an excrement in potentia

I’ve been thinking about the fact that two English philosophers – Shaftesbury and John Stuart Mill – were subjected, when young, to the educational regime of two other English philosophers: John Locke and James Mill.

As far as I can tell, John Stuart Mill paid little attention to Shaftesbury. He certainly didn’t know of Shaftesbury’s strange notebooks, the Philosophical Regimen, as they were called by their first editor, Benjamin Rand, although Shaftesbury called them the Askemata, or Exercises. I'v e previously written about this, and thought I'd reproduce the following:

Ginzburg did not include Shaftesbury in his brilliant essay on the geneology of Estrangement as a literary device, in which he traces, link by link, the connection between the Stoic practices recorded by Marcus Aurelius and the formalist notion of “making strange”, that formula which was so important to Victor Shklovsky. However, Ginzburg’s explanation of the Stoic method – a method that is neither dialectical nor introspective nor, quite, logical - can easily be applied to Shaftesbury's Philosophical Regimen:

“Epictetus, the philosopher-slave whose ideas profoundly influenced Marcus Aurelius, maintained that this striking out or rearsure of imaginary representations was a necessary step in the quest for an exact perception of things. This is how Marcus Aurelius describes the successive stages:

“Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse that is drawing you like a puppet. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour.”

Each of these injunctions required the adoption of a specific moral technique aimed at acquiring mastery over the passions...”

Shaftesbury’s method and madness converge on an operating table in which the writer is both surgeon and patient. One notices that the direction of the Stoic move – of wiping away impressions – is the opposite of the direction of the Lockean idea – which builds outwards from a presumed tabula rasa. For Shaftesbury, the Lockean notion that in our minds we build the world anew (an implication that finds its political expression in Tom Paine) can’t possibly be true. The world is the more certain fact, and its impingement upon the mind comes in the form of impressions that are distorting – rather than the sole hermeneutical resource with which we make our uncertain way through the world. In the PR, Shaftesbury’s exercises literally apply Marcus Aurelius’s suggestions, and reference the idea of viewing things “as from a height.” The aftershocks of the clash between Locke's experience (which, for Shaftesbury, is a false kind of innocence) and the Stoic dissection of experience can be felt in the question marks that swarm all over Shaftesbury’s text. They seem like so many jabs into the simulacra of the philosopher patient, the wax doll upon which he intends to operate in order to effect a ritual cleansing. Here’s a passage from the notes on “Deity”. It comes just after a passage comparing the Deists and the Epicureans – “Atoms and void. A plain negative to the Deity, fair and honest. To Deism, still no pretence. So the sceptic....
“From whence then this other pretence? Who are these Deists? How assume the name? By what title or pretence? The world, the world? say what? how? A modified lump? matter? motion? – What is all this? Substance what? Who knows? why these evasions? subterfuges with words? definitions of things never to be defined? structures or no foundations? Come to what is plain. Be plain. For the idea itself is plain; the question plain; and such as everyone has invariably some answer to which it is decisive. Mind? or not mind? If mind, a providence, the idea perfect: a God. If not mind, what in the place? For whatever it be, it cannot without absurdity be called God or Deity; nor the opinion without absurdity be called Deism.” (38-39)

While we recognize both Marcus Aurelius's exercise and the grammatical echoes of the great Carolinean preachers - Donne, Taylor - the effect of this continually interrupted movement, this play of thought that tears at itself, over pages, is of a sort of self-cutting. One can’t help but wonder whether the voices at play, here, don’t include Locke's voice from the nursery. A voice which we know from Locke's work on education, which was confessedly based on his experience teaching the Shaftesbury children. This is Locke:
“Familiarity of discourse, if it can become a father to his son, may much more be condescended to by a tutor to his pupil. All their time together should not be spent in reading of lectures, and magisterially dictating to him what he is to observe and follow. Hearing him in his turn, and using him to reason about what is propos’d, will make the rules go down the easier and sink the deeper, and will give him a liking to study and instruction: And he will then begin to value knowledge, when he sees that it enables him to discourse, and he finds the pleasure and credit of bearing a part in the conversation, and of having his reasons sometimes approv’d and hearken’d to; particularly in morality, prudence, and breeding, cases should be put to him, and his judgment ask’d. This opens the understanding better than maxims, how well soever explain’d, and settles the rules better in the memory for practice. This way lets things into the mind which stick there, and retain their evidence with them; whereas words at best are faint representations, being not so much as the true shadows of things, and are much sooner forgotten. He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos’d, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor’s lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.”


Wit and false colours. Which, of course, are just what is defended in Shaftesbury's Sensus Communis. One might wonder how one gets from the severities of the stoic operating table to the epigrams of the drawing room - this has puzzled Shaftesbury's commentators, at least. The key is to follow not the thread of that truth which is discovered by a process of corresponding idea to object, according to the narrow procedures of proof, but to take a broader, more social sense of proof into account. Wit is a trial. A trial is a different thing than the amassing of proofs, which is the sort of activity done by the police or prosecutor before a trial. Trials are about guilt and innocence, which is the context in which truth gains its social footing. Thus, trials are dramas about character and circumstances. Trials are part of the world as theater. And the world is a place of infinite and not so converging impressions. Here is the gap, the little peephole, into souls, and for souls, truth alone is not enough. Truth won't give us seriousness. Which is why we need other methods more appropriate to our theatrical world. Which is why we need wit. The test of opinion is in the struggle between the serious and the absurd. This is a point to which Shaftesbury returns time and again in defending wit as the kind of thing that is consistent with common sense: ridicule drives an opinion to the point at which it becomes ridiculous, or extravagant. It drives it outside the bounds of common sense. It makes it a scapegoat. It expels it.

Yet Shaftesbury is careful not to confuse absurdity with falsity. An opinion doesn’t have to be untrue to be absurd. In the infinitesimal separation, there lodges an infinite meaning, because it presents another dimension of reason, one in which the terms concern the serious and the absurd. It is in that dimension that LI sees the glimmer of what Durkheim called the sacred. The spirits at work in the festival of mockery are the spirits of the sacred and the profane, and the shock of mocking opinion, especially one’s own, is derived from the sense of profanation, of de-consecration.

The trial of opinion by wit is parallel to the trial of the mind by the body, as this is laid out in the Philosophical Regimen. “Nature has joined thee to such a body, such as it is. The supreme mind would have it that this should be the trial and exercis of inferior minds. It has given thee thine; not just at hand, or as when they say into one’s mouth; not just in the way so as to be stumbled on by good luck; not so easily either, but so as thou mayst reach it; so as within thy power, within command. See! Here are the incumbrances. This is the condition, the bargain, terms. Is the prize worth contending for? or what will become of me if I do not contend? How if the stream carries me down? how if wholly plunged in this gulf? What will be my condition then? what, when given up to body, when all body, and not a motion, not a thought, not one generous consideration or sentiment besides?” That gulf, as Shaftesbury points out at the beginning of the section on the body, is one composed of shit. The body is an excrement in potentia

“And as from the parts of the body, so also abstract it from the whole body itself, an excrement in seed, already half being, half putrefaction, half corruption. Thus be persuaded of this: that I (the real I) am not a certain figure, nor mass, nor hair, nor nails, nor flesh, nor limbs, nor body; but mind, thought, intellect, reason; what remains but that I should say to this body and all the pompous funeral, nuptial, festival (or whatever other) rites attending it, “This is body. These are the body only. The body gives life to them, exalts them, gives them their vigour, force, power and very being.”

The trial of the mind proposed here will follow a body’s logic, which is the logic of juxtapositions. Throughout the Regimen, the thought of the simultaneous and the all – that gaze down from the height – operates to create a world wide absurdity, a feeling of disgust, of a crowd of potential excrement increasing at every moment:

“Consider the number of animals that live and draw their breath, and to whom belongs that which we call life, for which we are so much concerned; beasts, insects, the swarm of mankind sticking to this earth, the number of males and females in copulation, the number of females in delivery, and the number of both sexes in this one and the same instant expiring and at their last gasp’ the shrieks, cries, voices of pleasure, shoutings, groans nd the mixed noise of all of these together. Think of the number of those tht died before thou wert or since; how many of those that came into the world at the same time and since; and of those now alive, what alteration. Consider the faces of those of thye acquaintance as thou sawest them some years since; how changed since then! how macerated and decayed! All is corruption and rottenness; nothing at a stay, but continued changes; and changes renew the face of the world.” (257)

And as always, Shaftesbury’s move is to put these notions in a scene, sketched rapidly.

Life is as those that live it. What are those? What are we? Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati. Tolerable carrion; fit to be let live. Honest poor rascals not so bad as when they say “scarce worth the hanging.” Life-worthy persons, if a bare liveable life. But say, what are we? What do we make of ourselves? How esteem ourselves? Warm flesh, with feelings, aches, and appetites. The puppet – play of fancies. O the solemn, the grave, the ponderous business. – Complex ideas, dreams, hobby-horses, houses of cards, steeples and cupolas. – The serious play of life. – Shows, spectacles, rites, formalities, processions; children playing at bugbears, frighting one another through masks. The heard, priests, cryer. The trump of fame; the squeaking trumpet and cat-call; the gowns! habits! robes! How underneath? How in the nightcaps, between the curtains and sleeps? How anon in the family with wife, servants, children, o where even none of these must see? Private pleasures, other privacies? the closet and bed-chamber, parlours, dining-rooms, dressing-rooms, and other rooms. In sickness, the lazy hours, in wines, in lecher? taking in, letting out- O the august assembly; each of you, such as you are apart!” (258-259)

The wit of Sensus Communis and the reductions and division of the Philosophical Regimen are attempts not only to find a place for profanation, but – in as much as absurdity is a proxy for the profane – to come back to the serious as a form of the sacred.

Doormen of genius

The great wheel of circulation is altogether different from the goods which are circulated by means of it. The revenue of the society consists altogether in those goods, and not in the wheel which circulates them. – Adam Smith

How can we reconcile what Simmel says about the lengthening of the means – the lengthening of the instrumental interval – to ends in capitalism with our experience of what Marx pointed out again and again – that capitalism becomes a global second nature that conceals the system of production under the great wheel of circulation? For, starting from Marx’s perception, we notice that everything seems speeded up, and not slowed down, in capitalism. For Shylock and Bassanio, a bet on cargo would take months to come to some end – but for a Jerome Kerviel, hundreds of millions of dollars can be bet and lost or won on bundles of financial instruments in the course of a day merely by using a cursor. The sugar I put in my coffee today came Saint Louis, a company that refines and distributes sugar derived from beets cultivated in Europe, while the coffee came from Peru. Both were purchased at the Monoprix down the street. The logistical network by which both products could be refined, packaged, trucked to stores and finally end up consumed on my table is only intermittently visible to anyone – it is visible in the truck that unloads the packages and the store clerks who stock it – it is visible to the rural proles who harvest the beans, picturesquely dressed in colorful and characteristic clothing and smiling (according to the image on the package) (although in reality probably wearing tee shirts that say Harvard or Hard Rock Café or something similar and blue jeans, part of the vast dump of tee shirts throughout the undeveloped economies), and visible as digits displayed on a screen to accountants at the company and stock market traders. All of which means that as Simmel’s teleological series are lengthening, they are also producing the appearance of temporal shortening – they are faster. The faster they are, the more they are lengthened – this is one of the paradoxes of capitalism.

It is a paradox that, as well, impinges on the novelistic representation of the Great Transformation. Lukacs, in the Theory of the Novel, speaks a little mysteriously of the various regimes of “distance” between the hero and the meaning of life in the epic, the tragedy, and the novel. This distance is, I think, an expression of the teleological chains that Simmel saw on the surface of life in a fully monetized society. For the epic and the tragic hero, the quest is to understand the sense of life in the face of fate – the world here consists of large, or one might say, royal contingencies. But for the novelistic hero, fate doesn’t have the same totalizing meaning – it has, instead, a dispersing meaning.

“For life, gravity means: the absense of any present sense, the indissoluble enclosure in senseless causal connections, the withering in fruitless nearness to earth and farness from heaven, the having to endure in not being able to liberate oneself from the irons of simple brutal materiality from that which for the best immanent forces of life is the continual goal of overcoming: expressed with the value concept of form – triviality.”

Baudelaire said that Balzac’s novels are distinguished from the usual novel of moeurs by the fact that Balzac’s delight in the massive triviality of material circumstances transforms them into signs and symbols of genius: “All his personages are endowed with a vital ardor by which he is himself animated. All his fictions are as profoundly colored as dreams. From the summit of the aristocracy to the plebes at the bottom, all the actors of his Comedy are more eager for life, more active and clever in struggle, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In brief, each, with Balzac, even the doormen, have genius.”

Baudelaire is a very surefooted critic. Wilde obviously copies Baudelaire here in his famous essay on the Decay of Lying, and Wilde was as cunning as a jewel thief when it came to copping the shiny bits of his predecessors. But though I am sure that Baudelaire is correct about the excess in Balzac, I am not sure that this excess did not flow back into life – or rather, I am not sure that Balzac was not simply being prophetic. Proust thought so – thought that the aristocracy absorbed Balzac’s aristocrats into the norms of their own behavior. The transmission, here, was obviously through a literacy and taste that one might not suppose in the doormen. But could it be… could it be that the burden of trivia itself imposed a struggle upon them such that the result, under the Great Transformation, in the midst of teleological chains that were both lengthening and shortening – in an Alice in Wonderland world – was that genius became a job requirement of the doormen of Paris, London or New York? In comparison to the Sganarelles and Figaros of the old order, at least.

revelatory preferances

As economists with a psychological bent have discovered, there is a problem with the way economists talk about preferences. Preferences in the neo-classic paradigm, codified by Arrow and Debreu, are invariant and logically sorted by a simple transitivity rule, so that if preference a is preferred to b and b to c, a is preferred to c. There is no test ‘in the wild’ that has ever reproduced this theorem.

However, economists generally dismiss tests in the wild as non-relevant, for, they claim, either the psychological tests that show non-transitivity are due to the special circumstances of the experiment itself, or empirical non-transitivity itself doesn’t count, because models that are transitive approximate the collective reality of markets.

There is, however, another problem with the idea of ‘choice’ as it is used in mainstream economics. It divorces consumption from what Simmel considered one of the hallmarks of modernity: the increase in both the number of links and the complexity of links that leads from means to ends. Simmel considers that money triumphs as an institution in modern society because it forms a perfect means in the midst of the tangle of means and purposes.

For the economist, revealed preferences have a certain dead-endedness – whether one buys a commodity for another end, or for itself alone makes no difference to the economic analysis of the transaction. But it is easy to see that this can’t be true. It isn’t simply that there is a difference between a company buying coal to make steel with – which, though a consumption of coal, leads to another purpose that will have a global effect on the purchase of the coal – but it is also true that satisfaction, or marginal utility, is also effected by the means-end chain.

As Simmel points out, for the individual, there is a divide between the logic of purposes, in which an overall purpose gives meaning and direction to a chain of means, and the emotional and motivational logic of means, in which means as stages in which one must act in a certain way have to be endured or enacted with a purposiveness in their own right that absorbs energy. Indeed, it is a common experience for those who finish a long task, say, writing a book or even simply an article, to feel a letdown at the end of the process, as one is simultaneously freed from exerting one’s energy and attention to the matter at hand and at the same time left with a sort of unguided and unstructured moment. The moment is not a vacation – it is a crowning, a finish, an ending. And yet it doesn’t give one anything to do.

But of course there is more to Simmel’s point than this. Much of the modern life-story is taken up with long-term projects of consumption towards some end. College students, for example, are encouraged from the very beginning to aim at some degree, which is in turn seen as the key to a job. And yet, as the degree is years off, it would be difficult to make a calculation to understand just how much time and energy one should spend on each step. Not that something like this doesn’t happen – a computer science student in an elective English literature class is very often a study in someone who has calculated exactly how little time needs to be spent on a subject that is only a lightly weighted means to his end. Of course, this student intersects with a teacher whose purpose is, in fact, exactly to teach that English literature class. Modern life is full of what we might call purposive jams – like traffic jams, they consist of people who, jostling one another, are going different places but find themselves within the limits of the same narrow situation.

The series of means is also susceptible to another contingency: polysemy. For as the steps, the means, to these longer ends are situations, they also have a multitude of affordances. The student might, by some miracle, fall in love with English literature, which would change his purposes entirely. This is a reality that doesn’t fall under revealed preferences, but quite the reverse – the preference itself is revelatory.

The adventure of modern life begins with revelatory preferences.

Freedom and money

And everywhere we go people be like damn where you from, where you from
I'm from moneyland
So give me some money, man


In the last post in this series, I wrote about Caillois’s sense of the morphology of the game. Whether it is the triangle of baseball, the rectangle of the football field, or the strew of different bits of plastic models under the Christmas tree, play ultimately forms a circle about itself, much like God – that archetype of the circle in which the center is nowhere and everywhere.

As I also pointed out, one of the grounds of play, in Caillois’ schema – the freedom of choosing to play – seems to have a deep connection to one of the grounds of modern capitalism in Marx’s view – free labor. The player’s choice to obey certain rules – whether scripted or spontaneous – and the laborer’s choice to sell a certain product for money – one’s ‘time – both give us moments of relative freedom, the bounds of which are determined in the system in operation.

Georg Simmel was also attracted to social ‘morphology’ – to hubs and linkages, to circles and the social meaning of encirclement. One catches a glimpse of the idea of the ‘encircling’ institution in the Philosophy of Money. There, Simmel presses on the parallelism of three social factors in modernity: law, money, and education, the latter of which bears the guises of science, culture, and ‘intelligence’. The parallelism begins with the ‘leveling’ logic to which they are all subject. Thagt is, they operate on the principal of equalization. The law ideally views all those subject to it as equal; all commodities are equally buyable by money, even if by different amounts; and the content of intelligence is defined as such by being equally true for all who gain access to it. In modernity, then, the legitimation of hierarchy is derived from quantity rather than quality, to put it in vulgar Hegelian terms.

But this quantitative aspect is deceptive – behind the piles of money or the IQ test, there lurk social mechanisms that are certainly qualitative, disciplinary, and positional in more than quantitative terms. I have been pondering this equality in terms of the idea of the encircling institution. In the premodern landscape, the police, schools, and money were, of course, present, but they were not omnipresent. They did not have an enclosing nature. All three, however, developed in tandem with each other within the modern state, especially after the French Revolution. By this I mean that they ‘touched’ everyone. Where before – as one can see by reading, for instance, Mazzoni’s The Betrothed – great patches of Italy had literally no law enforcement at all, which was as true for England, Scotland, Massachussetts and Russia, etc. In addition, these kingdoms, city states and colonies were mainly rural, with economies that could be and was run with little reference to money as such. And, finally, there was no school system set up did not service the population as a whole of the European states (except for Holland) until the early nineteenth century. Then, in the U.S., in Prussia, and later than that in France and England, literacy, the greatest of all impositions on the Little Tradition by the Great Tradition, became theoretically mandatory. And even then, it is surprising, when one looks at the statistics, how few people were processed through higher education. A scientist in France in 1888 could well have met all the specialists in his field, or at least all those with diplomas: there was relatively few.

What is important to remember is that all three encircling institutions were put in place on a national scale by the end of the nineteenth century. One of the morphological mistakes of orthodox Marxism is to consider this a matter not of circles, but of a vertical constructs – hence, the famed structure/superstructure idea. Marx himself used this image not as a permanent heuristic but as a heuristic at hand to get to the notion of class. It is, however, certainly not indispensable, and a firmer sense of the circulation of commodities erodes that image.

I began this post with a reference to freedom. Heine, as I pointed out weeks and weeks ago, usefully analyzes freedom in terms of privacy, equality, and utopia (and here I am simplifying his simplification). Simmel takes a materialist approach to freedom that helps us understand the coupling of freedom and encirclement. Like everything Simmel writes in The Philosophy of Money, the insight tends to get buried in a very confusing style of topical presentation – a style that yearns to be aphoristic and that takes on its systematic duties as almost a punishment, which is then meted out to the reader. Myself, I understand how one can beat one’s wings against the cage of the dullest prose: but in life there is rhapsody, and there is taking out the garbage, and one should try, when possible, not to confuse the two.

In my next post, I think, or the next at least in this series, we will discuss freedom and money

Some rambling notes on entanglement

In 1991, an anthropologist, Nicholas Thomas, wrote a book entitled “Entangled Objects” in which he proposed that other dimensions of commodity exchange exist outside of what is usually analyzed in terms of production and circulation. That is, objects are entangled with other objects and situations to a degree that confounded both the theory of revealed preference and the Marxist analysis of surplus value, the latter of which held production and circulation too far apart, the former of which had forgotten production and overlapping markets altogether. 

 The idea of entanglement was taken up by two different economic sociologists, Daniel Miller and Michel Callon, who have clashed about just what it means. Callon, who is better known, is one of the architects of Actor Network Theory, has made field studies of fishermen and stock brokers to study markets and producers. His theory of markets, based in this research, accords a great role to what he calls the performativity of economics models – that is, economists model transactions according to theories of rational choice and then real markets are molded to adhere to the model. It is a sort of para-Dorian Gray effect, with the wickedness of the economist showing up in the way market participates in a particular market identify themselves. Miller has developed what he calls a virtual theory of markets – by which he means that transactions that are framed as exchanges in a market are so framed by the abstractions of economics, which paints a virtual picture of economic reality and works to make the latter conform to the former. 

Miller, unlike Callon, does not give the market framing any ontological privilege. Thus, he resists the whole idea that the market describes anything more than a locale in which commodities are exchanged.

 For both thinkers, the way objects are entangled in production and the symbolic realm make the neo-classical claim about the exchange of commodities unrealistic. Both writers are engaged in what Mill called ethology; unlike Mill, however, both Miller and Callon think that there is an experimental dimension to economic theory, which is enacted or performed in real transfers of objects.

The polemic between Miller and Callon has crystallized around an example, introduced by Miller - a transaction that does not, as it happens, involve the cowry shells beloved by economic anthrologists: the buying of a Renault automobile. 

 That it is a Renault instead of a Honda or a Ford is a sign that this is, among other things, a transatlantic debate. The French car gives us a vaguely French buyer – in Miller’s example, a woman named Sophie, who accrues a profile that would make her ideal for an Oprah interview: “So let us imagine the case of Sophie buying a Renault. What are the factors that determine Sophie’s selection of this car and the price she is prepared to pay for it? Sophie is recently divorced and, while she has kept possession of the family house, her ex-husband kept the car. Her income is now much restricted so the Renault will be a small one. This is an important decision for her, one of the most signicant purchases she has made for a while. For one thing she is suddenly redefining her image as an individual as against being a ‘partner’ in a relationship. So the aesthetics and the image of the car are important as a decision about her outward appearance, and many of her friends are very stylish. She is quite proud of that element of nationalism that leads her towards buying a French car, with a confidence bolstered by recent victories in football. So she is clear that she wants a Renault as opposed to say a Fiat or Toyota. Also the car is becoming ever more important to her since her two children are growing to an age where much of her parenting consists of chauffeuring them around to friends and activities, so the car must function well to facilitate her daily responsibilities (Maxwell 2001). Also she has realized that car journeys are actually the main time when she listens to loud music so the sound system in the car is perhaps more important than the hi-fi. in her home (Bull 2001). Sophie is also (to an admittedly rather mild degree) a bit of an environmentalist so that some of the ‘costs’ of the car, which are normally regarded as externalities, are internal to her equation. She wants an efficient engine principally to save her own petrol costs but also she is happy that this is for the sake of the earth as well as for the sake of her budget.” [“Turning Callon Right side up” ] 

 I will overlook the oddly sappy terms in which Sophie’s character is described, although they have the glaze of self-help psychology – Sophie is, as E.M. Forster might put it, a thin character, and she is all the thinner for being “confident”, or ‘happy for the sake of the earth’, that her car has good gas mileage,etc. Oddly, Miller, who has done ethnographic fieldwork, seems uninterested in saying exactly what the ‘earth’ means to Sophie. However, aside from Sophie’s cartoonishness, Miller’s portrait is distinguished by a lack of noticing both the material situation in which his purchaser makes her purchase – where does Sophie live, anyway? – and a blind spot so large as to be puzzling: Sophie is not ‘purchasing’ a car, if she is a normal car buyer – she is taking out a loan. That new cars are big ticket items for most drivers, and that they are entangled, at both ends of the market transaction (that is, the ends designated by the seller and the buyer) is, one would think, one of the primary entanglements of this transaction. It is one of the reasons that the disentanglement is so doubted by Miller and so easily imagined by Callon: 

"As noted elsewhere, the object of the transaction may be a service, irrespective of how ‘immaterial’ it may seem. For example in Sophie’s case the sale may include a leasing contract or after-sales services. But since all that is specified and qualified, salespersons and buyers are quits once the transaction has been completed. In other words... the disentanglement of the car from the seller’s complicated and heterogeneous world is accomplished. And this is because the goods are detached and reattached that the two agencies become quits: the two processes are strongly intertwined. In other words it is quite impossible to separate the two issues of the embeddedness and of the alienation of (commercial) goods.” 

 Callon’s borrowing of the term agencement from Deleuze is one way to grasp the fact that choice or consumption is only one dimension of the economy – production is the other. Marx and the classical economists knew this well; the neo-classicals have erected an entire science on forgetting it. Yet Callon, too, envisions a checkbook and the alienation of property, as though Sophie were buying a steak. The checkbook brings into this transaction a bank; it should also bring into this transaction the seller’s terms, which will certainly include an interest rate. Callon mentions the lender's terms, but doesn't seem to understand that alienation here is a highly conditioned term. Sophie operates, as we all do, in a world in which purchase is not a matter of being endowed with a supply of funds equal to one’s desire for goods, but rather in a world in which one’s continuing supply of income makes one suitable for funds flowing from other parties – banks, credit card companies, the automaker’s own lending unit – which in turn leads to secondary transactions – the bundling of loans into larger financial products that can be sold amongst parties in such derivative markets – and so on. At the time Callon published his refutation of Miller, in 2005, there was something like 300 trillion dollars of derivates contracts being traded “out there” . The entanglement of supposedly separate markets impinged, virtually, on every big ticket transaction. If Sophie were living in Dublin and buying a Range Rover, in 2011 the taxes she paid would be going to pay off bad bets made by bad Irish banks who had plunged into the credit markets that, at some point, serviced the big ticket purchases of people like Sophie – as well as the small credit card purchases. This makes it all the more interesting that economists model a market – rather than the tangle of markets that actually exist – and insist on a highly unrealistic notion of the individual revealing preferences in these simple to disentangle, recognizable markets, when of course they are operating in ways they are not sure of in markets that they cannot overview to make purchases that they ‘prefer’ due to the existential structures in which they are embedded. To trust, then, that they reveal a preference, here, is like understanding the Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg by assuming that a number of soldiers from a number of Southern states had decided, on their own, that it was a good time to take a stroll across a Pennsylvania meadow. 

The notion of entanglement helps us see how circulation and production in capitalism have, over the nineteenth and twentieth century, shaped certain ‘ideal types’: producers, middle persons, clerks and lawyers and doctors,  consumers, etc.  One of the characteristics of those types is that they have learned to navigate the hyperconnectivity of capitalism. But they have not learned, even on the level of economics, to understand it. Take someone who is supposedly much more sophisticated than Sophie: Larry Summers. I was struck by one of Summer’s responses in the brief interview with him in the NYT Sunday magazine. You have been cast as the heavy in documentaries like “Inside Job” and on “Frontline” for sowing the seeds of the economic crisis during the Clinton administration. You were against regulating derivatives and in support of repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which significantly relaxed how banks do business. Did they miss the mark by casting you in this light? 

"Oh, these are much more complicated issues than those kinds of movies can suggest. Canada, for example, is generally pointed to as a major regulatory success. But it’s got universal banking that goes considerably beyond the Glass-Steagall reforms that happened in the United States. The major accidents in the United States — Bear Stearns, Lehman, Fannie and Freddie — had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall. Did we 10 years ago foresee everything that happened with respect to derivatives? Absolutely not." 

Summer’s is right that these are complicated issues. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand their complication. The question that is posed, here, is: is there an entanglement between deregulating banks and allowing them to expand their services in all directions so that any crisis they experience will be violently transmitted through the economy and deregulating mortgage markets and derivatives so that they will be free to make riskier investments? And behind this, the larger question: why even have banks if the capital they mobilize is invested, incestuously, in a pyramid of bets about the capital they mobilize? Does this create a perverse incentive to keep the financial services sector from investing in longer range projects – thus creating a huge barrier to long term Research and Development by making it an unattractive investment? 

 Summers, of course, might have some inkling of these things. But he really can’t connect two things that are modularly separated by his models. Over here we have the separation between investment banks and commercial banks, and over here we have a market in financial instruments that, on the consumer end, deregulates the process of mortgage lending, and, on the other end, creates unregulated opportunities for derivatives of ‘real’ financial instruments to be traded back and forth for profit, but no real social gain. Every economist gets trained, through modeling, to bracket and separate factors that the economist knows, in reality, are interrelated. This is done, firstly, in order to build and make models work. But somewhere along the way, they begin to think that these separations and divisions actually reflect reality. Hence, their policymaking is always done on the principle that the economy is a modular system, without any thought about the fact that it is also a highly interconnected system. Summers simply can’t think through the proposition that he was the architect of a malign coupling – big banks, stinking financial instruments – and thus reverts to the logic of analogy beloved by those pushing bad policy. Analogy pushing has evidently moved on from the glory days, in which our occupation of Iraq was just like occupying Germany after WWII. It is now an excuse for turning a blind eye to the essential and massive dysfunction of financial markets. And this, in turn, manufactures a bigger blind eye, in which our supposedly ‘neo-liberal’ government, virtuously shunning central planning and ‘industrial policy’, actually operates a very intense industrial policy that is centered on promoting financial services.  

I wrote the bulk of this in 2012. And in this year, 2021, we still don't see entanglement taken very seriously, even as we live in its virtues and vices. This is where a training in Marx is a virtue, and an ignorance of Marx is a vice - for Marx, at least, had a systematic view of capitalism, while the orthodox political economist has only a mythical monster called a market. And so we go into our world-changing future with this primitive intellectual tool, which is scary. 

Music of the spheres

Caillois’ notion of play and games, outlined in Games and Man, attracted an influential attack, “Homo Ludens Revisited”, by Jacques Ehrman in 1968. Ehrman’s article is one of the first really deconstructive articles published in America. It appeared in the Yale French Review, which was establishing itself at the time as the bridgehead of a Tel Quel sensibility in the United States.

The attack took on the underlying binaries, such as Ehrman saw them, in Caillois’ essay. The strategy of showing an underlying incoherence in the binaries, either as an overlap of their extensions or as an insufficient motivation for the arguments based upon them – either as too much or too little – went on to become a common feature of American literary criticism. Deconstruction in America became a form of demasking – which is an especially pertinent term for the criticism of an essay that poses the question of the function of the mask.

Ehrman ostensively directs his attack at Huinzinga, but the emotional onus is really on Caillois. Here’s where we begin:

“Play or seriousness. This alternative is sometimes treated as a dialectic: play and seriousness which, in turn, implies a whole series of others: gratuitousness and/or utility; play and/or work; play and/ or everyday life; the imaginary and/or the real; etc. . . . The concepts here placed in opposition or in parallel are found constantly in Huizinga - as in Caillois, moreover, and in an even more pronounced way, since the latter's definition and classifications of play lead him, as we have indicated, to delimit too categorically the sphere of play by opposing it to the real, to work, and so forth.”

Ehrman develops his criticism in terms of the idea that one cannot call upon the real or the serious to do one’s conceptual work, as these terms are both too vague and too all encompassing. If play exists, it must, by definition, exist in everyday life – and thus play cannot be defined over against everyday life.

“For finally, if the status of "ordinary life," of "reality," is not thrown into question in the very movement of thought given over to play, the theoretical, logical, and anthropological bases on which this thinking is based can only be extremely precarious and contestable. In other words, we are criticizing these authors chiefly and most seriously for considering "reality," the "real," as a given component of the problem, as a referent needing no discussion, as a matter of course, neutral and objective. They define play in opposition to, on the basis of, or in relation to this so-called reality. As the criteria against which play is measured are external to it, its nature remains necessarily second in relation to the "reality" that serves as its yard- stick and is therefore considered "primary" (cf. Huizinga: "Play al- ways represents something," p. 35). But it is legitimate to wonder by what right "reality" may be said to be first, existing prior to its components - play in this case (although it might just as well be some other object of the social sciences) - and serving as their standard”

In moving from criticizing the vagueness of ‘ordinary life” to the implicit claim that play puts it into question, however, Ehrman opens himself up to the charge that some supposition, here, is being assumed rather than argued for. For what does Ehrman mean by the ‘status’ of ordinary life? Is it the status of something that doesn’t exist? And how does this status exist? In what society or culture? If it is the culture that allows Caillois and Huizinga to use these terms (and their allied syntagmas – in particular, work) is unmasked by Ehrman, he perhaps owes us an account of this status and its construction. But no geneology is forthcoming in Ehrman’s essay. Nor is there any attempt to overview Caillois’ essay beyond remarking on the ideologically motivated argument that defines play in opposition to work, games in opposition to ‘the real’, the ludic in opposition to the earnest, etc.

I can grant Ehrman’s objections to the unanalyzed role taken by those oppositions in structuring the argument that Caillois makes, but I am, as well, unconvinced that the contradictions or tensions here vitiate the essay. In fact, the essay produces what I would call doxic moments – moments in which plausibility structures the conceptual given, rather than a logic of definition – in order to use its contradictions to build a history. And this is not an unworthy task, though it is shot through with a Eurocentric and ethnocentric vocabulary.

One should begin by putting Caillois’ essay in the context of his project, about which he wrote extensively: diagonal science. As we have noted, Caillois was attempting to create ‘transversal cuts” across the disciplines to explain or observe phenomena that are, indeed, obscured by the assumption that the division of the sciences corresponds, exhaustively, to the division of the natural kinds. In this, he is making a move that goes sharply against the definition of ‘seriousness’ as something appertaining to our present epistemological arrangements. He is, indeed, willing to risk appearing like a savant freak, a kook. At the base of this effort is Caillois’ sociological interest in the economy of sacrifice. Sacrifice and the sacred are constant preoccupations within his work. This, unfortunately, one would never know from the attack on the micro-level of the play essay by Ehrman.

Like many savant freaks, Caillois had a fondness for new classificatory schemes. The ‘science’ of games was, at the time he wrote his essay (1958), a terra incognita, an unnamed blank space, waiting for the first explorer to name its parts (a colonialist metaphor! And meant to be so, since there is no point in denying Caillois’ inheritance from a colonialist mindset, even as modified by an extensive acquaintanceship with anthropological reports). I have found some of those categories – such as ilynx, or vertigo – extremely helpful.

But what is missing in Caillois is a larger sense of how play or a game self-enclaves. Here, Ehrman is certainly correct, even if his categorical rejection that such a story is possible seems unwarranted. I think that Caillois can be usefully supplemented by Simmel’s hints about the three encircling institutions in modernity: the law, education, and money. Sphere calls to sphere, circle calls to circle – or evokes further circles, to use Caillois’ term. About which I will write more in my next post.

Amie's site

In the seventies, Roland Barthes turned to the particular and the neutral, towards fascination and love, which altogether formed the third stage in his ‘semiological adventure.’ Here, political engagement gave place to a hedonism that was also, of course, an openness to pain, for pain is the vulnerability intrinsic to pleasure, the complement as well as the adversary, the deepening and that out of which sweetness comes as a sort of startling new premise into the world – for if the world holds such sweetness, surely it must be a different and stranger place than one took it for. What one took it for was indifferent – because it is indifference, rather than pain, that is the real opposite of pleasure, its real annihilation. Pain and pleasure can both be unbearable, but indifference is all too bearable.

Pain, then, is also part of the process. In particular, the pain Barthes felt was the loss of the person he most loved his mother. The first photo in his 1975 book, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, is not of himself, but of his mother, alone, on the beach. In 1979, after she had died, Barthes looked back on that photo in La Chambre Claire. In section 25, he sets the scene of arranging photos of his mother after her death, writing that he did not ‘love’ any of them except the one “that I had published where one sees my mother, young, walking on the beach at Landres, and where I ‘rediscovered’ her walk, her health, her radiance…” The rest, however, were tugged by indifference, or what Barthes calls history – that space in which the ones we know are only, only jurisdictionally recognizable – one may testify that these are photos of one’s mother, but there is a fissure between that testimony and the mother one knows.

In this book on photography, Barthes develops the idea of the punctum. The punctum is another name for Barthes’ beloved ‘detail’ – the effect of the real, this time seen outside the framework of that eternal couple, nature and culture. The punctum is contrasted with the studium. We may read, or scan, a photo, but what interests us, he claims, is the moment when something is released from the picture, “like an arrow, and comes to pierce me.” The cut or wound of that arrow, and the point of the arrow, are both designated by punctum – it is the base of punctuation and of puncturing. It is the pick, the little hole, the little spot. The stain.

All of which brings me to the point of this post. My friend Amie died last year. I wrote about this in a post in December. I have no photograph of Amie – in fact, I don’t know what she looked like, I have her voice in her emails and comments but not her physical presence of its grain – and yet I have a stong and overwhelming sense that we were intellectual companions, and that what I was doing, in Limited Inc, trying to assemble a book, The Human Limit, had to do, by every sort of coincidence and sign, with her project and her reflections. Her project was writing a treatise of some kind on soundtracks, which would bring together her love – her taste – for certain films and her fascination with sound as meaning and accompaniment.

The puncture created by her death in my world may be a small detail – the hole that punctures a balloon may be only the width of the point of a needle – but it is a telling detail to me, a proportion of volume to loss that still astonishes me. And I resent death not only for taking Amie, but also for taking her unfairly, before she had her chance. I don’t forgive the world this.

In the face of that loss, Amie’s friends have set up a blog on which some of her writing is being put up. The site is called Peirates. Mark it reader.