au revoir arrivaderci chow

Well, that’s it. I’ve done all the editing and reviewing I can stand. So now, off to Chicago for four days with the family. A wedding, see my old friend Janet, try to find the very spot where Nelson Algren hoisted Simone de Beauvoir up so she could peer through the bars of one of Chicago’s jails – what could go wrong? Although I have this premonition of doom. Of course, I have a premonition of doom when I buy breakfast cereal...

In the meantime, some more linkies for y’all.

First, Zoe’s tout va bien, a song that is all about LI – the problem with happiness! as per this instructive video, it leads inevitably to slaughtering your neighbors, your parents and your dog.

Then, a nice piece about Penelope Fitzgerald by Julian Barnes. Barnes makes a play with the phrase “amateur writer.” I first heard that phrase years ago, having dinner with Alfredo Bryce Echinique – a name which, alas, means nothing to Americans, but take my word for it, Bryce is the Peruvian novelist you should read, not Vargas Llosa.

And then, there is this, from At Swim Two Birds – the new Everyman Flann O’Brien will be at my side in the several bars and restaurants in the several airports that I will honor with my presence (while they pay no attention, silly fools!) on the way up to Chicago:

“It was stated that while the novel and the play were both pleasing intellectual exercises, the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters. The play was consumed in wholesome fashion by large masses in places of public resort; the novel was self-administered in private. The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic. In reply to an inquiry, it was explained that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. It was undemocratic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living. This would make for self-respect, contentment and better service. It would be incorrect to say that it would lead to chaos. Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before—usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature.”

links and a plea

Deviens ma proie
Libertine

As per my last post, LI is not going to be posting too much this week. However, I would like to point our readers to the Wax works video mentioned by the mysterious Azazel616 in a comment to the Insects post. I love this sequence of vids.

Further, for those of you yearning and burning for the latest in French folky goth music with that saving touch of Peau d'Âne, you should hurry to see Claire Ditzeri’s Tableau de Chasse. It is the eternal story of man, woman, and huntin’, which ends with the lights out and Cupid turning back into the primal essence.

And hey, those of my readers who know or live in Chicago, could you help a guy out with opinions re the finer bars and diners? You know what I mean - the kind of places where a man can get his head knocked in for emitting incautious opinions about the, uh, political incompetence of Pilsudski.

hypochondria of the deskbound

All the neighborhood dogs/lickin at her feet

“Benvenuto Cellini made the brilliant observation: wounds do not make us clever, because new ones always announce themselves under a different form. This I know well from my own experience.”

Lichtenberg’s experience – his orientation, if you will – derived, as everybody likes to point out, from the childhood accident that crippled him – bent his spine, that is (although the Lichtenberg society has demystified this beautiful story with a more plausible one about rickets – no matter! the myth probably arises from Lichtenberg’s own understanding of his wound ). It left him with a lifetime’s share of hypochondria – in one letter after another, his whole life long, Lichtenberg was dying. He felt bad about the fact that, feeling bad all the time, he didn’t know if he was feeling bad or good at any one particular time. The hypochondriac’s dilemma, as he well knew, was that hypochondria, in which one always suspects something bad, might disguise the advent of something worse.

Lichtenberg was an enlightenment savant, the professor of “universal philosophy” in Göttingen, an astronomer, mathematician, and general spreader of light. Ah, these savants in their cities – Smith in Glasgow, Montesquieu in Bordeaux, Kant in Konigsberg, and Lichtenberg in Göttingen. Like any enlightenment savant, he liked sex – and this part of Lichtenberg’s life, since Gert Hoffman’s novel, has now become the most famous part of his life. This would not really surprise Lichtenberg, with his satiric sense of the unexpected reputation, the perversity of fame, that checkers history.

Like all the German savants, Lichtenberg was an inveterate contributor to or founder of journals. For a long time, he contributed little essays to the Göttingen Tachenkalender. In 1783, he contributed Specimens of curious superstitions. I don’t believe this essay has been translated into English. Lichtenberg is, in general, not very translated into English. NYRB books published a translation of the Waste Books for which he is most known, by the most successful translator of Nietzsche, R.J. Hollingdale. I must say, I find Hollingdale’s preface pretty bad, since it isn’t true that Lichtenberg’s other writings are terrible. True, the Hogarthian essay is, uh, tedious ... but it was preparatory to the great anti-physiological writings. Lichtenberg’s epigrammatic style is evident in these writings – for instance, his mock learned work on the physiognomy of dog’s tails and what they tell us about the character of dogs. There is something very Twain like about that essay.
Well, LI is pressed by business right now, and we have to go to Chicago for a wedding on Wednesday – we will be back on Monday, August 4. So our readers might not fill themselves with the usual cornucopia of trivial fact and bombastic speculation that we try to give them each and every day. Damn! So our plan to translate Lichtenberg in bits, then the remarks about superstition by Goethe in his essay on Justus Moser, then the bit about astrology in Goethe’s letter to Schiller - these will all have to be put off.

the advocate for the insects

My thesis of the human limit seems, at first glance, to be countered by Lüthi’s persuasive notion that folktale heros and folktale objects possess a depthlessness that can’t be attributed to some stylistic primitiveness. That depthlessness is a narrative choice, as one can see by looking at the legends that circulate at the same time, and within the same circles. If a character displays no astonishment about the world in which “wishes matter”, then perhaps this is a sign of the fact that fundamentally, pre-modern European societies saw the world in the same way as early modern and modern societies – that the world is essentially made for man. In fact, the positivist version of history would say exactly this. Isn’t God simply Man, suitably arrayed in a cosmic fatsuit? Doesn’t Red Riding Hood’s wolf speak French? Aren’t the stars above us tuned to the flushes and faints of the microcosmic Adam? Isn’t the stamp of man on the World since the world was conceived in the minds of men? And, to reverse my narrative line, isn’t it just in modernity that we discover the “indifference” of the world, to use Camus’ phrase?

The positivist narrative, which plots the advance of the human understand from belief in God to belief in humanity (whether that humanity is represented by the self interested individual, the proletariat or the scientist) generated a counter-narrative that became popular in the sixties, in which the “West” is identified with greed and technology, and we are given an easy to use list of villains, like Descartes, capitalism, rationality, etc., etc. In this counter-narrative, the founding book, Genesis, lays out the environmental disasters to come, as God gives man dominion over nature. In fact, the positivists and their opponents generally share a view of the unfolding of history, but assign different values to it. And, of course, ultimately both views seem to agree on the desirability of promoting happiness as the supreme emotional value.

Take, for example, the judicial relationship between man and beast. Or man and caterpillar.

“In 1586, extraordinary rains caused a great quantity of caterpillars to be born, which devastated Dauphiné. The grand vicar of the diocese of Valence cited them to appear before him and appointed for them a curator of defender. After solemn debates, the caterpillars were condemned to empty the premices of the diocese immediately; but they failed to hasten to obey, and, in place of anathemas and excommunications, it was agreed, after the advice of two theologians and two professors of law, to have recourse to abjurations, prayers, and aspersions of holy water. In spite of all, the caterpillars only disappeared a long time afterwards. This singular sixteenth century trial is remarkable inasmuch as this was the age of a great intellectual movement imprinted on minds and that the teaching of Roaldes, Cujus and Salinger threw a lively flame on the university of Valence.” (Bulletin d'archéologie et de statistique de la Drôme, 1875:452-3)

What happened in Valence was not an unusual occurence. The philosophes of the eighteenth century had great fun with the idea of an “advocate for the insects”. However, LI is fascinated by the very possibility that the insects have a legal side that should be listened to, debated, especially since we know that the asperging of holy water has given way to the asperging of insecticide without the insects having any advocate left.

The positivist could say, however, that the advocate of the insects is only advocating for them from the human point of view – that is, God is using them to avenge some human fault.

Well, this will lead us to a little essay by Lichtenberg. And the, by these byways, we will get back to Schiller, Goethe and astrology.

lest that thy heart's blood run cold...

Max Lüthi, in his The European Folktale: Form and Nature, systematically contrasts the folktale (Märchen) with the legend (Sagen). Legend, for Lüthi, is something like the Saint’s tale, or the Arthurian tales, which – he claims – endow characters and objects with a “greater three-dimensionality” than folktales. According to Lüthi, folktales are characterized, stylistically, by depthlessness – the other world, the Aber-world, of the supernatural is accepted by the folk tale hero without a blink.

“In the Grimms’ folktale of the Seven Ravens, we are told of the little sister who arrives at the glass mountain: ‘What was she to do now? She wanted to save her brothers and had no key to the glass mountain. The good little sister took a knife, cut off one of her little fingers, pit it into the gate, and thus managed to open it. Once she had made her way in, a little dwarf came to meet her” – and so on, without the slightest indication of physical or psychological distress.” (13)

Lüthi’s examples can be infinitely multiplied. Red Riding Hood shows no surprise that the wolf talks to her; Rosanie accepts Ricdin-Ricdon’s magic wand without any question about how it works, or why, if it possesses the magical qualities Ricdin-Ricdon claims, he hasn’t made better use of it. In Dumb Hans, a hunchback who impregnates a princess simply by wishing is also able, by wishing, to build her a castle and cast off his hump – why, then, did he spend his youth being mocked and tormented for being an ugly hunchback? The superimposition of a violent, sexually active, hierarchical world over a “once upon a time, when wishes were still of use” does not take the questions that arise in that hierarchical world and apply them to the new, hybrid world – instead, there is a sort of automatic assumption that the rules have changed, now. But have changed capriciously, as it were, by themselves.

That general attitude of depthlessness, in the world of folktales, seems to translate an aspect of the culture which, according to an increasingly powerful consensus among the elite in the seventeenth century, was riddled by superstition. The struggle against superstition does not begin in the seventeenth century – Plutarch wrote against superstition. It became one of the commonplaces of Christian preaching. In On Godly Fear, a sermon by Jeremy Taylor, the great Anglican preacher, superstition is analyzed as a misplaced fear, and put among the pagan and Romish practices. It is at the base of idolatry.

“The Latins, according to their custom, imitating the Greeks in all their learned notices of things, had also the same concepiton of this, and by their word superstitio understood “the worship of demons,” or separate spirits; by which they meant, either their minores deos, or else their zoas apotheothentas, “their braver personages, whose souls were suppose to live after death;” the fault of this was the object of their religion; they gave a worship or a fear to whom it was not due: for whenever they worshipped the great God of heaven and earth, they never called that superstition in an evil sense, except the Adeoi, “they that believed there was no God at all.” Hence came the etymology of superstition: it was the worshipping or fearing the spirits of their dead heroes, “quos superstites credebant,” “whom they thought to be alive” after their apotheiosis, or deification, “quos superstantes credebant”, “standing in places and thrones above us;” and it alludes to that admirable description of old age, which Solomon made beyond all the rhetoric of the Greeks and Romans; “Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way;” intimating the weakness of old persons, who, if ever they have been religious, are apt to be abused into superstition; they are “afraid of that which is high;” that is, of spirits, and separate souls of those excellent beings, which dwell in the regions above us...” (Sermons, 1874:66)

This long notion of a misplaced fear, a double of the expected and demanded fear before those who are actually on high, migrates from the Stoics to the Church fathers to the natural scientists. It still constitutes the critical attitude that is taken to superstition and the understanding of folk practices. Yet, there’s an odd break between the ability to go between this world and the other world in the folktales and this picture of the culture of superstition. As always, when folktales pose a hermeneutic problem, they usually produce a folktale about that problem. So, the problem of the wish generates the folktale of the Fisherman’s wife that is about the very nature of wishing; and the problem of fear and its lack becomes “A Tale About the Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was.”

To which we will return... Our point, however, is that the struggle against superstition was defined differently at the end of the seventeenth century than at the beginning – that is, for the elite culture. The court position of the astrologer is a good marker of this change. Jean Baptiste Morin, whose book on French astrology (an apparently endless book, having a million volumes, which were employed to build the great wall of France – a little known structure which can be seen from one of our moons) has been partly translated by the American federation of astrologers, was still able to write horoscopes for King Louis XIII and give astrological advice to Richelieu, but even then, he was engaged in a bitter rearguard battle with Gassendi about the truth of astrology. Hervé Drévillon in Lire et ecrire l’avenir notes that the laws against astrology changed during the seventeenth century. In 1628, decrees were made against prophecies that predicted the fates of individuals, princes and states – “It was a matter then of containing astrology in certain limits, without contesting a certain legitimacy and pertinence belonging to it.” However, in “1682, the strategy of monarchic power in regard to astrology changed. From this time forth, it was no longer a matter of containing a discourse in the limits of what was judged politically tolerable, but of eradicating a belief whose effects were considered pernicious for the morality and order of the public.” [226] The members of the erudite elite who were willing to defend astrology dwindled. Perrault, Drévillon notes, in his death notice of the blind military strategist, Blaise de Pagan, attributed Pagan’s book on natural astrology to his “faiblesse.”

Franchising the column

LI owes Scott McLemee, who writes a column at Inside Higher Education, a note of thanks for having publicized our column on academic books (appearing every two months now!) at the Austin American Statesman. We did an interview with him in January, which, rather surprisingly, was quoted in a speech by the president of the Association of American University Presses at their convention. For the first and last time in history, I actually had a tiny tiny effect on the world:

“Last month, during his speech at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, outgoing president Sandy Thatcher quoted from my interview with Roger Gathman, who writes “The Academic Presses” for the Austin paper. “The people making decisions,” Gathman had said, “have to realize that it is in their interest to encourage reading. They have to start thinking about the need to generate an audience. At that level, it makes no sense for all of your cultural coverage to point to activities that don’t involve reading.” Thatcher, who is also the director of Penn State University Press, indicated that his recent venture in editing the review section of a local newspaper, the Centre Daily Times, was inspired in part by that column.

At the time, I pointed out that Gathman’s comment about reading would seem profoundly sensible to anyone who gave it two minutes of thought – but who could spare that much time when (as it seems at newspapers nowadays) the sky is falling?”

I am planning - lazily - to franchise this column, that is, sell it to other newspapers, which could publish it a week after I write it for the Austin American Statesman. My plan is to go to newspapers in university towns - Athens Ga, Madison Wi, Eugene Oregon. The problem with the plan is, of course, exactly what Scott points out in the article - the ethos of newspaper publishing has eroded.

Newspapers are much mythologized beasts - they have by and large contributed to the "softening" of manners that is the mark of liberal society, but they have done so unconsciously, as it were - from Pulitzer to the Chandlers to the Hearsts, media owners have commonly shared the political bent of Murdoch, yet they have depended on writers to provide their materials. Writers are a feu follet breed - normally, their cultural capital is in gross disproportion to the return they make on it. Hence, they are inclined to think of themselves as badly appreciated, which plants the seed of dissatisfaction with social arrangements as they are. And of course they pass through social circles in which the bourgeois norms are bent in any number of interesting ways. This doesn't necessarily result in liberalism per se - it can easily result in extreme reaction - but it shows itself around the edges even in the day to day work of creating establishment supporting narratives.

lies, damn lies, and the conventional wisdom

LI likes to read the econ blogs when times get all roller-coastery. One thing that the blogs share with the thumbsuckers in the papers is that Americans will generally have to get used to lowering their standard of living. This has become the truism du jour, and it goes along with the other truism, which is that Americans have been living way past their standards of living.

Of course, that is all nonsense and lies. There is one and only one cause of our present discontents, which is that Americans – by which I mean the bottom 80 percent – have been horribly underpaid for the last thirty years. It is always and everywhere good to remember that wealth comes only from the bottom. Wealth creation simply doesn’t happen at the top – licitly. Of course, we’ve watched wealth creation happen at the top for years, but a close look at it shows that it is merely the piling of one fiction on top of the other. What the top does, at the limit, is administer and manage. For this function, it has succeeded in rewarding itself with the lion share of the wealth created over the past thirty years – by the bottom 80 percent. When one reads stories, such as the much commented upon story in the NYT about the Diane McCleod, the woman with two jobs, earning 45, 000 per year, who had accumulated debts of around $280,000, including her home, an asset that is probably worth around $160,000 in today’s market, the first thing I thought is that she should probably be making 80 to 90 thousand a year working those jobs. She would be, if wages had risen as they rose in the seventies. But here’s what happened: to arrest the falling profit margins, the political and business establishment decided to smash that rise in the wage rate. They did so under the cover of a story that is universally repeated, and so now, simply assumed. That story is that wealth comes from the top. It is a fairy tale for babies, but it has nicely succeeded in blunting the progressive tendency in taxation as well as arousing the general public’s support for programs designed to cut the general public’s throat. Of course, the guilt machine turns on automatically to make the whole thing go down like sugar. Turns out McCleod liked purses, and purchased many expensive purses on her credit cards. Is that shameful or what? She actually wanted something she considered beautiful in her life. How disgusting.

Or... no. This is what is shameful:

“GE Money Bank, which levied a 27 percent rate on Ms. McLeod’s debt and is part of the GE Capital Corporation, generated profits of $4.3 billion in 2007, more than double the $2.1 billion it earned in 2003.”

In 1979, a 27 percent rate would be illegal.

The U.S. is experimenting with a unique blend of robber baron capitalism and consumerism. The barons depend on the consumer, while at the same time, they chisel down the amount the consumer takes home until, of course, relative to the robber baron the consumer’s income sinks below the horizon. To make up for the logical gap here, the robber baron extends credit at 27 percent to the consumer. To make it, the consumer takes two jobs, thus robbing the day of any moment in which to be simply human. The consumer responds in the classically mammalian way when the lab environment turns hostile, by rushing to the bowl for sweets. In the labs, the rats die and they jack out the kidneys to examine the stress effects. In the suburbs and traffic jams, the consumer’s humanity turns to a peculiar mixture of glucose and methane, while the wallets are jacked out for other charges as they may apply. Outside the window, the world is upside down and the Whore of Babylon has lofted a bright, shiny sword.

what does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?

Kant’s little writings are all too little known, except for the all too known What is Enlightenment. One of his most entertaining papers is entitled “What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking.” It was written to interfere in a dispute between Mendelssohn and Jacobi over the limits of reason and the rights of genius. Mendelssohn, in the course of this dispute, talks about being “oriented” by common sense, or healthy reason, and opts for a religious purified of enthusiasm, worshipping a rational God. Kant, with that driest of dry wits (the wit of the praying mantis as she devours her mate) likes the word orientation (and of course there is a little subdued play here with Mendelssohn as a man from the orient – a Jew).

This is how Kant explains it:

To orient oneself means, properly: out of a given world region (in the four of which we divide the horizon) to find the other, namely, the place of rising (sunrise). If I look at the son in the heaven at this instant and know that it is noon, so I know how to find the south, west, north and east. But I need in support of this throughout the feeling of a difference in my own subject, namely, my right and left hands. I name it a feeling; because these two side show externally to the intuition [Anschauung – inner view] no marked difference. Without this capacity: in the description of a circle, without requiring any distinction of objects in it, to still distinguish the movement of the left to the right from the opposed direction, and through this to determine a difference in the position of the objects a priori, would not be something I knew how to do, if I did not set the West to the right or the left of the south point of the horizon, and so thus should complete the circle with the north and the east until I was again at the south. Thus I orient myself geographically by all objective data on the heavens, but only through a subjective base of difference (Unterschiedungsgrund); and if, in a day through some miracle all the constellations otherwise retaining the same shape and position relative to each other only took a different direction, that is, instead of eastwardly, going now westwardly, in the next starbright night no human eye would perceive the least change, and even the astronomer, if he simply relied on what he saw and not at the same time on what he felt, would be unavoidably disoriented.

Kant always had a deep appreciation of the time reversable world of Newtonian physics. The notion of the sky played backwards or the earth going backwards is a gorgeous mindfall – one can go a long way down, thinking of that. Is there a bottom? This is a subjective claim indeed, but not one often raised in philosophy. Partly because philosophers spend too little time marveling over left and right. Kant, in this essay, uses the term subjective to mean something oddly material – inhabiting a body in space and time. But, as Kant knows, that body is built, partly, of directions that seem to have nothing to do with space and time as we commonly think of them, requiring an imaginary dimension in which we can transfer from left to right and right to left. This is the issue at the heart of the dispute between Leibniz and Newton about absolute vs. relative space. Which I’m not going into, except to note how Kant is building his notions

His next move is to expand this idea – which, incidentally, involves introducing the first practical joke (if we put aside Descartes evil demon) in philosophy (and all the praying mantises go doo, da doo da doot da doot doo da doo da doo doot da doot):

This geographic concept of the process of orientation I can now expand, understanding it thusly: in a given space in general, thus purely mathematically, to orient oneself. In darkness I orient myself in a well known room when I get hold of only a few objects, whose place I have registered in my memory. But here I am obviously helped in nothing by the specific affordances (Bestimmungsvermogen) of the place according to a subjective ground of distinction: then the objects, whose places I should have to find, I don’t see at all; and if someone, playing a joke on me, had put all the same objects in the same order one with another, but to the left where all had previously been to the right, so I would in a room where otherwise the walls were all the same, not be able to find myself. But so I orient myself now through the simple feeling of a difference between my two sides, the right and the left. Just that happens, when I in the nighttime on street otherwise familiar to me, in which I can now not distinguish between houses, go and appropriately wend my way.

Am I the only one, reading this, who thinks:

“He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.”

I won’t translate all of Kant’s essay. I want to drive us to this passage – and, I assure you, I am still thinking about Wallenstein and superstition. A moment, ladies and gentlemen. Let me compose myself. I haven’t been feeling well lately. Isn’t it hot in here? Let me get out my handkerchief. Actually, touch of an old tropical distemper, plus of course the damned clap. Vixen was well worth it! The worms have the best of it. They dine off the best bits... Was this the face that launched a thousand ships...

Oh.

“The course of things is approximately this. First, genius disports itself by making its bold flights, since it has dropped the thread that otherwise links it to reason. It soon entrances others through mighty speeches and great expectations, and seems to have set itself on a throne, which slow, heavy reason barely graces; whereby it still leads with the language of the same. The at that point assumed maxim of unworthiness of a too highly placed, lawgiving reason we common men call enthusiasm [Schwarmarei] these sports of benificent nature call it illumination. Because in the meantime there must arise a confusion of speech among them because, while reason can assume the dignity to command every man, here now this one, now that one follows his inspirations: thus must finally arise, out of inner inspirations through the testimonies of externally observed facts, out of traditions, that were in the beginning themselves kinds of preferences, with time becoming intrusive oracles [Urkunde], with a word the whole subjection of reason under the fact, i.e. superstition - because this at least carries with it the form of law and thus a point of rest.”

Time for a quick one...

“The double sense of life accuses me...”

In 1797 and 98, Schiller was working on his Wallenstein cycle of plays. Wallenstein, a Bohemian warlord who figured in the thirty years war, was not at first glance an ideal figure for create, in the German language, theater in the Shakespearian vein. In her history of the thirty years war, C.V. Wedgewood pens this portrait:

“He was not a popular man: tall, thin, forbidding, his face in the unexpressive portraits which have survived is not prepossessing. No great master painted him and the limners who attempted his saturnine features agree only in a few particulars. The irregular features, the high cheek bones and prominent nose, the heavy jowl, the thick, out jutting underlip...

Already Wallenstein had a reputation for pretensions beyond his station. A Czech by birth, speaking the language fluently and allied to many of the leading families, dispossessed and otherwise, Wallenstein was influential if not popular in many sections of society...

Meanwhile, before the end of 1623 Wallenstein had contracted a second marriage, with Isabella von Harrach, a lady who regarded him with the nearest approximation to love which we may suppose it was ever his fate to inspire...”

Kepler, who worked for the Bohemian court, had drawn up his horoscope. Although astrologers were employed by all the royal houses in the early 17th century (Campanella, the author of City of the Son, had drawn up Louis XIV’s horoscope), Schiller decided to make astrology as central to Wallenstein’s Death as witchcraft was to MacBeth. Wallenstein did have his own astronomer, “Sini”. Voltaire, in the Philosophical Dictionary, under the entry Astronomy, made some typical acerbic comments about this:

"You should still less be astonished that so many men, who were, besides, elevated above the vulgar, so many princes, so many popes, who one could not fool about the least of their interests, were so ridiculously seduced by that impertinence of astrology. They were very proud and very ignorant. The stars were only for them: the rest of the universe was scum in whose affairs the stars didn’t meddle at all. They were like that prince who trembled at a comet, and who responded gravely to those who didn’t fear it at all: you can talk – you aren’t a prince.

The famous Duke of Wallenstein was one of the most infatuated by this chimera. He called himself a prince, and consequently thought that the zodiac was formed expressly for him. He never besieged a city, he never began a battle, then after having held council with the heavens. But as this great man was extremely ignorant, he had established for the chief of his council an Italian rogue named Jean Baptiste Seni, on whom he bestowed a six horse carriage and a stipend of twenty thousand livres. Jean-Baptiste Seni could not predict, however, that Wallstein would be assassinated by the orders of his gracious lord, Ferdinand II, and that he, Seni, would be returning to Italy on foot.

It is plain that one can know nothing of the future but by conjectures. These conjectures can be so strong that they approach certitude. You see a whale swallow a small boy: you can bet 10,000 to 1 that he will be eaten. However, you can’t be absolutely sure, after the adventures of Hercules, of Jonah and of Roland the fool, who remained so long in the belly of a fish.”

Hmm, I wonder if this entry gives us the seed of the story of Pinocchio? Anyway, in LI’s daunting pursuit of whatever, we will be using Schiller’s Wallenstein and Goethe’s more “instinctive” sense of astrology –as one commentator puts it – to discuss superstition.

homo sominex

One of those facts that makes the drinking man doubt the observant side of the human animal is the strange lag in the discovery that every healthy male sports an erection about every 90 minutes during the sleep cycle. And for y’all ladies out there, well, the vagina goes through a 90 minute cycle as well, tied to REM sleep, of dilation and moistening. Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care! While there are cave paintings of sleeping men with erections and there’s an Egyptian tomb painting of the same fascinating subject, science with a capital S only stumbled onto it in 1944, when it was reported by German doctors. This is all according to Paul Martin’s book on Sleep. That scientists were so late to the game is depressing news – where were the giants of Natural Philosophy back in the 17th century? Martin, hating Freud, hastens to say that the erections and vaginal dilation aren’t sexual in nature. He also says he’d like to buy a bridge in Brooklyn, if any of his readers happen to own one.

That the Nazis were studying sleepers in 1944 seems to surprise Martin, but those of us who’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow realize that WWII was more than a war, it was the world we come from, it was the egg opening, it was the hatching of our common psychotic global humanity, a synergy of endorphins. Our erections were wagging as the bombs were dropping. So of course, humans were guinea pigged on all levels, for all purposes, because this is how control happens, honey. Now, let me strap you back into your cot...

However, I am starting up this subject to link to the review of a book, Insomniac, by Gayle Greene that I received and didn’t review. I feel guilty about that. But when I told my editor I wanted to review two books on sleep problems, he looked at me as if I were nuts. And when I told him Sleepers Civil Rights were the next big next big thing (I get carried away, I foam at the mouth, I start sounding like Maldoror off his meds!), he changed the topic. I obviously had briefly lost that contact with reality. The synaptic distance had lengthened.

Well, the sleepless are truly in a different world from the slugabeds, the ones without the wired brain tap tap tapping Nevermore at the vital center somewhere back there in the brain. I have always loved IT for owning up to the insomnia that keeps her up (If your tired unblinking head/rivet the dark with linear sight...) especially as insomnia is one of those things it is difficult to be in solidarity with – for what does insomnia do but make you cranky, and what makes you crankier than somebody bitching about insomnia? Which is why the sleepless do not form a class. Oh, they might compare remedies, but only to diss each other’s favorites. Sleepless anonymous would be a (waking) nightmare.

Myself, as middle age has crept upon, I’ve encountered the old restless legs/cramped muscles problem that so many have solved simply by putting a bullet in their heads. Actually, it is the cramps that is the worst. The pain scares me – I’ve never been a fan of pain. Especially when my foot will suddenly cramp up. It will happen and then, for nights afterwards, the ghost of that cramp will hover over my foot. I’ll stare at the ghost. The ghost will stare at me. It is a hard thing in life when a man is afraid of his own foot.

I’ve been advised that the best thing is calcium (hence, got some calcium horsepills) and phosphorus (hence, I’m eating ever more bananas). So the nightly routine is sleeping pill, aspirin (on principle) horsepill of calcium. Last week I ran out of sleeping pills, and insouciantly decided to show the world and my foot that I could do without. So for four days I knew four a.m. intimately. And I developed a new syndrome, which I am sure is related to kanashibari, except that instead of feeling a being sitting on my chest, I would get this ghostly feeling. The hairs would rise on my body, like I was scared. And I would feel scared, briefly. Perhaps it was the ghost of my sleep that was visiting me, but really, that’s double dipping and no fair. So I went back to the pills.

This is from D.T. Max’s review of Insomniac:

Insomniac is, along the way, an alarming, uncomfortable portrayal of how researchers in the field fail the sufferers they are supposed to treat. Desperate for funds, bent over by insurance companies, whiplashed by the National Institutes of Health, researchers do not treat insomnia as it is actually experienced. If you cannot cure me, Greene seems to be saying, at least hear me. Don’t tell me how insomnia ought to be, but let me tell you how it really is. “What is missing from everything I read about insomnia is—the insomniacs,” she writes. And earlier she confides, “No doctor I ever saw showed the slightest curiosity about the cocktail of hormones, estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, that I ingest daily.” “This is a somewhat cranky book,” she writes. Indeed it is.
And with reason, as Greene makes clear. Certainly insomnia came early to her and has stayed for a long time. Greene was born wide awake. “There is no sleep in that baby,” her mother wrote to her father in 1944, in a I’ve tried (nearly) everything anyone has ever told me worked for them,” she writes, “and it’s taken me some strange ways: lathering myself in sesame oil, brewing a Chinese herbal tea so foul that my dog fled the kitchen when it steeped, concocting a magnesium supplement that hissed and spat like something out of Harry Potter.” On the pharmaceutical front she’s been equally active, sampling “valerian, kava kava, chamomile, skullcap, passionflower, homeopathic concoctions, L-tryptophan, 5-HTP, GABA, melatonin, Elavil, Zoloft, trazodone, tricyclics.” Add to this the benzodiazepines, “Librium, Valium, Xanax, Dalmane, Klonopin, Restoril, Halcion, and more Ativan than I care to remember or probably can remember, since the drug erodes memory.” Throw in Ambien and Sonata, and “in the bad old days” sedatives such as Nembutal, Seconal, and Miltown. Plus the over-the-counter remedies: Sominex, Nytol, Sleep-Eze. Not to mention other treatments, including meditation, acupuncture, and biofeedback. And on and on, poor soul. Nothing ever quieted her chattering brain.”
Bad old days? What the fuck? Oh please, what I’d not do for a Seconal. I have my own theory about the chattering brain, which is that if you wire it to chatter, it won’t turn off. If I had learned not to read in bed, if I could avoid the computer screen, if I wasn’t continually scribble scribble scribble, if at some point these had been my choices, I believe I’d sleep like my brothers tell me they do. But I took the road less traveled by – because I’m a complete idiot. Although, in fact, I’m not as cranky as Gayle Greene, who has a much deeper condition than I do. The pills work for me. By two, usually, I’m out like a baby.

what hell, what terror!

In our archives, somewhere, are buried the remains of a large essay we were planning on writing about John Law once upon a time. My, how a decade flies when you are having fun!

Antoine Murphy (a wonderfully Beckett sounding name) is your man for all things Law-ful. In his book on Law, he grasps the very central point of what Law called the systéme. Law had seen that the national economies of his day were held back by specie money. Specie money, like gold or silver coin, is, as it were, a self-valueing asset. Its weight and metallic content are, ideally, equal to the value on its face. Thus, the man who carries a gold coin carries a coin literally worth its weight in gold. When a kingdom needed to debase its money, it did so by stinting on the weight and composition of its coinage. Swift’s wrath against the brummagen coinage issued by William Wood, under license from the crown, and with the blessing of the assayer of the mint, Isaac Newton, was directed at the drain of real value that would occur when gold coins at a false weight were exchanged for true. Asset money was always a constraint on a kingdom since it depended on there being in circulation enough gold and silver to allow for the consistent issuance of money. Law correctly saw that this system would forever restrain commerce. Thus, as Murphy explains, Law introduced credit money. The worth of credit money depends on its position in the whole financial system. It is worth nothing in itself except the promise it carries on its face. With credit money, as Murphy points out, an “array of new monetary products (liabilities) ... can be created [from the credit-money system] and the range of loan products (assets) that can be produced.” (108)

When the regent took power after the death of Louis XIV, he was staring at a kingdom that had long been bankrupted to pay for Louis’ wars and projects. Law, a gambler and an outlaw from England (where he’d escaped imprisonment for murder at Newgate), had long been proposing a credit-money scheme to various kingdoms, including Scotland. The Regent, desperate for any expedient to lift the monarchy from ruin, agreed at last to Law’s schemes. I won’t bother with the details of the stages by which Law moved from running a bank to running a monopoly on trade – the Compagnie de l’orient, popularly known as the Mississippi company – to finally running a bank combined with a trade and tax monopoly (the collection of taxes were farmed out in France) with royal backing. And indeed, pumping credit money into France got the country going again. Instead of edging up against the artificial constraint of too little specie money, a stream of credit money re-inflated France’s commerce and reinvigorated the agricultural sector. Law calculated that France could stand a total of 3 billion livres in coinage – a calculation he based on its potential for trade, and its comparative size against England, which was estimated to have 1 billion livres in circulation.

Finally, Law tied credit money to an asset – land. Land had the advantage of not being portable, for one thing – unlike gold. And for another thing, land was, Law thought, the basis of wealth. Having been ceded the land of the Mississippi, Law’s company divided it up – in a sense. That is, one could buy shares of it. And those shares could be exchanged for his bank’s billet, which were supported by the tax farms, which paid off the King’s debt, which had been paid by a loan from the bank.

There are two obvious problems: one is, how do we control the issuing of credit money? it seems like there is a built in incentive to create, as Montesquieu claimed, imaginary money – or at least it was easier to debauch credit money. And the second problem was asset money. People could refuse to exchange credit money and demand asset money. And this would automatically make credit money of less value.

In 1719 and 1720, the Mississippi company “boomed” – meaning that credit money circulated and shares in the Mississippi company rose spectacularly in value. The company’s brokerage house on Quincampoix street became a famous scene of a sort of continual avarice riot. All classes thronged it, trading, going broke, becoming rich. But it was a very fragile structure, a bubble, and at the first sign of trouble, when the shares went down, there was a flight to asset money that devalued the credit money. Law attributed this to the plague that struck Marseilles in 1720 – the same plague Artaud wrote about in Theater and its Double. Artaud wrote about the social structure liquifying in the face of the plague, which was true in one sense. But that liquification was an old fashioned chaos. What was really liquifying the social structure was credit money, and here, the plague created a very conservative reaction. Doctors wanted asset money. So did the butcher, the baker, and the candlestickmaker. Which is when Law persuaded the Regent (who, along with his friends, had become extremely wealthy via Law’s system) to issue a decree banning, in effect, specie money. This was the beginning of the end – the use of force shook confidence in Law, and his enemies used this decree to spread rumors about the true purpose of the system.

Law was forced from his position as France’s Controller General – the position that Colbert held – and had to flee France in a carriage loaned to him by Mme de Prie, a woman who valued her favors. This one was meant to get rid of Law with the least possible difficulty. Mme de Prie had made a mint in the bubble, and in time became Louis XV’s mistress, where she used her influence to keep Law from being recalled to France.

I wonder if, as the carriage crossed the French border, where Law was stripped of his passport and pocket change, whether one could hear, on the wind, the words: “mes gages, mes gages, mes gages.” Or was it something altogether more grandiloquent that ushers in the culture of happiness?

Chi l'anima mi lacera?
Chi m'agita le viscere?
Che strazio, ohimè, che smania!
Che inferno, che terror!

virtuous gamblers, virtuous atheists

The case is plain, you must put on a Sword, Kill a Beau or two, get into Newgate, be condemned to be hanged, break Prison, IF YOU CAN – remember that by the way – get over to some Strange Country, turn Stock-Jobber, set up a Mississippi Stock, bubble a Nation, and you may soon be a great man; if you would have but great good luck, according to an old English Maxim:

Dare once to be a Rogue upon record
And you may quickly hope to be a Lord. [Defoe 1869,

189 in: Daniel Defoe his Life and recently discovered writings, I]

“...as that may be, I have not read anywhere, since the fable of King Midas, still less seen, that anyone has the talent for converting to gold all that he touches; I don’t believe, as well, that M. Law is endowed with this virtue, but I think all his knowledge is but a shrewd game, a new and skillful move in the shell game, which puts the goods of Pierr in the pocket of Jean, and only enriches the one from despoiling the other; that sooner or later this will stop, the game will be seen through, an infinite number of gentlemen will be ruined, and I foresee all the difficulty, even the impossibility, of restitutions of that gain, and even more, who to restore gains of that sort; that I abhorred the goods of others, and I wouldn’t charge myself with it, even equivocally.” – Saint-Simon, Journal xvii

When Montesquieu came to Venice in the summer of 1728, he was on a long fact finding tour through Europe. He was 38. He was a celebrity for the Persian Letters, which he’d written at thirty; one of those letters, 142, http://www.wm.edu/history/rbsche/plp/letter142.htm had attacked John Law’s “system,” pretty much following the same line of thought as Saint Simon. It must have been written at some point close to February 1720, when Law made one of the boldest move in European economic history by having a decree published which practically prohibited specie currency – that is, gold coins. About which, we will write in another post. Montesquieu was a virtuoso – a dabbler in natural history – as well as a philosopher. As he toured Europe, he kept notes not only on the people and the gossip he heard, but on the mines he toured, the factories he was ushered into. Coming into Venice, for instance, he noted the number of estimated whores, 10,000, as a pertinent economic fact, as much as he later noted famous mirror works. Whores and disgraced men who had fled their native lands were, in Montesquieu’s opinion, the key symbols of the Venice of his time: not the doge, not the lions of St. Mark. In Montesquieu’s account, Venice was definitely going through dog years. No one came to the carnivals anymore, or attended the opera, which once drew foreigners to the city – at least, according to Montesquieu. He paints a picture of a city in full decay – a place in which the cathedrals smelled of the fats of the corrupting corpses in the catafalques.

Of the disgraced men that Montesquieu came to see, one of them was John Law, born of “Aeolus, the god of the winds”, and a “Caledonian nymph”, and come to the gambler’s paradise to die, the only person he loved, his wife/mistress, left behind in France and making due as the mistress of a nobleman. Montesquieu notes that he interviewed Law on the 29 August, 1728, but he doesn’t say where. One thinks of a palazzo, rented of course, moldy, cluttered with old bric a brac, the household overseen by a sinister looking valet wearing a shabby fez. Obviously, Montesquieu was looking for the inside story to the mystery of how, exactly, the “system” had been put into operation. Montesquieu’s interview has been used ever since as a crib to the scandals surrounding the Bubble but, as Law’s biographer, Antoin E. Murphy, notes, Montesquieu didn’t seem to understand what Law was trying to tell him about the system. Instead, he noted a lot of figures – and Law’s figures were amazing, a million here, a billion there, which were almost demonic numbers in the Europe of the time – while Law’s deeper explanation of what he was trying to do seemed to go over our philosophe’s head. I was thinking that this meeting would make a nice contrast with Sganarelle and Dom Juan’s talk in the forest, but that’s a prettier idea than the historic reality it is built on.

So: what is the convergence here between Law’s system and Bayle’s society of atheists? It has to do with the difference between general belief and particular belief. The belief about the meaning of the cosmos – a belief that gives us a variety of Gods – was, you remember, discounted by Bayle as a factor in particular human behaviors. At the same time, Bayle was bothered by, and wrote against, superstition. Tolerance and the war against superstition go hand in hand – not only in Bayle, but in Locke, and in the Enlightenment tradition. Similarly, Law tried to institute a sort of economic atheism. This creed disbelieved in gold and silver. That is, disbelieved that gold was special. Briefly, Law got the unbelievable chance to enforce his beliefs on the primary nation in Europe. There are those who think France actually recovered from the lugubrious Louis XIV and his endless, bankrupting wars because of Law. But in the popular culture, Law’s system became a byword for a mass delusion.

Well, I’ll go from there when I have time.

"I drive a Rolls Royce
Cause it's good for my voice..."

the society of atheists

In terms of science, the comets of 1680 was perhaps the most important ever to appear in the skies. The orbit of it was illustrated in Newton’s Principia of 1687. It was made the object of extensive observation by Royal Society astronomers, like Halley. And it gave rise to various and sundry reports of supernatural phenomena, from hens laying comet shaped eggs to rumors that the world was ending. Sara Schechner’s description of the comets (from Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology) is still impressively scary:

“In early November of 1680, a comet appeared before sunrise and was sighted heading toward the sun until the end of the month. In mid-December, another comet appeared in the evening sky, heading away from the sun. Its tail was immense, growing to be over seventy degrees long.”

In Mexico city, there were rumors about the resurrection of the dead and processions. Sigüenza y Góngora, the great Mexican humanist and official Cosmographer to New Spain, wrote a book, The Philosophical Manifesto Against Comets, Stripped of their Dominion over the Fearful, to counter-act popular fears about the comet (and three hundred seventeen years later, my friend Miruna Achim wrote her Ph.D dissertation on Sigüenza – and, as she might point out, that Schechner’s book shows no awareness of Sigüenza whatsoever hints at the provincial Eurocentrism that bedevils the history of science).

Pierre Bayle also wrote about the comet. Bayle, like Sigüenza, is writing against superstition as much as he is writing in a scientific manner about celestial phenomena. Thus, Bayle’s Diverse Thoughts on the Comet is more of a philosophical than an astronomical treatise. In it, Bayle devoted a long section on the morals and behavior which might be found in a society of atheists and produced a “paradox” that proved to be important in the history of the liberal tradition. Bayle choses to combat the common idea that an atheist moves from disbelief in God to lewdness, drunkenness and murder. In fact, Bayle thinks it is a mistake to think that atheists would be more prone to murder one another, or less prone to pride themselves on their honor, than Christians. In fact, Bayle claims, the difference between a society of atheists and a society of Christians would be of the same type, with the same variations, as the difference between two societies of Christians. Local customs would make for some differences, but in both, the norms would be as we would expect: a moral code would be followed, as well as a code of honor. His Christian interlocutor might say, “ it is a strange thing that an atheist might live virtuously, he would be a monster who surpassed the forces of nature” – But Bayle points to two pieces of evidence that show that the Christian has misunderstood the atheist. First, there are ancient virtuous sages who were atheists, or, like Epicure, conceived that God did not interfere in the course of the world, while at the same time there are plenty of Christian criminals, of whom the courts are full to overflowing. And second Bayle claims, from the accounts of travelers, that there really are societies of atheists, for instance in Brazil, who were no worse than societies of Christians. In fact, a good deal better.

Why is this? Bayle has several answers. For instance, voluptuaries, who are considered great deniers of God, are misunderstood, according to Bayle. You don’t run after blonds and brunettes, get drunk as often as possible, and seek to kill time with every kind of debauch and at the same time concern yourself with knowing if Descartes were right or wrong in his metaphysical proofs of God. Similarly, the atheists Bayle knows are as lean as Crassius, and spend their time studying, all the better to refute the proofs of the divinity. Beyond this admittedly comic fact lies a more serious one: man does not regulate his conduct by his opinions.

“I conceive that it is a very strange thing that a man may live morally who believes neither in paradise nor hell. But I always return to the fact that man is a certain creature who, with all his reason, does not always act in consequence of his beliefs. Christians have furnished us enough proofs of this.”

Others have too. Stoics act unstoically when they are in pain. Turks, who have a famous belief in fatality, flee danger. “They use their lights and their prudence much as we do.” There are Christians who believe in predestination, and those who don’t: “But in spite of this difference, they govern themselves, one another, in the same fashion, as for what concerns morals. If they differ in some way, this derives from the genius of the nation, and not the genius of the sect.” [427]

The great explanation, however, lies in the nature of opinion itself. General opinions, according to Bayle, don’t determine behavior. It is particular opinion – and, in particular, self interest – that does.

Vico, in his New Science, notes shrewdly that Bayle has been mislead by his travelers’ tales: those Brazilian Indians, for instance, did have a religion. Vico claims, in fact, that religion is a universal characteristic of human societies, and thus tells us something about the social bond itself. Of course, Vico has turned out to be right, insofar as explorers and priests simply refused to recognize the rituals and narratives of the peoples they encountered as religious. Although that discovery has made it clear that the whole notion that religion depends on an act of belief, as it seems to do in Christianity, or to a lesser extent in Judaism, is not universal to all religions.

But as interesting, to me, is Bayle’s notion that an atheist belief system might even be better, insofar as it would be a general belief in nothing. Thus, the general belief, which Bayle thinks doesn’t have an effect on human behavior in particular, would be supplemented. For, in actuality, Bayle’s belief about the indifference of the general belief system is not completely descriptive. By the very fact that he is writing against superstition, one can conclude that it is Bayle’s logical conclusion that human beings should not be determined in their behaviors by their general beliefs. Unfortunately, in reality, they seem to be.

This is, once again, one of those universals to be in which the seventeenth century is so rich. I think, however, Bayle’s idea is not only important in as much as it makes the case for tolerance of a sort, but also for advancing a notion of human beings as being both individual and vacant – except insofar as particular motives move them – which plays an important role in theorizing the capitalist market.

More about that later.

nostalgia to karma - scattered notes

Nostalgia, that longing for a past that longing has created, is a trap that is hidden in the path of that philosophical critic – like LI – upon whom the contemporary lies like a nightmare on the brain of the living. A revenant, in fact. For such a critic, this nightmarish condition is recognized, justly, as the result of multiple framing conditions constructed over the course of the past. The contemporary is a synthesis, and it is the critic’s job to dissolve it into it composite parts, each the result of decision after decision, systematic shifts in production and attitude, a social psychology that represses its lost opportunities, and even individuals, singularities, karma. And once the critic has done his job, he thinks he’s found the key, the story, the narrative. But, in fact, he’s still entangled in the synthesis he has supposedly dissolve, he’s still unconsciously seeing the contemporary as the destination to which the past tends. Which is how it becomes easy to slip into the language of heroes versus villains. And, if the critic is a dreamer, as LI is, he approaches his task with the sigh, “if only,” on his lips. “If only” is the prologue to the utopian dream.

So it goes with the strange story I am putting together, that story of the happiness of the people, the happiness of the individual, the happiness of the system. In Milan, in 1796, the occupation government set up by Napoleon’s soldiers launched a contest for the best essay on the topic, “which form of free government is most conducive to the happiness of Italy?” I can see that this is a beautiful question. The beauty of it is buried, of course, under centuries of trivializing the terms, but – it is definitely a beautiful question.

... I’ve been following the adventurer because it is under the form of adventure that an individual could range the positional social structure in the early modern period. And because, unlike the artist or the politician, other creations of the early modern period, the adventurer never ceased to be a character type and only a character type. It never became a vocation. However, as a character type, it loaned itself to both artist and politician.

And at certain extraordinary moments, the adventurer became universal. In a sense, that is what a revolution is: the interval in which everyone, whether they want to be or not, is an adventurer.

....

I came across a wonderful description of a Neapolitan poet, Eleonora Fonseca Pimental, who supported the French when the French army took Naples and proclaimed a Republic in 1799. The French were extremely unpopular with the peasants, the aristocracy, and the lazzaroni. Pimental was aware of this, but believed that education was the answer – the people must be enlightened. Unfortunately for her, the counter-revolution, led by priests, retook Naples for the King. It was a bloodbath for the Jacobins and Republicans. According to Christopher Duggan’s history of Italy, The Force of Destiny, many of the intellectuals, the radicals, were rounded up and hung or decapitated. About Pimental he writes: She went to the scaffold on 20 August, her brown skirt tucked modestly around her legs, and uttering the words of Virgil: Forsam et haec olim meminisse juvabit – “Perhaps one day even these things will bring pleasure.” Oblivious to such erudition, the crowd cheered loudly as she hanged.” (23)

Karma is a royal family. Pimental was hung due largely to the actions of the King Ferdinand’s Queen, Caroline. Queen Caroline had, at one time, been a patron of culture, and of all things French, at the Court, to display opposition to her enemy, the King of Spain. Everything changed, changed utterly for her on October 16, 1793. That was the date of the death of her sister. Queen Caroline’s sister was a woman named Marie Antoinette.

the economy of loaves and fishes

Kevin Phillips, as a populist, always gets under the skin of professional economists. And, of course, when a professional economist is put in a corner, he responds with professional jargon. Like Sganarelle in The Doctor in Spite of Himself, mixing up medical and rhetorical effects, economists will immediately revert to model talk when pressed, disregarding the fact that their enemy, the populist, is criticizing the very idea that those models represent economic reality. The economist will then defend himself with some reference to other sciences in which models are used, like physics. Thus, Tyler Cowen, the man who wants you to believe that there is no difference between trading between Austin and Dallas and trading between Austin and Bangalore, gave Phillips book the thumbs down in his review of it, which ends by saying: The author should spend a week locked in a room with the Solow model. Of course, as I have pointed out in my own post on trading the residual, the Solow model is very much about national economies. Since Cowen apparently believes the nation has no status as a unit of analysis in economics, it is hard to see what he thinks that model is going to do for him, since it presupposes that the nation is a unit of analysis. In any case, the model reference is almost always meant to impress the reader with the “science” of economics, and the science is supposed to be proven by the fact that the models can be built, just like in physics. Of course, there’s no reason to think that physical forces and economics forces are alike. If anything, the model should be behavioral, the reference should be to biology, and the reification of models should simply stop. The counter-revolution in economics, the overthrow of the post-World War II order (as the inevitable cracks showed up in capitalism – the declining rate of profit, as per Marx’s prediction, which was all over the seventies) was a return to the ‘foundation’ of economics as a science. Robert Lucas, when he wrote that equilibrium is the “condition of intelligibility” of economic thought, put the doctrine nicely. This is the great rule. Institutional economists, and the Keynes who has not been modified and smoothed into professional presentability, exist on the outskirts precisely because they dispute this idea.

However, this isn’t to say that Phillips doesn’t carry certain old superstitions into his attacks on the establishment, including one of the oldest, which is that the State should – for magical reasons – always try to balance its budget. This populist theme puzzles me. It turns the state into an abstraction – which is, of course, a large step in the direction of neo-classical economics. If the state could be seen as an intrusion on the efficient market sphere – instead of simply another aspect of the total economy, one having to do with the economy’s primary task of distributing wealth – then we dissipate the cloud of unknowing that settles over the economic system whenever economists pull the discussion of it into a discussion of “efficiency.”

That said, in this Harpers article, Phillips is right to point out that the picture of our economy painted by the government over time has been increasingly distorted by the desire of administrations, Democrat and Republican, to massage the numbers. And to put a gloss on the ideologies they are selling. The most startling of those distortions is the odd way in which the government treats housing.

“In 1983, under the Reagan Administration, inflation was further finagled when the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing, too, was overstating the Consumer Price Index; the BLS substituted an entirely different “Owner Equivalent Rent” measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his or her house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still in place today, simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs. Because low inflation encourages low interest rates, which in turn make it much easier to borrow money, the BLS’s decision no doubt encouraged, during the late 1980s, the large and often speculative expansion in private debt—much of which involved real estate, and some of which went spectacularly bad between 1989 and 1992 in the savings-and-loan, real estate, and junk-bond scandals.”

Later on, Phillips writes:

“Nothing, however, can match the tortured evolution of the third key number, the somewhat misnamed Consumer Price Index. Government economists themselves admit that the revisions during the Clinton years worked to reduce the current inflation figures by more than a percentage point, but the overall distortion has been considerably more severe. Just the 1983 manipulation, which substituted “owner equivalent rent” for home-ownership costs, served to understate or reduce inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points.”

If you think about that for a minute, you will have a key to the odd behavior of the Fed – which is aligned with the odd behavior of the Bush administration. If housing prices had been fairly assessed, the Fed would have faced a big jump in inflation around 2004-2006. And it would have had to respond, at least by traditional rules, by raising interest rates to meet that inflation. Now, the Fed did raise interest rates over this period, but the addition of 3 to 4 percentage points to the inflation numbers would have caused a much bigger raise. At the same time, the Bush administration should have used the peak period to raise taxes – the state should have taken money out of an incipient inflationary spiral. What would have been the effect of that? If would, for one thing, have busted the housing bubble earlier. And for another thing, it would have strengthened the dollar. A stronger dollar, of course, would have significantly lowered the inflation in the price of a barrel of oil. Such being the case, the Fed would then have lowered the interest rate for a whole other reason over the last two years – with housing prices falling as they are. And presumably the price of oil, even with the rise due to the mad, bad aggression of the Bush people, would not have risen to over one hundred dollars a barrel. Instead, we have a typical third world misalignment between, on the one hand, deflation of the most significant asset most Americans are invested in, the house, and on the other hand, inflation of the one product that Americans depend upon most to maintain their lifestyles, oil.

Of course, the odd adjustments to the cost of living index explain other things too. If housing prices were really going down, by way of hedonic adjustments, when they seemed to be going up, then it would make sense that the number of buyers would be going up – there are more buyers for lower priced goods. Indeed, that happened. Unfortunately, it also happened that the majority of those buyers were using mortgages they couldn’t pay for. Somehow, they couldn’t hedonically adjust the mortgage terms so that they could pay it.

In a sense, what Phillips is pointing to is the separation between accounting, on the one hand, and economics assessments, on the other. Accounting, which should move policy, should simply be about the costs in the real living environment. Economists, however, are right that, from an absolute standpoint, Americans are living in a more prosperous world than, say, when they had to spend a third of their take home income on food. But they are dead wrong that anybody is living in an absolute standpoint. We all live in the relative. In accounting, if a company makes a better quality product, x, for the same cost it made the alpha line of x, and sells it for the same price, the company doesn’t thus lose money. No accountant in the world would put the company in the red for such a deal. What counts is simply the cash flow.

Now, of course, it is too late. What the Fed can or can’t do doesn’t matter so much at the moment. If the Government doesn’t understand where to cut unnecessary expenses – the Iraq war – and where to increase expenditures – unemployment benefits, health care, and a vast program for addressing the twin problems of de-industrialization and the environment - then this is going to be another period of severe recession for most Americans, followed by a silent recession for most Americans. It isn’t a good prospect.

On the other hand, if the U.S. is not going to do what it should to address the huge environmental problems its very prosperity has caused, a set of problems that the U.S., with its massive socialistic investments in higher education, is perfectly positioned to take on, maybe the cure is just a long, long slump.

the human limit/l’expérience-limite

Before I had ever read the phrase “l’expérience-limite”, I had felt it. In the rather peculiar way one gropes around a hole in the dark, gaining a hand understanding which is, of course, difficult to put into words that belong to the world of light. The feeling, which was especially strong in me in the eighties, was that the norms of success, success as I had imbibed it in the burbs where I grew up, encoded, at a deep level, a ghastly defeat. The term of success were simply the terms of a dishonorable surrender, a betrayal of the forces one’s ego could muster, just so as to retire to a lifetime of being able to purchase enough stupifiants to help one forget the treason, that failed slave revolt. This is, of course, a child’s view of that artificial paradise, our life now. On the other hand, our criteria are determined by our situation – I have no overall vision of this time in which to judge it absolutely.

So, when I encountered the phrase in Blanchot, who I read after reading Bataille (and Bataille has always been closer to my heart) – I was magically caught up in it. In fact, in the early nineties, under the banner of l’expérience-limite, I fucked up in a number of ways that I’m not going to go into – some of them I am still paying for.

Since, at the moment, I am using the “human limit” to help me define that way of being in the world which was eclipsed by the happiness culture, I thought I’d go back and see what Foucault said about l’expérience-limite – he whose life was, according to his biographer, James Miller, so enthralled by that notion. Actually, Foucault doesn’t say much about it directly. But he does make one of his flashing, gnostic remarks in an interview with Duccio Trombadori in 1978:

“ The phenomenologist's experience is basically a way of organizing
the conscious perception (_regard reflexif_) of any aspect of daily,
lived experience in its transitory form, in order to grasp its meaning.
Nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot, on the contrary, try through
experience to reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to
the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or extreme. They
attempt to gather the maximum amount of intensity and impossibility at
the same time. The work of the phenomenologist, however, essentially
consists of unfolding the entire field of possibilities connected to
daily experience.

Moreover, phenomenology tries to grasp the significance of daily
experience in order to reaffirm the fundamental chracter of the subject,
of the self, of its transcendental functions. On the contrary,
experience according to Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille has rather the
task of "tearing" the subject from itself in such a way that it is no
longer the subject as such, or that it is completely "other" than itself
so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation.

It is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a "limit-experience"
that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson that
I've learned from these authors. And no matter how boring and erudite my
resulting books have been, this lesson has always allowed me to conceive
them as direct experiences to "tear" me from myself, to prevent me from
always being the same."

This way of looking at the experience limit has, unfortunately, only been applied to Foucault’s own biography. I think, however, it contains the seed of an experience of reading and writing, of the third life, which brings together the adventurer and the book. The book, the use of which becomes the sign that separates the savage from the civilized, would, it seems, not have a savage use – useless to the savage who can’t read it, and transforming the savage who does read it – into the civilized. Perhaps, however, there is a savage literacy, a way of taking the book too seriously, of being driven mad by it, or of going through it – writing it and reading it – as an experience of de-subjectification.

In praise of bourgeois theater

LI loves Roland Barthes. But we don’t share all of Barthes’ tastes. For instance, Barthes said, in an interview, that he could never feel “close” to Molière. In Molière, he saw foreshadowed the bourgeois theater for which Barthes, famously, had extreme distaste. No Artaud or Brecht came out of Sganarelle’s pocket.

What came out of Molière’s pocket – Labiche, Nestroy, Offenbach – is oriented to a certain kind of laughter. For Barthes, this laughter came out of the smiling, healthy lips of the bourgeois as a sort of baying of the hounds. It was unlocked by simple contradiction: those contradictions which unfolded, tactically, as characters scheme to realize desires which are, on the surface, prohibited by the bourgeois order, but which turn out to be eminently subsumable under that order. That is, in fact, the function of the laugh – it is an acknowledgement of weakness and an acceptance of the underground order, that social supplement which drains off certain irrepressible desires. It is the humor of the wink, the humor of dinner theater, the humor of the suburban ethos depicted on the tv sitcom, in which hypocrisy is exposed not as a way of critiquing the system, but as a weapon to make the system seem total. Whatever doesn’t destroy you makes you weaker. And: everything you want is here, anyway.

So we understand Barthes dislike - and surely his view of Moliere as the ultimate bourgeois writer is influenced by Sainte-Beuve - but we don’t share it. We believe there is a certain aesthetic glory to the humor of the wink. But more than that, the great bourgeois farceurs throw a demonic light on the strategies of their characters, by which they turn the closed system into a Piranesian series of echo chambers. Barthes, we believe, never read Kraus – which is a shame. Kraus would have, perhaps, unlocked for him the dimension in Nestroy and Offenbach, and by inference, Molière, which Barthes seems to miss (besides which, we think the avant garde gesture of separating Brecht from Molière is foolish – Brecht is tied to cabaret, to the humor of Karl Valentin, for instance, by so many lilliputian threads that you can’t yank them out - and that humor in turn leads us inevitably back to Moliere).

In the essay, Nestroy and Posterity (der Nachwelt), Kraus writes:

“If art is not what they [the patrons of good taste] believe and allow, but is the distance between a spectacle and a thought, is the shortest connection between a gutter and the Milky Way, then there has never been a messenger under the German heavens quite like Nestroy. Evidently I mean, never among those that have reported, with a laughing face, that life is an ugly business. We will not disbelieve his message just because it arrives in a couplet. Nor because, in his hurry, he gave the hearer something catchy to sing, because he satisfied with contempt the needs of the public, in order to be able to think a little higher without being interfered with. Or because he wrapped his dynamite in cotton wool and only blew up his world after he had led it to firmly believe that it was the best of worlds; and because he had the spirit to lay on the shaving cream, when it was time for cutting necks ... although otherwise he didn’t wish to give anybody any trouble.”

Happy Tanabata!

Our far flung correspondent, Mr. T in NYC, reminded us yesterday that today is Tanabata day – at least it might be. I am hoping he will send some pics of how he celebrated it. This day should be dear to those who love the stars – North, I’m lookin’ at you! – and for those living in smoggy regions where the stars barely peep through – I will shed tears for you.

As for LI, we are going to pray for our wishes to come true. And then we will watch this nice little video from Oomph, the German metal goth band that has its own ideas about wishes.

Happy festival, you all!

Some jottings

Notes:

- Some dates. In 1695, Perrault’s Contes de la mere Oye is published. Mlle L’Heritier’s La Tour Ténébreuse ou les jours lumineux, which contains Ricdin-Ricdon, was published in 1705, though it was in circulation, I believe, earlier. Antoine Galland published Le Mille et une Nuits between 1704 and 1717. And, finally, Augustin Calmet’s Dissertations sur les apparitions, des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Boheme, de Moravie et de Silésie was published in 1746. We will return to all of this later.

...
- In the introduction to Calmet’s dissertation, he writes that the supernatural has changed even in his native Lorraine in the last fifty years. Each century, each country has its fashions, its diseases, its particular visitations. Once, people made pilgrimages to Rome. Once, the countryside would be flooded, in times of crisis, with flagellants. “At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, everybody in Lorraine only talked about witches and warlocks. That has no longer been the question for a long time. When Descartes’ philosophy appeared, what a vogue did it have? One despised ancient philosophy; one only spoke now of physical experiments, of new systems, of the new discoveries of M. Newton which had just appeared; all the intelligences were turned to his side. The system of M. Law, the banknotes, the fureurs of the rue Quinquampoix, what movements haven’t they caused in the kingdom?”
- Calmet’s notion of modes, his mixture of convulsionaires, witches and banknotes, is just in the line of our own thoughts. Of course, Calmet’s dissertation is to inform France of a new mode, a new fashion in the supernatural world, coming in from the East: the vampire. A whole new kind of revenant.
- In our last post regarding fairy tales, we pointed to a similarity between the world of the fairy tale, in which, in a given, unplanned moment, the social totality was subject to the wish – and the presiding spirit of the modern, ilex, the world turned upside down.
- Rightside up society produces within itself the story of how it came, which is inseparable from how its rules and conventions function. Oftentimes, in folk etymologies, a previous word is hypothesized as being the predecessor of some current word. This is, properly, not back formation, but it is often so called. Rightside up societies use a form of back formation to explain themselves to themselves.
- But the modern, as we have noted, is obsessively drawn to the moment of ilex. There are two steps in the modern game. One is to boldly project a vision of rightside up society which shows that, actually, it is upside down. Or, rather, what is makes the society rightside up is just what the society denies. The second move comes later – that is the move that explains how it is that the collective social consciousness could believe about itself theories and facts that are in error. In the Enlightenment, the explanation refers to superstition. For the Marxists, the explanation is the false consciousness. For the Freudians, it is the complex relationship of the superego to the unconscious.
- In Cornelius Agrippa’s work on the incertitude of science, according to his biographer, Prost, Agrippa made a violent attack on the nobility. In fact, he produced a myth, a geneology of society that went like this:

“The separation of the human family into two branches began with the very children of Adam. From the victim, Abel, came the plebians; from Cain, the murderer, came the nobles, whose work will be to hold in contempt the laws of God and those of nature, confidence in their own force, the usurpation of authority, the foundation of cities and empires, the domination over the creature that God had set at liberty, and who sees himself submitted to servitude and iniquity. For such is, from the beginning, the office of the nobility.”

Agrippa was a favorite author of Foucault’s during the time of the writing of the Words and Things. In Agrippa, one gets a strong sense of the Renaissance episteme Foucault hypothesized, one based on similitudes, the infinite search for the signatures in things. It isn’t surprising that Agrippa’s notion of the horror of the nobility extends, then, to noble creatures.

“All nobility, in a word, is in its essence evil [mauvaise]. Among the animals, those that one values as more noble than the others are everywhere the most nuisance causing: these are the eagles, the vultures, the lions, the tigers. Among the trees, those which are reputed noble and consecrated to the gods are those which are sterile, and of which the fruits are of no use, like the oak and the laurel. Among the stones, it is not the millstone with which we grind the wheat, but the gem without utility that is honored.” (Prost 2, 84).

Perhaps Nietzsche read Prost on Agrippa – this passage is almost too perfectly opposed to Nietzsche, down to Zarathustra’s animals.

Prost notes that Agrippa published this diatribe against the nobility in a book which he was careful to adorn with his emblems of nobility. LI is not very impressed with the irony here. Much more interesting is the millenarian energy.

Trading away the residual

In development economics, the “residual” refers to the factor in the growth of the economy first identified by Robert Solow in 1956. It had been thought that physical capital accumulation, plus land, explained the growth of national economies. After Solow, whose model indicated that these could account, at most, for 50 percent of economic growth, economists started exploring just what the residual was. This was the beginning of the new growth school, with its emphasis on knowledge, technological change, education.

Alas, this changed emphasis rather neglected the relationship between physical capital accumulation and ‘human capital”. For economists, humans are blanks. The man who works as a welder can be retrained to work in a grocery store, or to make chips for a computer, etc., etc. His work preferences, his experience, counts for zip. It is only – ah, the sweetness of it all! – when you get to highly skilled labor like, say, being an economist that you have to be careful to preserve the full majesty of the skill. Economists never consider that they should be retrained to teach, say, literary criticism. That is because they recognize, in themselves, what it means to be human, and in others, what it means to be a zero in a column. We are talking about a severe professional autism.

The impact of this autism is evident in the way the New Growth school attached itself to the old orthodoxy of free trade. One would think that there would be sense, a glimmering sense, that technostructures, then, must involve knowledge – must involve a whole dimension of tacit knowledge – necessary for their growth and change. For instance, when the auto first arrived on the scene in these here states, it naturally attracted the repair services of blacksmiths. Blacksmiths were those people who, at the grassroots, had the most experience with metal – and the auto was the most metal the average person had ever had to deal with. If one traces auto repair back far enough in this country, you always run into blacksmithing.

This makes sense. There are constraints on substitution of skills. And there are paths that skills take in an economy. Imagine, however, that somehow, the U.S. had outsourced all blacksmiths, or most, before the auto appeared. The experience of this vast metal object and needing to repair it would have had to involve creating a service from scratch. This would have impeded, in a major way, the sales and distribution of autos.

Well, this is what the kind of free trade regime which is the essence of Reaganism has helped bring about. We have offshored our residual. Or much of it. Economists are stubbornly blind to that fact, because this offshoring has been massively beneficial to the only class they serve, the wealthiest 1 percent. That class, of course, makes money everywhere. Of course, when it gets into trouble, it gets its money from the taxpayers of one country or anoterh in the grand old tradition of ancien regime nobility – otherwise, however, it is as multi-culty as dick.

The refusal to even consider an industrial policy, about which American economists take a peculiar pride (I did mention the massive professional autism problem, didn’t I?) is resulting in the peculiar shape of downturns and booms in the contemporary U.S. of A. At the moment, economists are puzzling over the odd belief of the public that there is this inflation thing going on. Impossible! inflation, as we all know, being a symptom of class warfare, or, since we don’t want to scare the children, of greedy workers demanding outrageous pay through corrupt unions, which luckily have been smashed. So wages are flat and declining – and isn’t that great! Alas, having pissed on the residual, what is happening at the moment in the U.S. is a phenomenon very familiar from Latin America: a primary products led inflationary spiral. In the seventies and eighties, Latin American countries were hit by savage inflation, kickstarted by increases in petroleum prices, that occurred at the same time the Washington Consensus was being put in place from the barrel of a gun. The inflation eventually went down, and W.C. shills patted themselves on the back – but of course the reason it went down is that the primary product price structure collapsed. Hey, it is back!

Don’t worry though. Nobody will discuss this at all. No economist will recognize it. And, collectively, our lives will get crappier and crappier as we timorously forget that once, there actually was such a thing as resistance. Now, let’s watch some teevee!

Who's that young girl laughing at me
Like I was the butt of some hilarity

and idiot begat moron, who begat imbecile...

Well, finally an article about a presidential candidate who gets Iran right. A candidate who demands peace with Iran. A candidate who sees through the bullshit...

Alas, it is not MY candidate, Barack Obama, who has somehow floated into the hands of the D.C. consultant class over the last couple of weeks. I don’t see in Obama an ultra-liberal, but I did see in him a man who had figured out that our foreign policy was as dysfunctional as the Manson family, with much more bloody consequences. Alas, he seems to be trying to placate an establishment that has been seriously weakened by its contradictions, failures, and pathology. The current meme: things are goin’ right in Iraq, because the surge was so awesome, is the latest bs being tossed out by that establishment. To which Obama’s reply should be, the surge was not awesome at all, but was simply a compound of misbegotten policies sinking us ever deeper into a country from which justice and self interest both demand we withdraw. The Obama that exploited Hilary Clinton’s weakness for U.S. directed blood baths was the Obama who won. Unfortunately, that guy is absent at the moment. Where is he? Obama, come back.

In the meantime, put a knife in my heart and turn it – the person who does get it is Bob Barr. Bob Barr! The libertarian idiot from Cobb County, Georgia. He gets it so much that he joined the It’s Time to Talk to Iran conference sponsored by a grassroots group, along with Barbara Lee, the sensible Dem representative from California.

The Diplomatic Courier’s reporter clutters up the story a bit – I don’t think the Barr part makes sense as it is reported – but these two grafs tell the story:

“As part of a larger grassroots diplomatic initiative entitled “It’s Time to Talk to Iran,” the discussions were preceded by a press conference whereby politicians and activists advocated “a diplomatic surge for peace and reconciliation.” Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), her usually calm features tensed with determination, thundered, “It is time to put an end to [an American-Iranian policy marked by threats and fear-mongering]… The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said that ‘we must learn to live together as brothers or we will surely perish together as fools.’ It is time to talk to Iran. All it takes to begin is one ‘Hello.’” Others seconded Rep. Lee’s sentiments, alternately describing diplomatic engagement with Iran as a “mission of mercy” to unfortunate Iranian citizens.
Underlying these passionate statements was the premise that engaging Iran militarily would represent a devastating political, economic, and humanitarian loss for the United States preceded by a “tragic series of lost opportunities.” According to former Georgia representative and current Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, American “strategic and tactical interests” in the Middle East could not bear the loss of benefits from a better relationship with Iran. However, two questions lingered: what kind of “strategic and tactical” significance did Iran actually have and what could grassroots diplomacy do in an escalating conflict of hard rhetoric?”
Perhaps what Barr said is that the beneficiaries of the current policy would suffer a serious blow if detente with Iran were put in place. Which, of course, is true.
What puzzles, though, is why this truth isn’t discussed at all in a period when, it would seem, its time has come. The GOP has come up with an answer – a spurious, fraudulent answer – to the cost of gasoline. The answer is to destroy our coastlines. The Dems could easily, very easily, countercharge by a proposal that would lower the cost of gas immediately: lets have detente with Iran. Let’s have a peacetalker in the White House. Let’s give up publicly, once and for all, the American government’s often hinted at desire to overthrow the regime in Teheran. The Dems should be publicizing the effect of Bush’s increased sanctions on taking oil off the market right now. They should be burning into the American mind the fact that we are now paying about a dollar more per gallon for the Middle East policy of colonialism and aggression.
They aren’t. It is a no go zone. Silence. There are many reasons. One of them is the tie between rightwing Americans and rightwing Israelis. The Courier article floats the completely bogus story that Iran micromanaged the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. That of course is simply and completely a lie, from beginning to end. However, it is a comforting lie from the point of view of Israel’s leadership, since it blames another power for what was evident in that war: Israeli overstretch. The Israeli ambition to be the Middle Eastern superpower which deals with the U.S in the Middle East, sort of lead dog as the U.S. colonizes the area, met an obstacle: reality.
But the tie between rightwing parties is a result of the military industrial/petro complex, not, of course, the cause of it. Israel no more pulls the strings in our foreign policy than Saudi Arabia does. Stringpulling is the wrong metaphor. There are no puppets here. There is collusion between interested parties, quite a different thing.

LI also recommends Thomas Powers article in the current NYRB, also greeted with complete silence, about Iran.