public sanity, private insanity

I’m working on a job at the moment, translating a lecture by Didi-Huberman on Aby Warburg. Warburg fascinates me. He tempts my romantic side, my Gnostic side. Warburg was the son of a very rich banker who decided to go into anthropology and art history – who traveled to Taos in the 1890s to observe Pueblo rituals and who traveled to Florence in the 1900s to study Renaissance art. Already his work is disturbed by a strange spirit, a spirit that drove him into a five year stay in the insane asylum in the 1920s. He hallucinated that bits of the flesh of his family were mixed in among his food. And he also hallucinated that the Jews were going to be annihilated. Yes, among the flotsam and jetsam of symptoms, there was that one, that prophetic craziness, spilling out in his sessions with Dr. Binswanger. And I think that there is something about the voice of the most sane, our governors, about how they speak and think, that one has to go a bit crazy to hear. For it is something that isn’t sane at all, it is a mechanical grating, a noise from the underworld.

santa monica

The psychogeographer who comes aground in Santa Monica may be shown the ocean – it’s a mighty fine ocean – and the famous pier – it’s an awfully crowded pier – and perhaps 3^rd street, an outdoor street mall on European lines, if, that is, Mickey Mouse had designed Europe. But the guide is unlikely to take him to Main street and point out an office building that looks as bland and as soulless as any other office building. Which is a shame, because the psychogeographer, if he is any good, must have felt his fingers burning since he came ashore. Goethe said he wrote the Sorrows of Young Werther with burning fingers, for its only with burning fingers that one can catch hold of the signs and wonders of the age. And as psychogeography is all about intersigns, omens, Gnostic connections, this bland building in a sense towers over the city. Because this is the headquarters of Rand corporation – research and development corporation – that was founded by the Air Force almost in the flicker of the fires of Hiroshima. This is the second Rand building, remodeling the first, where the classic Randites of the forties and fifties gathered. It is Rand that made Santa Monica one of the minor capitals of the apocalypse. The one that never happened. In Anaheim, Disney was busy creating a vector into the child consciousness with which to stuff in Winnie the Pooh and commodity fetishism, preparing us all for our adult life. In Santa Monica, Rand was working another seam. Rand, in a sense, shaped the American sense of vulnerability, and definitely gave it a vocabulary. Counterforce. Second Strike. Deterrence. Mutually Assured Destruction. Failsafe. All terms that came out of the Rand think tank. It was a thinker at Rand who came up with the ICBM, a huge advance in the “delicate balance of terror” – another Rand phrase. And, in the sixties,  it was a Rand contractor who came up with the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam. The old death squads, for instance in Indonesia, were sloppy. Here, death squads were targeted and kill ratios were calculated. In a sense, Rand gave birth to the contemporary death squad – from the Argentine generals with their mini-concentration camps in schools and factories to the 2005-2007 American effort in Iraq. A bit of village or urban quartier torture, rape, and massacre, and voila – pacification!

So the properly informed psychogeographer will walk through the streets of Santa Monica and dream of Kenneth Arrow, who invented rational choice at RAND (and haven’t we all lived under the thumb of rational choice since?), or think of Albert Wohlstetter, he of the delicate balance of terror, who would come down from his ace pad on Laurel Canyon of a weekday morning. It was Wohlstetter who mentored Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.

And in the haze of this past, perhaps our intersigning flycatcher will jot down the prophecies of the graybearded black guy at Seven Eleven or the tourette’s illuminee at the corner of 9^th and Wilshire. It takes a maladjusted mind to know the heart of the heart of it all.

adam and the law

I’m not one of life’s naysayers. This is funny, because I have a very negative attitude – or at least I often have a negative attitude – but something about the word “no” is difficult for me. This was pointed out  to me in a recent discussion about Adam’s anarchic urge to suck on electric chords and put his mouth up to electric outlets. It is I understand not uncommon in babies. Also, I have a vague memory of how, at one point when I was a small kid, I liked to bite down on a penny because I sort of liked/didn’t like the coppery taste in my mouth – it was the way liking would go to disliking and back, it was an unbalanced taste – and I also liked the way it carried a sort of electric charge to the teeth that made me cringe a bit. However, I don’t think Adam is at that point yet. Still, here he is, our eleven month old, charging at electrical outlets, and what I do is I catch him and say, oh, you thought you were going to pull a fast one. And things like that. Instead of saying no, no, no!

What is it with no? I’d like to think that it is dialectically difficult, but maybe it is that I’m a natural enabler. A weak soul with a wobbly moral code.

A couple of days ago, we were up in Adam’s room and he spotted the electric outlet at the far end of the room and made a fast crawl in its direction, and I tried the no. No, Adam, I said. Unexpectedly, this caused Adam to nearly die with laughter. Nope, Adam, I said, and again the laugh – Adam has a very good laugh, an infectious laugh, he makes you want to make him laugh. He’d laugh, watching me, and then turn back to the electric outlet, and I’d say no, and he’d almost flip with how funny it was that Da was saying no.

Now, perhaps an eleven month old is not an oracle, but there was something here, something happening here, that was … well, a little unheimlich to yours truly. Could I be seen through so easily?

Jesus, of course, issues the classic judgment: “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” Jesus was not generally close to the Stoics, but here I see their trace. This may be the most un-Socratic of his sayings. On the other hand (the enabler’s great phrase!) one can see the reason for it as a rule of prudence. And yet, the saying comes in the great chapter 5 of Matthew, the chapter of the beatitudes, where the yea and nay logic is, to say the least, strained. On the one hand, there the law and the prophets is to be fulfilled, in the person of the Christ, and on the other hand, various laws, including the most important, the law of talion – eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth – are negated. Jesus seems to duck and weave among the inevitable ironies of rules and language. As who does not? For I say unto you, pulling up my socks and getting on my heels, even yea and nay have their infinite varieties. The rest – that about which we cannot speak – is exactly what we all speak about.

Which may be why Adam found me so hilarious in the role of lawgiver. Wait until I tell him about the law and the prophets!

Nudgery liberalism and its discontents

I read the review of This Town, the supposed expose of D.C.’s indealing establishment, by Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books, and I had to laugh. Like Ezra Klein, Tomasky, a “liberal”, is offended that the book ignores, as he puts it in his last graf: “… a city where everything isn’t a game, where everyone isn’t just in it for the money and the parties, and where many thousands of people do interesting work but don’t come within a whisper of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. They shape this town, too.”

In other words, what about the crew of neoliberal policymakers and think tankers and aides who work so hard.

I have to laugh. Granted some of them might not be in it just for the money – but what one really has to ask is why they are such abysmal failures. For the majority of  people in the U.S., life in 2013, in Obama’s second term, is worse on every quality of life category that counts than life was in 2000, or 2005. And life wasn’t so good then to begin with.

The era of the nudgery liberals seals, in a sense, the conservative dominance – the ice age – that has sucked out all our air since Reagan’s time. The trick has not been about the scale of the government – the trick has been about the retreat of the government to a private enterprise heaven of intermediaries, making government ‘more efficient’ with the full approval and seal of the Dems. Having responded to the fall of socialist heaven with the idea that government can play the role of sugar daddy to big business but direct that business, by a whole bag of treats, to give the working class a break has been an outstanding joke. But the D.C. libs don’t get the punch line.

To illustrate: There was a post in the Washington Post’s wonkblog the other day showing that, according to a Pew Research poll, the uninsured are about evenly divided in their support for or opposition to  Obamacare. Sarah Kliff, the writer, is concerned that Americans are very very confused about Obamacare. This may be so – it is a massively confusing substitute for single payer state run healthcare, such as Medicare. What else could one expect from a program that had its roots in Romneycare and its design in proposals made by Newt Gingrich in the 90s? But one thing that isn’t touched on in the polls or the article is at the real heart of the uninsured’s unease: you really can’t trust the government. Supposedly, the uninsured are going to be subsidized by the federal government so that they can fulfill the mandatory insurance provision. But the uninsured can read the paper. They can remember things. Things like Obama trying to cut back Social Security and Medicare as part of his grand bargain. Perhaps they can even remember the evisceration of welfare under Clinton. So the question is: if those subsidies are on the chopping block one day, would the Dems protect them? If the answer is no – and there is every reason to think that Obama’s grand bargain is the real Dem template – than what we would be left with is an inadequate subsidy and a real mandate requirement. It is quite easy to envision a Dem congress or president deciding that a little out of pocket money from the working class to keep their nifty hodgepodge of crappy private insurance companies going would be a small sacrifice.

Neoliberals in D.C., in other words, have undermined any confidence one might have in the supposedly liberal programs they support and devise. This is why the plea for the “thousands of people doing interesting work” falls, at least in my case, on deaf ears. Fuck em.

style

We bought a big semi-transparent plastic box in which to stash Adam’s growing stash of toys – his treasures, except that Adam is still too young to have even a glimmering of the meaning of primitive economics and its symbols Although perhaps it is I who am the prisoner of my concepts, here, since Adam thinks through his body as the neurons bloom there way inside, and he immediately knew that this box was itself a toy. It quickly became one of his favorites (besides the quickly snatched away electric chords and the dustpan that he has access to when his parents let down their guard and allows him in the kitchen).Adam uses the sides of the box to pull himself almost all the way to a standing position, and there he will totter for a moment, and then come down with a plop back into sitting position, pulling the box with him. At a tilt, all the objects in the box are accessible to his probing hands, and so the fun begins. Gently burbling to himself – and sometime making loud squawking sounds or ak ak sounds, as if disagreeing with someone – he’ll pull the things out.
The pulling out is what interests him. Once they are out, he has a way of casting them aside with a perfect indifference that would break Melanie Klein’s heart. This is not the angry flinging away of breast substitutes, condemning the male child to futile quests and depression in the life-course. No, this is something else – this is the beginning of style.
Style, after all, is merely the ritualization of selection. The very emblem of style is the way the practiced smoker, having consumed as much as he wants of the cigarette, flicks away the butt. Now, Adam’s way of flinging things shouldn’t be mixed together as though it were one gesture. There is, for instance, the way he will simply drop over his shoulder the things that we thrust upon him that interest him in no way shape or form. Heartbreakingly, the soft animal dolls don't even get tossed over the shoulder, but are dropped immediately on the floor – Adam, from the heights of his baby futurism, has no time for the bourgeois fetishes of his parents. On the other hand, a plastic cap – ah, the functionality of it – will fascinate him. He’ll tenderly turn it around, and then gingerly put it in his mouth, unless his uncomprehending parents snatch it from him first.
The end result of the plastic box game looks, to me, like the pointless strewing of objects across the room. But what exactly is a “point” – and isn’t that suspension of the point what style is all about? The point as I clumsily cling to it is some catch in the structure that entropy has inexorably condemned to dissipation. Or something like that. Adam, however, is unperturbed by the adult panic codified in the purpose. Nor is this strewing a fort/da strewing. Fort/da objects are special things, like the pacifier. He’s simply squandered his treasure and moved on, hunter gatherer style. And what lottery ticket winner among us can blame him?

a stroll through the past...

Finally, in India he had, as he thought, found his ideal realised. There, with whatever shortcomings, there was at least a strong Government; rulers who ruled; capable of doing business; of acting systematically upon their convictions; strenuously employed in working out an effective system; and not trammelled by trimming their sails to catch every [316]temporary gust of sentiment in a half-educated community. His book, he often said, was thus virtually a consideration of the commonplaces of British politics in the light of his Indian experience. He wished, he says in one of his letters, to write about India; but as soon as he began he felt that he would be challenged to give his views upon these preliminary problems: What do you think of liberty, of toleration, of ruling by military force, and so forth? 

At the beginning of our last series of wars, in 2001, I became interested in the interconnected problems of empire and central planning. At the time, I thought of war in the normal way – as derivative of the state. I am now not so sure that war isn’t, as Heraclitus thought, primary, and the state secondary, something dragged behind the one human organization that will always be with us.

At the time, there was a spate of essays in the thumbsucking journals assuring us that America was an empire and it was time to get with the white man’s burden. It was spring time for Niall Ferguson, in other words.

I noticed that one emblematic figure from history was sometimes mentioned in these Imperialist pep rallies – Pilate. Tony Blair, perhaps the most unctuous figure in recent history, had mentioned Pilate with some sympathy in a speech lauding “humanitarian intervention” – a beautiful phrase that was as meaningless as, say, loving rape, or charitable robbery. A conman’s phrase, in other words. Conman’s phrases go through the thumbsucking journals like berries through the belly of a goose – they come in all sweet and gooey, and they come out shit.

I found, I thought, the definitive topos on the Pilate as tragic colonial governor – or tragic humanitarian intervenor – in an obscure Victorian book, Liberty Equality Fraternity, by Virginia Woolf’s uncle, Fitzjames Stephen. The more I learned about Stephen, who is mentioned by a lot of late nineteenth century worthies – for instance, William James – the more I thought he was the kind of marginal figure through which major currents of history flowed in an exemplary fashion.

Well, my essay on Pilate, and on the imperialist effect on politics in the twentieth century, fell by the wayside. But I remembered it recently when I saw an allusion in the TLS to Leslie Stephen’s biography of his brother, and looked up the chapter on the book. I was impressed – the chapter is a minor classic in sorting out various currents in the philosophy of law and politics which we have all but forgotten, having decided, by warrant of the 101 class, that utilitarianism runs straight through John Stuart Mill and then gets taken up by various analytic ethicists in the 1950s and 60s, thus missing its whole historical effect.

To which I have to return…