Remora
Burning down the house.
Everybody knows that modernism's over, everybody knows the good guys lost -- to cite, with a small change in wording, Leonard Cohen. The abstract expressionists, and their successors, were willing and eager to do what they did for the price of the paint. The adventure, the beauty of it, the reason you'd hock your body, the reason you'd let yourself become a laughingstock at the family reunions, was that painting was dearer to you, as a painter, than heroin is to a junky. It was the stuff. Then the money came down, and at first that was all right. But money comes attached by a million spiderweb-like strings to money-men, and that isn't all right. Not eventually. American art would have been better off, in the last twenty years, if it had been traded by crack-heads and curated by homeless alkies. Alas, it was traded by Saatchi's and housed by such confidence men as 'Tom' Krens, the Guggenheim's director. Deborah Soloman's NYT Magazine story about Krens would do Hans Haacke himself proud. Unfortunately, Haacke has no sense of humor. About Solomon, one should be cautious -- her byline says that she is working on a bio of Norman Rockwell, about which LI's views are pretty clear: I would rather look at the toilet paper hanging on the roll in my bathroom than anything Norman Rockwell ever, uh, what is the word? created? And her let's-all-be-populists now ending is pretty insane -- she has just spent the entire article buzzing among money men from Cleveland, but suddenly they represent vox populi? I don't think so. But to LI's ears, the quotes in this piece are priceless. This is one of the trustees giving us his very raison d'etre:
''People who want to be socially established are attracted to the Met board, but people who want to have fun are attracted to the Guggenheim,'' says Stephen Swid, chairman of Knoll International furniture and a longtime Guggenheim trustee. ''The Museum of Modern Art has David Rockefeller, who sits down with the trustees -- $5 million, $20 million, that's what they give. You have to understand that David Rockefeller is an American icon. But we're like from the shtetl.''
Here's Peter Lewis, the chairman of the Guggenheim, in all his beefy glory:
''I buy pictures,'' Lewis protested. ''Don't call me a collector. I really don't know about art. I love creativity. I love artists, their lifestyle and attitude. How does a businessperson from Cleveland who doesn't want to read books about art connect with the art scene?'' Suddenly, with a quick apology, he removed his artificial leg and placed it across his lap, explaining he felt more comfortable that way. Asked how he lost a limb, he replied dismissively, ''Oh, just doing stupid macho things.''
Here is another wondrous quote from Lewis, explaining why Guggenheim has become, as Solomon says elsewhere in the article, parodying Malraux, a Museum with Walls only. Lewis forces us to ask: are these people real?
" 'Tom resonates more with buildings than with pictures,'' Peter Lewis told me."
Resonance should be confined to the viewing of porn, where it is appropriate. If only LI could find a similar way to fast forward through the endless reel of truly disgusting capitalists, in this, the age of the Jurrassic plutocrat!
Sunday, June 30, 2002
Friday, June 28, 2002
Remora
"...the faces change back to black and white cartoon old men, obscure members of the cosmopolitan night." -- Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
Unfortunately, the cartoon old men and one woman LI has to talk about this morning are less obscure than they should be. The cosmopolitan night they belong to is called the Supreme Court, and they are called judges. These sad-sacks are up to their usual tricks -- allowing, on the one hand, the state to practice its most egregious tyrannies on the subaltern population of the young, the poor, and the feckless, the clipped angels among the faceless many, while on the other hand chipping away at the limitations placed, however imperfectly, on the natural malefactors of great wealth, aka entrenched corporate power.
A ruling yesterday is typical of the Court's absolute decrepitude. The court ruled that schools could arbitrarily order drug tests -- in other words, have access to the bodily chemical infrastructure of -- students. And so, a right that inheres in the governance of the modern nation-state -- the right to be educated -- is turned into a gun against the educated. Here's a couple of grafs in the NYT:
"In emphasizing the "custodial responsibilities" of a public school system toward its students, rather than the details of how the program was organized, the majority opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas appeared to encompass random drug testing of an entire student population.
But one member of the majority, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who wrote a concurring opinion while also signing Justice Thomas's, said it was significant that the program in the Tecumseh, Okla., school district "preserves an option for a conscientious objector" by limiting the scope to students in extracurricular activities. A student "can refuse testing while paying a price (nonparticipation) that is serious, but less severe than expulsion," Justice Breyer said.Students who are found to be using drugs at Tecumseh High School are barred from their activities and referred for counseling, but are not otherwise disciplined or reported to the police. The policy was challenged by Lindsay Earls, an honor student active in several activities who is now attending Dartmouth College."
There is the outrage, this band of carcasses with their martinis at home, their drinks for dinner, pissing on the kids, and there is its conjunction with the greater outrage, the continuing war on drugs. There seems to be a misperception out there that the war has moderated on, at least, the most common of those drugs, marijuana. Wrong, captain. Drugwar lists some very interesting stats on its site:
"In 2000, 46.5 percent of the 1,579,566 total arrests for drug abuse violations were for marijuana -- a total of 734,497. Of those, 646,042 people were arrested for possession alone. This is an increase over 1999, when a total of 704,812 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses, of which 620,541 were for possession alone."
LI must admit, the left is not the counterforce it should be to this incredible and sick machinery. The best arguments against the day, the year, the decade, the two decades, the half century of infamy encoded in 704,812 marijuana arrests have been flung out by libertarians. James Bovard has a nice article on the Future of Freedom site. He is especially acidic about the current administration's cute idea of linking one losing war -- on drugs -- to its current idee fixe -- a permanent war on terrorism. Bovard points out that the war on drugs, unlike the war on terrorism, is a war on the laws of the market:
"But how will the DEA change the laws of agricultural economics that encourage farmers to grow crops disapproved by the U.S. government? Afghan farmers can easily earn ten times more from growing opium than from growing wheat or other crops. The effort to persuade Third World farmers to abandon illicit crops will be about as successful as trying to persuade stockbrokers and law-firm partners to abandon their high-paid jobs, move to Mexico, and scratch out a livelihood assembling toilet brushes for sale at Wal-Mart.
"If the Bush administration is really serious about defunding terrorist groups, it should summon the courage to look at drug laws themselves. The falling price of cocaine and heroin in recent decades is proof of the failure of drug warriors to close the borders. Federal officials have admitted that the government fails to interdict up to 90 percent of the drugs being smuggled into the United States. This failure rate is absolutely intolerable when illicit drugs finance terrorism. "
LI has a theory about how to look at state actions like banning products (marijuana, or handguns) or services (euthenasia, robbery, murder) should be seen within the framework of effective and ineffective regulation of markets. We should post that theory one of these days -- as far as we know, it is our original contribution to political philosophy.
"...the faces change back to black and white cartoon old men, obscure members of the cosmopolitan night." -- Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
Unfortunately, the cartoon old men and one woman LI has to talk about this morning are less obscure than they should be. The cosmopolitan night they belong to is called the Supreme Court, and they are called judges. These sad-sacks are up to their usual tricks -- allowing, on the one hand, the state to practice its most egregious tyrannies on the subaltern population of the young, the poor, and the feckless, the clipped angels among the faceless many, while on the other hand chipping away at the limitations placed, however imperfectly, on the natural malefactors of great wealth, aka entrenched corporate power.
A ruling yesterday is typical of the Court's absolute decrepitude. The court ruled that schools could arbitrarily order drug tests -- in other words, have access to the bodily chemical infrastructure of -- students. And so, a right that inheres in the governance of the modern nation-state -- the right to be educated -- is turned into a gun against the educated. Here's a couple of grafs in the NYT:
"In emphasizing the "custodial responsibilities" of a public school system toward its students, rather than the details of how the program was organized, the majority opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas appeared to encompass random drug testing of an entire student population.
But one member of the majority, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who wrote a concurring opinion while also signing Justice Thomas's, said it was significant that the program in the Tecumseh, Okla., school district "preserves an option for a conscientious objector" by limiting the scope to students in extracurricular activities. A student "can refuse testing while paying a price (nonparticipation) that is serious, but less severe than expulsion," Justice Breyer said.Students who are found to be using drugs at Tecumseh High School are barred from their activities and referred for counseling, but are not otherwise disciplined or reported to the police. The policy was challenged by Lindsay Earls, an honor student active in several activities who is now attending Dartmouth College."
There is the outrage, this band of carcasses with their martinis at home, their drinks for dinner, pissing on the kids, and there is its conjunction with the greater outrage, the continuing war on drugs. There seems to be a misperception out there that the war has moderated on, at least, the most common of those drugs, marijuana. Wrong, captain. Drugwar lists some very interesting stats on its site:
"In 2000, 46.5 percent of the 1,579,566 total arrests for drug abuse violations were for marijuana -- a total of 734,497. Of those, 646,042 people were arrested for possession alone. This is an increase over 1999, when a total of 704,812 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses, of which 620,541 were for possession alone."
LI must admit, the left is not the counterforce it should be to this incredible and sick machinery. The best arguments against the day, the year, the decade, the two decades, the half century of infamy encoded in 704,812 marijuana arrests have been flung out by libertarians. James Bovard has a nice article on the Future of Freedom site. He is especially acidic about the current administration's cute idea of linking one losing war -- on drugs -- to its current idee fixe -- a permanent war on terrorism. Bovard points out that the war on drugs, unlike the war on terrorism, is a war on the laws of the market:
"But how will the DEA change the laws of agricultural economics that encourage farmers to grow crops disapproved by the U.S. government? Afghan farmers can easily earn ten times more from growing opium than from growing wheat or other crops. The effort to persuade Third World farmers to abandon illicit crops will be about as successful as trying to persuade stockbrokers and law-firm partners to abandon their high-paid jobs, move to Mexico, and scratch out a livelihood assembling toilet brushes for sale at Wal-Mart.
"If the Bush administration is really serious about defunding terrorist groups, it should summon the courage to look at drug laws themselves. The falling price of cocaine and heroin in recent decades is proof of the failure of drug warriors to close the borders. Federal officials have admitted that the government fails to interdict up to 90 percent of the drugs being smuggled into the United States. This failure rate is absolutely intolerable when illicit drugs finance terrorism. "
LI has a theory about how to look at state actions like banning products (marijuana, or handguns) or services (euthenasia, robbery, murder) should be seen within the framework of effective and ineffective regulation of markets. We should post that theory one of these days -- as far as we know, it is our original contribution to political philosophy.
Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Remora
Poor Business Week chose the wrong day to headline an optimistic forecast by a Morgan Stanley Investment "Strategist" Barton Biggs. As WorldCom basically takes itself off the field, here's what Briggs -- a man BW bills as usually "dour," in order to give credence to his pap - has to say:
"Since its 2000 peak, the Nasdaq has fallen as much as the Dow did from 1929 to 1932, notes Biggs. And it has dropped more than Japan's Nikkei index has since its high in 1989, he adds. "The pattern of the equity markets since last summer has been classic," says Biggs, in foretelling that a double bottom is about to happen -- or has already begun.
A VIGOROUS RALLY. Given all these, "we have increased our exposure to equities," says Biggs. Assuming the September lows hold, as he expects, rallies of 15% to 20% are conceivable in the broad indexes in the U.S. and Europe, predicts Biggs.
In the U.S., he forecasts that over the short term, the Dow will climb to between 10,800 and 11,000, from 9,380 currently."
Biggs, and others of his ilk, gain income "strategizing' by doing such dumb and dumber things as bringing up comparisons between the Nasdaq and the Nikkei, as if these comparisons were some kind of argument. There might or might not be reasons to think, hey, these are comparable situations. But comparison itself, without analysis, is blind, deaf and dumb. And so would be any investor who listened to someone like Biggs. One could easily envision the Dow hitting 10,800, but not for any of the reasons given by Biggs. And, right now, one can as easily envision the stockmarket version of the gutter ball -- a constant trough, between 9 and 10 thou.
Here's the Washington Post, quoting a less dour, and more paniced, investment "strategist" about the current market:
"At Merrill Lynch, meanwhile, Bernstein has warned clients of a "considerable near term risk" that could see a further 10 to 15 percent decline in the major stock indexes. With the stocks of the S&P 500 still selling at 24 times their expected earnings next year, he said, "our view is that the market, even at this level, is still quite speculative." The historic average is around 15.
"The implications of further declines in stock prices are anything but positive for the broader economy. Although this doesn't suggest the economy will slip back into recession again, forecaster Sinai sees little hope that the economy can grow at the 5 and 6 percent annual rates normally associated with economic recoveries. His forecasts calls for growth rates at half that."
Business magazine circulation is way off this year. And headlines like BW's are the reason. As the biz media became a pipeline for the uplifting crap diffused by glorified bucket shop salesmen, they lost credibility with their readers. Until they take a tougher approach, who is going to read them? A shrinking pool of suckers and pr men, that's who.
Poor Business Week chose the wrong day to headline an optimistic forecast by a Morgan Stanley Investment "Strategist" Barton Biggs. As WorldCom basically takes itself off the field, here's what Briggs -- a man BW bills as usually "dour," in order to give credence to his pap - has to say:
"Since its 2000 peak, the Nasdaq has fallen as much as the Dow did from 1929 to 1932, notes Biggs. And it has dropped more than Japan's Nikkei index has since its high in 1989, he adds. "The pattern of the equity markets since last summer has been classic," says Biggs, in foretelling that a double bottom is about to happen -- or has already begun.
A VIGOROUS RALLY. Given all these, "we have increased our exposure to equities," says Biggs. Assuming the September lows hold, as he expects, rallies of 15% to 20% are conceivable in the broad indexes in the U.S. and Europe, predicts Biggs.
In the U.S., he forecasts that over the short term, the Dow will climb to between 10,800 and 11,000, from 9,380 currently."
Biggs, and others of his ilk, gain income "strategizing' by doing such dumb and dumber things as bringing up comparisons between the Nasdaq and the Nikkei, as if these comparisons were some kind of argument. There might or might not be reasons to think, hey, these are comparable situations. But comparison itself, without analysis, is blind, deaf and dumb. And so would be any investor who listened to someone like Biggs. One could easily envision the Dow hitting 10,800, but not for any of the reasons given by Biggs. And, right now, one can as easily envision the stockmarket version of the gutter ball -- a constant trough, between 9 and 10 thou.
Here's the Washington Post, quoting a less dour, and more paniced, investment "strategist" about the current market:
"At Merrill Lynch, meanwhile, Bernstein has warned clients of a "considerable near term risk" that could see a further 10 to 15 percent decline in the major stock indexes. With the stocks of the S&P 500 still selling at 24 times their expected earnings next year, he said, "our view is that the market, even at this level, is still quite speculative." The historic average is around 15.
"The implications of further declines in stock prices are anything but positive for the broader economy. Although this doesn't suggest the economy will slip back into recession again, forecaster Sinai sees little hope that the economy can grow at the 5 and 6 percent annual rates normally associated with economic recoveries. His forecasts calls for growth rates at half that."
Business magazine circulation is way off this year. And headlines like BW's are the reason. As the biz media became a pipeline for the uplifting crap diffused by glorified bucket shop salesmen, they lost credibility with their readers. Until they take a tougher approach, who is going to read them? A shrinking pool of suckers and pr men, that's who.
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Remora
Reader's mirage
Limited Inc was alerted to Bradford DeLong's weblog site today, when we came upon some comment about comment De Long had made about a recent William Greider article. Here are De Long's remarks about Greider:
"William Greider, writing in the Nation, hopes for a depression in the United States--for this would "deflate" the "smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy" and be "a good thing for world affairs, since Washington couldn't run roughshod over others. He believes that such a depression could be triggered by "... financial scandals" which would lead "overseas investors... to take their money home... the declining dollar... [to] fall sharply... credit... [to] become suddenly scarce, since our debtor-nation economy relies heavily on capital borrowed from abroad, and... trigger an ugly downdraft in the U.S. economy." And then "the fashionable boastfulness about America... would implode."
Going to the article, however, one quickly finds that Greider is not "hoping" for a depression in the United States. He does, however, hope that the smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy is deflated. His point is that economic policies that Greider thinks are taking us to the brink of depression will have the ironic effect of making America look inward, as so deflate the etc., etc. But noting that one expects an unexpected outcome from a bad thing isn't the same as hoping for the bad thing. In fact, Greider clearly describes his hopes, which are what they have been for some time: a populist economic policy that would strenghten the regulation of the financial industry, aim at ameliorating the inequality of incomes in the country, and would rid the private sector of its current problems with corrupt accounting and bloated CEO salaries.
Now, Limited Inc thinks that Greider's goals are good. We do think he is missing the boat on the effects of depression: the idea that nation's turn inward when their economies collapse isn't borne out by anything in recent history. But De Long's reading of Greider is so outrageous that we were tempted to dismiss the man completely. That, however, would be a mistake. De Long has an excellent analysis of stock valuations on his site, pointing out (as LI has pointed out long ago, somewhere -- was it a review? or one of these damn posts?) that the stock market, by traditional standards, is still overvalued.
"-Few people recognize how far out of whack the stock market still is today.
-There is still a large disconnect between current stock-market values and traditional valuation ratios relative to measures like earnings and dividends.
...
-Typically, over the last fifty years, stocks sell for about 30 times annual dividends and for about 18 times annual earnings.
-Today, however, stocks are selling for more than 30 times earnings, and more than 60 times dividends."
Usually, writers who notice this fact then become all alchemical about technical analysis, the bogus but influential school of analyzing stocks used by a certain truly reactionary species of contrarians. Actually, the traditional standard isn't the expression of natural law: it is rather the expression of accumulated expectations, given a history of productivity gains, inflation, competition with other investment instruments, etc. The New Economy model basically boiled down to the argument that current valuations are rational. The rationality goes something like this: the technologically abetted gains in productivity, and the instances of metastizing growth (for instance, among tech companies from the eighties to the late nineties) has made the 30 times earnings, and 60 times dividend metric more reasonable. This argument also includes, as a subargument, the sub voce dismissal of dividends as an archaic remnant of an earlier era of stock investment. This argument points to the increasing tendency of investors to buy stocks specifically to sell them in the short term, rather than benefit from splits and dividends in the long term.
While De long doesn't go into the ins and outs, here, I have to give him credit for laying out the issue. So -- I can't totally dismiss him as a reactionary slug. He's too smart a reactionary slug to really believe what he wrote about Greider -- it was, I think, an immediate reaction to his impression of the article. LI knows that situation: sometimes, the impression of what one reads is different than what one has really read. Call it: reader's mirage.
Reader's mirage
Limited Inc was alerted to Bradford DeLong's weblog site today, when we came upon some comment about comment De Long had made about a recent William Greider article. Here are De Long's remarks about Greider:
"William Greider, writing in the Nation, hopes for a depression in the United States--for this would "deflate" the "smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy" and be "a good thing for world affairs, since Washington couldn't run roughshod over others. He believes that such a depression could be triggered by "... financial scandals" which would lead "overseas investors... to take their money home... the declining dollar... [to] fall sharply... credit... [to] become suddenly scarce, since our debtor-nation economy relies heavily on capital borrowed from abroad, and... trigger an ugly downdraft in the U.S. economy." And then "the fashionable boastfulness about America... would implode."
Going to the article, however, one quickly finds that Greider is not "hoping" for a depression in the United States. He does, however, hope that the smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy is deflated. His point is that economic policies that Greider thinks are taking us to the brink of depression will have the ironic effect of making America look inward, as so deflate the etc., etc. But noting that one expects an unexpected outcome from a bad thing isn't the same as hoping for the bad thing. In fact, Greider clearly describes his hopes, which are what they have been for some time: a populist economic policy that would strenghten the regulation of the financial industry, aim at ameliorating the inequality of incomes in the country, and would rid the private sector of its current problems with corrupt accounting and bloated CEO salaries.
Now, Limited Inc thinks that Greider's goals are good. We do think he is missing the boat on the effects of depression: the idea that nation's turn inward when their economies collapse isn't borne out by anything in recent history. But De Long's reading of Greider is so outrageous that we were tempted to dismiss the man completely. That, however, would be a mistake. De Long has an excellent analysis of stock valuations on his site, pointing out (as LI has pointed out long ago, somewhere -- was it a review? or one of these damn posts?) that the stock market, by traditional standards, is still overvalued.
"-Few people recognize how far out of whack the stock market still is today.
-There is still a large disconnect between current stock-market values and traditional valuation ratios relative to measures like earnings and dividends.
...
-Typically, over the last fifty years, stocks sell for about 30 times annual dividends and for about 18 times annual earnings.
-Today, however, stocks are selling for more than 30 times earnings, and more than 60 times dividends."
Usually, writers who notice this fact then become all alchemical about technical analysis, the bogus but influential school of analyzing stocks used by a certain truly reactionary species of contrarians. Actually, the traditional standard isn't the expression of natural law: it is rather the expression of accumulated expectations, given a history of productivity gains, inflation, competition with other investment instruments, etc. The New Economy model basically boiled down to the argument that current valuations are rational. The rationality goes something like this: the technologically abetted gains in productivity, and the instances of metastizing growth (for instance, among tech companies from the eighties to the late nineties) has made the 30 times earnings, and 60 times dividend metric more reasonable. This argument also includes, as a subargument, the sub voce dismissal of dividends as an archaic remnant of an earlier era of stock investment. This argument points to the increasing tendency of investors to buy stocks specifically to sell them in the short term, rather than benefit from splits and dividends in the long term.
While De long doesn't go into the ins and outs, here, I have to give him credit for laying out the issue. So -- I can't totally dismiss him as a reactionary slug. He's too smart a reactionary slug to really believe what he wrote about Greider -- it was, I think, an immediate reaction to his impression of the article. LI knows that situation: sometimes, the impression of what one reads is different than what one has really read. Call it: reader's mirage.
Sunday, June 23, 2002
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote that the various schools of philosophy can be reduced, in the end, to the �blind and involuntary memoire� of certain philosophers � thus, in one of the great ironies of intellectual history, surrendering the discipline to the corruptions of vulgarity. The leveling impulse, of which Nietzsche made himself the greatest foe, insinuated itself into his method at its moment of greatest acuteness. And, after all, what is this vulgarity, this personalization of the abstract, but one of the masks of nihilism?
Granting our disagreement with Nietzsche�s disingenuous equation between �the life� and �the thought�, LI thinks it has a certain pertinence, transposed to the the mystery story. A mystery, from our perspective, is nothing more than the hidden autobiography of its investigator.
And this, reader, gets us to the self-infatuated self who is writing to you here. LI has a habit, at least on this site, of transforming every text we reference into a mystery. Under every text we discern -- whether due to our paranoia or our acuteness - the hidden labyrinth in which motive, like the Minotaur, lurks. This is how we hook up with Nietzsche -- because we take that motive to be death drive of nihilism, the leveling impulse to which, eventually, all that is beautiful and alive is sacrificed. We take this personally. We know why we are alone in this culture. We know that solitude is a process of attrition. We know that LI is becoming, daily, a little more lunar.
Yet still we venture into it: the news, the think piece, the movie, the web site. Our own implication in the labyrinth is a performative act � by entering it, we co-create it. We connive at it. If we could leave it, if we weren�t continually wasted in the center, we would destroy it. If mystery is autobiography, its solution is the transcendence of the self. So far, this is not a stage we've ever achieved. Narcissism, narcissism every day.
So: these are the rules of the site. The irrepressible autobiographical impulse rules here, and the reader knows to watch for the silvery, ephemeral flash of experience, which ultimately governs the supposedly neutral instrumentation of argument.
Everything, however, depends on our ability to play this game with a modicum of competence. Lately, we have more and more reason to suspect that we have lost that ability. While our writing becomes more and more convoluted, its justification becomes more and more remote. Why are we doing this? We�ve been reminded of this by M., a friend of ours who lives in Mexico. M. is a highly intelligent, well read woman. If we have an ideal reader in mind when we write, it has to be M., or someone like her. Our last posts were written with a certain joy. We�ve become so bitter that there is a liberation in it: the acte gratuit of the court jester hanging himself. We thought M. would appreciate this, so we put together the two posts on Angola and sent it to her.
Her reply was crushing. We aren�t going to reprint the entire thing, but here is how M. begins:
�Who are the readers of your posts? Do they all have PhD's in international relations? I am afraid I'm more like the beast with the calm regard... I don't know the names, I don't know the people... I'm glad to read your posts but they send my head reeling.�
Our failures have ceased to amuse. Why are we writing this?
I can�t go on. I�ll go on.
Granting our disagreement with Nietzsche�s disingenuous equation between �the life� and �the thought�, LI thinks it has a certain pertinence, transposed to the the mystery story. A mystery, from our perspective, is nothing more than the hidden autobiography of its investigator.
And this, reader, gets us to the self-infatuated self who is writing to you here. LI has a habit, at least on this site, of transforming every text we reference into a mystery. Under every text we discern -- whether due to our paranoia or our acuteness - the hidden labyrinth in which motive, like the Minotaur, lurks. This is how we hook up with Nietzsche -- because we take that motive to be death drive of nihilism, the leveling impulse to which, eventually, all that is beautiful and alive is sacrificed. We take this personally. We know why we are alone in this culture. We know that solitude is a process of attrition. We know that LI is becoming, daily, a little more lunar.
Yet still we venture into it: the news, the think piece, the movie, the web site. Our own implication in the labyrinth is a performative act � by entering it, we co-create it. We connive at it. If we could leave it, if we weren�t continually wasted in the center, we would destroy it. If mystery is autobiography, its solution is the transcendence of the self. So far, this is not a stage we've ever achieved. Narcissism, narcissism every day.
So: these are the rules of the site. The irrepressible autobiographical impulse rules here, and the reader knows to watch for the silvery, ephemeral flash of experience, which ultimately governs the supposedly neutral instrumentation of argument.
Everything, however, depends on our ability to play this game with a modicum of competence. Lately, we have more and more reason to suspect that we have lost that ability. While our writing becomes more and more convoluted, its justification becomes more and more remote. Why are we doing this? We�ve been reminded of this by M., a friend of ours who lives in Mexico. M. is a highly intelligent, well read woman. If we have an ideal reader in mind when we write, it has to be M., or someone like her. Our last posts were written with a certain joy. We�ve become so bitter that there is a liberation in it: the acte gratuit of the court jester hanging himself. We thought M. would appreciate this, so we put together the two posts on Angola and sent it to her.
Her reply was crushing. We aren�t going to reprint the entire thing, but here is how M. begins:
�Who are the readers of your posts? Do they all have PhD's in international relations? I am afraid I'm more like the beast with the calm regard... I don't know the names, I don't know the people... I'm glad to read your posts but they send my head reeling.�
Our failures have ceased to amuse. Why are we writing this?
I can�t go on. I�ll go on.
Friday, June 21, 2002
Angola (part 2)
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughter�
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters�
I know the names of the summit that manipulated�
I know the names of those who ran�
I know the names of the powerful group who�
I know the names of those who, between on mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind who are behind the ridiculous figures who�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids who�
I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of�
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
This passage, from one of Pasolini's hallucinatory articles in the early seventies � the articles that possibly led to him being lured to a beach and murdered � is quoted in Peter Robb's excellent Midnight in Sicily, to which we have previously referred in our post on Sciascia. Pasolini, Robb says, went on to explain that he knew, but he didn't have proof. He knew, however, because "I am a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on, to imagine what is known and what is kept quiet, who pieces together the disorganized fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail."
The American writer, burdened with a less active imagination, and a set of clich�s that tend either to Hollywood or to the pisspoor identity kit politics that has narcotized academia for the past ten years, usually pieces together nothing but a homemade prejudice, a narcissistic grievance.
And LI is an American writer, all right? So don't ask me to rise to the heights.
Still, the quote seems appropriate as LI pulls back, these days,. Have you been getting the full heady rush of the world of blowback in your nostrils, your skin, your nerves, your blood, reader? The American jitters since 9/11. Tick it off, one, two.
- There's the odd paralysis that keeps American troops from sealing the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to actually capture AlQaeda operatives, in contrast with the troop heavy plans to invade a country that happens not to have attacked the US, Iraq.
-There's the unfelt, as yet, paralysis of civil liberties, as if the systematic weakening of our civil freedoms (of speech, of association, of purchase, of due process) was happening somewhere else, at a great distance. It is death by spider bite, death by Ashcroft, and the poison travels in subdermal channels, it operates as the vague threat of power, of something coming down, of a constraint one doesn't know how to name or give a face to.
--There are the truly brain dead, there are the tests that show, in a thousand subtle ways, who the zombies were all along. Like Steven Spielberg, who tells the NYT that he is magnanimously willing to give up his civil liberties to stop "9/11 from ever happening again."(1)
-There are the "organs"� the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, all the intelligence agencies that should never have existed in the first place, the state's version of polymorphous perversity. The organs upon which we are dumping money and power to protect the Heimat, while at the same time investigating the multiple incompetencies that demonstrate their structural inability to protect the Heimat. And no, it isn't because the terrorists are terribly clever. This is the new era, the era of terrorism as a hobby. If you can build a model plane, you can hijack a plane. And the FBI's newly expanded ability to penetrate chat rooms won't make a damn bit of difference.
So this is the state of play twelve years after the Fall of the Wall. After the fall of the utopia of rust in Eastern Europe. After the decade of global commercial nihilism, when the plan was... the end of history plan was... draining away what Schopenhauer called the Metphysical Need of Mankind:
'Excepting mankind, no other being wonders about its own existence; to the other creatures, existence is understood of itself so much that it isn't even noticed. Out of the calm regard of the beast the wisdom of nature speaks; because in them the will and the intellect aren't yet far enough apart that their mutual collisions against one another to cause them any curiosity. So the whole of phenomena still hangs from the branch of nature on which it budded, and is at one with the unconscious omniscience of the great mother. Only after the inner essence of nature (the will to life objectified) ascends through both realms of consciousless being and then through the long and broad series of beasts, cunning and amiable, does it finally arrive, with the entrance of reason, at Man, and so for the first time at reflection. Because at that moment it begins to wonder about its own works and asks itself, what it is...With this reflection and this astonishment there arises, in humankind alone, the peculiar need for a metaphysics..."
Yes, that's the basic gripe, the root of the anti-corporate movement: the fear that the globalizing world is returning us to the calm regard of the beast. We would no longer ask how it works -- just as we accept any of the improbable crap we see in typical Hollywood action flicks. The discontinuity, the shallowness, or non-existence, of character, the one note motives. Those films, the malls, the traffic, the talk radio -- all of it is about culture sinking to its lowest, dumbest level. It is the debauched image of the romantic ideal, life without questions, except for the unfortunate few -- okay, the vast majority -- who have been left outside of the all the golden gated communities.
No culture, no questions, no worries. But the peculiar need for metaphysics pops up in the most curious places, doesn't it? It popped up at Enron. It is popping up about the days and ways of Heimat security, back in the pre 9/11 idyll.
So: LI refuses. We refuse the end of history, we refuse the surrender of the need for metaphysics. You know we are a bunch of resentful failures around here, so what do you expect? But from the perspective of that refusal, we pick up on little stories, we make our trivial little connections.
For instance, we think that the story of what happened, and has been happening, in Angola, has something ghoulishly exemplary about it. The events that flow into and out of the death of Jonas Savimba, madman and murder that he was, the George Washington of dirty diamonds, the strong right arm of evangelical Christians (2)(some of whose leaders, like Pat Robertson (3), have strong and secret ties in this region of the world with diamond dealers, arms merchants, and some of the bloodiest tyrants of recent history), show that once again, Africa is where the white man lets down his pants, as Celine once wrote, and takes a dump. It seems to have been little remarked that Cheney is the first Vice President ever to have hired a mercenary army in a foreign land. Is this the Oliver North syndrome or what? Yes, as head of Haliburton, which includes the giant engineering firm, Brown and Root, Cheney was involved, no doubt at a distance, with a South African company named Executive Outcomes. Executive Outcomes -- which has dissolved, and reformed under a different name, last year -- was a PMC -- a private military company. Oh, it wasn't anything as tawdry as a group of hired killers. There's a rather laudatory article about EO in the magazine of the College of the Army, Parameters. Here's a list of such PMCs:
"A 1997 study by the private Center for Defense Information lists dozens of such organizations with international operations. South Africa has been the leading home of international security companies, including Executive Outcomes, Combat Force, Investments Surveys, Honey Badger Arms and Ammunition, Shield Security, Kas Enterprises, Saracen International, and Longreach Security. International military firms based in other parts of the world include Alpha Five, Corporate Trading International, Omega Support Ltd., Parasec Strategic Concept, Jardine Securicor Gurkha Services (Hong Kong), Gurkha Security Guards (Isle of Man, UK), Special Project Service Ltd. (UK), Defence Systems Ltd. (UK), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Vinnell Corporation (US), and Military Professional Resources Inc. (US). Executive Outcomes (South Africa) has been described as "the world's first fully equipped corporate army."
Isn't that something? a fully equipped corporate army. Press on the pedals, bring out the irony. Savimbi's UNITA army was undone by dos Santos by these guys, with Heritage Oil being, apparently, the middleman. The EO guys once fought for UNITA -- back in the days when dos Santos was a Marxist threat. Now, of course, dos Santos is merely a highly corrupt billionaire, and EO is happy to do the dirty in his employ. Heritage Oil meanwhile maintains its own little connections with the Bush family. There's an article in the Observatoire de Afrique Centrale this week that fingers Tony Buckingham, a canadian diamond merchant and soldier of fortune, as the man behind Heritage's african explorations in petrowealth. Heritage also holds stock in one of the PMC's that murdered protestors at a mine in Papua New Guinea in 1997. Cheney's associates, in other words, happen to have a little blood on their cuffs, but that's all right. Who's going to ask any questions about it? It 's a matter of keeping the natives under control, and lately isn't the mood changing? Isn't imperialism the new new thing?
I know the names. We all know the names. But do we really give a fuck?
Notes
1. "Right now, people are willing to give away a lot of their freedoms in order to feel safe. They're willing to give the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. far-reaching powers to, as George W. Bush often says, root out those individuals who are a danger to our way of living. I am on the president's side in this instance. I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9/11 from ever happening again." NYT
2. See, for instance, the hilarious obituary of that Christian parfait knight on the NewsMax site. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/26/01047.shtml. De mortuis nil nisi bonum
etc., but still -- I have never read an obituary that congregated so many lies in so little space. It makes me giddy.
3. For a brief summing up of Robertson's interest, and general sleeziness, see this story, by Greg Palast, on his site. Here are three interesting grafs from it:
"Neil Volder, president of Robertson Financial and director of the new bank venture, emphasises that Robertson selflessly donated between 65 and 75 per cent of his salary as head of International Family Entertainment. But that amounted to only a few hundred thousand dollars a year - pocket change for a man of Robertson's means.
There was also, says Volder, the $7m he gave to 'Operation Blessing' to alleviate the woes of refugees fleeing genocide in Rwanda. Robertson's press operation puts the sum at only $1.2m. More interesting is the way the Operation Blessing funds were used in Africa. Through an emotional fundraising drive on his TV station, Robertson raised several million dollars for the tax-free charitable trust. Operation Blessing bought planes to shuttle medical supplies in and out of the refugee camp in Goma, Congo (then Zaire).
But investigative reporter Bill Sizemore of the Virginian Pilot discovered that over a six-month period - except for one medical flight - the planes were used to haul equipment for something called African Development Corporation, a diamond mining operation a long way from Goma. African Development is owned by Pat Robertson."
4. See this Washington Post piece by Jon Jeter. The election of 1994, which legitimated dos Santos, was dubbed the choice between the Killers and the Robbers by the electorate. Jeter quotes estimates that put dos Santos' fortune in the 2 billion dollar range.
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughter�
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters�
I know the names of the summit that manipulated�
I know the names of those who ran�
I know the names of the powerful group who�
I know the names of those who, between on mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind who are behind the ridiculous figures who�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids who�
I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of�
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
This passage, from one of Pasolini's hallucinatory articles in the early seventies � the articles that possibly led to him being lured to a beach and murdered � is quoted in Peter Robb's excellent Midnight in Sicily, to which we have previously referred in our post on Sciascia. Pasolini, Robb says, went on to explain that he knew, but he didn't have proof. He knew, however, because "I am a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on, to imagine what is known and what is kept quiet, who pieces together the disorganized fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail."
The American writer, burdened with a less active imagination, and a set of clich�s that tend either to Hollywood or to the pisspoor identity kit politics that has narcotized academia for the past ten years, usually pieces together nothing but a homemade prejudice, a narcissistic grievance.
And LI is an American writer, all right? So don't ask me to rise to the heights.
Still, the quote seems appropriate as LI pulls back, these days,. Have you been getting the full heady rush of the world of blowback in your nostrils, your skin, your nerves, your blood, reader? The American jitters since 9/11. Tick it off, one, two.
- There's the odd paralysis that keeps American troops from sealing the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to actually capture AlQaeda operatives, in contrast with the troop heavy plans to invade a country that happens not to have attacked the US, Iraq.
-There's the unfelt, as yet, paralysis of civil liberties, as if the systematic weakening of our civil freedoms (of speech, of association, of purchase, of due process) was happening somewhere else, at a great distance. It is death by spider bite, death by Ashcroft, and the poison travels in subdermal channels, it operates as the vague threat of power, of something coming down, of a constraint one doesn't know how to name or give a face to.
--There are the truly brain dead, there are the tests that show, in a thousand subtle ways, who the zombies were all along. Like Steven Spielberg, who tells the NYT that he is magnanimously willing to give up his civil liberties to stop "9/11 from ever happening again."(1)
-There are the "organs"� the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, all the intelligence agencies that should never have existed in the first place, the state's version of polymorphous perversity. The organs upon which we are dumping money and power to protect the Heimat, while at the same time investigating the multiple incompetencies that demonstrate their structural inability to protect the Heimat. And no, it isn't because the terrorists are terribly clever. This is the new era, the era of terrorism as a hobby. If you can build a model plane, you can hijack a plane. And the FBI's newly expanded ability to penetrate chat rooms won't make a damn bit of difference.
So this is the state of play twelve years after the Fall of the Wall. After the fall of the utopia of rust in Eastern Europe. After the decade of global commercial nihilism, when the plan was... the end of history plan was... draining away what Schopenhauer called the Metphysical Need of Mankind:
'Excepting mankind, no other being wonders about its own existence; to the other creatures, existence is understood of itself so much that it isn't even noticed. Out of the calm regard of the beast the wisdom of nature speaks; because in them the will and the intellect aren't yet far enough apart that their mutual collisions against one another to cause them any curiosity. So the whole of phenomena still hangs from the branch of nature on which it budded, and is at one with the unconscious omniscience of the great mother. Only after the inner essence of nature (the will to life objectified) ascends through both realms of consciousless being and then through the long and broad series of beasts, cunning and amiable, does it finally arrive, with the entrance of reason, at Man, and so for the first time at reflection. Because at that moment it begins to wonder about its own works and asks itself, what it is...With this reflection and this astonishment there arises, in humankind alone, the peculiar need for a metaphysics..."
Yes, that's the basic gripe, the root of the anti-corporate movement: the fear that the globalizing world is returning us to the calm regard of the beast. We would no longer ask how it works -- just as we accept any of the improbable crap we see in typical Hollywood action flicks. The discontinuity, the shallowness, or non-existence, of character, the one note motives. Those films, the malls, the traffic, the talk radio -- all of it is about culture sinking to its lowest, dumbest level. It is the debauched image of the romantic ideal, life without questions, except for the unfortunate few -- okay, the vast majority -- who have been left outside of the all the golden gated communities.
No culture, no questions, no worries. But the peculiar need for metaphysics pops up in the most curious places, doesn't it? It popped up at Enron. It is popping up about the days and ways of Heimat security, back in the pre 9/11 idyll.
So: LI refuses. We refuse the end of history, we refuse the surrender of the need for metaphysics. You know we are a bunch of resentful failures around here, so what do you expect? But from the perspective of that refusal, we pick up on little stories, we make our trivial little connections.
For instance, we think that the story of what happened, and has been happening, in Angola, has something ghoulishly exemplary about it. The events that flow into and out of the death of Jonas Savimba, madman and murder that he was, the George Washington of dirty diamonds, the strong right arm of evangelical Christians (2)(some of whose leaders, like Pat Robertson (3), have strong and secret ties in this region of the world with diamond dealers, arms merchants, and some of the bloodiest tyrants of recent history), show that once again, Africa is where the white man lets down his pants, as Celine once wrote, and takes a dump. It seems to have been little remarked that Cheney is the first Vice President ever to have hired a mercenary army in a foreign land. Is this the Oliver North syndrome or what? Yes, as head of Haliburton, which includes the giant engineering firm, Brown and Root, Cheney was involved, no doubt at a distance, with a South African company named Executive Outcomes. Executive Outcomes -- which has dissolved, and reformed under a different name, last year -- was a PMC -- a private military company. Oh, it wasn't anything as tawdry as a group of hired killers. There's a rather laudatory article about EO in the magazine of the College of the Army, Parameters. Here's a list of such PMCs:
"A 1997 study by the private Center for Defense Information lists dozens of such organizations with international operations. South Africa has been the leading home of international security companies, including Executive Outcomes, Combat Force, Investments Surveys, Honey Badger Arms and Ammunition, Shield Security, Kas Enterprises, Saracen International, and Longreach Security. International military firms based in other parts of the world include Alpha Five, Corporate Trading International, Omega Support Ltd., Parasec Strategic Concept, Jardine Securicor Gurkha Services (Hong Kong), Gurkha Security Guards (Isle of Man, UK), Special Project Service Ltd. (UK), Defence Systems Ltd. (UK), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Vinnell Corporation (US), and Military Professional Resources Inc. (US). Executive Outcomes (South Africa) has been described as "the world's first fully equipped corporate army."
Isn't that something? a fully equipped corporate army. Press on the pedals, bring out the irony. Savimbi's UNITA army was undone by dos Santos by these guys, with Heritage Oil being, apparently, the middleman. The EO guys once fought for UNITA -- back in the days when dos Santos was a Marxist threat. Now, of course, dos Santos is merely a highly corrupt billionaire, and EO is happy to do the dirty in his employ. Heritage Oil meanwhile maintains its own little connections with the Bush family. There's an article in the Observatoire de Afrique Centrale this week that fingers Tony Buckingham, a canadian diamond merchant and soldier of fortune, as the man behind Heritage's african explorations in petrowealth. Heritage also holds stock in one of the PMC's that murdered protestors at a mine in Papua New Guinea in 1997. Cheney's associates, in other words, happen to have a little blood on their cuffs, but that's all right. Who's going to ask any questions about it? It 's a matter of keeping the natives under control, and lately isn't the mood changing? Isn't imperialism the new new thing?
I know the names. We all know the names. But do we really give a fuck?
Notes
1. "Right now, people are willing to give away a lot of their freedoms in order to feel safe. They're willing to give the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. far-reaching powers to, as George W. Bush often says, root out those individuals who are a danger to our way of living. I am on the president's side in this instance. I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9/11 from ever happening again." NYT
2. See, for instance, the hilarious obituary of that Christian parfait knight on the NewsMax site. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/26/01047.shtml. De mortuis nil nisi bonum
etc., but still -- I have never read an obituary that congregated so many lies in so little space. It makes me giddy.
3. For a brief summing up of Robertson's interest, and general sleeziness, see this story, by Greg Palast, on his site. Here are three interesting grafs from it:
"Neil Volder, president of Robertson Financial and director of the new bank venture, emphasises that Robertson selflessly donated between 65 and 75 per cent of his salary as head of International Family Entertainment. But that amounted to only a few hundred thousand dollars a year - pocket change for a man of Robertson's means.
There was also, says Volder, the $7m he gave to 'Operation Blessing' to alleviate the woes of refugees fleeing genocide in Rwanda. Robertson's press operation puts the sum at only $1.2m. More interesting is the way the Operation Blessing funds were used in Africa. Through an emotional fundraising drive on his TV station, Robertson raised several million dollars for the tax-free charitable trust. Operation Blessing bought planes to shuttle medical supplies in and out of the refugee camp in Goma, Congo (then Zaire).
But investigative reporter Bill Sizemore of the Virginian Pilot discovered that over a six-month period - except for one medical flight - the planes were used to haul equipment for something called African Development Corporation, a diamond mining operation a long way from Goma. African Development is owned by Pat Robertson."
4. See this Washington Post piece by Jon Jeter. The election of 1994, which legitimated dos Santos, was dubbed the choice between the Killers and the Robbers by the electorate. Jeter quotes estimates that put dos Santos' fortune in the 2 billion dollar range.
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Remora
Kenneth Minogue is a conservative economist of some sort at the London School of Economics. Limited Inc knows him solely as the author of a screamingly funny article in the New Criterion about the fall of Western Civilization. The jew, this time, isn't at the root of it all -- yes, times have changed, and now right wingers are proclaiming themselves the most philo of philosemites. No, at the root it turns out is the radical feminist. Taking leaps and making rhetorical pirouttes rather in the style of one of the Chansons de Maldoror (which so enthralled the surrealists), Minogue concocted, in this essay, one of those fanciful dreamscapes that makes the Scaife foundation crowd cream in their Bill Blass slacks. He overviews the enemies of the west from Islam to Stalin, and then -- drumroll please -- he finds the nasty fifth column in the kitchen:
"In the course of the 1960s, a new tribe was established that also sought to overthrow the Western citadel from within and had notably greater success. This was Betty Friedan�s radical feminists."
This is the caliber of character chosen by the TLS to review Will Hutton's latest lefty screed, The World We are In.Limited Inc wants to express our deepest respect for the Minogue's piece, Back to the future, in the June seventh issue. Minogue, in a mere two pages, manages to sound every rightwing shibboleth he could think of. The result is like the MIDI version of the Eroica -- grandeur reduced to tinniness.
M. starts from the refreshing premises that there are two possible political positions -- after, of course, ritually bashing Hutton for believing that there are only two possible political positions. On the one side, there is the "brutish and unconstrained state," and their ombudsmen. Hutton, who as an advocate of the 'stakeholder society" -(a school of thought that holds that the firm should be guided as much by the interests of its stakeholders -- customers, employees, and community -- as by its shareholders) is clearly on the Shadow side. Or shall we say his is the politics of steak tartare -- it looks normal on the outside, but it is bloody pink on the inside. His shareholder idea is nothing more than "backdoor socialism." And one knows from Minogue's previous writing about feminism that backdoor carries a heavy metaphorical burden for him, a sexual aura. Let's just say that Hutton's is the kind of politics you'd expect to appeal to a sodomite, begging your pardon and casting no animadversions on the man himself.
As we said, there are two sides in this struggle, however. Fighting the good fight against these latterday gremlins from the Kremlin are the advocates of "market freedom."
"Freedom" is practically the mating call of your average right winger. And like the mating call of the cuckoo, the bandicoot, and the Cactus Wren, it means something different to its own species than it means to someone like, well, Limited Inc. Because LI doesn't understand the aphrodisiacal qualities of glueing together freedom and market. Freedom and love, for instance, we like that. But freedom and market has never stirred the blood, what? And further, we don't understand to what agent the quality of freedom is being ascribed. Is it the freedom of the marketeer? Is it the freedom of the buyer? Are they both the same kind of freedoms? And how about the producers, and the service infrastructure? Are they agents? Surely, within these categories are social entities, sometimes on a vast scale, which extend over a collective of workers that are not quite represented (except as ... dread word ... stakeholders) by their organizational representatives in the market. The Sears salesman is not Sears --which is why Sears can fire him without committing suicide. But bien sur, he is marketing himself -- since every market contains a market. Scrooge knew this, and so does Minogue. You are your brand. LI has always had a more romantic vision of what freedom is all about. As in striking off the mind forged manacles of man. But no -- freedom here has been reduced to a shell of itself, a cultural nullity, an invitation to conformity on a large scale. We can't get with the program.
And then, of course, there is a whole set of questions about how the freedoms are secured. By, uh, the state? So let me get this straight, the brute state is enforcing freedom of contract, and other great stuff, like a central bank to help prop up the stock market in a dull season, and the state is enforcing the freedom to monetize what was formerly common (under the name of Intellectual property), and so you can't just be a Mexican farmer and go out and plant corn anymore cause Monsanto bought your corn gene, like, and so Monsanto can bring you into court for that, which is a state institution, but this is all in the name of market freedom, right, and and.. this state activity is entirely neutral, right, and in fact virtuous? This is where the plot gets all confused for a guy like me. Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys again? I think it is like this. The state plays the role of Igor, here, to Minogue's mad economic scientist. Minogue says things like, bring in the spurious extension of our patent for that pharmaceutical, and Igor scurries off, and then comes back and hands it to him. And things like that. This is called Freedom of the Marketplace, and it is coming soon, to a theater near you.
And, well, and then LI starts getting all childish, and pulling on professor Minogue's trousers, and pestering him with questions. Such as, what's the metric here, anyway? We have one to suggest, since we are speaking in terms of the marketplace. Maybe freedom is purchasing power. But of course, the rightwing goes all romantic and vague when you mention things like this, and they start muttering about how terrible equality is, and the like. Because the unpleasant fact is that purchasing power is unequal in the market, and if the market is the arena of freedom, then surely the unequal power of the market's agents has some bearing on how that freedom is enacted.
We still don't like Minogue's game. We still think this isn't the essence of freedom, this isn't all there is to having the option to do one thing or the other (which I imagine must be bundled, somehow, into the notion of freedom). But what we like about the notion of comparable purchasing powers, or the comparison of resources one brings to the market, or accrues in the market, is that it makes freedom a measurable quality. Here, then, is the paradox: the Freedom of the marketplace, where it has been unleashed in all its glory, seems to result in a startling disproportion of wealth -- or ability to do one thing (travel, eat, get educated) instead of another. So that it is possible that the agregate freedom of the agents in the marketplace actually diminishes as the market is given more freedom. More options, less ability to make choices. That is, it is possible that more and more financial power, and thus freedom, accrues to fewer and fewer. And those endowed with this greater freedom, using the scale of their market power (for anything that can be quantified can be marketed -- that's a simple rule), will operate within the structures of power as Market makers, turning legislative power into a market. Hey, welcome to reality. This, in fact, is what happens. The elected, the bureaucrats, the minions of the state in the Western system, ally with these freer agents in the market to do battle with each other, given the interests each private entity has. Meanwhile, the state tumbles into the market, dissolving its tangible services into those that are traded for tangible awards (as policies are designed in order to please contributers) and intangible ones (for instance, in the trust felt by the regulators of, say, the Power industry, that they will be hired by said industry when they retire from their various posts).
This is the kind of problem that vexed Montesquieu -- and it was the kind of problem that made Enlightenment thinkers very subtle about what, exactly, constitutes state power, how it is embodied, how its branches conflict, etc., and how the limits it imposed on the market actually promoted the greater freedom of the agents in the market. All lost on such as Minogue. His is a resolutely Thatcherian conservativism -- tied to the holy scriptures a la Hayek, and without much sense for what the labels mean anymore. Which might be why he throws around conservative pejoratives without thinking much about them. For instance, he talks of the 'brutish" state. That is the kind of talk that confuses LI. We are in the good old lefty tradition that is always suspicious of the state's brutish tendencies, too. But for us, brutish means, well, things like bombing unarmed civilians, or mobilizing ethnic hatred, or criminalizing drugs and incarcerating at a wholly mad level an unacceptable percentage of ethnic minorities, or what have you. But for Minogue, all this is mere piffle. Mere breaking of eggs. Of course, the stray tear for the victims of Stalin and Mao must be allowed to course down the weathered cheek, maybe at the next meeting of the Oxford Tory Association. But brutish, in Minogue's vocabulary, refers to one dread and deadly thing, one curse above all others, one plague that is much more important than that pesky thing going around Africa, what'chamacallit, the one afflicting sodomites in Amsterdam and San Francisco, so he's heard: yes, friends and brothers, we are talking about a tax rate on the top percentile income bracket that exceeds, say, 15 percent. The killing fields are one thing, but to force a man to hide, with the utmost indignity, his income in some offshore shell company in the Bermudas, why, there are limits. It's, it's... it is the fall of civilization, no doubt about it.
Kenneth Minogue is a conservative economist of some sort at the London School of Economics. Limited Inc knows him solely as the author of a screamingly funny article in the New Criterion about the fall of Western Civilization. The jew, this time, isn't at the root of it all -- yes, times have changed, and now right wingers are proclaiming themselves the most philo of philosemites. No, at the root it turns out is the radical feminist. Taking leaps and making rhetorical pirouttes rather in the style of one of the Chansons de Maldoror (which so enthralled the surrealists), Minogue concocted, in this essay, one of those fanciful dreamscapes that makes the Scaife foundation crowd cream in their Bill Blass slacks. He overviews the enemies of the west from Islam to Stalin, and then -- drumroll please -- he finds the nasty fifth column in the kitchen:
"In the course of the 1960s, a new tribe was established that also sought to overthrow the Western citadel from within and had notably greater success. This was Betty Friedan�s radical feminists."
This is the caliber of character chosen by the TLS to review Will Hutton's latest lefty screed, The World We are In.Limited Inc wants to express our deepest respect for the Minogue's piece, Back to the future, in the June seventh issue. Minogue, in a mere two pages, manages to sound every rightwing shibboleth he could think of. The result is like the MIDI version of the Eroica -- grandeur reduced to tinniness.
M. starts from the refreshing premises that there are two possible political positions -- after, of course, ritually bashing Hutton for believing that there are only two possible political positions. On the one side, there is the "brutish and unconstrained state," and their ombudsmen. Hutton, who as an advocate of the 'stakeholder society" -(a school of thought that holds that the firm should be guided as much by the interests of its stakeholders -- customers, employees, and community -- as by its shareholders) is clearly on the Shadow side. Or shall we say his is the politics of steak tartare -- it looks normal on the outside, but it is bloody pink on the inside. His shareholder idea is nothing more than "backdoor socialism." And one knows from Minogue's previous writing about feminism that backdoor carries a heavy metaphorical burden for him, a sexual aura. Let's just say that Hutton's is the kind of politics you'd expect to appeal to a sodomite, begging your pardon and casting no animadversions on the man himself.
As we said, there are two sides in this struggle, however. Fighting the good fight against these latterday gremlins from the Kremlin are the advocates of "market freedom."
"Freedom" is practically the mating call of your average right winger. And like the mating call of the cuckoo, the bandicoot, and the Cactus Wren, it means something different to its own species than it means to someone like, well, Limited Inc. Because LI doesn't understand the aphrodisiacal qualities of glueing together freedom and market. Freedom and love, for instance, we like that. But freedom and market has never stirred the blood, what? And further, we don't understand to what agent the quality of freedom is being ascribed. Is it the freedom of the marketeer? Is it the freedom of the buyer? Are they both the same kind of freedoms? And how about the producers, and the service infrastructure? Are they agents? Surely, within these categories are social entities, sometimes on a vast scale, which extend over a collective of workers that are not quite represented (except as ... dread word ... stakeholders) by their organizational representatives in the market. The Sears salesman is not Sears --which is why Sears can fire him without committing suicide. But bien sur, he is marketing himself -- since every market contains a market. Scrooge knew this, and so does Minogue. You are your brand. LI has always had a more romantic vision of what freedom is all about. As in striking off the mind forged manacles of man. But no -- freedom here has been reduced to a shell of itself, a cultural nullity, an invitation to conformity on a large scale. We can't get with the program.
And then, of course, there is a whole set of questions about how the freedoms are secured. By, uh, the state? So let me get this straight, the brute state is enforcing freedom of contract, and other great stuff, like a central bank to help prop up the stock market in a dull season, and the state is enforcing the freedom to monetize what was formerly common (under the name of Intellectual property), and so you can't just be a Mexican farmer and go out and plant corn anymore cause Monsanto bought your corn gene, like, and so Monsanto can bring you into court for that, which is a state institution, but this is all in the name of market freedom, right, and and.. this state activity is entirely neutral, right, and in fact virtuous? This is where the plot gets all confused for a guy like me. Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys again? I think it is like this. The state plays the role of Igor, here, to Minogue's mad economic scientist. Minogue says things like, bring in the spurious extension of our patent for that pharmaceutical, and Igor scurries off, and then comes back and hands it to him. And things like that. This is called Freedom of the Marketplace, and it is coming soon, to a theater near you.
And, well, and then LI starts getting all childish, and pulling on professor Minogue's trousers, and pestering him with questions. Such as, what's the metric here, anyway? We have one to suggest, since we are speaking in terms of the marketplace. Maybe freedom is purchasing power. But of course, the rightwing goes all romantic and vague when you mention things like this, and they start muttering about how terrible equality is, and the like. Because the unpleasant fact is that purchasing power is unequal in the market, and if the market is the arena of freedom, then surely the unequal power of the market's agents has some bearing on how that freedom is enacted.
We still don't like Minogue's game. We still think this isn't the essence of freedom, this isn't all there is to having the option to do one thing or the other (which I imagine must be bundled, somehow, into the notion of freedom). But what we like about the notion of comparable purchasing powers, or the comparison of resources one brings to the market, or accrues in the market, is that it makes freedom a measurable quality. Here, then, is the paradox: the Freedom of the marketplace, where it has been unleashed in all its glory, seems to result in a startling disproportion of wealth -- or ability to do one thing (travel, eat, get educated) instead of another. So that it is possible that the agregate freedom of the agents in the marketplace actually diminishes as the market is given more freedom. More options, less ability to make choices. That is, it is possible that more and more financial power, and thus freedom, accrues to fewer and fewer. And those endowed with this greater freedom, using the scale of their market power (for anything that can be quantified can be marketed -- that's a simple rule), will operate within the structures of power as Market makers, turning legislative power into a market. Hey, welcome to reality. This, in fact, is what happens. The elected, the bureaucrats, the minions of the state in the Western system, ally with these freer agents in the market to do battle with each other, given the interests each private entity has. Meanwhile, the state tumbles into the market, dissolving its tangible services into those that are traded for tangible awards (as policies are designed in order to please contributers) and intangible ones (for instance, in the trust felt by the regulators of, say, the Power industry, that they will be hired by said industry when they retire from their various posts).
This is the kind of problem that vexed Montesquieu -- and it was the kind of problem that made Enlightenment thinkers very subtle about what, exactly, constitutes state power, how it is embodied, how its branches conflict, etc., and how the limits it imposed on the market actually promoted the greater freedom of the agents in the market. All lost on such as Minogue. His is a resolutely Thatcherian conservativism -- tied to the holy scriptures a la Hayek, and without much sense for what the labels mean anymore. Which might be why he throws around conservative pejoratives without thinking much about them. For instance, he talks of the 'brutish" state. That is the kind of talk that confuses LI. We are in the good old lefty tradition that is always suspicious of the state's brutish tendencies, too. But for us, brutish means, well, things like bombing unarmed civilians, or mobilizing ethnic hatred, or criminalizing drugs and incarcerating at a wholly mad level an unacceptable percentage of ethnic minorities, or what have you. But for Minogue, all this is mere piffle. Mere breaking of eggs. Of course, the stray tear for the victims of Stalin and Mao must be allowed to course down the weathered cheek, maybe at the next meeting of the Oxford Tory Association. But brutish, in Minogue's vocabulary, refers to one dread and deadly thing, one curse above all others, one plague that is much more important than that pesky thing going around Africa, what'chamacallit, the one afflicting sodomites in Amsterdam and San Francisco, so he's heard: yes, friends and brothers, we are talking about a tax rate on the top percentile income bracket that exceeds, say, 15 percent. The killing fields are one thing, but to force a man to hide, with the utmost indignity, his income in some offshore shell company in the Bermudas, why, there are limits. It's, it's... it is the fall of civilization, no doubt about it.
Remora
A scandal identi-kit.
It works like this. The detective parks his car across the street from the warehouse, he gets out his camera, he takes pictures of men carrying briefcases meeting and exchanging them. The detective follows cars, he takes pictures of meetings in parks and under bridges.
We've seen this, right? The pictures, the movie, the implied plot. So here are a few pictures.
One would show Jacques Chirac meeting with George Bush on December 18, 2000 in Washington, DC at the French Embassy. One would show a former US supported "Freedom fighter," Jonas Savimbo, with seven bullets in him, holding onto a gun. One would show Eduardo Dos Santos, the president of Angola and former hardline Marxist foe of Savimbo, being feted at a White House dinner shortly after Savimbo's assassination. And one would show an arms dealer named Pierre Falcone (whose wife Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia, is Laura Bush's friend) getting together $20,.000 to contribute to Bush's presidential campaign through his wife's beauty products corporation, Essante. In all, $100,000 was contributed during the campaign, and then, in 2001, returned when Falcone went to jail.
Falcone is not unknown to Chirac -- or to his old rival, Mitterand. In fact, he is one of the central figures in one of those simmering French scandals that would destroy the regime in another country: the arms trafficing scandal that involved Mitterand's son, Jean-Christophe, and huge, unaccounted for sums, as well as a mafioso style Russian arms dealer, Arkadi Gaydamak.
This isn't a story we've seen covered in the NYT. It runs through Angola and traces the surprising fault lines of the New World Order. How new worldish it is can be gauged by what happened to Jonas Savimba.
In the old days -- the eighties -- Savimba was a right wing hero. Probably the only black man Jesse Helms ever willingly ate with, he was praised by Reagan as a George Washington type figure. His UNITA guerrillas were fed with American money, trained (as far as they had any training) by the CIA, and armed by the CIA, too.
But when the Soviet threat dissolved, Savimba was undone by the economic facts on the ground. Those facts were about oil. The suddenly capitalistic dos Santos could deliver the oil. Savimba, the loser of the first post-communist election, could only deliver his mad dog personality. And suddenly that personality wasn't in demand. The invites to the Helms house were on permanent hold. Savimba retires with his guys to the bocage, of course, and forays out to attack airliners, murder villagers, rape women, and do all the stuff that made him George Washington in the first place. Well, how inconvenient. So he is tracked down -- perhaps with American help -- and killed:
"Fifteen bullets in all -- one in the neck, two in the head, the others in the chest, legs and arms -- finally overcame the boss of UNITA, who is dead at 67 years of age, Friday at 3 p.m. on the banks of the Luvuie River at Moxico." So read the announcement of his unhappy death this February. Another old cold warrior bites the dust, gangster style."
The way American intelligence agencies leave their assets around -- Savimba in Angola, bin Laden in Afghanistan -- it is like some drunk Texas trucker throwing beer cans out the cab. Human litter, but somebody has to pick it up.
However, never let it be said that Savimba's less glorious years had no function or meaning. With UNITA threatening him, dos Santos, backed by various American petro-chemical companies, such as Dick Cheney's Haliburton, needed arms. The desire for arms and drugs is the only unlimited desire known to mankind. Luckily, in this world, an embattled dictator can always find somebody to sell him a few hundred million dollars worth of weaponry; this is where Falcone, with his buddy Gaydamak, and his connections with Chirac and his faithful friend, Jean-Christophe Mitterand, fits in. As does ( scumbags of the world display the most touching solidarity) Clinton's good friend, Marc Rich, the on the run moneybags whose company, Glencore, deals in oil.
A scandal identi-kit.
It works like this. The detective parks his car across the street from the warehouse, he gets out his camera, he takes pictures of men carrying briefcases meeting and exchanging them. The detective follows cars, he takes pictures of meetings in parks and under bridges.
We've seen this, right? The pictures, the movie, the implied plot. So here are a few pictures.
One would show Jacques Chirac meeting with George Bush on December 18, 2000 in Washington, DC at the French Embassy. One would show a former US supported "Freedom fighter," Jonas Savimbo, with seven bullets in him, holding onto a gun. One would show Eduardo Dos Santos, the president of Angola and former hardline Marxist foe of Savimbo, being feted at a White House dinner shortly after Savimbo's assassination. And one would show an arms dealer named Pierre Falcone (whose wife Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia, is Laura Bush's friend) getting together $20,.000 to contribute to Bush's presidential campaign through his wife's beauty products corporation, Essante. In all, $100,000 was contributed during the campaign, and then, in 2001, returned when Falcone went to jail.
Falcone is not unknown to Chirac -- or to his old rival, Mitterand. In fact, he is one of the central figures in one of those simmering French scandals that would destroy the regime in another country: the arms trafficing scandal that involved Mitterand's son, Jean-Christophe, and huge, unaccounted for sums, as well as a mafioso style Russian arms dealer, Arkadi Gaydamak.
This isn't a story we've seen covered in the NYT. It runs through Angola and traces the surprising fault lines of the New World Order. How new worldish it is can be gauged by what happened to Jonas Savimba.
In the old days -- the eighties -- Savimba was a right wing hero. Probably the only black man Jesse Helms ever willingly ate with, he was praised by Reagan as a George Washington type figure. His UNITA guerrillas were fed with American money, trained (as far as they had any training) by the CIA, and armed by the CIA, too.
But when the Soviet threat dissolved, Savimba was undone by the economic facts on the ground. Those facts were about oil. The suddenly capitalistic dos Santos could deliver the oil. Savimba, the loser of the first post-communist election, could only deliver his mad dog personality. And suddenly that personality wasn't in demand. The invites to the Helms house were on permanent hold. Savimba retires with his guys to the bocage, of course, and forays out to attack airliners, murder villagers, rape women, and do all the stuff that made him George Washington in the first place. Well, how inconvenient. So he is tracked down -- perhaps with American help -- and killed:
"Fifteen bullets in all -- one in the neck, two in the head, the others in the chest, legs and arms -- finally overcame the boss of UNITA, who is dead at 67 years of age, Friday at 3 p.m. on the banks of the Luvuie River at Moxico." So read the announcement of his unhappy death this February. Another old cold warrior bites the dust, gangster style."
The way American intelligence agencies leave their assets around -- Savimba in Angola, bin Laden in Afghanistan -- it is like some drunk Texas trucker throwing beer cans out the cab. Human litter, but somebody has to pick it up.
However, never let it be said that Savimba's less glorious years had no function or meaning. With UNITA threatening him, dos Santos, backed by various American petro-chemical companies, such as Dick Cheney's Haliburton, needed arms. The desire for arms and drugs is the only unlimited desire known to mankind. Luckily, in this world, an embattled dictator can always find somebody to sell him a few hundred million dollars worth of weaponry; this is where Falcone, with his buddy Gaydamak, and his connections with Chirac and his faithful friend, Jean-Christophe Mitterand, fits in. As does ( scumbags of the world display the most touching solidarity) Clinton's good friend, Marc Rich, the on the run moneybags whose company, Glencore, deals in oil.
Monday, June 17, 2002
Remora
Depth charges
We received, over the weekend, a heartening email from M. She responded to the criticism that LI is shallow and vapid -- the criticism we'd conveyed in a previous post, transmitted to us by the friend of a friend -- with the beautiful phrase, "you exceed the average depth by a very large measure."
That's a difficult compliment to live up to. Limited Inc has the distinct feeling, lately, that we are crawling on our belly. That we are approaching some terrible financial and social abyss in this prone and stupid position. That verbal facility is a death curse. That our desperation, stupidity, and a forked tongue are doing us in. That it is no accident that, reading Baudelaire's Journals, we keep getting that Ecce Homo feeling -- except that the man who is ecce is the man writing this sentence, a man who's shot his wad, the spent cracker, the layed off fool.
But trying to keep up our end, trying frankly to feel deep again, we searched for topics: And then we came across this interview with Rodolphe Gasch� in Eurozine, and we thought we'd begin the week with some tribute to Derrida -- after all, he's the step father of this misbegotten site -- he's named us.
When Limited Inc. was a mere snakelet of a graduate student in Philosophy, deconstruction was just building to its peak. This was back in the late eighties. The school was popular enough that, to our dismay, its terms began to take on alchemical overtones. Any resentful attack on politically correct targets became a deconstruction of them. Usually, the attack turned out to be some crude mixture of formalism and the most vulgar kind of Marxist reduction.
Well, at the time we thought there was a certain recognizable irony at work here. This happened with Leibnitz -- followed by the ever tedious Christian Wolf. This happened to Kant -- he was followed by the ever more mystical Schelling and Co. To propose a system is to be systematically misunderstood. And to propose an anti-system is to be immediately systematized. The clown follows the hero.
Begin with a philosophical technique that explained identity as the strategic disposition of forces within the text, and that futher extends to the term, text, a meaning which encompasses both the game of sense and the continual immersion of language in its material embodiment, and its eternal denial (ecriture begins with pronunciation, don't you know, and philosophy begins with a systematic recoil from that fact ). Then throw in a whole other thematic -- the politics of identity that is pointed to by the word phallogocentrism. And then sieve this through an academic class that is deeply conscious of its own economic and social displacement in the world, as universities become mere addenda to business schools. Mix, and you get the awful deconstructive "readings" that flourished in the eighties and nineties.
Gasche, who wrote a good book about Derrida, Tain of the Mirror, makes several moves in this interview that fill us with dismay for our side. First, he disses analytic philosophy. In response to the question of philosophy's existence in departments of literature (as in, what's a discipline like you doing in a place like this?) he responds:
"Undoubtedly, some departments of comparative literature, but certainly not all, have increasingly turned philosophical, with some including straightforward instruction in the discipline "philosophy." But I think it is safe to say that with some exceptions, of course, such instruction remains framed by the requirements and expectations specific to students whose main concerns are literary. I should add, however, that with the inclusion of a number of subspecialties in the literary curriculum such as gender studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and so forth, the spectrum of the issues that philosophy can and must address in comparative literature has expanded dramatically. With this, new opportunities have arisen for anchoring philosophy in comparative literature departments. Evidently, if the philosophy taught in these departments is 'continental' it is for good reasons. The students are literary students, and analytical philosophy has nothing to offer them."
Now, if we were feeling our deconstructive oats, we would make much of the exchange between analytic philosophy and these literary students. It is a null exchange -- "analytic philosophy has nothing to offer them." And it is an exchange based, apparently, on offers -- philosophy is offering a thing. The thing it is offering, it turns out, is absolute -- it is the thing itself. If continental philosophy can offer something to these students, it is also absolute -- it also offers all it has.
Limited inc believes the offer of the absolute is obviously a con. Ah, we could go on and on about the con of continental philosophy. Instead, we will go into normal speak, and protest, like the merchant of theory that we once aspired to be. Far from offering nothing, analytic philosophy can 'offer" the event -- the event thematized, the event as the moment in which analytic philosophy both breaks down and advances. Deconstruction joins analytic philosophy in that moment, joins as a disenchanted party. Deconstruction will no longer con the student - that is its promise.
But time marches on, and we realize that we have reached a point in this post where we have totally lost our audience. Nothing does it quicker than writing about philosophy. Sorry. One other long quote, however, from the Gasche article for the one person left who might actually be reading this sentence:
"The deconstructive literary criticism that I targeted in "Deconstruction and Criticism," and which critique also frames my exposition of Derrida's thought in The Tain of the Mirror, rests, or rather rested, on the assumption that the literary text is constituted by an integral, and flawless, mirror play on all levels of the text ranging from the thematic to the one of the signifier. The critical operation of bringing the text's self-reflection to light, this is what this criticism understood by deconstruction. No doubt the Yale School and its disciples were the prime representative of this conception of literariness. However, and ironically, de Man, many of whose students adopted the deconstructive literary theory, does not easily - rather, does not fit at all - into this scheme, as I have argued in my last book. But the Yale School was not the only spokesman for this approach to the literary text. Deconstructive literary criticism was a much broader phenomenon, it diffused easily, whether as the result of a progressive dilution of the tenets of the Yale School, or as the specific form in which New Criticism became capable of survival. From my criticism of deconstructive literary criticism it is clear that I do not buy its conception of the text, nor its understanding of the task of criticism. It is a reductive approach to textuality. But in order to demonstrate that any literary text worth the name, achieves full, all inclusive specularity, this kind of criticism had to draw on aspects of language - established by linguistics, semiotics, and pragmatics - neglected by the traditional thematic, humanist, historical criticisms, but also formalist poetics. Its objections against the traditional modes of criticisms are well founded, and need to be recognised as such. In many ways, deconstructive literary criticism had a sobering effect on literary studies. I would add, however, that deconstruction in literary studies based itself on a conception of the text that is as narrow, and as questionable as the ones at the foundation of the more traditional conceptions of criticism. Let me explain myself. Since what counts in deconstructive literary criticism is the demonstration that in a text everything mirrors everything, and, hence, that no single position, statement, theme, or truth, can prevail, its criticism of other positions is limited to the accusation of disregarding certain aspects of the text which when brought into play, would debunk the claims made by singling out one of its items, or levels. Its conception of the text is speculative in essence even though the absolute speculation that animates it, serves to demonstrate that there is no absolute knowledge."
Ah, with what feelings of luxury I once plunged into this kind of argument! The delirium of all the brave young grad students! and their subsequent detoxification, drying out in every college and junior college and land grant U. from here to Bakersfield, California! And how the world goes on!
Depth charges
We received, over the weekend, a heartening email from M. She responded to the criticism that LI is shallow and vapid -- the criticism we'd conveyed in a previous post, transmitted to us by the friend of a friend -- with the beautiful phrase, "you exceed the average depth by a very large measure."
That's a difficult compliment to live up to. Limited Inc has the distinct feeling, lately, that we are crawling on our belly. That we are approaching some terrible financial and social abyss in this prone and stupid position. That verbal facility is a death curse. That our desperation, stupidity, and a forked tongue are doing us in. That it is no accident that, reading Baudelaire's Journals, we keep getting that Ecce Homo feeling -- except that the man who is ecce is the man writing this sentence, a man who's shot his wad, the spent cracker, the layed off fool.
But trying to keep up our end, trying frankly to feel deep again, we searched for topics: And then we came across this interview with Rodolphe Gasch� in Eurozine, and we thought we'd begin the week with some tribute to Derrida -- after all, he's the step father of this misbegotten site -- he's named us.
When Limited Inc. was a mere snakelet of a graduate student in Philosophy, deconstruction was just building to its peak. This was back in the late eighties. The school was popular enough that, to our dismay, its terms began to take on alchemical overtones. Any resentful attack on politically correct targets became a deconstruction of them. Usually, the attack turned out to be some crude mixture of formalism and the most vulgar kind of Marxist reduction.
Well, at the time we thought there was a certain recognizable irony at work here. This happened with Leibnitz -- followed by the ever tedious Christian Wolf. This happened to Kant -- he was followed by the ever more mystical Schelling and Co. To propose a system is to be systematically misunderstood. And to propose an anti-system is to be immediately systematized. The clown follows the hero.
Begin with a philosophical technique that explained identity as the strategic disposition of forces within the text, and that futher extends to the term, text, a meaning which encompasses both the game of sense and the continual immersion of language in its material embodiment, and its eternal denial (ecriture begins with pronunciation, don't you know, and philosophy begins with a systematic recoil from that fact ). Then throw in a whole other thematic -- the politics of identity that is pointed to by the word phallogocentrism. And then sieve this through an academic class that is deeply conscious of its own economic and social displacement in the world, as universities become mere addenda to business schools. Mix, and you get the awful deconstructive "readings" that flourished in the eighties and nineties.
Gasche, who wrote a good book about Derrida, Tain of the Mirror, makes several moves in this interview that fill us with dismay for our side. First, he disses analytic philosophy. In response to the question of philosophy's existence in departments of literature (as in, what's a discipline like you doing in a place like this?) he responds:
"Undoubtedly, some departments of comparative literature, but certainly not all, have increasingly turned philosophical, with some including straightforward instruction in the discipline "philosophy." But I think it is safe to say that with some exceptions, of course, such instruction remains framed by the requirements and expectations specific to students whose main concerns are literary. I should add, however, that with the inclusion of a number of subspecialties in the literary curriculum such as gender studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and so forth, the spectrum of the issues that philosophy can and must address in comparative literature has expanded dramatically. With this, new opportunities have arisen for anchoring philosophy in comparative literature departments. Evidently, if the philosophy taught in these departments is 'continental' it is for good reasons. The students are literary students, and analytical philosophy has nothing to offer them."
Now, if we were feeling our deconstructive oats, we would make much of the exchange between analytic philosophy and these literary students. It is a null exchange -- "analytic philosophy has nothing to offer them." And it is an exchange based, apparently, on offers -- philosophy is offering a thing. The thing it is offering, it turns out, is absolute -- it is the thing itself. If continental philosophy can offer something to these students, it is also absolute -- it also offers all it has.
Limited inc believes the offer of the absolute is obviously a con. Ah, we could go on and on about the con of continental philosophy. Instead, we will go into normal speak, and protest, like the merchant of theory that we once aspired to be. Far from offering nothing, analytic philosophy can 'offer" the event -- the event thematized, the event as the moment in which analytic philosophy both breaks down and advances. Deconstruction joins analytic philosophy in that moment, joins as a disenchanted party. Deconstruction will no longer con the student - that is its promise.
But time marches on, and we realize that we have reached a point in this post where we have totally lost our audience. Nothing does it quicker than writing about philosophy. Sorry. One other long quote, however, from the Gasche article for the one person left who might actually be reading this sentence:
"The deconstructive literary criticism that I targeted in "Deconstruction and Criticism," and which critique also frames my exposition of Derrida's thought in The Tain of the Mirror, rests, or rather rested, on the assumption that the literary text is constituted by an integral, and flawless, mirror play on all levels of the text ranging from the thematic to the one of the signifier. The critical operation of bringing the text's self-reflection to light, this is what this criticism understood by deconstruction. No doubt the Yale School and its disciples were the prime representative of this conception of literariness. However, and ironically, de Man, many of whose students adopted the deconstructive literary theory, does not easily - rather, does not fit at all - into this scheme, as I have argued in my last book. But the Yale School was not the only spokesman for this approach to the literary text. Deconstructive literary criticism was a much broader phenomenon, it diffused easily, whether as the result of a progressive dilution of the tenets of the Yale School, or as the specific form in which New Criticism became capable of survival. From my criticism of deconstructive literary criticism it is clear that I do not buy its conception of the text, nor its understanding of the task of criticism. It is a reductive approach to textuality. But in order to demonstrate that any literary text worth the name, achieves full, all inclusive specularity, this kind of criticism had to draw on aspects of language - established by linguistics, semiotics, and pragmatics - neglected by the traditional thematic, humanist, historical criticisms, but also formalist poetics. Its objections against the traditional modes of criticisms are well founded, and need to be recognised as such. In many ways, deconstructive literary criticism had a sobering effect on literary studies. I would add, however, that deconstruction in literary studies based itself on a conception of the text that is as narrow, and as questionable as the ones at the foundation of the more traditional conceptions of criticism. Let me explain myself. Since what counts in deconstructive literary criticism is the demonstration that in a text everything mirrors everything, and, hence, that no single position, statement, theme, or truth, can prevail, its criticism of other positions is limited to the accusation of disregarding certain aspects of the text which when brought into play, would debunk the claims made by singling out one of its items, or levels. Its conception of the text is speculative in essence even though the absolute speculation that animates it, serves to demonstrate that there is no absolute knowledge."
Ah, with what feelings of luxury I once plunged into this kind of argument! The delirium of all the brave young grad students! and their subsequent detoxification, drying out in every college and junior college and land grant U. from here to Bakersfield, California! And how the world goes on!
Thursday, June 13, 2002
Remora
The exchange between Annie Applebaum and the always odious Strobe Talbott in Slate is a little treasure trove of Clintonia -- remember that magic time when the White House was inviting crooked Chinese and Indonesian money into the coffers of the Democratic Party, while palling around with the Mafia, uh, I mean government of Boris Yeltsin and his shifty-fingered ilk?
Applebaum is less scoriating on this subject than I'd like her to be, but she does put the bite on Strobe's Gray Flannel trousers act. Here's a nice graf:
You are arguing, essentially, that in order to destroy something bad (communism), we had to let something less bad (oligarchic noncapitalism) grow in its place. Well, maybe we didn't have much influence over this change anyway (despite the fact that U.S. policy�and U.S. rhetoric�often implied that we did).
Yet you are also arguing that it was OK for us to give our tacit approval to this change because we got some political concessions in exchange. Here I disagree: I would argue that Russia made most of the political concessions (agreeing to NATO expansion, getting troops out of the Baltics) because it is weak and because it had no other choice, not because Yeltsin and Clinton were friends. We didn't have to look on, smiling, while a handful of people stole the Soviet Union's assets, and we didn't have to lend the Russian government the money that it was no longer able to collect in taxes and oil revenue.
To my mind, the crucial thing is to stop thinking about Russia as exceptional and to stop treating the country as if it were always a special case. In the 1990s, the IMF created special loans, just for Russia, with special rules�thanks, largely, to political pressure from the United States. Instead of that, we should offer Russia fair rules, free trade�that is, not make up reasons to exclude Russian products�and insist that Russia join the WTO on the same terms as anybody else. Loans to Russia should be made on the same terms that loans are made to Bolivia. Russia should be allowed to remain a member of the Council of Europe only if it abides by the Council of Europe's rules, which means no human rights abuses in Chechnya.
Strobey gets a bit ruffled by the barking and biting. He brings out, as our ace in the hole, Gore's friendship with Chermonydryn:
"Go back and take a look at the sections in the book (at the end of Chapter 2, for example) on what we did, through technical assistance and exchange programs, to promote civil society. This was also a major theme of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission�which I believe would have accomplished a lot more if Chernomyrdin had lasted longer (but that gets me into the tricky territory of counterfactual history, and we've got our work cut out for us on the solid ground of the factual)."
Yes, I bet Chernoblyn wishes he'd lasted longer too -- he was making out like a bandit. Here's an old NYT story about Strobe's buddy:
"When the CIA uncovered what its analysts considered to be conclusive evidence of the personal corruption of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of Russia in 1995, they sent it to the White House, expecting Clinton administration officials to be impressed with their work," reports James Risen of the New York Times. "Instead, when the secret CIA report on Chernomyrdin arrived in the office of Vice President Al Gore, it was rejected and sent back to the CIA with a barnyard epithet scrawled across its cover, according to several intelligence officials familiar with the incident."
"At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.," Risen continues, "the message seemed clear: The vice president did not want to hear allegations that Chernomyrdin was corrupt and was not interested in further intelligence reports on the matter. As a result, CIA analysts say they are now censoring themselves. When, for instance, the agency found that it cost a German business executive $1 million just to get a meeting with Chernomyrdin to discuss deals in Russia, it decided not to circulate the report outside the CIA, officials said."
But Chernobobin found soul mates at the Clinton White House, no doubt about that. Here's a background report by Ann Williamson that goes back to the voucher program (a Bush senior era program that was sanctified by all the free enterprising poobahs, and that was evidently an invitation to corruption) and up to the stropping up of the always drunk Yeltsin as a viable candidate for capitan of the Titanic in 1995. Williamson includes such gloriously tawdry details of the Clinton Administration's dealings with Yeltsin as the Tyson factor:
"Following the Russian Communists� success in the December 1995 parliamentary elections, the Fund proceeded into even dodgier territory with the 1996 $10.2 billion loan, which came front-loaded with a billion dollars meant for Yeltsin�s re-election. Tape recordings of conversations between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Yeltsin made public demonstrate that in return longtime Clinton supporter and campaign donor Tyson Chicken�s exports to Russia � a $700 million annual business � were protected from a threatened 20 percent tariff increase."
In the words of my favorite punk Asian american duo, Cibo Matto:
I know my chicken...
Or -- I'm still glad I voted for Nader.
The exchange between Annie Applebaum and the always odious Strobe Talbott in Slate is a little treasure trove of Clintonia -- remember that magic time when the White House was inviting crooked Chinese and Indonesian money into the coffers of the Democratic Party, while palling around with the Mafia, uh, I mean government of Boris Yeltsin and his shifty-fingered ilk?
Applebaum is less scoriating on this subject than I'd like her to be, but she does put the bite on Strobe's Gray Flannel trousers act. Here's a nice graf:
You are arguing, essentially, that in order to destroy something bad (communism), we had to let something less bad (oligarchic noncapitalism) grow in its place. Well, maybe we didn't have much influence over this change anyway (despite the fact that U.S. policy�and U.S. rhetoric�often implied that we did).
Yet you are also arguing that it was OK for us to give our tacit approval to this change because we got some political concessions in exchange. Here I disagree: I would argue that Russia made most of the political concessions (agreeing to NATO expansion, getting troops out of the Baltics) because it is weak and because it had no other choice, not because Yeltsin and Clinton were friends. We didn't have to look on, smiling, while a handful of people stole the Soviet Union's assets, and we didn't have to lend the Russian government the money that it was no longer able to collect in taxes and oil revenue.
To my mind, the crucial thing is to stop thinking about Russia as exceptional and to stop treating the country as if it were always a special case. In the 1990s, the IMF created special loans, just for Russia, with special rules�thanks, largely, to political pressure from the United States. Instead of that, we should offer Russia fair rules, free trade�that is, not make up reasons to exclude Russian products�and insist that Russia join the WTO on the same terms as anybody else. Loans to Russia should be made on the same terms that loans are made to Bolivia. Russia should be allowed to remain a member of the Council of Europe only if it abides by the Council of Europe's rules, which means no human rights abuses in Chechnya.
Strobey gets a bit ruffled by the barking and biting. He brings out, as our ace in the hole, Gore's friendship with Chermonydryn:
"Go back and take a look at the sections in the book (at the end of Chapter 2, for example) on what we did, through technical assistance and exchange programs, to promote civil society. This was also a major theme of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission�which I believe would have accomplished a lot more if Chernomyrdin had lasted longer (but that gets me into the tricky territory of counterfactual history, and we've got our work cut out for us on the solid ground of the factual)."
Yes, I bet Chernoblyn wishes he'd lasted longer too -- he was making out like a bandit. Here's an old NYT story about Strobe's buddy:
"When the CIA uncovered what its analysts considered to be conclusive evidence of the personal corruption of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of Russia in 1995, they sent it to the White House, expecting Clinton administration officials to be impressed with their work," reports James Risen of the New York Times. "Instead, when the secret CIA report on Chernomyrdin arrived in the office of Vice President Al Gore, it was rejected and sent back to the CIA with a barnyard epithet scrawled across its cover, according to several intelligence officials familiar with the incident."
"At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.," Risen continues, "the message seemed clear: The vice president did not want to hear allegations that Chernomyrdin was corrupt and was not interested in further intelligence reports on the matter. As a result, CIA analysts say they are now censoring themselves. When, for instance, the agency found that it cost a German business executive $1 million just to get a meeting with Chernomyrdin to discuss deals in Russia, it decided not to circulate the report outside the CIA, officials said."
But Chernobobin found soul mates at the Clinton White House, no doubt about that. Here's a background report by Ann Williamson that goes back to the voucher program (a Bush senior era program that was sanctified by all the free enterprising poobahs, and that was evidently an invitation to corruption) and up to the stropping up of the always drunk Yeltsin as a viable candidate for capitan of the Titanic in 1995. Williamson includes such gloriously tawdry details of the Clinton Administration's dealings with Yeltsin as the Tyson factor:
"Following the Russian Communists� success in the December 1995 parliamentary elections, the Fund proceeded into even dodgier territory with the 1996 $10.2 billion loan, which came front-loaded with a billion dollars meant for Yeltsin�s re-election. Tape recordings of conversations between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Yeltsin made public demonstrate that in return longtime Clinton supporter and campaign donor Tyson Chicken�s exports to Russia � a $700 million annual business � were protected from a threatened 20 percent tariff increase."
In the words of my favorite punk Asian american duo, Cibo Matto:
I know my chicken...
Or -- I'm still glad I voted for Nader.
Dope
A friend tells us: I sent your post about bias in the press to a conservative friend of mine. He responded that Limited Inc was confusing the issue. And that Limited Inc was in the habit of confusing issues, because Limited Inc lacked a certain, necessary depth.
Now, there you go: my friend's friend has provided an explanation for a problem that has frankly puzzled us: why isn't Limited Inc exercizing world wide influence and being consulted by the powers of the Earth on a daily basis?
More specifically, this has made Limited Inc think about issues qua issues. As in, what are issues, and where do they come from?
The traditional political divisions are usually delineated by showing that, on a given array of issues, x will take this position and y will take that position. What Limited Inc is all about, gentle readers, is disputing the given-ness of the issues themselves. Their shape, their texture, their topical constitution, their implementation, their distribution... The issue machine, if you will. So that the issue of, say, bias in the media, which is usually a tug of war between people who say, hey, there is a liberal bias in the media and those who say hey, there isn't a liberal bias in the media, is recast in other terms: first, as the sociological donnee that any subculture exists and perseveres by enforcing a certain tone upon its members, and by, secondly, taking journalism as merely one of those subcultures, to be compared with the petroleum industry, or the car industry, etc. This way of treating the issue doesn't "solve' the problem of bias, but puts the explanation for bias, (and its inevitability) in terms of the historical determinants that have shaped the composition of those who work in journalism, or car design, or etc. That's a question for another day. We are seeing, in the spread of weblogs, a subculture form that is apparently tilted towards the right. I'm not sure that impression is true, but if it is, the question would be: is there a first mover advantage that would select more and more conservative webloggers? or have we not yet passed that threshhold? is the weblog subculture in a more amorpohous stage in which the population of webloggers is accumulating randomly?
But to return to the fascinating issue of the issue. To make the meta leap, the froggish jump.
The OED defines the primary meaning of issue to mean output of some sort, from the Latin, exire, a thing that goes out. An issue, in this sense, implies, first, a flow, and second, a place the flow comes to, stops at, or passes through. Issue in this sense is an egress, a child, or the expression of energy. I'm not sure how, exactly, this meaning became linked with the meaning of issue as a controversial notion. Here's how the OED defines this:
"A point on the decision of which something depends or is made to rest; a point or matter in contention between two parties; the point at which a matter becomes ripe for decision. Esp. in to put to ([]on, upon, an, the) issue and similar phrases: to bring to a point admitting of decision.
c1566 J. ALDAY tr. Boaystuau's Theat. World Biijb, The battel of this world is so perillous, the yssue so terrible and fearfull. 1613 SHAKES. Hen. VIII, V. i. 178 Now, While 'tis hot, Ile put it to the issue. 1656 BRAMHALL Replic. vi. 279 If he stand to this ground, there are no more controversies between him and me for the future but this one, what is the true Catholick Church, whether the Church of Rome..or the Church of the whole World, Roman, Grecian, Armenian, Abyssene, Russian, Protestant,..I desire no fairer issue between him and me. 1665 GLANVILL Def. Vain Dogm. 20, I am willing to put it upon the issue, whether it be so to any body else but this philosopher. 1748 RICHARDSON Clarissa I. iv. 25, I saw plainly that to have denied myself to his visits..was to bring forward some desperate issue between the two. 1863 TYNDALL Heat vi. 193 The problem I think is thus narrowed to the precise issue on which its solution depends. 1873 BURTON Hist. Scot. VI. lxxii. 290 Look at the issue between England and Scotland as it stood at the moment.
c. A matter or point which remains to be decided; a matter the decision of which involves important consequences.
1836 J. GILBERT Chr. Atonem. v. (1852) 145 Conferring the power of choice, and connecting that choice with most important issues. 1875 JOWETT Plato (ed. 2) III. 133 There is a mighty issue at stake..the good or evil of the human soul. 1898 Westm. Gaz. 22 July 3/2 �We want issues�. In the absence of issues politics become a question of self-interest..to manipulate the tariff for the benefit of trusts and manufacturers."
Limited inc doesn't want to engage in the Heideggerian folly of claiming that the semantic evolution of a term gives us the theodicy of the concept -- but we do think that there is a link between the term's emergence with a certain meaning and the historical situation in which that emergence occurs. Looking at the OED's citations, we notice that the evolution of "issue" is towards the problem/solution framework. An issue arises when there is a problem. Problems are formalized in science, and the OED's citations show that there is a back and forth between the "issue" as a description of a social problem and the 'issue" as a description of a scientific problem. The problem indicates a matter to be decided. So if one confuses an issue, one can: a, be confused about the problem that the issue is about, or that the issue indicates; or b, be confused about the correlating decisions that solve the problem. My friend's friend would probably add one more kind of confusion of issue, c, an intentional blurring of the scope of a problem for sophistical purposes.
Limited Inc's inclination is to say this: the motivation for delineating the issues as they are delineated among the governing classes should be looked at with maximum suspicion. This approach is naturally disconcerting if your politics is about viewing the divisions within the governing class (the liberal vs. conservative divide) as the defining political division. We are trying, in our humble way, to re-draw the problem set, which puts us outside of that kind of politics, even if our sympathies are to one tendency within it. This sometimes makes our points seem tendentious or extra-political. Alas, that's the price we have to pay. And so... at least for this year, it looks like the world leaders aren't going to be turning to us for political advise. But what can we say? such is the burden of greatness.
A friend tells us: I sent your post about bias in the press to a conservative friend of mine. He responded that Limited Inc was confusing the issue. And that Limited Inc was in the habit of confusing issues, because Limited Inc lacked a certain, necessary depth.
Now, there you go: my friend's friend has provided an explanation for a problem that has frankly puzzled us: why isn't Limited Inc exercizing world wide influence and being consulted by the powers of the Earth on a daily basis?
More specifically, this has made Limited Inc think about issues qua issues. As in, what are issues, and where do they come from?
The traditional political divisions are usually delineated by showing that, on a given array of issues, x will take this position and y will take that position. What Limited Inc is all about, gentle readers, is disputing the given-ness of the issues themselves. Their shape, their texture, their topical constitution, their implementation, their distribution... The issue machine, if you will. So that the issue of, say, bias in the media, which is usually a tug of war between people who say, hey, there is a liberal bias in the media and those who say hey, there isn't a liberal bias in the media, is recast in other terms: first, as the sociological donnee that any subculture exists and perseveres by enforcing a certain tone upon its members, and by, secondly, taking journalism as merely one of those subcultures, to be compared with the petroleum industry, or the car industry, etc. This way of treating the issue doesn't "solve' the problem of bias, but puts the explanation for bias, (and its inevitability) in terms of the historical determinants that have shaped the composition of those who work in journalism, or car design, or etc. That's a question for another day. We are seeing, in the spread of weblogs, a subculture form that is apparently tilted towards the right. I'm not sure that impression is true, but if it is, the question would be: is there a first mover advantage that would select more and more conservative webloggers? or have we not yet passed that threshhold? is the weblog subculture in a more amorpohous stage in which the population of webloggers is accumulating randomly?
But to return to the fascinating issue of the issue. To make the meta leap, the froggish jump.
The OED defines the primary meaning of issue to mean output of some sort, from the Latin, exire, a thing that goes out. An issue, in this sense, implies, first, a flow, and second, a place the flow comes to, stops at, or passes through. Issue in this sense is an egress, a child, or the expression of energy. I'm not sure how, exactly, this meaning became linked with the meaning of issue as a controversial notion. Here's how the OED defines this:
"A point on the decision of which something depends or is made to rest; a point or matter in contention between two parties; the point at which a matter becomes ripe for decision. Esp. in to put to ([]on, upon, an, the) issue and similar phrases: to bring to a point admitting of decision.
c1566 J. ALDAY tr. Boaystuau's Theat. World Biijb, The battel of this world is so perillous, the yssue so terrible and fearfull. 1613 SHAKES. Hen. VIII, V. i. 178 Now, While 'tis hot, Ile put it to the issue. 1656 BRAMHALL Replic. vi. 279 If he stand to this ground, there are no more controversies between him and me for the future but this one, what is the true Catholick Church, whether the Church of Rome..or the Church of the whole World, Roman, Grecian, Armenian, Abyssene, Russian, Protestant,..I desire no fairer issue between him and me. 1665 GLANVILL Def. Vain Dogm. 20, I am willing to put it upon the issue, whether it be so to any body else but this philosopher. 1748 RICHARDSON Clarissa I. iv. 25, I saw plainly that to have denied myself to his visits..was to bring forward some desperate issue between the two. 1863 TYNDALL Heat vi. 193 The problem I think is thus narrowed to the precise issue on which its solution depends. 1873 BURTON Hist. Scot. VI. lxxii. 290 Look at the issue between England and Scotland as it stood at the moment.
c. A matter or point which remains to be decided; a matter the decision of which involves important consequences.
1836 J. GILBERT Chr. Atonem. v. (1852) 145 Conferring the power of choice, and connecting that choice with most important issues. 1875 JOWETT Plato (ed. 2) III. 133 There is a mighty issue at stake..the good or evil of the human soul. 1898 Westm. Gaz. 22 July 3/2 �We want issues�. In the absence of issues politics become a question of self-interest..to manipulate the tariff for the benefit of trusts and manufacturers."
Limited inc doesn't want to engage in the Heideggerian folly of claiming that the semantic evolution of a term gives us the theodicy of the concept -- but we do think that there is a link between the term's emergence with a certain meaning and the historical situation in which that emergence occurs. Looking at the OED's citations, we notice that the evolution of "issue" is towards the problem/solution framework. An issue arises when there is a problem. Problems are formalized in science, and the OED's citations show that there is a back and forth between the "issue" as a description of a social problem and the 'issue" as a description of a scientific problem. The problem indicates a matter to be decided. So if one confuses an issue, one can: a, be confused about the problem that the issue is about, or that the issue indicates; or b, be confused about the correlating decisions that solve the problem. My friend's friend would probably add one more kind of confusion of issue, c, an intentional blurring of the scope of a problem for sophistical purposes.
Limited Inc's inclination is to say this: the motivation for delineating the issues as they are delineated among the governing classes should be looked at with maximum suspicion. This approach is naturally disconcerting if your politics is about viewing the divisions within the governing class (the liberal vs. conservative divide) as the defining political division. We are trying, in our humble way, to re-draw the problem set, which puts us outside of that kind of politics, even if our sympathies are to one tendency within it. This sometimes makes our points seem tendentious or extra-political. Alas, that's the price we have to pay. And so... at least for this year, it looks like the world leaders aren't going to be turning to us for political advise. But what can we say? such is the burden of greatness.
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
Remora
Because LI has spurned the water of life, and is one of those unfortunates who will be processed on the left hand of our Lord transiting to the eternal gnashing of teeth that reportedly awaits our type, one would think that the abuse being hurled at the Catholic Church by a press that is normally servile to religious groups to a point of intellectual abasement that is hard to stomach would warm our hearts. Well, it doesn't.
Sunday, I was listening to a NPR interview with Alan Cooperman, who with Lena H. Sun wrote a Sunday article for the Washington Post , Hundreds Of Priests Removed Since '60s:
Survey Shows Scope Wider Than Disclosed
The intro grafs tell the story:
"The Roman Catholic Church has removed 218 priests from their positions this year because of allegations of child sexual abuse, but at least 34 known offenders remain in church jobs, according to a survey of Catholic dioceses across the United States by The Washington Post.
The survey also found that at least 850 U.S. priests have been accused of sexual misconduct with minors since the early 1960s, and that more than 350 of them were removed from ministry before this year."
In the interview on NPR, Limited Inc believes that Alan Cooperman said (we don't have a transcript) that in his research, which took in a forty year period, about 1 percent of the priesthood had probably been involved in some kind of sexual misconduct.
What the interviewer never asked, what no paper is asking, is how this compares with Protestant denominations, or with the secular equivalents of pastoral care: psycho-therapy, self-realization groups, etc. Now, LI's wild guess is that the Catholic church is well within the norm. That is, given the opportunity for sexual misconduct (a term that is pretty opaque) among a group of people who have to do with counseling, "spiritual" advice giving, and other activities that involve a traffic in what Freud called transference, and given the personality types attracted to the role of "helper," a good one percent will use their positions to have sex. However, there's no investigation of Baptist churches, or New Agey groups in Sedona, or of Freudian psycho-analysts, in the papers.
So where's the beef, the j'accuse here? It is this: the more the media piles on the Catholic church, the more the images begin to resonate with the anti-Catholic propoganda endemic in in protestant Europe and protestant America in the nineteenth century. Limited Inc has begun thinking of the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a book that was published in the 1830s. That was a decade in which Irish immigration began to bring out anxieties among the Protestant establishment. Two convents were actually attacked, one in Massachussetts, one in South Carolina. Maria Monk alleged that she was unwillingly immured in a convent in Montreal, in which the nuns were treated as sexual tools of priests, who would periodically cull and kill the infants that were the tragic fruit of said priests' lust. In other words, the psycho-pathology of millienarianism, as described by Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millenium. He goes back to classical sources, finding Latin anti-Christian texts that describe the sect as one promoting incest and extreme promiscuity, with baby sacrifices and the whole lot. This constellation of elements pops up again and again in Western history, now directed at the jews, now directed at some cult. In the case of Maria Monk, there was an amusing afterwords to her confessions -- a falling out among her 'ghost-writers." It is as if the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had wanted a piece of the copyright action. The story is told in this essay by Ruth Hughes:
The first thing you have to understand about the Awful Disclosures is that they are not true. The second thing you have to understand is that Maria Monk had very little to do with writing it. Her story is a pathetic one, just not the one she would have you believe. Maria Monk was born to a Protestant family in St. Johns, Quebec in 1816 or 1817. In an affidavit written after the scandal of the Awful Disclosures broke, Maria Monk's mother described her as an uncontrollable child, a fact she attributed to a brain injury suffered when Maria was little more than a toddler: a slate pencil was rammed into her ear, penetrating her skull. From that time on, according to her mother's testimony, Maria was uncontrollable and subject to wild fantasies. Her only known contact with a Catholic institution was as an inmate of the Magdalene asylum in Montreal. When it was discovered that she had become pregnant while resident in the asylum, she was asked to remove herself from that institution. It was then, aged eighteen and pregnant, that she met William K. Hoyte, head of the Canadian Benevolent Society, an organization that combined Protestant missionary work with ardent anti-Catholic activism. Hoyte took Monk as his mistress, and together they traveled to New York. At this late date, we will never know how much of the story originated with Monk's disordered imagination and how much of it was created by the opportunistic Hoyte. Hoyte called upon his fellow nativists, Rev. J. J. Slocum, Rev. George Bourne, Theodore Dwight, and others; collectively they wrote the Awful Disclosures. Maria Monk is believed to have contributed details of the city of Montreal and of the practices she observed in the Magdalene asylum. This much is known because shortly after the publication of the Awful Disclosures, the cabal began to fight amongst themselves over the profits, and several suits and counter-suits were initiated in the New York courts: Slocum was the principal author, Hoyte and Bourne were major contributors, and the others mostly just offered suggestions. Slocum and Maria Monk banded together in suing the others and their publishing house, Harper and Brothers. Maria Monk then left Hoyte to became the companion of Slocum. Monk was still under-age, and Slocum was appointed her guardian.
The first edition of the Awful Disclosures carries the imprint of Howe and Bates. If you look to find other titles put out by that publishing house, you won't find much. Howe and Bates were employees of Harper and Brothers. Harper was worried that their Catholic customers would desert them if they published Maria Monk's book, but they could not deny themselves what looked to be a lucrative enterprise. They created the dummy publishing house of Howe and Bates to insulate themselves from any fallout. Interestingly, the only other work I have found with the imprint of Howe and Bates is a refutation of Monk's claims.
"
LI's point, dear reader, isn't that the accusations of pedophilia in any given case against a priest are untrue -- rather, the point is that the systematic accusation against the Catholic church is beginning to assume a form that seems to be all too consonant with the elements that have legitimated persecution in other eras. And it isn't as if these elements aren't always underfoot in the Barbaric Yawp we call the U.S.A. -- remember the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria of the early 90s.
Because LI has spurned the water of life, and is one of those unfortunates who will be processed on the left hand of our Lord transiting to the eternal gnashing of teeth that reportedly awaits our type, one would think that the abuse being hurled at the Catholic Church by a press that is normally servile to religious groups to a point of intellectual abasement that is hard to stomach would warm our hearts. Well, it doesn't.
Sunday, I was listening to a NPR interview with Alan Cooperman, who with Lena H. Sun wrote a Sunday article for the Washington Post , Hundreds Of Priests Removed Since '60s:
Survey Shows Scope Wider Than Disclosed
The intro grafs tell the story:
"The Roman Catholic Church has removed 218 priests from their positions this year because of allegations of child sexual abuse, but at least 34 known offenders remain in church jobs, according to a survey of Catholic dioceses across the United States by The Washington Post.
The survey also found that at least 850 U.S. priests have been accused of sexual misconduct with minors since the early 1960s, and that more than 350 of them were removed from ministry before this year."
In the interview on NPR, Limited Inc believes that Alan Cooperman said (we don't have a transcript) that in his research, which took in a forty year period, about 1 percent of the priesthood had probably been involved in some kind of sexual misconduct.
What the interviewer never asked, what no paper is asking, is how this compares with Protestant denominations, or with the secular equivalents of pastoral care: psycho-therapy, self-realization groups, etc. Now, LI's wild guess is that the Catholic church is well within the norm. That is, given the opportunity for sexual misconduct (a term that is pretty opaque) among a group of people who have to do with counseling, "spiritual" advice giving, and other activities that involve a traffic in what Freud called transference, and given the personality types attracted to the role of "helper," a good one percent will use their positions to have sex. However, there's no investigation of Baptist churches, or New Agey groups in Sedona, or of Freudian psycho-analysts, in the papers.
So where's the beef, the j'accuse here? It is this: the more the media piles on the Catholic church, the more the images begin to resonate with the anti-Catholic propoganda endemic in in protestant Europe and protestant America in the nineteenth century. Limited Inc has begun thinking of the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a book that was published in the 1830s. That was a decade in which Irish immigration began to bring out anxieties among the Protestant establishment. Two convents were actually attacked, one in Massachussetts, one in South Carolina. Maria Monk alleged that she was unwillingly immured in a convent in Montreal, in which the nuns were treated as sexual tools of priests, who would periodically cull and kill the infants that were the tragic fruit of said priests' lust. In other words, the psycho-pathology of millienarianism, as described by Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millenium. He goes back to classical sources, finding Latin anti-Christian texts that describe the sect as one promoting incest and extreme promiscuity, with baby sacrifices and the whole lot. This constellation of elements pops up again and again in Western history, now directed at the jews, now directed at some cult. In the case of Maria Monk, there was an amusing afterwords to her confessions -- a falling out among her 'ghost-writers." It is as if the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had wanted a piece of the copyright action. The story is told in this essay by Ruth Hughes:
The first thing you have to understand about the Awful Disclosures is that they are not true. The second thing you have to understand is that Maria Monk had very little to do with writing it. Her story is a pathetic one, just not the one she would have you believe. Maria Monk was born to a Protestant family in St. Johns, Quebec in 1816 or 1817. In an affidavit written after the scandal of the Awful Disclosures broke, Maria Monk's mother described her as an uncontrollable child, a fact she attributed to a brain injury suffered when Maria was little more than a toddler: a slate pencil was rammed into her ear, penetrating her skull. From that time on, according to her mother's testimony, Maria was uncontrollable and subject to wild fantasies. Her only known contact with a Catholic institution was as an inmate of the Magdalene asylum in Montreal. When it was discovered that she had become pregnant while resident in the asylum, she was asked to remove herself from that institution. It was then, aged eighteen and pregnant, that she met William K. Hoyte, head of the Canadian Benevolent Society, an organization that combined Protestant missionary work with ardent anti-Catholic activism. Hoyte took Monk as his mistress, and together they traveled to New York. At this late date, we will never know how much of the story originated with Monk's disordered imagination and how much of it was created by the opportunistic Hoyte. Hoyte called upon his fellow nativists, Rev. J. J. Slocum, Rev. George Bourne, Theodore Dwight, and others; collectively they wrote the Awful Disclosures. Maria Monk is believed to have contributed details of the city of Montreal and of the practices she observed in the Magdalene asylum. This much is known because shortly after the publication of the Awful Disclosures, the cabal began to fight amongst themselves over the profits, and several suits and counter-suits were initiated in the New York courts: Slocum was the principal author, Hoyte and Bourne were major contributors, and the others mostly just offered suggestions. Slocum and Maria Monk banded together in suing the others and their publishing house, Harper and Brothers. Maria Monk then left Hoyte to became the companion of Slocum. Monk was still under-age, and Slocum was appointed her guardian.
The first edition of the Awful Disclosures carries the imprint of Howe and Bates. If you look to find other titles put out by that publishing house, you won't find much. Howe and Bates were employees of Harper and Brothers. Harper was worried that their Catholic customers would desert them if they published Maria Monk's book, but they could not deny themselves what looked to be a lucrative enterprise. They created the dummy publishing house of Howe and Bates to insulate themselves from any fallout. Interestingly, the only other work I have found with the imprint of Howe and Bates is a refutation of Monk's claims.
"
LI's point, dear reader, isn't that the accusations of pedophilia in any given case against a priest are untrue -- rather, the point is that the systematic accusation against the Catholic church is beginning to assume a form that seems to be all too consonant with the elements that have legitimated persecution in other eras. And it isn't as if these elements aren't always underfoot in the Barbaric Yawp we call the U.S.A. -- remember the Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria of the early 90s.
Monday, June 10, 2002
Remora
Bias
Limited Inc was thinking that the big story today - which is, of course, Britney Spears new CD, and how it compares with the great works of the past -- was something we should get right on. We should jump on this with both feet, Jim. We should make our own preferences -- for Britney's Blue period, and her experiments in dissonance and the atonal register when she was going out with that N Sync guy -- crystal clear. Of course, we were heavily sedated when these and other thoughts raced through our head...
Instead, we are going to address a less serious issue -- that of liberal bias in the press and the entertainment industry. Housesitting over the weekend, we finally had a chance to take in the O'Reilly report. The report -- we kid you not -- was a shocking expose of LEFT WING BIAS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY! Roll over Walter Winchell, and tell Estelle Parsons the news... Uh, right, where were we? Oh yes, O'Reilly's shocking scoop.
What makes this scoop particularly delicious -- and it is made in a number of venues about the NYT, or news organizations in general -- is that it is always denied, with a sort of prim huffiness, by press guys and gals. And then there's always Eric Alterman to tell us, hey, how about all those right wing bigmouths on Fox TV.
Well, why is it that nobody makes a big deal of, say, the rightwing bias of oil executives? Or how about the male-military bias of car designers (find me a woman who has any sayso in designing an American car, and I will admit, then, that finally, finally, feminism has broken through). In fact, since Comte was a pup, we've all gotten hip to a social fact: in all subcultures, there will be a certain commonality of ideas -- a certain tone that constrains which ideas are expressed. This makes for group cohesion, and for tacit rules that allow expelling members from the group -- and what is the point of a group if you can't expel members? Etc., etc. Anyway, to continue this boring presentation of platitudes, such constraints will act to select people for membership in those subcultures. Try being a born again Christian in the New York Times -- or try being a radical feminist lesbian in Exxon. I am pretty confident that the culture that writes the news in BigMedia, as well as the culture of Hollywood performers (not producers, or owners, or distributors of films) would turn out to be slightly to the left if one polled them about 'social' attitudes. Economic attitudes are a different matter. In the same way, I am pretty confident that the same poll would skew right for Oil Company execs. Now, I have never been sure what the point of this is -- are the O'Reilly's of the world really calling for ideological quotas? I think that might be a good idea, actually. Mixing in a few Florida Christians among the Hollywood set, or watching movies that indicate that God would really, really like those Jewish people to sort of consider taking Jesus Christ into their hearts as their lord and savior, right after wiping out this next set of dusky colored people with 666 tatooed on their foreheads, would be more than offset by El Paso Oil being represented by Sandra Bernhardt in some Senate hearing about the manipulation of power prices. And wouldn't it be nice if GM were forced to recruit for their designers at Ms. Magazine, instead of among retired defense industry apparatchiks?
The defense of focusing on the media or entertainment -- a last ditch defense, I think, and barely worth mentioning, as indeed this whole issue is barely worth mentioning -- is that ideology counts more, in these industries, than it does in energy or building cars. But you have merely to say that sentence to see that it is self-refuting. The decision to make a decent, low priced, low emission automobile is most definitely ideological -- it is about, among other things, how one wants to operate within a whole industrial system that has concretized other decisions about social action. It has to do with whether the corporation is more responsible to its stakeholders or its shareholders. There's nothing more ideological than that.
Bias
Limited Inc was thinking that the big story today - which is, of course, Britney Spears new CD, and how it compares with the great works of the past -- was something we should get right on. We should jump on this with both feet, Jim. We should make our own preferences -- for Britney's Blue period, and her experiments in dissonance and the atonal register when she was going out with that N Sync guy -- crystal clear. Of course, we were heavily sedated when these and other thoughts raced through our head...
Instead, we are going to address a less serious issue -- that of liberal bias in the press and the entertainment industry. Housesitting over the weekend, we finally had a chance to take in the O'Reilly report. The report -- we kid you not -- was a shocking expose of LEFT WING BIAS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY! Roll over Walter Winchell, and tell Estelle Parsons the news... Uh, right, where were we? Oh yes, O'Reilly's shocking scoop.
What makes this scoop particularly delicious -- and it is made in a number of venues about the NYT, or news organizations in general -- is that it is always denied, with a sort of prim huffiness, by press guys and gals. And then there's always Eric Alterman to tell us, hey, how about all those right wing bigmouths on Fox TV.
Well, why is it that nobody makes a big deal of, say, the rightwing bias of oil executives? Or how about the male-military bias of car designers (find me a woman who has any sayso in designing an American car, and I will admit, then, that finally, finally, feminism has broken through). In fact, since Comte was a pup, we've all gotten hip to a social fact: in all subcultures, there will be a certain commonality of ideas -- a certain tone that constrains which ideas are expressed. This makes for group cohesion, and for tacit rules that allow expelling members from the group -- and what is the point of a group if you can't expel members? Etc., etc. Anyway, to continue this boring presentation of platitudes, such constraints will act to select people for membership in those subcultures. Try being a born again Christian in the New York Times -- or try being a radical feminist lesbian in Exxon. I am pretty confident that the culture that writes the news in BigMedia, as well as the culture of Hollywood performers (not producers, or owners, or distributors of films) would turn out to be slightly to the left if one polled them about 'social' attitudes. Economic attitudes are a different matter. In the same way, I am pretty confident that the same poll would skew right for Oil Company execs. Now, I have never been sure what the point of this is -- are the O'Reilly's of the world really calling for ideological quotas? I think that might be a good idea, actually. Mixing in a few Florida Christians among the Hollywood set, or watching movies that indicate that God would really, really like those Jewish people to sort of consider taking Jesus Christ into their hearts as their lord and savior, right after wiping out this next set of dusky colored people with 666 tatooed on their foreheads, would be more than offset by El Paso Oil being represented by Sandra Bernhardt in some Senate hearing about the manipulation of power prices. And wouldn't it be nice if GM were forced to recruit for their designers at Ms. Magazine, instead of among retired defense industry apparatchiks?
The defense of focusing on the media or entertainment -- a last ditch defense, I think, and barely worth mentioning, as indeed this whole issue is barely worth mentioning -- is that ideology counts more, in these industries, than it does in energy or building cars. But you have merely to say that sentence to see that it is self-refuting. The decision to make a decent, low priced, low emission automobile is most definitely ideological -- it is about, among other things, how one wants to operate within a whole industrial system that has concretized other decisions about social action. It has to do with whether the corporation is more responsible to its stakeholders or its shareholders. There's nothing more ideological than that.
Sunday, June 9, 2002
Dope
LI has been crawling out from under our rock and re-connecting with the ten chapters of a crime novel we wrote a couple of years ago. Our inspiration, at the time, was Leonardo Sciascia, the great Italian writer. If you haven't read any of Sciascia's toothpick slim, extremely disorienting novels, let's just say they are not by any means your usual entertainment.
Crime, for Sciascia, is the surface unfolding of an event that, correctly interpreted, can represent the matrix of hidden power relationships. Sciascia's investigators require a hermaneutics of governance as the necessary supplement to the labor of deduction. Now, since the former is a rare thing, his investigators have a tendency to fail. In Sciascia's world, the criminal doesn't explain the crime, even if you catch him: the criminal is a merely the last instance of a chain that extends down, down in the dark. Sciascia's detectives are undone through their naive trust in the detective's unalterable standard, the correspondance theory of truth. That trust makes them vulnerable to the powers that might or might not have condoned the crime, and that might or might not see the advantage in the catching of its perpetrators. The detective, in other words, sees the crime as a problem to be solved, while the powers that be (legitimate and illegitimate) see it as a solution to be manipulated -- a warning, a riddence of an obstacle, a reward, and always, no matter on what side, as a small way of spreading the nihilistic rumor that the dominant power -- the bureaucracy, the Mafia, the party, the church, the cliches of the media - is, eventually, irresistible.
Sciascia, I suppose it goes without saying, was Sicilian. If you come across his small, excoriating book on the Moro affair -- an excellent example of a Sciascian crime that actually happened -- grab it and read it. Aldo Moro was kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades, but according to Sciascia, that is only one face of the crime. The other face of this crime was the opportunity, given to Moro's many enemies, to dispose of the man. So both in the suddenly relentless attitude of the state (which, in the Moro case, presented itself as incapable of dealing with criminals -- a noticeable change from the posture of the Christian Democrats when it came to dealing with, say, the Mafia, and a change even from previous dealings with the Red Brigades) and the disjunction of that attitude from the actual police work (which was comically inept even by Italian standards), we have a social phenomenon in which the approach to it that is framed by the idea of finding who did it obscures the more socially charged question of who benefited from it.
For a completely clueless account of the Moro case, by the way, there's an essay by Richard Drake in the New Criterion that is a classic expression of what you might call the logical positivism of the detective. The notion is, briefly, that all crimes are atomic instances that do not add up to a higher level of crime. The conventional conspiracy theorist believes that it is from the higher level of crime that the atomic instances derive. And the Sciascian theory is that atomic instances of crime create a higher level of criminal opportunity from which to retrospectively make use of crime. Uses are many, but from the Sciascian p.o.v., the interesting thing is how the investigation of crime, which is after all monopolized by the state, is pulled into the system of crime. This is the truth encoded in the detective genre, with its free agents -- its detectives -- operating outside the police monopoly; although only Sciascia, as far as I know, takes the Sherlock Holmes genre a step further by turning the detective's mistrust onto the very act of detecting.
Which gets us -- by a leap -- to Marxypoo, as he was known to his friends.
Now that Marx has been freed from his ism, we are able to understand his virtues without falling under the spell of his vices. Well, okay, maybe we aren't - the troubling ism is still out there, even with the economic theory shot full of holes and debunked from Vladivostock to Budapest -- but we should be. In any case, one of his virtues, which prefigured a whole style of journalism we are now familiar with from such writers as Joan Didion, or Norman Mailer, was the inquisitor's gaze he cast upon the common document, the everyday news story, the faits divers. He had what you might call the longitudinal vision -- the ability to collate distant facts, or forgotten incidences, and apply them with devastating effect to the story at hand. His third chapter on the Civil War in France is an excellent example of what I mean. Here he is, uncovering, beneath the most resplendent virtues, the most egregious deviants.:
"Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Milliere, one of the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, now shot by express orders of Jules Favre, published a series of authentic legal documents in proof that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunken resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man, and that, in a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. As these dry legal documents were not to be got rid of by any amount of rhetorical horse-power, Jules Favre, for the first time in his life, held his tongue, quietly awaiting the outbreak of the civil war, in order, then, frantically to denounce the people of Paris as a band of escaped convicts in utter revolt against family, religion, order, and property. This same forger had hardly got into power, after September 4, when he sympathetically let loose upon society Pic and Taillefer, convicted, even under the empire, of forgery in the scandalous affair of "Etendard". One of these men, taillefer, having dared to return to Paris under the Commune, was at once reinstated in prison; and then Jules Favre exclaimed, from the tribune of the National Assembly, that Paris was setting free all her jailbirds!"
Mr. K.M. then goes on to probe the less reputable side of other ticket-of-leave men, as he describes them, as they saved France from the dangers of the Paris Commune. Marx, as we know, was absolutely wrong about the proletariat -- it turned out they were not history's favorite class, especially when they were represented by the class that claimed they were history's favored class. But Marx might have been right about the Lumpenproletariat. Their upward social mobility, tracked ironically in the 10th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and probed more gravely in the above mentioned piece, showed more than Marx knew. The ticket of leave man's century was about to dawn. The amazing thing about Stalin and Hitler is that these men, and the men around them, were all, recognizably, petty criminals: blackmailers, rapists, thieves. I mean literally: Stalin was an armed robber, Hitler was a petty blackmailer, and such as Beria were, without exageration, rapists. We were reminded of Marx's words by an article in the NYT today concerning one of Limited Inc's favorite topics, CEO compensation packages. With the foresight that characterizes today's ticket-of-leave man, many CEO's negotiate a package in which dismissal or (heavens!) the withdrawl of remuneration is not to be effected by such petty events as, say, conviction for felony:
"There may be only one type of job in which somebody can commit a felony and, after being fired as a result, still receive a severance package worth many years of salary. The job is chief executive of a large corporation."
Journalist David Leonhardt does not, of course, infuse his story with the vinegar that was Marx's stock in trade, but he does have some interesting antecdotes:
"Some contracts have gone so far as to restrict the kind of felony convictions that permit companies to deny executives a severance payment. At Fortune Brands, the maker of Jim Beam bourbon, Master Lock and other consumer products, for example, a felony must result in personal enrichment for Norman H. Wesley, the chief executive, at the expense of the company.At J. C. Penney, a felony conviction would cost Allen I. Questrom his severance only if it involved "theft or moral turpitude." And before LG&E Energy, based in Louisville, Ky., was acquired by a British power company in 2000, it exempted its chief from good-cause dismissal for any felonies "arising from an environmental violation."
"More broadly, executives have asked companies to remove contract clauses that could deny them severance payments, also known as golden parachutes, if they fail to perform their duties. In a sign of how much influence executives have gained over their own compensation, many companies have complied, inserting clauses that restrict dismissible offenses to deliberate misbehavior. "The scope of what constitutes cause has gotten narrower over the last 10 years," said Robert J. Stucker, a lawyer in Chicago who has represented Leo F. Mullin of Delta Air Lines, Robert L. Nardelli of Home Depot and other chief executives during contract negotiations."
Ah -- doesn't it make you want to celebrate the foresight of the Captain of Industry? In the old days, they hightailed it out of town after looting the till -- now they put the right to loot the till in the contract.
And they say there is no progress....
LI has been crawling out from under our rock and re-connecting with the ten chapters of a crime novel we wrote a couple of years ago. Our inspiration, at the time, was Leonardo Sciascia, the great Italian writer. If you haven't read any of Sciascia's toothpick slim, extremely disorienting novels, let's just say they are not by any means your usual entertainment.
Crime, for Sciascia, is the surface unfolding of an event that, correctly interpreted, can represent the matrix of hidden power relationships. Sciascia's investigators require a hermaneutics of governance as the necessary supplement to the labor of deduction. Now, since the former is a rare thing, his investigators have a tendency to fail. In Sciascia's world, the criminal doesn't explain the crime, even if you catch him: the criminal is a merely the last instance of a chain that extends down, down in the dark. Sciascia's detectives are undone through their naive trust in the detective's unalterable standard, the correspondance theory of truth. That trust makes them vulnerable to the powers that might or might not have condoned the crime, and that might or might not see the advantage in the catching of its perpetrators. The detective, in other words, sees the crime as a problem to be solved, while the powers that be (legitimate and illegitimate) see it as a solution to be manipulated -- a warning, a riddence of an obstacle, a reward, and always, no matter on what side, as a small way of spreading the nihilistic rumor that the dominant power -- the bureaucracy, the Mafia, the party, the church, the cliches of the media - is, eventually, irresistible.
Sciascia, I suppose it goes without saying, was Sicilian. If you come across his small, excoriating book on the Moro affair -- an excellent example of a Sciascian crime that actually happened -- grab it and read it. Aldo Moro was kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades, but according to Sciascia, that is only one face of the crime. The other face of this crime was the opportunity, given to Moro's many enemies, to dispose of the man. So both in the suddenly relentless attitude of the state (which, in the Moro case, presented itself as incapable of dealing with criminals -- a noticeable change from the posture of the Christian Democrats when it came to dealing with, say, the Mafia, and a change even from previous dealings with the Red Brigades) and the disjunction of that attitude from the actual police work (which was comically inept even by Italian standards), we have a social phenomenon in which the approach to it that is framed by the idea of finding who did it obscures the more socially charged question of who benefited from it.
For a completely clueless account of the Moro case, by the way, there's an essay by Richard Drake in the New Criterion that is a classic expression of what you might call the logical positivism of the detective. The notion is, briefly, that all crimes are atomic instances that do not add up to a higher level of crime. The conventional conspiracy theorist believes that it is from the higher level of crime that the atomic instances derive. And the Sciascian theory is that atomic instances of crime create a higher level of criminal opportunity from which to retrospectively make use of crime. Uses are many, but from the Sciascian p.o.v., the interesting thing is how the investigation of crime, which is after all monopolized by the state, is pulled into the system of crime. This is the truth encoded in the detective genre, with its free agents -- its detectives -- operating outside the police monopoly; although only Sciascia, as far as I know, takes the Sherlock Holmes genre a step further by turning the detective's mistrust onto the very act of detecting.
Which gets us -- by a leap -- to Marxypoo, as he was known to his friends.
Now that Marx has been freed from his ism, we are able to understand his virtues without falling under the spell of his vices. Well, okay, maybe we aren't - the troubling ism is still out there, even with the economic theory shot full of holes and debunked from Vladivostock to Budapest -- but we should be. In any case, one of his virtues, which prefigured a whole style of journalism we are now familiar with from such writers as Joan Didion, or Norman Mailer, was the inquisitor's gaze he cast upon the common document, the everyday news story, the faits divers. He had what you might call the longitudinal vision -- the ability to collate distant facts, or forgotten incidences, and apply them with devastating effect to the story at hand. His third chapter on the Civil War in France is an excellent example of what I mean. Here he is, uncovering, beneath the most resplendent virtues, the most egregious deviants.:
"Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Milliere, one of the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, now shot by express orders of Jules Favre, published a series of authentic legal documents in proof that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunken resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man, and that, in a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. As these dry legal documents were not to be got rid of by any amount of rhetorical horse-power, Jules Favre, for the first time in his life, held his tongue, quietly awaiting the outbreak of the civil war, in order, then, frantically to denounce the people of Paris as a band of escaped convicts in utter revolt against family, religion, order, and property. This same forger had hardly got into power, after September 4, when he sympathetically let loose upon society Pic and Taillefer, convicted, even under the empire, of forgery in the scandalous affair of "Etendard". One of these men, taillefer, having dared to return to Paris under the Commune, was at once reinstated in prison; and then Jules Favre exclaimed, from the tribune of the National Assembly, that Paris was setting free all her jailbirds!"
Mr. K.M. then goes on to probe the less reputable side of other ticket-of-leave men, as he describes them, as they saved France from the dangers of the Paris Commune. Marx, as we know, was absolutely wrong about the proletariat -- it turned out they were not history's favorite class, especially when they were represented by the class that claimed they were history's favored class. But Marx might have been right about the Lumpenproletariat. Their upward social mobility, tracked ironically in the 10th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and probed more gravely in the above mentioned piece, showed more than Marx knew. The ticket of leave man's century was about to dawn. The amazing thing about Stalin and Hitler is that these men, and the men around them, were all, recognizably, petty criminals: blackmailers, rapists, thieves. I mean literally: Stalin was an armed robber, Hitler was a petty blackmailer, and such as Beria were, without exageration, rapists. We were reminded of Marx's words by an article in the NYT today concerning one of Limited Inc's favorite topics, CEO compensation packages. With the foresight that characterizes today's ticket-of-leave man, many CEO's negotiate a package in which dismissal or (heavens!) the withdrawl of remuneration is not to be effected by such petty events as, say, conviction for felony:
"There may be only one type of job in which somebody can commit a felony and, after being fired as a result, still receive a severance package worth many years of salary. The job is chief executive of a large corporation."
Journalist David Leonhardt does not, of course, infuse his story with the vinegar that was Marx's stock in trade, but he does have some interesting antecdotes:
"Some contracts have gone so far as to restrict the kind of felony convictions that permit companies to deny executives a severance payment. At Fortune Brands, the maker of Jim Beam bourbon, Master Lock and other consumer products, for example, a felony must result in personal enrichment for Norman H. Wesley, the chief executive, at the expense of the company.At J. C. Penney, a felony conviction would cost Allen I. Questrom his severance only if it involved "theft or moral turpitude." And before LG&E Energy, based in Louisville, Ky., was acquired by a British power company in 2000, it exempted its chief from good-cause dismissal for any felonies "arising from an environmental violation."
"More broadly, executives have asked companies to remove contract clauses that could deny them severance payments, also known as golden parachutes, if they fail to perform their duties. In a sign of how much influence executives have gained over their own compensation, many companies have complied, inserting clauses that restrict dismissible offenses to deliberate misbehavior. "The scope of what constitutes cause has gotten narrower over the last 10 years," said Robert J. Stucker, a lawyer in Chicago who has represented Leo F. Mullin of Delta Air Lines, Robert L. Nardelli of Home Depot and other chief executives during contract negotiations."
Ah -- doesn't it make you want to celebrate the foresight of the Captain of Industry? In the old days, they hightailed it out of town after looting the till -- now they put the right to loot the till in the contract.
And they say there is no progress....
Friday, June 7, 2002
Remora
As the Stock Market goes from pit to pit,Business Week surveys the passivity of Washington in the face of the various CEO-gates. And hey, we used the term, stupid as it is, first, understand? Don't tell Limited Inc that you get no value from perusing our humble pages. Anyway, that the Congress is about as competent as the D.C. Police Department is no big news. Why, after all, should we expect the fence to catch the burglar, or the pimp to join the vice squad? Congress, like the Mafia, is mainly a protection racket. It has so operated with regard to regulating the Accounting industry. Paid off, the Congressman's honor and future wealth depends on doing a good job aiding the looting of businesses by the higher managerial levels. Don't look to those eminent suits to bestir themselves anytime soon, unless... well, one should always remember that capital is not a unified thing -- it is a composite of opposing interests. Money might begin to flow from an entirely different direction in this affair. So far, the interest that is represented in Congress has been the accounting interest. But there is big money being lost by big money men, every day. And slowly they are responding. Viz this graf of the BW story:
CAPITALISM "IN PERIL." So far, the business lobby has overpowered proinvestor voices. Consumer groups, the AARP, and Common Cause support reforms. But they either lack muscle or are unwilling to devote resources to fight business. The vacuum has prompted Vanguard Group founder John C. Bogle to start the Federation of Long-Term Investors, a shareholder-rights group that includes Warren E. Buffett and other prominent investors. A strong accounting oversight board is a top priority. "Our capitalistic system is in peril," says Bogle.
While the reform drive in Washington has largely stalled, the private sector is mustering a response to the market's demand for a cleanup. Dozens of corporations have fired consultants affiliated with their audit firm, and at least 18 companies have adopted shareholder proposals to make the split permanent.
Boards, meanwhile, are strengthening their audit and compensation committees with directors who have no ties to management, acting in advance of proposed new stock exchange rules. "We are seeing the beginning of a cultural shift in corporate governance," says William B. Patterson, director of the AFL-CIO's Office of Investment."
That the AFL-CIO is temporarily on the side of the investors is something to note -- after all, it is the meaner, leaner, stockholders are everything companies that are the most prone to lay off workers. While Warren Buffett likes to say the ocassionally shocking thing in public -- for instance, that he is severely undertaxed -- he is no friend of the working stiff. But ... it is little noted how much the pension funds of unions have driven that kind of mentality. In the late seventies, it was Union pension fund managers who started raising holy hell about getting value for their equities. And they were crucial allies of the corporate raiders, who then unloaded workers. If investors seriously organize -- ie start massively bribing the legislature -- the issue of reform just might gain traction again.
As the Stock Market goes from pit to pit,Business Week surveys the passivity of Washington in the face of the various CEO-gates. And hey, we used the term, stupid as it is, first, understand? Don't tell Limited Inc that you get no value from perusing our humble pages. Anyway, that the Congress is about as competent as the D.C. Police Department is no big news. Why, after all, should we expect the fence to catch the burglar, or the pimp to join the vice squad? Congress, like the Mafia, is mainly a protection racket. It has so operated with regard to regulating the Accounting industry. Paid off, the Congressman's honor and future wealth depends on doing a good job aiding the looting of businesses by the higher managerial levels. Don't look to those eminent suits to bestir themselves anytime soon, unless... well, one should always remember that capital is not a unified thing -- it is a composite of opposing interests. Money might begin to flow from an entirely different direction in this affair. So far, the interest that is represented in Congress has been the accounting interest. But there is big money being lost by big money men, every day. And slowly they are responding. Viz this graf of the BW story:
CAPITALISM "IN PERIL." So far, the business lobby has overpowered proinvestor voices. Consumer groups, the AARP, and Common Cause support reforms. But they either lack muscle or are unwilling to devote resources to fight business. The vacuum has prompted Vanguard Group founder John C. Bogle to start the Federation of Long-Term Investors, a shareholder-rights group that includes Warren E. Buffett and other prominent investors. A strong accounting oversight board is a top priority. "Our capitalistic system is in peril," says Bogle.
While the reform drive in Washington has largely stalled, the private sector is mustering a response to the market's demand for a cleanup. Dozens of corporations have fired consultants affiliated with their audit firm, and at least 18 companies have adopted shareholder proposals to make the split permanent.
Boards, meanwhile, are strengthening their audit and compensation committees with directors who have no ties to management, acting in advance of proposed new stock exchange rules. "We are seeing the beginning of a cultural shift in corporate governance," says William B. Patterson, director of the AFL-CIO's Office of Investment."
That the AFL-CIO is temporarily on the side of the investors is something to note -- after all, it is the meaner, leaner, stockholders are everything companies that are the most prone to lay off workers. While Warren Buffett likes to say the ocassionally shocking thing in public -- for instance, that he is severely undertaxed -- he is no friend of the working stiff. But ... it is little noted how much the pension funds of unions have driven that kind of mentality. In the late seventies, it was Union pension fund managers who started raising holy hell about getting value for their equities. And they were crucial allies of the corporate raiders, who then unloaded workers. If investors seriously organize -- ie start massively bribing the legislature -- the issue of reform just might gain traction again.
Thursday, June 6, 2002
Remora
The Line, 2
In our last post, we made a few tentative jabs at thinking about the culture implications of a society in which the accumulation of wealth on the one side, and its absence on the other side, produces a gulf greater than that between, say, a Roman master and his slave. This is one of the great unthought ofs -- one of the unconscious features which plays its role in global culture. The promise of democracy is all hollowed out even as it is suavely announced by its spokesmen. For the Enlightenment ideal -- that one should be treated as an adult, and act like one -- depends on one being an adult human. The poor, though, are increasingly not. The suave spokesmen know it.
One of the things that should be noted about this wealth gulf, one of the reasons we are bringing up the tedious Roman reference, is that we'd like you to ponder the historical uniqueness of our status situation. Ours, our time's. Let's count it out: the Roman master could acquire other slaves, a greater amount of food, gorgeous clothing, and civil honor, and was in his way terrible. But in terms of levels of material existence, the master wasn't really going to find a better doctor, or dentist, or find more nutritious food, or even get a better education than the slave. The gulf between master and slave was in 500 a.d. as it was in Hegel's description in 1803 - they were both, in order to get the dialectic started, simply human beings. Hegel didn't talk about master and parakeet, master and deathwatch beetle.
Of course, this isn't true today. The Western dream of the lower species, that racist canard, was not, it turns out, a description, but rather a promise -- this was the vast project of the Western owners, the movers and shakers. if there really isn't an under-race, they would create an underclass. And over time, as the question of who was human became a question of who had the technology to be human, more and more of the poor simply don't have the price for that ticket, or the looks to get into that club. Since Limited Inc is one of this mass -- an ape on the planet of the apes that is being staged under your very windows, every day -- we can talk all about it. We aren't denied human rights anymore -- for human rights aren't really relevant to the non-human. We don't ride, for one thing, in cars. We don't go to dentists and have our toothaches cured. If we get AIDS, malaria, tb, or merely some cancer of a vital area, sleeping sickness, heart disease, the lot, and all our fault, drug or sex related no doubt, or due to living in some cancer gulch, living next to a refinery, living next to one of those old Monsanto chemical factories, living where they've put in all the highways so the humans can speed through the neighborhood, well, what do you expect? There is no cure. Whereas, of course, among human beings, the ardent discussions are about fertility drugs and viagra. The ardent discussions are about psychotherapy, the ardent discussions are about the safety of children. Are they attention deficit disorder children? Bring on the counselors, by all means.
There is a whole sphere not only of goods and services, but of ways of living, that are available to the masters and simply unimaginable to us apes. Of course, we vulgarly imagine it. Or rather, have it imagined for us by the humans. We have tvs -- well, LI doesn't, but that at least is a statement, not simply a factor in our ongoing immiseration -- and rent videos and there they are, the masters all adoringly imagined for us, and their childish antics, the things they blow up, the food they eat, the vehicles in which they chase each other around. This, we say, is what that species must do. Or must think they do. But for us apes, it is all a nature film, a wildlife film. They are different creatures, they move at different speeds, they eat different things, they die of different diseases, they experience their pains through different channels, and they experience their pleasures that way too.
Limited Inc is thinking about this a lot lately. We've just had a bout with the electric company -- owned and operated, supposedly, by the City of Austin -- in which the City of Austin won. Basically, they drained us of our cash. And we still don't have the money to remain in the desolate little efficiency to which we cling for another month. So we spent yesterday and today lamenting the move out to the street, which has gone from being a nightmare to being something we should plan on. We look at those weatherbeaten souls holding up the cardboard signs by the intersection of Lamar and 5th street reading, wer will mich horen, wenn ich schreie, unter dem Engeln Ordnungen, and we wonder about our own future. Although not exactly human, as LI's faithful reader know -- the ape has surely shown through, the rubbery features, the fur, the bulk, the inability to fit into shoes, pants, shirts -- we are still used to certain of the human comforts, and we contemplate their removal with dismay, and more than that, with a sort of animal panic, a paralyzing disarray. We live pretty much on a bushman's salary -- that is, on about six hundred dollars a month in US currency, supplemented by the money we beg, when the bills can no longer be put off, from friends and relatives. Every act of beggary is another descent into animality, so we have a very phased sense of what it means, we've swallowed the time release pill, the one that brings us to this level of poverty, and then to this further level, this murkier level. Descent, descent. And we know that, at forty four, this isn't going to go on forever. There are no jobs for our kind, for one thing; there's no honor in the poverty, for another thing; and neither love, which has long been forgotten, nor health awaits us in the future. The dark corner, another words, and, with our stiff little limbs in the air, being brushed into some dustpan like the cockroach in Kafka's Metamorphosis.
This is why we have been thinking about Uber die Linie, Ernst Junger's essay on nihilism. The essay takes its readings from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and makes the interesting suggestion that power, in the modern world, is promoted by something Juenger calls the nihilistic rumor -- the rumor that some force out there owns the future, from which one is excluded, and that resistance is futile. It's the No Future of the Sex Pistols, lived as the everyday experience of the apes.
Limited Inc, in other words, is talking about failure. We were moved recently by the New York article on a jazz singer, Susannah McCorkle, who jumped to her death last year from her sixteenth story apartment. But we did find it rather amusing that her death was immediately psychologized. She was, of course, depressed. The secret word -- failure -- never comes up in the article. But failure is a big external thing. It isn't generated as a mood -- it impresses itself upon one, day after day, as a state of affairs. This seeminly can't be admitted in a country that puts such stock in success -- it is as if the polar opposite doesn't exist; as if, magically, an opposition has been abolished. The piece begins with a description of a gathering of friends to honor the singer, then goes on in this graf to explain it all:
"If the gathering was upbeat, the months since McCorkle's suicide have been anything but for her friends, as the complexities of the singer's life and death have grown clearer and more painful. Hers was, in many ways, a quintessential New York story, in both its public triumphs and its private tragedy.Brainy, warm, and funny, McCorkle belonged to an exclusive coterie of American singers: She performed in the best rooms, recorded nineteen albums, and enjoyed more than two decades of acclaim from the jazz press as well as the devotion of fans around the world. But in the months before her death at 55 stunned them all, her record company, Concord, had decided to issue a compilation album instead of a new one, and the Algonquin Hotel had given her precious fall slot at the Oak Room, one of cabaret's most prestigious venues, to a younger singer. McCorkle also felt she was getting nowhere working on a memoir she'd been struggling with for years."
The article is written in the idiom that systematically disguises failure and its consequences. It is as if we were reading the account of the flailing of a woman drowning, and then were told that she the breathlessness she died of was all mental. The brain, not the lungs. I don't think so. But LI hastens to say that this is certainly not the author's fault. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence of the American idiom. That the ape can, one day, grow inside you is not something you tell your nearest and dearest. Far better the word, depression.
The Line, 2
In our last post, we made a few tentative jabs at thinking about the culture implications of a society in which the accumulation of wealth on the one side, and its absence on the other side, produces a gulf greater than that between, say, a Roman master and his slave. This is one of the great unthought ofs -- one of the unconscious features which plays its role in global culture. The promise of democracy is all hollowed out even as it is suavely announced by its spokesmen. For the Enlightenment ideal -- that one should be treated as an adult, and act like one -- depends on one being an adult human. The poor, though, are increasingly not. The suave spokesmen know it.
One of the things that should be noted about this wealth gulf, one of the reasons we are bringing up the tedious Roman reference, is that we'd like you to ponder the historical uniqueness of our status situation. Ours, our time's. Let's count it out: the Roman master could acquire other slaves, a greater amount of food, gorgeous clothing, and civil honor, and was in his way terrible. But in terms of levels of material existence, the master wasn't really going to find a better doctor, or dentist, or find more nutritious food, or even get a better education than the slave. The gulf between master and slave was in 500 a.d. as it was in Hegel's description in 1803 - they were both, in order to get the dialectic started, simply human beings. Hegel didn't talk about master and parakeet, master and deathwatch beetle.
Of course, this isn't true today. The Western dream of the lower species, that racist canard, was not, it turns out, a description, but rather a promise -- this was the vast project of the Western owners, the movers and shakers. if there really isn't an under-race, they would create an underclass. And over time, as the question of who was human became a question of who had the technology to be human, more and more of the poor simply don't have the price for that ticket, or the looks to get into that club. Since Limited Inc is one of this mass -- an ape on the planet of the apes that is being staged under your very windows, every day -- we can talk all about it. We aren't denied human rights anymore -- for human rights aren't really relevant to the non-human. We don't ride, for one thing, in cars. We don't go to dentists and have our toothaches cured. If we get AIDS, malaria, tb, or merely some cancer of a vital area, sleeping sickness, heart disease, the lot, and all our fault, drug or sex related no doubt, or due to living in some cancer gulch, living next to a refinery, living next to one of those old Monsanto chemical factories, living where they've put in all the highways so the humans can speed through the neighborhood, well, what do you expect? There is no cure. Whereas, of course, among human beings, the ardent discussions are about fertility drugs and viagra. The ardent discussions are about psychotherapy, the ardent discussions are about the safety of children. Are they attention deficit disorder children? Bring on the counselors, by all means.
There is a whole sphere not only of goods and services, but of ways of living, that are available to the masters and simply unimaginable to us apes. Of course, we vulgarly imagine it. Or rather, have it imagined for us by the humans. We have tvs -- well, LI doesn't, but that at least is a statement, not simply a factor in our ongoing immiseration -- and rent videos and there they are, the masters all adoringly imagined for us, and their childish antics, the things they blow up, the food they eat, the vehicles in which they chase each other around. This, we say, is what that species must do. Or must think they do. But for us apes, it is all a nature film, a wildlife film. They are different creatures, they move at different speeds, they eat different things, they die of different diseases, they experience their pains through different channels, and they experience their pleasures that way too.
Limited Inc is thinking about this a lot lately. We've just had a bout with the electric company -- owned and operated, supposedly, by the City of Austin -- in which the City of Austin won. Basically, they drained us of our cash. And we still don't have the money to remain in the desolate little efficiency to which we cling for another month. So we spent yesterday and today lamenting the move out to the street, which has gone from being a nightmare to being something we should plan on. We look at those weatherbeaten souls holding up the cardboard signs by the intersection of Lamar and 5th street reading, wer will mich horen, wenn ich schreie, unter dem Engeln Ordnungen, and we wonder about our own future. Although not exactly human, as LI's faithful reader know -- the ape has surely shown through, the rubbery features, the fur, the bulk, the inability to fit into shoes, pants, shirts -- we are still used to certain of the human comforts, and we contemplate their removal with dismay, and more than that, with a sort of animal panic, a paralyzing disarray. We live pretty much on a bushman's salary -- that is, on about six hundred dollars a month in US currency, supplemented by the money we beg, when the bills can no longer be put off, from friends and relatives. Every act of beggary is another descent into animality, so we have a very phased sense of what it means, we've swallowed the time release pill, the one that brings us to this level of poverty, and then to this further level, this murkier level. Descent, descent. And we know that, at forty four, this isn't going to go on forever. There are no jobs for our kind, for one thing; there's no honor in the poverty, for another thing; and neither love, which has long been forgotten, nor health awaits us in the future. The dark corner, another words, and, with our stiff little limbs in the air, being brushed into some dustpan like the cockroach in Kafka's Metamorphosis.
This is why we have been thinking about Uber die Linie, Ernst Junger's essay on nihilism. The essay takes its readings from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and makes the interesting suggestion that power, in the modern world, is promoted by something Juenger calls the nihilistic rumor -- the rumor that some force out there owns the future, from which one is excluded, and that resistance is futile. It's the No Future of the Sex Pistols, lived as the everyday experience of the apes.
Limited Inc, in other words, is talking about failure. We were moved recently by the New York article on a jazz singer, Susannah McCorkle, who jumped to her death last year from her sixteenth story apartment. But we did find it rather amusing that her death was immediately psychologized. She was, of course, depressed. The secret word -- failure -- never comes up in the article. But failure is a big external thing. It isn't generated as a mood -- it impresses itself upon one, day after day, as a state of affairs. This seeminly can't be admitted in a country that puts such stock in success -- it is as if the polar opposite doesn't exist; as if, magically, an opposition has been abolished. The piece begins with a description of a gathering of friends to honor the singer, then goes on in this graf to explain it all:
"If the gathering was upbeat, the months since McCorkle's suicide have been anything but for her friends, as the complexities of the singer's life and death have grown clearer and more painful. Hers was, in many ways, a quintessential New York story, in both its public triumphs and its private tragedy.Brainy, warm, and funny, McCorkle belonged to an exclusive coterie of American singers: She performed in the best rooms, recorded nineteen albums, and enjoyed more than two decades of acclaim from the jazz press as well as the devotion of fans around the world. But in the months before her death at 55 stunned them all, her record company, Concord, had decided to issue a compilation album instead of a new one, and the Algonquin Hotel had given her precious fall slot at the Oak Room, one of cabaret's most prestigious venues, to a younger singer. McCorkle also felt she was getting nowhere working on a memoir she'd been struggling with for years."
The article is written in the idiom that systematically disguises failure and its consequences. It is as if we were reading the account of the flailing of a woman drowning, and then were told that she the breathlessness she died of was all mental. The brain, not the lungs. I don't think so. But LI hastens to say that this is certainly not the author's fault. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence of the American idiom. That the ape can, one day, grow inside you is not something you tell your nearest and dearest. Far better the word, depression.
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