here evoked and is at the same time combated. … Eduard Herriot, the mayor of Lyons, went and was the first to introduce the pistol, all in underlining explicitly its humanitarian character. For example, in response to a letter sent by one of his co-mayors, E. Herriot qualified the pistol as the “least barbarous means of slaughter.” (60)

If Kant saw the collapse of the human limit, his response was certainly not to rethink the animal. In fact, the animal is – because it is without self consciousness – always and universally a means for Kant. A means for the one who holds the place delimited by the rational existence: the person.

Kant probably did not go down to see the livestock brought into the old slaugherhouse on the Pregel in Konigsberg. It was a very old site. Konigsberg had a lively butcher’s guild. They used to parade gigantic sausages on New Years day. In 1601, they carried a sausage that was almost 1000 ells long and weighed almost 900 pounds, according to Johann Hübner (1762).

But because there was a municpal abattoir, it wasn’t necessarily up to date. The ones in Berlin were notoriously noxious, polluting, and filthy. The floorboards rotted with the perpetual rain of blood from the slaughtered beasts, and sometimes the butcher, arm upraised and ready to strike, would be as surprised as the beef cow when the floor boards gave way, tumbling them both into the stifling darkness below the slaughterhouse. Who knows what was down there. In 1810, the city closed them, so that once again, butchers would slaughter animals on the street. On that same date, however, Napoleon famously ordered an abattoir reform, setting municipal slaughterhouses out in the suburbs, and hiding the killing and stripping of the beasts.
This was a much admired move. In London, beasts were run up Oxford street to the Smithfield Market until 1850. Britain was the home of the first organized anti-cruelty effort, but Londoners could see, every day, how the cattle and sheep and pigs were run. They had to be beaten into making their pilgrimage. However, with trains and with cooling equipment, things started to change. In Dresden, by the 1890s, the municipal slaughterhouse was so clean and sweet that tours were made of it, and the tourist could, after seeing sausages being made, take refreshment in a garden restaurant. Apparently, none of the smells carried. Of course, these slaughterhouses became famous for another reason in 1945, when Kurt Vonnegut and a bunch of POWs sheltered in one from the U.S. bombing attack.

The beast and the rational being, then, were much more shoulder to shoulder in 1781, when the Critique of Practical Reason was written, then they were even fifty years later. As the meat market grew, the meat making disappeared.
…
In 1800, a bill was proposed in the House of Commons to ban bull-baiting. In bull-baiting, a bull was tied to a stake and dogs, often bull dogs, were set upon it. Sometimes, the dogs succeeded in killing the bull, sometimes the bull succeeded in killing the dogs, and most often, the bull and the dogs came off wounded.

The bill was defeated. Even so, it produced enough of a stir that a French academy asked a prize question about whether animals had a right to not being treated barbarously.

Another animal cruelty bill was introduced in the Parliament seven years later by Erksine, the well known defender of Tom Paine. It too was defeated.

Both defeats were mainly due to the eloquence of William Windham. Windham was one of Burke’s Whigs. He served as a minister in Pitt’s war government. He was, evidently, out of sympathy with the French Revolution. Yet the speech he made against banning bull-baiting is a document that defends the pleasures of the rural poor in explicitly class conscious terms; in almost the same terms, Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son in law, denounced the anti-vivisection movement in Britain in the 1890s.

Windham begins by dismissing the argument that bull-baiting has a corrupting influence on the character of the spectators by using himself as an instance: he saw two bull-baitings in his youth, he claims, and has not, since, seen any signs of cruelty or corruption. He then gets to the heart of what he thinks is wrong with the legislation by making it an issue of the culture of the common people:

“A great deal has lately been said respecting the state of the poor, and the hardships which they are suffering. But if they are really in the condition which is described, why should we set about to deprive them of the few enjoyments which are left to them? If we look back to the state of the common people in those countries with which our youthful studies make us acquainted, we find, that what with games, shews, festivals and the institutions of their religion, their sources of amusement and relaxation were so numerous as to make them appear to have enjoyed a perpetual holiday… “ Then he imagines what the poor in the country might say to the reformers: “Why interfere with the few sports we have, while you leave yourself and the rich so great a variety? You have your carriage, and your country houses; your balls, your plays, your operas, your masquerades, your card-parties, your books, your dogs, and your horses to amuse you – On yourselves you lay no restraint. – But from us you wish to take the little we have?”

Windham is objecting, as becomes apparent, not just to interference with bull baiting, but to the tendency to regulate the amusements of the poor for their own good. And in so opposing the bill, he speaks up for that countryside culture:

“In the exercise of those sports they may, indeed, sometimes hurt themselves, but could never hurt the nation. If a set of poor men, for vigorous recreation, prefer a game of cudgels, instead of interrupting them, it should be more our business to let them have fair play.”

This is the note of Hazlitt and Cobbett – and not what one might expect from a reactionary. Nor this: ‘The advocates of this bill, Sir, proposed to abolish bull-baiting on the score of cruelty. It is strange enough that such an argument should be employed by a set of persons who have a most vexatious code of laws for the protection of their own amusements. I do not mean at present to condemn the game laws; but when Gentlemen talk of cruelty, I must remind them, that it belongs as much to shooting, as to the sport of bull-baiting; nay more so, as it frequently happens, that where one bird is shot, a great many others go off much wounded. When, therefore, I hear humane Gentlemen even make a boast of having wounded a number of birds in this way, it only affords me a further proof that savage sports do not make savage people. Has not the butcher as much right to demand the exercise of his sport, as the man of fortune to demand that of hunting?”

Move forward, now, to Lafargue, who begins: “The bourgeois have the tenderness of angels in regard to animals: they feel a closer relationship to the animals than they do to the workers.”

Lafargue is not only following, unconsciously, in the path of the Burkian Windham, but in the path of Marx, who, in his list of the paragons of bourgeois humanism in the Communist Manifesto, includes societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Lafargue finds it infuriating that an English law allows the police to interfere with a scientist experimenting on an animal, and while allowing companies to experiment on their human clients with products mixed dangerous impurities or the like, all to save a bit of money in production:

“John Simon is an English factory inspector. He has studied the tortures to which the tender hearted bourgeois submits children, women and proletarian men in the capitalist prisons, in order to steal the fruits of their labor. He denounced them with a courage never known to the radicals. In his discourse [to a recent congress], he established that there exists two categories of experiment. One practiced by the physiologist on certain animals. The other practiced on thousands of men by speculators. For an example, he cites the classic experiments of Professor Tiersch on mice in order to discover the mode by which Asiatic cholera propagates, and the popular and well known experiment which was practiced during two cholera epidemics, of 1848-49 and 1853-54 on a half million inhabitants of South London by a certain commercial company who supplied these districts with polluted water.”

However, Lafargue is not only concerned with science – although it is interesting that the a defense of the amusements of the common people has transformed, in the course of the century, into a defense of science. He also uses Windham’s example of bird shooting to indict the bourgeoisie for committing acts of cruelty for their own amusement whilst banning acts that repulsed them among the lower orders.

Only by seeing that the dispute over animals and their treatment has deep roots in the common life, a life that was being transformed all over Europe, can one make one’s way, here. There is a delusion that we can get a clear political guide from understanding the pattern of our semantic binaries. They seem to group themselves before our eyes. We look at the history of the word, person, we see a sort of semiotic equivalent of the theodicy here, we think that we can make sense of the civil wars hidden in the word. We say, look at these oppositions deriving from this word that is originally a simulacra of the face, the face as an exchangeable object. Look at the number of semiotic transformations we can touch upon: of the relationship between the face and the body, the clothed and the naked, the man and the woman,, the elite and the common, the man and the beast. But when we look at how these things are imminently constituted and experienced, we find that things are not as we imagined them to be.

Maurice Angulhon, in “Le sang des bêtes. Le problème de la protection des animaux en France au XIXème siècle”, claimed that, unlike the 20th century, the entire onus of the movement to protect animals from cruelty, especially domestic animals, was aimed at preventing human cruelty. Windham, in fact, is responding to a similar claim in England – the spectacle or practice of cruelty to animals among the working classes will lead to either crime or a dangerous propensity to political rebellion. Surely this is true, to some extent, that the chief organizers for the protection of animals were animated by a “curious mixture of profound humanism and social fear.” For instance, under Napoleon, the traditional way of butchering an animal, which was done in the full view of whoever wanted to watch in Paris, was regulated so that it occurred in special abbatoirs. Just as the ladies wore red sewn into their necklines as a memorial of the guillotine, so, too, this prohibition could be seen as another, more fearful homage to the guillotine: “in dissimulating the blade of the butcher one contributed perhaps to avoiding the blade of the street jury.” (85) Industry and animal husbandry were much more visible, nonetheless, in cities where the flow of traffic was measured by the horse, and where the knacker’s trade in sick and dying horses, which were often sold off and starved to death, flourished.

…
Here is the famous report from an acquaintance of Nietzsche’s about the events of January 3, 1889 (although whether this happened on January 3 or December 27, 1888 is under some dispute)

“But the high point was the episode of that day on which Davide Fino saw the professor on the Via Po between two policemen, followed by a crowd of circling people. Friederich Nietzsche had, a few minutes before, put his arms about the neck of a taxi-driver’s beaten horse and refused to let him go. He had seen how the coachmen had beat the four legged creature, and had felt such enormous pain, that he had seen himself obliged to offer the beast his dedication.”

where I am now

I had a discouraging day yesterday, surveying the supposedly coordinate pieces of The Tears of Homo Economicus and asking myself, where’s the coordination? Jesus. My original idea was simply to carve a small book out of my Human Limit project, but over the last four months I’ve made certain small and major changes in the potential book, all of which are driven by my flinching the stylistic norms native to the humanities, in which thesis, argument and example unroll with the monological inflexibility of an alarm clock going off. I am not that kind of writer. The demon of the lateral is always at my ear.

In the preface to his dissertation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin compared the nineteenth century compulsion to write within the form of a system to the original energies of the tractate, which, developing at the same time as the mosaic in the West, shared with the mosaic and the stained glass window the same principle of representation: a number of pieces – which congealed, in the tractate’s case, around certain authoritative or sacred citations – were arranged so that their systematic unity only appeared in juxtaposition, which is to say that the unity is extruded onto some external observer. What this means is that the pieces, seen individually and from within, may seem to be little complete bubbles in themselves, little snow globes, but that they are really parts of a grander schema and their meanings are not self contained after all, but partial. The whole meaning supervenes only when the all of the parts are juxtaposed. And all of the parts are juxtaposed when the demon of the lateral ceases to whisper in your ear.

Although cultural historians conventionally ascribe an organic unity to the Middle Ages, in reality, this form of unity-in-pieces is completely mechanical. What I like about the tractate is that it comprehends the essay and the aphorism. It builds not towards the muted shock of the logical conclusion, but instead towards the naked shock of the ‘line’- that is, the quote, the citation, in which ‘proof’ (the prestige of which derives from the institutionalization of truth) is transformed into the beautiful gesture (the prestige of which derives from the anarchy of individual experience). This is the dream of all clerks, all those who sit at desks, all the white collar crowd, all the agents of circulation, whether they admit it, or rather, act on it, or not. It is their clerkly terror and glory.

So I talked to A. about this. She’d been telling me that I should talk to her about what was on my mind.
I said this, approximately. At first, when I was considering this book simply as a sort of mythography following the figure of homo economicus, it seemed simple. I would ask why the term appeared in the 1890s, and then relate it to the turn in economics that was coordinate with the beginning of the consumerist phase of capitalism – which I interpret as the beginning of the modernist distancing from production, on the same order as the distancing from nature. I would point to how this figure, which admittedly describes only a few of the characteristics of any real person, has been used to create policy, and thus imposed as a model on populations that are humanly resistant to it. I would then use the notion of matrixes of exchange to explore the continuing existence of ‘non’ rational forms of exchange, with the idea that these are not non-rational at all, and that the viability of capitalist society depends on the fact that there are a diversity of exchange systems.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do something a little more fun. So my second version of this project was to emphasize character formation under capitalism. Returning to the thesis that modernization has occurred under the sign of two removes, I thought I’d use Marx’s notion of the agent of circulation – the clerk, the salesman, the lower white collar employee – as the social niche in which the figure of the homo economicus has the greatest impact and, at the same time, creates the greatest repulsion. The logic of circulation is the logic of demand – which is how the organs of the media originally branch off and become the productive shadow of this segment of the total circulation of commodities. Establishing this link between the agent of media and the agent of circulation is important, as the quantitative character-shaping force of economic man and his counterparts in capitalist society are a result of the quantitatively greater penetration of media into the private life.

Thus, the essays in The Tears of Homo Economicus will cover a great deal of literary and sociological material, bathed in my associations as a reader and dumbfounded citizen of my time, in the service of a relatively small number of theses. Somehow, this should be do-able.