Weekend: the week in politics!

Of course, LI is getting tons of emails about our relative silence vis a vis the late breaking political developments. The convention. The crucial question of leadership and experience. The whole gender thing.

We are speaking, of course, of the PS conference at La Rochelle, and whether Ségolène Royal or the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, take over the spot of first secretary of the party. Our heart is with Delanoë. We like the idea of confrontation, of getting in the face of the reactionaries in power. We dislike Royal’s idea that the PS has to extend peace feelers to the MoDem, of all feeble front organizations for a toothfairy solution to social problems. The dream of the Third Way should, by this time, have revealed itself clearly as the same old nightmare from which we are all trying to wake up. On the other hand, I like Royal as the face of the party. She did resurrect the corpse, which was shot by Jospin and his Blairing around ways. So, at the moment, I think Delanoë’s confrontational strategy will work better in an election year than as a 24/7 offyear theme. In fact, what I’d like to see is an agreement between the two – Delanoë agreeing to serve as party secretary, in return for supporting Royal for one more try at the presidential. As for the perpetual bickering of the party elite – well, it is an old story, and for reasons that escape me, the journalists always cover it as though it were some kind of disaster.

“A trois semaines de la date-limite pour le dépôt des motions [at the congress of Rheims], qui départageront les prétendants à la succession de François Hollande, l'heure était aux grandes manoeuvres pour Ségolène Royal, Bertrand Delanoë, Martine Aubry ou Pierre Moscovici. Objectif: constituer une majorité dans un parti balkanisé. Au sortir de l'université d'été, la situation n'est pas plus claire. Aucun des prétendants ne paraît pour l'instant en mesure de réunir plus du quart du parti lors du vote sur les motions.
A ce petit jeu, Ségolène Royal se sera montrée la plus discrète. La finaliste de l'élection présidentielle de 2007, qui mise tout sur son aura parmi les militants, s'est contentée d'une apparition le premier jour, marquée par un appel quasi-mystique à "l'amour" entre socialistes et une rapide réunion de ses partisans. Samedi et dimanche, elle a préféré à La Rochelle la fête du Parti démocrate italien.”


Then, of course, there is the most popular socialist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with his pion, Moscovi. The French love to express their preference for the Colbert type in polls – not the comedian, the treasurer – but they vote for Louis xiv types.

Okay, so that is the roundup. Amie will no doubt have to correct me if this is a misanalysis. Oh, and ... I hear that something is happening in the U.S.A. too. I haven’t been paying attention. Who are the candidates again?

the privilege of turn 3

I’ve already commented once on Ginzburg’s essay, Making it strange: the prehistory of a literary device. Ginzburg traces the connection between the Stoic practices recorded by Marcus Aurelius and, link by link, the formalist notion of “making strange”, that formula which was so important to Victor Shklovsky. Ginzburg does not mention Shaftesbury in his essay; yet his explanation of the Stoic method can easily be applied to Shaftesbury's Philosophical Regimen:

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

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

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

Shaftesbury’s method and madness converge on an operating table in which the writer is both surgeon and patient. One notices that the direction of the Stoic move – of wiping away impressions – is the opposite of the direction of the Lockean idea – which builds outwards from a presumed tabula rasa. For Shaftesbury, the Lockean notion that in our minds we build the world anew (an implication that finds its political expression in Tom Paine) can’t possibly be true. The world is the more certain fact, and its impingement upon the mind comes in the form of impressions that are distorting – rather than the sole hermeneutical resource with which we make our uncertain way through the world. In the PR, Shaftesbury’s exercises literally apply Marcus Aurelius’s suggestions, and reference the idea of viewing things “as from a height.” The aftershocks of the clash between Locke's experience (which, for Shaftesbury, is a false kind of innocence) and the Stoic dissection of experience can be felt in the question marks that swarm all over Shaftesbury’s text. They seem like so many jabs into the simulacra of the philosopher patient, the wax doll upon which he intends to operate in order to effect a ritual cleansing. Here’s a passage from the notes on “Deity”. It comes just after a passage comparing the Deists and the Epicureans – “Atoms and void. A plain negative to the Deity, fair and honest. To Deism, still no pretence. So the sceptic....

“From whence then this other pretence? Who are these Deists? How assume the name? By what title or pretence? The world, the world? say what? how? A modified lump? matter? motion? – What is all this? Substance what? Who knows? why these evasions? subterfuges with words? definitions of things never to be defined? structures or no foundations? Come to what is plain. Be plain. For the idea itself is plain; the question plain; and such as everyone has invariably some answer to which it is decisive. Mind? or not mind? If mind, a providence, the idea perfect: a God. If not mind, what in the place? For whatever it be, it cannot without absurdity be called God or Deity; nor the opinion without absurdity be called Deism.” (38-39)

While we recognize both Marcus Aurelius's exercise and the grammatical echoes of the great Carolinean preachers - Donne, Taylor - the effect of this continually interrupted movement, this play of thought that tears at itself, over pages, is of a sort of self-cutting. One can’t help but wonder whether the voices at play, here, don’t include Locke's voice from the nursery. A voice which we know from Locke's work on education, which was confessedly based on his experience teaching the Shaftesbury children. This is Locke:

“Familiarity of discourse, if it can become a father to his son, may much more be condescended to by a tutor to his pupil. All their time together should not be spent in reading of lectures, and magisterially dictating to him what he is to observe and follow. Hearing him in his turn, and using him to reason about what is propos’d, will make the rules go down the easier and sink the deeper, and will give him a liking to study and instruction: And he will then begin to value knowledge, when he sees that it enables him to discourse, and he finds the pleasure and credit of bearing a part in the conversation, and of having his reasons sometimes approv’d and hearken’d to; particularly in morality, prudence, and breeding, cases should be put to him, and his judgment ask’d. This opens the understanding better than maxims, how well soever explain’d, and settles the rules better in the memory for practice. This way lets things into the mind which stick there, and retain their evidence with them; whereas words at best are faint representations, being not so much as the true shadows of things, and are much sooner forgotten. He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos’d, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor’s lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wit of Sensus Communis and the reductions and division of the Philosophical Regimen are attempts not only to find a place for profanation, but – in as much as absurdity is a proxy for the profane – to come back to the serious as a form of the sacred. LI would love, at this point, to refer to Marcel Mauss’ book on Prayer – but we have no more time for this.

privilege of turn 2

Second Part

Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis essay is, as he puts it, an earnest attempt to defend raillery. This is a very odd way to begin an essay on common sense, which is the kind of phrase that Shaftesbury’s tutor Locke was getting at with his notion that we receive our ideas from experience:

“But perhaps you may still be in the same humour of not believing me in earnest. You may continue to tell me, I affect to be paradoxical, in commending a Conversation as advantageous to Reason, which ended in such a total Uncertainty of what Reason had seemingly so well established.”

From the very beginning, then, Shaftesbury is presenting an explicit break between form and content. The form of the essay is, as Shaftesbury would know from Montaigne, the place of opinion, doxis, and is not a treatise. It deals with becoming – the characteristicks of men – rather than being – the universal forms. It is Shaftesbury’s piece of fun to defend mockery – his object – with a piece of reasoning. And that he labels this an essay on common sense calls attention to the difference between common sense and rationality. Shaftesbury is explicit enough about the nature of wit. It is paradoxical. It is extravagant. Moreover, it seems to affect a certain disconnect between the speaker and the opinion the speaker gives. In fact, at first glance, if we take common sense to be a secondary kind of rationality, it would seem that the freedom of wit and humor is a freedom from common sense in as much as common sense assigns beliefs to people, so that each self possesses a belief. On the other hand, it is a form of the commons, of shared possession. And there are many forms the commons takes – it isn’t all pasturing the village’s sheep. It is also the life of the common, in fairs, everyday talk, rituals. If we extend this sense of the common to common sense, then we are less shocked that wit, that thief who unlocks the chain binding a man to his opinion, should be part of the commons. On the other hand, as we know from Don Quixote, the impulse to unlock chains and free prisoners, while a noble one, can have dubious results.

Shaftesbury, puts the essay in terms of an argument with an unnamed friend who doesn’t see wit’s right to operate in the commons. Like the puritans casting out the punch and judy shows and the bear baitings, this friend can’t see the point of mockery, and can see, very well, the vice of it.

“I HAVE been considering (my Friend!) what your Fancy was, to express such a surprize as you did the other day, when I happen’d to speak to you in commendation of Raillery. Was it possible you shou’d suppose me so grave a Man, as to dislike all Conversation of[60] this kind? Or were you afraid I shou’d not stand the trial, if you put me to it, by making the experiment in my own Case?

I must confess, you had reason enough for your Caution; if you cou’d imagine me at the bottom so true a Zealot, as not to bear the least Raillery on my own Opinions. ’Tis the Case, I know, with many. Whatever they think grave or solemn, they suppose must never be treated out of a grave and solemn way: Tho what Another thinks so, they can be contented to treat otherwise; and are forward to try the Edge of Ridicule against any Opinions besides their own.

The Question is, Whether this be fair or no? and, Whether it be not just and reasonable, to make as free with our own Opinions, as with those of other People?”

I want to linger on this trial of opinion by wit. Which will be the subject of my next post.

the privilege of turn 1 (revised)

Anthony, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1670-1713) was born into a title that had been given to his grandfather, the first earl, who was the giant of the family. The First Earl was one of the grandees who designed the proto-whig culture that opposed James II, and brought about his downfall. He was the patron of John Locke, whom he first employed as a physician, then encouraged as a patron, used as a pamphleteer, made the entremetteur for his son, Anthony, the second earl (who married the woman Locke found for him) and finally employed to tutor his grandchildren. By chance (although it is a chance that one is not surprised at in class bound Britain) two of the English philosophers, Shaftesbury and Mill, could claim to be entirely educated by the reigning English philosopher that preceded them – respectively, Locke and Bentham.

The third earl Shaftesbury dutifully followed in his grandfather’s footsteps – his father seems to have been an entirely ineffectual man – in promoting the Whig policy, first under William, then under Anne. On becoming the head of the house after his father’s death, he took over the running of the family estate, too. All of these burdens destroyed his health. He begins a typical letter to the manager of his estate, John Wheelock, in November 1703, like this:

“I am sorry to hear all things are so low and tenants so disheartened. The greater must be my frugality and care to repair the great wounds I have made in my estate. I shall keep in my compass of ₤ 200 for the year that I stay here [in Holland], and if this does not do it shall be yet less, and the time longer, for I will never return to be as I was of late richly poor; that is to say, to live with the part of a rich man, a family and house such as I have, and yet in debt and unable to do any charity or bestow money in any degree.” In another letter that same year, he writes:

“I should have been glad to have lived in the way that is called hospitable in my country, but experience has but too well shown me that I cannot do it. Nor will I ever live again as I have done and spend to the full of my estate in house and a table. I must have werhewithal to do good out of my estate, as well as feed a family, maintain a set of idle servants entailed upon me, and a great mass of building yet more expensive. If my estate cannot, besides my house and rank, yield me five or six hundred pounds a year to do good with (as that rank requires), my house and rank may both go together, come what will of them, or let the world say what they will, they shall both [be] to ruin for me...”

In the next decade, fighting a mysterious sickness and bouts of ‘melancholia”, Shaftesbury, like many indebted British nobles, economized by remaining for long seasons on the Continent. In his last journey to Italy in 1711, when he was deathly ill with shortness of breath – he’d been told, or believed at least, that the coal fires of London were to cause for his asthma, and was going to stay in Naples to breath the air there, and because it was cheap – he writes to Wheelock:


“As good a husband as I have been (and my wife surely the best housewife as well as wife, nurse and friend that ever was known in her whole sex), I have not been able to keep with the expense proposed, but have expended at least a hundred pund a month by Bryan’s reckoning, I fear I shall be little able to diminish it. But it will not be, I trust in God (and can surely presume), much beyond this present compass. If I live my family and paternal estate will not (I hope) be prejudiced by this remittance out of it for my subsistence...”

It was while in Naples that he completed the book that made him famous: Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times.

LI has been reading one essay from that mass: ‘Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of wit and humor’. Shaftesbury’s reputation rather waned in the twentieth century, until Gadamer mentioned this essay in Truth and Method, since, of course, Gadamer’s book is concerned, in part, with the analysis of common sense. Both Gadamer and Habermas instigated an interest in the formation of the public sphere in the Enlightenment that has produced ever swelling torrent of books and articles, and Shaftesbury was revived, to an extent, as a spokesperson for sociability.

Myself, I’ve been struck by the discrepancy between this secondary literature and Shaftesbury’s writings. The secondary literature might persuade the reader to regard Shaftesbury as a sort of philosophical etiquette writer, decorous, a bore. But reading Sensus Communis and, especially, Shaftesbury’s notebook - which he entitled Askemata, or exercises, but which was published as the Philosophical Regimen – I’ve been struck, instead, by Shaftesbury’s near madness. His Philosophical Regimen, which has sunk into total obscurity, is a document that is as strange in its way as Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. John Stuart Mill fled to the Lake Poets for relief from his early teaching. Shaftesbury fled to Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and yet one can still hear the voice of his tutor in the dense cloud of question marks and comments.

Let me end this with a quote from one of the letters about said tutor. This is to one of Shaftesbury’s admirers, Michael Ainsworth, June 3, 1709:


It was Mr. Locke that struck the home blow: for Mr Hobbes character and base slavish principles in government took off the poison of his philosophy. ‘Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order aand virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural, and without foundation in our minds. Innate is a word he poorly plays upon; the right word, though less used, is connatural. For what has birth of progress of the foetus out of the womb to do in this case? The question is not about the time the ideas entered, or the moment that one body came out of the other, but whether the constitution of man be such that, being adult and grown up, at such or such a time, sooner of later (no matter when), the idea and sense of order, administration, and a God, will not infallibly, inevitably, necessarily spring up in him.

Then comes the credulous Mr. Locke, with his Indian, barbarian stories of wild nations, that have no such idea (travellers, learned authors! and men of truth! and great philosophers! have informed him), not considering that is but a negative upon a hearsay, and so circumstantiated that the faith of the Indian danger may be as well questioned as the veracity or judgment of the relater; who cannot be supposed to know sufficiently the mysteries and secrets of those barbarians: whose language they but imperfectly know; to whom we good Christians have by our little mercy given sufficient reason to conceal many secrets from us, as we know particularly in respect of simples and vegetables, of which, though, we got the Peruvian bark, and some other noble remedies, yet it is certain taht through the cruelty of the Spaniards, as they have owned themselves, many secrets in medicinal affairs have been suppressed.”

Congratulations, IT, on post 1000

IT has just logged her 1000th post. Alas, although I have thrown my typical Yankee fascist careerist advice at her – that she should be a regular writer for the Guardian, as she has a popular tone, leftist theory coming out of her fingernails, and a knack for hot button femme kultcha issues - does she listen to me? Does anybody? I think she is afraid of waking up one morning after a night of strange dreams to find that she’s been transformed into Polly Toynbee – or worse, Julia Burchill.

She’s been on a roll with her series about what women talk about in the movies, which has somehow come to center on Sex and the City. I’m not sure how the Bechdel Test, as she calls it, deals with women playing men, vide Cate Blanchett, playing Bob Dylan. h I’d urge extending the topic to misogyny in movies, partly because some kindly soul put up half of the short film by Jean Eustache, Une sale histoire, which is a story of a man who becomes obsessed with staring through a hole bored in the wall between the men’s and women’s toilet in a cafe. He tells the story to three women, one of them the amazing Françoise Lebrun, who played Veronika in La Maman et la putaine. In “A dirty Story”, this is the narrator’s explanation for the end of his brief episode of voyeurism. “I stopped because I had the impression, in the end, that everything could only be seen in the perspective of that hole.” Eustache was appalled, I think, by the way in which danger had dropped out of sex - in this he was like Mailer, who viewed the pill as another zombie move by Dow chemical to replace our vital fluids with some liquid we had to pay rent on. Eustache was appalled by the sheer sloppiness of the post May 68 left. He despaired that what had been born was nothing more than a culture of excuses for sloth, promiscuity, and the shutting down of empathy - in particular, the latter. Empathy was, after all, what held the left together for a century - an empathy between the intellectual and the worker, between the workers themselves, between the people and the party. Of course, this was a history of empathy abused, and we all know how it worked out. But the reaction to the crackup - what Eustache saw as a generation that used leftleaning themes as a sort of tinsel thrown over a bloated egotism that could as easily tip, third way-ishly, into the most brutal capitalism - killed him.

Recently, in Le Monde, the book blogger, Pierre Assouline, wrote a post (that it is impossible to imagine being printed by a major paper in the Anglosphere) which grew nostalgia for that era of diffuse energies that Eustache despised. It was an obituary for Tony Duvert, a novelist of the sixties and seventies, friend of Roland Barthes, and a pedophile. Or rather, his novels exalted the love of pre-adolescent boys, and combined that theme with a familiar gay misogyny (the kind of denigration of women that was apparently part of Foucault’s conversational repertoire, at least according to James Miller, his biographer). This, I should say, I am taking on faith from Assouline, having never read Duvert. Assouline surveys the progressive isolation of Duvert, who in the end was, apparently, without a publishing house:

Sa liberté de ton, louée dans les années de la libération sexuelle, serait intolérable. Les ligues hurleraient aussitôt à l’apologie de la pédophilie et obtiendraient leur interdiction à la vente. Il défendait un principe, le droit des adolescents à disposer de leur libre sexualité, qui serait inaudible aujourd’hui. D’autant qu’il voulait retirer les enfants aux mères et, d’une manière générale, aux femmes ; il leur contestait un droit exclusif sur les enfants. “La période d’innocence qui s’offrait aux artistes dans les années 70 est révolue : on ne peut plus parler librement de ces choses en ce moment” disait récemment François Nourissier qui l’admirait. Il y a trente ans, on pouvait le lire comme un moraliste, chose devenue impensable de nos jours où il aurait été dénoncé comme immoraliste s’il lui avait pris de s’exprimer.

...

I’m hoping, now that there are two of Jean Eustache’s films up on YouTube, that someone will upload his Le Cochon – which, contrary to what one may expect, is – so I have read – appreciative and lyrical of the art of slaughtering a hog. This sounds excellent to me. I think the reason that I have seen only one Hanecke film is that the one I saw is about a boy who is inspired to kill a girl after watching a video of a hog being killed – using a stun gun. We are apparently supposed to look upon this with horror. I found that so utterly meretricious that I have been reluctant to look at a Hanecke film since. I certainly don’t look on killing a pig with horror – I mean, it isn’t as if I think pork was magically transported to my favorite bbq place from fairy land. Similarly, I never felt any repulsion to the scene in Roger and Me when some down on her luck woman raising rabbits for sale kills one and skins it.

I am repulsed, on the contrary, that there is such tender feeling about the bloody everyday facts of life. I can’t help but think that our tenderness about these things is in direct proportion to the spread of factory farming. The more tenderhearted the movie audience is about elementary butchery, the more leeway agribusiness has to raise and slaughter animals any way they like to. Back when Eustache was filming a good, healthy hog butchery, in the sixties, a hog was raised right, instead of as they are raised today, in the ghastly hog concentration camps.

Hmm, I’ve gotten a little off topic...

all about foodviews

LI reader's might be interested in my review of two food books here. Hmm, the title of the review is a little more scary than what's inside - it is all about foodviews!

I have high hopes for this review. If it catches the eye of some soul on the board of education, maybe it will suggest that the U.S., or at least Austin, should imitate the French and institute a semaine du goût. The American descent towards obesity and diabetes, which stems from our agribusinesses and inequalities, cannot be overturned by teaching children to look at taste before quantity or energy (sugar), but it can't hurt.

Cosi 3

It smells like girl
It smells like girl

LI suspects that, by the very nature of my research into the roots of happiness, I sometimes leave the impression that it was all a mistake. That the happiness culture was a terrible thing.

That doesn’t actually reflect my opinion. My liberalism amounts to this: avoiding totalizing viewpoints. From one point of view, the mutual bond between the nascent happiness culture and the nascent market culture was a disaster from the beginning. From another point of view, it was progress. One and the same observer could move between those two points of view, and often did, in the eighteenth century. Of course, I’m not pretending, either, that those were the only two points of view on what was happening, simply two conflicting assessments. What is striking, however, is that gradually, the ability to pose questions about what happiness is, and about the passional norms which supposedly underlie individual lives and collectivities, were increasingly blocked by the assumption that one has to begin with the self evident – even though, as we can see again and again in the 19th and 20th centuries, attempts to systemize the passions, to impress a vocabulary upon them that reflects their “universal” nature, continually produces inconsistencies. This region of social and personal life proves very hard to organize.

In Cosi fan tutte, we have an example of a fairy tale like failure to organize the passions on a traditional basis, followed by an ending that makes the astonishing proposal that this is all right. Reason tells us that we are not the dupes of passion, unless we hold to an unreal notion of passion. Now, this is what I think Tallyrand meant by the sweetness of life. It is an exploration, on the aesthetic plane, of Hume’s extraordinary and revolutionary phrase that reason should be the slave of the passions.

But first: some material context, from the trade in sex.

Report by Pidansat de Mairobert, published in the Espion anglais, 1784, concerning the maison de madame Gourdan, the most famous brothel in Paris:

“Pass now to the piscine. This is the bath where one introduces the girls that are recruited ceaselessly for Mme Gourdan, in the provinces, the country side and among the people of Paris. Before producing some like subject for her amateur, who would recoil in horror if he saw her coming out of her village or shack, we clean her up in this place (on le decrasse en ce lieu), we soften the skin, whiten it, perfume it, in a word, one curries a cinderella as one would prepare a superb horse.

They opened next an armoir, where there were a number of essences, liquids and waters for the usage of ladies.
They pointed out “l’eau de pucelle”.”

Mme Gourdan, like the most advanced pinmaker, understood something of the power of the division of labor, and she understood how to leverage her position in the sex market. It was a market that was pushed by two factors: on the one hand, the quantity of the labor supply was in direct proportion to the violence to which girls were customarily subject in their homes and workplaces; on the other hand, the clientele were specialists in the special – they were always leaping to new fetishistic niches.

So, the supply: these dirty recruits were recruited by a floating group of watchers. According to Eugene DeFrance, from whose biography of the La Maison de Madame Gourdon I take these notes, here is a typical scouting report from Mlle Caroline, a dancer with the Theatre des Italiens and one of Madame Gourdon’s sources:

“If you wish, my dear maman, on my street I have a pretty little bourgoise, 14 years old, who stays with a step mother who beats her twenty times a day. I will bring her to you; she has strongly urged me. I could easily have her received by Vaugien; the little one will gladly give herself to his fantasies, I’ve already told him about it. She’ll agree to anything on the condition that she leaves her wicked step mother. Please write me back as soon as possible, dear maman, etc.” (103)

The Vaugien in question is a vice cop.

Then, on the other hand, there was advertising and marketing. Apparently if you were a wealthy enough man in Paris, you would receive solicitations and advertisements for girl just as, today, you receive spam email offering you zero percent home loans. Like a butcher knows the choicest cuts, Goudon was an expert in the charcuterie of girl. The English Spy interviewed a Madame Sapho, who recounted her story: a peasant girl from the environs of Paris who Goudon kindly helped elope from her guardians, and stashed with an associate. The associate wrote, “what a Peru you’ve found in this child! ... she has a diabolical clitoris and she will be better for women then man. Our most illustrious tribades ought to pay for our latest acquisition in Gold!”

Goudon in fact had a client – a woman who was a member of a club of lesbians – who she hurried to with the news, and Madame Sapho was on her way up in the world.

In fact, Goudon was more than a simple bawd. She was a connector. A doctor’s wife, in debt, wants to sell her charms? Goudon would send a letter to one of the amateurs who she knew. She’d arrange a meeting. Sometimes, she’d spot a likely girl and arrange, under a false pretext, a meeting that would result in a rape.

All of this is happening under the nose of the opera, so to speak.

More about this at LCC.

A factory for making universals in the bowels of the folk consciousness

In Brown’s book on Cosi fan Tutte, which is a treasure trove of quotations, there is a passage from Jonathan Miller [who LI once shared a drink with, ho ho] explaining how he envisions the opera, and particularly the role of Don Alfonso. It is Alfonso who begins the action with a bet: he bets Ferrando and Guglielmo, two soldiers, cento zecchini, that he can prove their fiances can be seduced in a day. It is simply a matter of rearranging the tableau – by a simple ploy, he has the two announce they are going away, then has them disguise themselves and has each soldier woo the other’s fiance. A recto, we have Despina, the maid who tries to convince Fiordiligi and Dorabella that all men are essentially fickle, especially soldiers. Miller views all of this in the light of Don Alfonso’s fundamental motive:

“I have always seen him as a genuine eighteenth-century philosopher, a mixture of Diderot and Voltaire, and this means that the opera then becomes an experiment with human nature. In the first scene, to show him as a philosopher and not a joker, I had him appear at a table covered with books and classical references – the drawings of Sir William Hamilton’s Neapolitan Collections, some of Galvani’s early experiments on animal electricity, and thee might be a mesmeric tub in his room. He is interested in all these scientific and intellectual developments of the Enlightenment. The view that ultimately all human beings are the same because all individuals partake in the nature of Man is an eighteenth century idea. It follows that if there is any escape from a basic human nature it is achieved only by acknowledging those parts of oneself that cannot be altered.”

Diderot and Voltaire would not have recognized that the choice was between being either a philosopher or a joker – but this aside – and I bracket it now only to make a promise that I will come back to it later, because it is of the utmost importance to see how Mozart deals with such assumptions about the codes of seriousness - there is a lot of sense in Miller’s notion. One can’t help noticing that this is an opera that deals with another world of seduction than Don Juan’s. Don Juan’s was limited by hell on one side and marriage on the other. He traverses that world as an adventurer, believing in neither estate – and yet, by his behavior, by the life defining importance he grants these limits even as he opposes them, showing them a kind of respect. The libertine of the 17th century was taking a bet him or herself – Pascal’s bet – but the notion that hellfire might wait at the end of it was not something one could easily put off when the whole weight of the order in which one had been raised depended on that assumption. Which, in turn, was nested in a system of assumptions about spirits, nature, and human beings.

There’s no question of hell in Cosi fan Tutte, although about spirits ...

boy's world

Roberto Calasso has an amazing eye for the damning quotation. He is, after all, an admirer of Karl Kraus. In The Ruin of Kasch, he devotes a chapter to the ‘anti-romantic child”, Bentham. I read that chapter yesterday, and immediately recognized that it was about the U.S., circa 2000-2008.

Here are some Bentham quotes, taken from Halevy’s book about the Utilitarians;

“Directly or indirectly, well being, in one shape or another, or in several shapes, or all shapes taken together, is the subject of every thought, and the object of every action, on the part of every known Being who is, at the same time, a sensitive and thinking being.”

“Money is the instrument of measuring the quantity of pain or pleasure. Those who ar not satisfied with the accuracy of this instrument must find some other.”

“The only common measure the nature of things affords is money.”

These statements have a familiar ring to the American ear. Surely we just heard them. Wasn’t somebody on the radio, on the news, in the office, at a restaurant just saying that? The notion that money is the measure of all things has long been common to libertarians and economists. Markets in everything is the recent title of a book particularly recommended on the economic blog circuit.

But it isn’t the debasement of this kind of thinking that interests me, or even its impossibility – Market is a term that just aches to be taken apart, since it has many meanings and is used in a wholly senseless way to cover the whole of the life of exchange. We actually live in an economy with huge market gaps, and the title market is given as an honorific to aggregate activities, such as looking for a job, that really don’t correspond to being in a market at all. The job market and the banana market are much, much different things.

But let us leave that aside. As I say, it isn’t the debasing and painfully stupid reduction of pleasure and pain to money so much as the cultural effect of the moneyist attitude which interests me. Calasso juxtaposes these phrases of Bentham with this marvelous paragraph:

“John Stuart Mill – the first guinea pig to receive a strictly Benthamite education, one based entirely on the criterion of usefulness – did not react with sumptuous delirium, as Judge Schreber would in an analogous situation. On the contrary, he managed to write a magnanimous essay on Bentham. A genuine respect and lucidity guide Mill’s words, which involuntarily reveal more than what they say on the surface. First, he offers us the most fitting definition of the Master, presenting him as “the great subversive” and, in particular, as the “chief subversive thinker of an age which has lost all that they could subvert.” Bentham was the first living tabula rasa, a stolid and insolent child who could nave no doubts because he had no experience – and would never acquire any. “He had niether an internal experience, nor external; the quiet, even tenor of his life, and his healthiness of mind, conspired to exclude him from both. He never knew prosperity and adversity, passion nor satiety. He never had even the experience which sickness gives; he lived from childhood to the age of eighty-five in boyish health. He knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart. He never felt life a sore and a weary burthen. He was a boy to the last. Self-consciousness that daemon of the men of genius of our time, from Wordsworth to Byron, from Goethe to Chateaubriand, and to whcih this age owes so much of both its cheerful and its mournful wisdom, never was awakened in him. How much of human nature slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know. He had never beenb made alive to the unseen influences which were acting on himself, nor consequently on his fellow creatures.”

Oh the age of boys. We are living in the full tide of it, for the Great Moderation, as the economists love to call it, which has become the Great Corruption under the ever vigilant eye of the Great Fly, has put the boys as firmly on our back as the Old Man of the Sea was on Sinbad’s. Anybody who is alive to these Benthamite strains will recognize that the same boys-will-be-boys atmosphere that heralded the runup to the war in Iraq (a war prefigured in the sales for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, Endwar, Ghostrecon, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of the boy unconscious) became the blood and ouns of the Bush boom. What James Galbraith calls the Predator state requires a mentality so stripped of any other measure than money and the immediate lulls of wellbeing that it can’t even recognize experience anymore. How to do this? One has to look at the whole system – the schooling, the media, the office atmosphere, the suburbs. One has to look at it the way one looks at processed meat – in these slaughter houses they cut away the imagination, all unnecessary emotional registers, and most of all, the very idea of the negative capacity – which is, like, so gross and negative! To catch the end result of this shallowness, one has to read, say, the Freakonomics blog over a long period of time. Or attend, listen, to the yearning burning love for Bush himself – remembering that the secret of the action movie is not the movie itself, but the action figures one sells concurrently. Bush is our most perfect national doll. He is a perfect doll for boys, and the boys are sore disappointed in him. Cause, as we know, America is Boy’s Life writ large.

And where's my nobel prize???

Limited Inc – you might think our little suggestions fall dead from our pages. From my mouth to God’s deaf ear, as they say. But notice this, from our March 20, 2008 post:

“What the Government should do is place all securities under the sweeping powers of the same kind of agency that regulates drugs. And, just as drugs are tested for their real effects and approved with regulatory strings, securities too should be subject to testing (which would be in the nature of simulations) and approved, if found not to have malign side effects and found to be useful, only with their own regulatory strings. The ‘shadow’ financial system, as Roubini calls it, has become a giant ectoplasm of iffy puts and options, in a system that really has already developed the vehicles it needs for investment, thank you very much. And, as we have seen, Alien turns to the nanny state as soon as the downside whacks it. Thrust the fuckers into the light. Regulation now, regulation forever.”

And notice this, in today’s WSJ:
“Joseph Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University who won the Nobel in 2001, suggested misguided innovation itself caused the current turmoil. Noting that homeowners’ most important risk assessment is the likelihood that they can retain their home amid market volatility, Stiglitz said, “these are the problems [financial markets] should have created products to match. But they created risks, and now we’re bearing the consequences of this so-called innovation.”
There were some areas of agreement. The standards that gauge how much capital banks should hold — called Basel II for the Swiss city in which they were developed — focus too tightly on managing daily risk and not enough on handling crises. “What happens most of the time is not important,” said Scholes, noting the current financial turmoil comes on the heels of the dot-com bubble’s bursting and the Asian financial crisis of the early 1990s. “We have to learn how to handle the shocks when they occur.”
One idea that might prevent a repeat of the turmoil: a commission that would vet financial products before their release, akin the Food and Drug Administration’s evaluation of drugs before they’re released to the market. McFadden suggested, “we may need a financial-instrument administration that tests the robustness of financial instruments and approves only the uses where they can do no harm.”

I came across this quote at Marginal Revolution, the libertarian blog run out of George Mason university's economics department, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries. The bloggers denounced it as a terrible idea. If the crank libertarians are opposed to it, it must be good!

Dove son? che loco è questo?

LI has been thinking that what I need to do, if I am to satisfy the armies of periodizers that inhabit my nightmares, is to go from showing how the conditions for the change in the attitude towards happiness came together in the seventeenth and eighteenth century (this is what all these themes over the past half a year have been about, captain!) to showing how happiness became a norm. That is, showing how it ended up filling three places normatively - as a feeling; as a judgment over the life order (or a judgment over lifestyles); and as a justification for political and economic arrangements. So far, I’ve been trying to show that those spaces haven’t always been connected by happiness. That this threefold social phenomena isn’t simply a matter of one feeling taking over from a previous dominant one. That the three places condition each other; and that in the wake of the slow vanishing of the human limit, there was play room for a number of affective political structures. Most notably, that of volupté. I’ve liked the often quoted phrase of Tallyrand’s said about the “sweetness” of life in the ancien regime, since that seems to point to something that is not a happiness norm, but that still held down this space between the desacralizing of the life order and the absence of a normative sense of happiness as the final legitimating end of social arrangements.

How would such a life be lived? Well, I can’t really do better than point to a quartet of Mozart’s operas: Le Nozze di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte.

In reading Bruce Allan Brown’s book about Cosi fan tutte, I came across the name Johann Pezzl – probably a very well known name to Mozart fans. Myself, I hadn’t heard of him before. Pezzl was a fellow mason and an inveterate scribbler, briefly one of Joseph II’s spies (another instance of the adventurer), and the producer of a number of popular books about Vienna. There are some wonderful quotes from Pezzl in Brown’s book – alas, I haven’t been able to find Pezzl’s Skizze von Wien, although I have found a copy of Neue Skizze von Wien.

I don’t have much time this week, but I want to do a little Pezzl quoting. And I wanted to link to this great production of Cosi fan tutte. Act two, scene 16 in particular seems to gather together so many of the themes I have been treating that it makes gives me the interpreter’s vertigo. You will notice that Despina speaks swabian – Mesmer’s language – and tartar – the language of Catherine’s Siberian Shaman:

Come comandano
Dunque parliamo:
So il greco e l'arabo,
So il turco e il vandalo;
Lo svevo e il tartaro
So ancor parlar

Three stories about Gerhard Van Swieten, an enlightenment doctor

Everybody knows
that baby's got no clothes

Story one. Van Swieten was the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician. In 1740, Maria Theresa asked his advice about a terribly personal matter. She’d been married three years by then, and had no children. Van Swieten delivered the following famous prescription: “Praeteria censeo, vulvam Sacratissimae Majestatis, ante coitum, diutius esse titilandam.” That is, Maria Theresa should have her clitoris stimulated before coitus. It worked. Her shy husband Francis I tried it, and Maria Theresa went on to get pregnant a lot.

Such is the story recounted by Jonathan Margolis in O: the intimate history of orgasm. The story is almost certainly false. Van Swieten did not meet Maria Theresa until after treating her sister in 1744 – he probably came to Vienna in that year or a year later. By this time, Maria Theresa had had several children. Her first child was born before 1740, incidentally. Margolis did not, however, simply make up his facts. He’s repeating an old gynecologist’s tale. It was introduced into English by the indefatigable sexologist, Havelock Ellis, who know doubt took it from the indefatigable German sexologist, Iwan Bloch (1908). Bloch, in turn, might have taken it from several sources. It is odd that it had currency among German medical men, as biographies of Van Swieten were abundant enough that there was plenty of evidence that it couldn’t have happened. Interestingly, however, the latin prescription always appears with the story, although not always in the same wording. Bloch’s version is “titillatio clitoridis”, and he throws out the supporting story about Maria Theresa’s infertility. The story is the kind of thing that is repeated without being cited – I found one version in which Swieten urges Maria Theresa to stimulate her clitoris with a feather, for instance. Why would such a story gain such a confident currency? Wouldn’t it seem, at first glance, that no participant – neither Van Swieten nor Maria Theresa – would have any motive for setting such a consultation down on paper? That this story moves by itself is, I would say, putting on my best Freudian spectacles, evidence that it operates like a sort of dream in the collective male unconscious. The empress already is an irritant – a woman in power. The Herr doctor (to whom is ascribed, for no very good reason, powers of insight into sexuality that nothing in van Swieten’s career justifies) lords it over her, however, for she has one point, one little bud, of weakness – that royal clitoris – and of course he sees that the whole problem radiates from there.

It is rather amusing that as the story drifts along, it allots narrative places to all participants, depending on the season and ideological flavor of the month. Margolis, for instance, makes up a sexually naive husband, Prince Francis Stephen of Lorraine, to go with this story.

Story 2. Van Swieten was Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician. She appointed him the head librarian of the court library. Being a product of enlightened Holland, a pupil of Boerhave, and an enemy of superstition, Van Swieten investigated the library and found it stuffed with alchemical, hermetic, spiritualist and astrological treatises. He had them all gathered up and burned, in spite of the howls of protests of all the hermetically inclined in Vienna.
This, too, is false. Although this story was reported in Van Swieten’s first biography, the Abbe Rautenstrauch, and it does reflect Van Swieten’s attitude towards ‘superstitious” garbage. At the time Rautenstrauch published his biography, this passage was protested by one of Van Swieten’s children, but his protests passed unheeded, and the act passed into the positivist legends of the 19th century. However, in 1906, the journal Janus published an article in which it published letters from Van Swieten showing that this action never happened.

Story 3. Van Swieten was the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s personal physician. In 1755, a report reached the court that bodies had been disinterred from a cemetery and burned in Olmütz because of the local belief that they were vampires. Maria Theresa appointed Van Swieten to investigate. In 1756, the court produced a against the vampire belief and forbidding these kinds of practices.

This story is true. Van Swieten is not only known, in a shadowy way, in sexology, but has become quite the villain in popular books about vampirism, where he is depicted as a hidebound reactionary. However, that picture is just the reverse of the one promoted in Enlightenment Europe, where Van Swieten’s book against the vampire belief was absorbed into the Voltairian battle against popular belief, with its consequent persecution of “witches” and “sorcerers”.

For a great blog on Habsburg vampires, go to magia posthuma.

The return of the pannier

This Sunday, forget Bill Keller’s frothing at the mouth about Westerners “kowtowing” to Beijing – not only is McCain bringing back Teddy Roosevelt but the whole glorious vocabulary of his time, which is like steak tartar in the mouth of our adorable, bloodthirsty MSM-ists! – and make a beeline to Caroline Weber’s article, The Belle Curve. There are those who have criticized LI’s obsession with the 18th century – but apparently we were simply mindmelding with today’s hottest fashion designers:

“But every now and then, a trend comes along whose sheer, unalloyed improbability startles even fashion’s strictest devotees. A case in point: the return this season of the amplified hip. From panniers at Louis Vuitton and Charles Nolan to crinolines at Alexander McQueen to peplums at Chanel, the fall/winter looks encourage women to channel PJ Harvey, who in ‘‘Sheela-Na-Gig’’ sang of her shapely charms: ‘‘I’ve been trying to show you over and over / Look at these, my child-bearing hips.’’ Incongruous as it may seem in an industry better known as an enemy than as a friend of female curves, today’s designers are bringing back the hourglass shape in all its bulging, bottom-heavy splendor.”

That’s right – panniers are back!

“At 18th-century Versailles, the panniered skirts of female court costume reached such vast widths that women had to enter rooms sideways. So great was the fear of getting stuck in doorways that young noblewomen trained for their first day at court with an exacting old gentleman who donned a ‘‘ridiculous, billowing skirt’’ of his own to lead the tutorial, according to the memoirs of the Marquise de la Tour du Pin. But one woman’s challenge is another woman’s opportunity. Just imagine the figure you’ll cut wedging your way onto a crowded N train in your new McQueen tutu. ‘‘Stand clear of the closing doors, please!’’ As the subway doors jam against your layers of stiffened tulle, all eyes will — I guarantee it — be on you. That’s what they call making an entrance.”

LI likes a jaunty skirt, but McQueen’s fall line doesn’t understand that billowing and jauntiness aren’t the same thing. Although we give McQueen a lot of points for that much commented upon gray mohair jacket dress worn by Rihanna in Elle. This is how McQueen explains his fall collection:

"I've got a 600-year-old elm tree in my garden," he said, "and I made up this story of a girl who lives in it and comes out of the darkness to meet a prince and become a queen." After a trip to India, the designer worked like a fiend for months in his studio, with images of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and the Indian Empire running through his mind. They were transformed into ballerina-length multi-flounced dance dresses, each more insanely exquisite than the last: A miraculous red-feather-fronted number turned to burst into a froth of creamy frills in back; another came covered in baby-fine knitted lace; a third had a pair of peacocks—again fashioned from cutout black lace—with their tail feathers fanning out over ivory tulle petticoats.

Interspersed were rigorously cut military tailcoats with taut pants detailed with military frogging, and slim brocade and cloque pantsuits with crisp white high-necked shirts. Then there was a stately parade of imperial-red and velvet jackets bedecked with millions of dollars' worth of antique Indian diadems and diamond neckpieces, and yet more incredible rich Empire-line saris and wispy dishabille transparencies. These were followed by a sequence of gold-encrusted, ermine-coated glory, echoing the heyday of Norman Hartnell and Hardy Aimes' fifties British couture as worn by Elizabeth II.

Whatever had triggered this new lease of inspired design, it went further than the mere rendition of fanciful costume for the sake of telling a story. Importantly, McQueen finally found it in himself to quash the confining, uptight carapace that had held back former collections, replacing it with a new sense of lightness and femininity.”

Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and the Indian Empire, did you say? I’m sorry: that’s a no go. As for the fifties British couture worn by Elizabeth II, where are my vials of wrath? I had them here a second ago...

One nice thing about this new trend is that Ysa Ferrer was obviously prescient, last year, in her mix of French Maid and Pompidour waif, as per To Bi or Not To Bi. It is a puzzle to LI that Ysa just doesn’t export to this country. I’ll never understand Americans.

Voltaire's shamans

Via dons maps

Even the Greeks were once, if you will, savages... – J.G. Herder

In the 1780s, both the model enlightened despots in Europe – Catherine II and Frederick of Prussia – suddenly found that the fashions were shifting. The old railing against superstition and spiritualism, which was so congenial to their hearts, was in conflict with the new interest in freemasonry, mesmerism, the hermetico-Egyptian philosophy – as Frederick the Great’s librarian, Abbe Pernety, called it – and, in Russia, with shamanism. Frederick’s nephew, who inherited the old man’s throne, immediately surrounded himself with a cabal of Rosicrucians. Catherine, who died in 1796, was already cracking down on what she regarded as the sinister power of the Masons in the late 1780s. She arrested the writer and publisher at the center of Russian freemasonry, Novikov – sentencing the old man to life in prison – and wrote a play, The Siberian shaman, mocking spiritualism as hypocrisy and faking, in much the spirit of Theophile de Viau exposing the fake possessed woman in 1620 – so much had libertine tropes migrated into the center of ancien regime power. Lai, Catherine’s shaman, is a Tartuffe of the steppe, so to speak. Or that may have been Catherine’s intention. However, he is given certain theatrical characteristics that are very different than the ceremonies of the devot in Moliere, as the translator of the play into English, ..., notes – he is, for instance, depicted as being in a sort of silent trance in the second act which goes on for some minutes, a unique stage direction in classical Russian theater. He is also depicted repairing boots – apparently a mark of someone truly low. Perhaps the idea that the feet are low, or dirty, or unclean, was behind Tolstoy’s obsessive shoe mending.

To my mind, though, the most interesting part of the play is the Shaman’s book. In a post (June 14 2008), I noted that the book and the savage became opposites after the discovery of the new world, although the idea that the savage might make books circulated on the fringe. In the eighteenth century, there was a controversy about whether the Inca’s quipu was a writing system, and whether the Inca priests made books of them – a position defended by Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, who was, perhaps not coincidentally, the center of Free masonry in Naples.

The constellation of savage, masonry – disguised as shamanism – and the book reappears in Catherine’s play in the scene in which Lai brags of his shamanistic book of fates. After Lai claims that he is occupied with the notion of non-existence and silence, two courtiers ask him where he gets his knowledge and he says – “in this book”

Sanov: What’s in your book?
Lai: Everything... everything... everything.
Sanov: Everything! But, for example, we who are present here. Are our first and last names in your book?
Lai. Knowledge is born with each person.
Sidor Drobin. So be it... but are we written in your book? That’s the question, do you hear?
Lai (Speaking quickly) Our characteristics are made up of ecstasy, of flow, of sustenance, of movement, of warmth, of the bitter root. Love and hate each have the same foundation, as do salt, action, oil and density.
Kromov: What chaos!
Sanov. What an unusual man!
Sidor Drobin. You can’t get an answer out of him... He’ll do only as he pleases.
Bragin. First he didn’t speak; now he has gotten out of hand.
Karp Drobin. But he hasn’t answered the question.
Bobin. He will answer. (tO lAI) 140 degrees! Tell us, what do you think of the people here? Are they all listed in your book.
Lai. (importantly and distinctly) They are listed in it.
Sidor Drobin. How? How? By first and last names?
Lai. Here will be a great marvel! If I so desire, I will tell you the qualities of characteristics of each and every one of you, without knowing either your first or last names. (49)

We’ll continue with this in a later post.

the firefly revolution

It was obvious that the Great Fly’s foreign policy would end up as comic opera, following the laws of Marx (Groucho, that is) . And so we’ve been treated to a week of amazing neo-con barking in the American press – although to be fair, neo-connerie is now an international language, and Le Monde feels obliged to publish Robert Kagan for his “opinion” about Russia. Georgia, a state that experienced a kleptocratic financed “revolution” which installed a mini-Bush who has squandered 70 percent of the state’s income on military spending, has faced off against Russia, a state that experienced a kleptocratic financed “revolution” a bit earlier – we all remember the good old days, when Clinton and Co. decided to make one last effort to re-elect a notorious drunk and one of the most corrupt politicians of modern times, Boris Yeltsin, don’t we? Or has that fact become officially a non-fact? The mouse that roared was thoroughly squashed, and it was just like Munich, the Hungarian Revolution, and that time Coca Cola replaced the classic Coke, all wrapped into one. The cause: two pieces of property that are “symbols” of Georgia’s “territorial integrity” – it is hard to even type the bogus phrases.

In the meantime, though, our governing elite has been busy trying to destroy the “territorial integrity” of Bolivia, because there a virtual dictator, a madman, and the newest Hitler – or so it seemed, before Putin became Hitler, trickily won an overwhelming plebiscite that will make it all the more difficult for the oil oligarchs to pry the eastern part of Bolivia, where the majority of the natural gas is, from the rest. But I have no doubt they will continue to work at the project, and their work will receive the unction of the American MSM, as it appears that Evo Morales can’t be democratic because (oh, I am in tears even reporting such a heinous thing!) he doesn’t believe in (sob) free (sob) markets! The sad and oppressed people of Bolivia – how can we leave them to suffer so with such a leader! It would be much kinder, I think we can all agree, to manage a split between Freedonia and Evildonia pronto.

LI used to be all about analyzing and shaking our fist at the combo of thuggery and stupidity which is the alpha and omega of the Narrative in the era of the Great Fly, but it has gotten sooooo hard, campers, to even fuckin' care. There is nothing that whittles away dissent like pointlessness. And besides, reality is doing an excellent job of shrinking misused power. The vast majority of Americans can give a fuck about the elite class’s Russophobic woody. And the elite can give a fuck about any interference with the Narrative. What is odd is that they even care, at this point, to justify the unjustifiable. But they are moral mavens all, and can’t make a step without patting themselves on the back for their morality. Morality is very important, especially as, without it, murdering people you don’t know looks oh so nasty. Robert Kagan could just as easily write in telegraphese: “Need to attack X. Money for defense industry needs to grow grow grow. Lie lie lies. Freedom. Free markets. Democracy.” The to and fro of opinion among a small circle – the liberal interventionists on one side, so against genocide, don’t you know, and the neocons on the other, so for that there democracy - is so stale that it is a wonder.

However, it does look like a decade of ulcerous imperialism is fresh out of resources. Squandering the military was partly the point – one does need some excuse to spend a couple trillion on useless military equipment. But we seem to have come up against a certain limit. Thus, this week’s spectacle, one to make the angels fart. (And speaking of squandering resources: although LI is no deficit hawk, even we were stunned that the U.S. ran a plus 100 billion dollar deficit for June. That can start to run into real money – and makes the current projection of a deficit of 480 billion dollars seem utopian. I predicted, in January, an employment rate by the end of the year of 6 percent – when the economists were predicting, at most, 5. Now my estimate is in the middle. So I’ll just haul off and say, if the U.S. doesn’t run a 600 billion dollar deficit this year, I’ll eat my baseball cap.)

As we know, war is the health of the post-WWII economy. But as the US has been popping wars like Hugh Hefner on a viagra jag, the effect has gotten muted. Sure, Iraq has been very very good to us – the excuse for vast government spending, the pipeline of unsupervised money flowing out to a great network of greedy, incompetent corporations to pay for some of the shoddiest work ever to bear the fine name of Brown and Root. In one of the numerous ironies of the Great Fly’s era, the money has actually benefited the Democratic demographic the most. Since these have been the years of the financial sector and the tech sector – which are concentrated in liberal urban areas – we’ve witnessed a pretty funny spectacle – red states voting for their own destitution, and Blue states, awash with cash, voting for virtue. But we are now feeling the rough edge of short term gains - you know, if you are going to have a tax holiday all the time, brew up fine, fine wars killing masses of unimportant people, and borrow money like there is no tomorrow, circumstances tend, after a while, to the red line. Which is why, much to the MSM’s amazement – who among the “thought leaders” is not, after all, a millionaire? – the country is stubbornly resisting the call to manliness. While the GOP has barely found its mojo with the stupid demographic this year – destroying the American environment on a deeper and more extensive level to bring oil into the market ten years from now at a price that will be determined by the demand in that market, which ain’t gonna be ten dollars per barrel, is just the kind of pisspoor, redneck thinking that is a winner among the exurban crowd – it seems to be having a trouble exciting the gonads of the outliers with its visions of ultraviolence. Luckily for Raytheon, the Dems, in a perfect position to take away the monopoly on foreign policy which they ceded, at the beginning of the Clinton years, to the GOP, have displayed the instincts of cowering puppies and tried to bark as loudly as toothless McCain about this farce of an issue. Somebody around Obama needs to read White Fang – an excellent tale about the consequences of breeding dysfunctional aggression, although, of course, larded with London’s social darwinism.

“Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him. Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the knees of Gray Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.
He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through the months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the gut-whips of Mit-sah and Gray Beaver snapping behind, their voices crying "Raa! Raa!" when they came to a narrow passage and the team closed together like a fan to go through. He lived again all his days with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought. At such times he whimpered and snarled in his sleep, and they that looked on said that his dreams were bad.
But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered -- the clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge. Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a mountain, screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was the same when he challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out of the blue it would rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into the ubiquitous electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of Beauty Smith. Outside the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew that a fight was on. He watched the door for his antagonist to enter. The door would open, and thrust in upon him would come the awful electric car. A thousand times this occurred, and each time the terror it inspired was as vivid and great as ever.”

hegelophobia

I know that kind of man
its hard to hold the hand
of anyone
who's reaching for the sky just to surrender

Amie, in the comments, writes that she has a question about my last two posts about the image of the limited good:

“It relates to the question of time and when wishes still "worked" and the limit where they seemingly went away - for good. Did they ever, "really"? I wonder if there is not always a non-contemporarity of time, a multiple and disjointed time, in which wishes and hopes still hold sway, return and burst forth.”

This is an excellent question, in as much as it makes me realize that I might have given a too hasty impression, in the last two posts, that I’ve seized a key to all history or something. My goal from the beginning has been to make it possible to ask the question: why did happiness take on the tripart form of an emotional norm, a judgment on life, and a reference that justifies political and economic arrangements? And all the themes I have been pursuing have been related to both making that question possible – that is, attacking the notion that man self evidently wants to be happy and human social structures self-evidently are judged on whether they facilitate happiness – and showing how the self-evident came into being. I’ve wanted to avoid a totalizing history – which means that I don’t think I can explain everything by simply showing that one set of dominant economic attitudes or practices gave way to another, or one episteme gave way to another – because, well, the time in which wishes still work is still part of our time – that is, as the past in which wishes still worked and the future in which wishes will work again. In fact, the triple function of happiness both occludes and supports itself on a disjointed sense of time.

To put this in terms of my obsession of the month – the war between enlightenment and superstition – that superstition is perennially being driven out and perennially coming back should warn any historian against taking his or her periodizations as natural laws, or stages in some predetermined, unalterable progress. Zatorski’s article (from my August 6 post), which gathers together several of Lichtenberg’s comments about superstition, nicely binds together the notion of discovery, science, and the peculiarity of the “again” – the Wiederkehr:

“The philosophy of the common man is the mother of ours, out of his superstitions we make our religion, just as we make our medicine out of his home remedies.” Even the concept “science” itself is observed to be highly unclear: “Where in the past one found the borders of science, we now find its middle.”

This demands a high degree of judgmental foresight. A quantum of distrust is evidently indispensable, but this means, at the same time, a certain distrust against dogmatic laws of reason. One would rather “neither deny nor believe.” For even the offerings of “rational” philosophy is nothing other than a treaty of peace that has come to stand “in the “counsels of men” – “superstition is itself a local philosophy, it also gives in its voice.” For this reason, even reason must remain continually conscious of the relative and time conditioned character of knowledge. Thus it would be adviseable to be very careful in labeling certain beliefs as superstitions, because what counts as such today can be transformed tomorrow into a serious theory: “There is thus a great difference between believing something “still” and believing it “again.” To still believe that the moon effects plants betrays stupidity and superstition, but to believe it again shows philosophy and reflection.”

Foucault’s Les mots et les choses has been both a great help to me, figuring out the 17th and 18th century, and a great target. In MC, he writes, in the section on exchange, something which I’ve pondered a great deal:

“Une réforme de la monnaie, un usage bancaire, une pratique commerciale peuvent bien se rationaliser, se développer, se maintenir ou disparaître selon des formes propres ; ils sont toujours fondés sur un certain savoir: savoir obscur qui ne se manifeste pas pour lui-même en un discours, mais dont les nécessités sont identiquement les mêmes que pour les théories abstraites ou les spéculations sans rapport apparent à la réalité. Dans une culture et à un moment donné, il n'y a jamais qu’ une épistémè, qui définit les conditions de possibilité de tout savoir.”

“A monetary reform, a banking protocol, a commercial practice can very well be rationalized, develop and maintain itself or disappear according to its own forms; they are always founded on a certain knowledge: obscure knowledge which doesn’t manifest itself for itself in a discourse, but of which the necessities are identically the same as for the abstract theories and speculations without apparent relation to reality. In a culture and at a certain given moment, there is never more than one episteme, which defines the condition of the possibility of all knowledge.”

I have to kick against this. In order to make this claim, Foucault has to systematically diminish the moments in which abstract theories, or real practices, are openly self reflexive. Knowledge isn’t just endlessly productive – that is, one discovery after another founded on a certain obscure knowledge – but it is also controversial. That’s why superstition is so important – here you can see that there is, in fact, more than one episteme, and that the past is not quietly and submerged, to form an archaeological strata, but persists and returns. Thus, Foucault’s emphasis on representation as the dominant episteme of the classical age simply doesn’t explain the strategic aspect of the enlightenment – there are no other powers at play, here. Self reflection leaps out of philosophy and into real life when it becomes apparent that there are other powers at play. One shouldn’t shy away from self reflection out of Hegelophobia.

cooking liberally

Good old Julia Childs. In my roll of liberals who softened American manners and humanized its politics, Childs is up there, along with Rachel Carson and John Kenneth Galbraith and William Whyte and C. Wright Mills and James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, the Abstract Expressionists, Rauschenberg, the Black Mountain poets... oh, all under the shadow of the missiles. So now it appears that she, like Marcuse, was in the OSS.

Currently, my roll would include Amy Trubek, whose book, Taste of Place, I just reviewed. I don’t know if I expressed my true and heartfelt love for Ms. Trubek in the review – but I did my best. Here’s an interview with her. Somebody should give this woman a tv show.

In which I stick my tongue into the mouth of world history

Ah, LI felt a sort of roast beef-y satisfaction about our last post. At last, we said at the editorial staff meeting, we are getting somewhere! meeting our thesis quota! taking world history by the hand and giving it a big french kiss! Then we passed out cigars and crystal meth and had ourselves a ball and a biscuit, sugar.

However, it may be that others did not have such feelings about our last post. Tedium and mal de mer might have been the more common response.

Well. Here’s the deal. We have long had the intuition that the mystery of how a number of apparently interlocking phenomena – the rise of natural philosophy, and of the industrial system, and of a market centered economic system, and – most crucially – of the free labor market – came together at the same time in certain societies in Europe could not be explained by projecting back upon pre-capitalist societies categories that were developed to explain capitalist ones.

In particular, we have thought that there was a fundamental difference in the way that wealth or treasure was perceived by pre-capitalist societies. We find Bataille’s notion of expenditure extremely helpful here. Foster’s image of the limited good simply outlines the conditions in which sovereignty, on Bataille’s model, exerts its power – a power that is based on a radical externality.

All of which points to a fact that is consistently underplayed in the intellectual histories of the 17th and 18th century, even by Foucault. That is the fundamental shock given to European societies by the discovery of the New World. That discovery is the true before and after in world history – before, there simply was no world history. Really, 1492 should be the year zero.

Before world history was the time when, as the first line in the first Grimm brother’s tale accurately puts it, wishes still worked. That is another aspect of the image of the limited good. When labor and wealth are radically disassociated in an economy that is static, one just over its Malthusian line (that line determined by the ratio of population to the resources that can sustain it), wealth is a matter of accident, or magic, or deception, or predation. The poor fisherman can fish his whole life long, but he will remain pretty much a poor fisherman – unless he pulls up a talking fish that is really an enchanted fish who can grant wishes. Otherwise, though, the fisherman might as well behold the lillies of the field, for he wasn’t going to ever be arrayed in such splendor, no matter how much he, or his wife, spun and toiled.

This static society is defined by its closure. And it is just that closure which was opened up by the discovery of America. Which jolted - “disoriented” – every thing. “Discovery” is a pleasingly dialectical term, on the border between two systems of production. It implies, on the one hand, the finding of something pre-existent – which is of course well within Bataille’s restricted economy and Foster’s limited good. But it came to be used for inventions – that is, additions to the stock of what is. That internal shift parallels the systematic social shift that is the condition of the happiness culture.

In the 17th and 18th century, these shifts could still be envisioned under an older system of categories – magically, as it were. A system in which the older exchanges were all governed by an essential and irresistible scarcity. When Ricden Ricdon gives Rosanie a magic wand to spin as much cloth as she wants to, it turns out to be a magical deception, a ploy for an exchange – one in which Rosanie has to give her soul. That form of exchange disappears, but leaves a trace – we do give our souls to the company store, but souls, in the new world, aren’t currency.

If we are looking, then, at the conflict between the “cognitive orientation” fixed by the image of the limited good and the cognitive orientation of the expanding economy – ruled over by the certainty that God was Man all along – we can get a better sense of why, for instance, the struggle against “superstition” was conducted with such ferocity in the 18th century. We understand its meaning not on the level at which it was framed by the philosophes – as a question of truth – but on a more fundamental level – the level of the human limit.

where does wealth come from?

My commenter Chuckie D. is none too happy with George Foster’s phrase, “"cognitive orientation" - as he says, what does that even mean? Myself, I obviously have a different take – which is why I introduced Kant’s essay on orientation as a fundamental indication of the subject’s effect in the world – for Kant, the way human’s orient themselves can’t be explained by the Lockean/Newtonian sensualists of the time. Foster spends some time on the question of the meaning of cognitive orientation, all of which is theoretically interesting – but not too much. Foster is not important for his work in theorizing attitudes, but, rather, for his description of a particular set of attitudes that are related to peasant life.

As I have been saying for the past year, it is impossible to understand the emergence of a happiness norm that governs not only one’s personal affective life, but that is, somehow, a collective social ideal and justification for political and economic arrangements without looking at the structure of the early modern political economy in Europe. My crude position was that the class immobility that had been the political ideal began to fragment in the 17th century. But why? Certainly the industrial system had not been put in place, nor do we see the hallmark of capitalism, which is a labor force mobilized by capital. Yet something is happening in the ‘classical age.’ It is something that changed Europe massively, yet has been weirdly underplayed among historians of Europe's intellectual history. It was called the discovery of the New World. Discovery, colonization, exploitation - these, I think, opened up the rigid hierarchies in the European economies. I think one of the factors that come into play, here, has to do with what Foster calls the limited good. Foster does not invoke Malthus, but surely the notion that goods are limited, so that to have a good requires that someone else not have that good – the zero sum sense of wealth – would be a rational response to a society in which the Malthusian limits were tight and visible – a society, for instance, in which famine was an ever present possibility.

I find the connection that Foster makes between the limit good, luck, and a certain image of wealth – wealth as treasure – to be highly suggestive. Foster came to his theory through his field work in Tzintzuntzan. He found it interesting that the peasants in this Mexican village divorced wealth from labor – wealth came from the outside, in the form of treasure. According to Foster, the idea of economic growth that underlines the capitalist ethos just doesn’t penetrate this world: “In fact, it seems accurate to say that the average peasant sees little or no : relationship between work and production techniques on the one hand, and: the acquisition of wealth on the other. Rather, wealth is seen by villagers in the same light as land: present, circumscribed by absolute limits, and having no relationship to work. One works to eat, but not to create wealth.”

It is at this point that the attack on superstition gains its salience. The attack on superstition is an attempt to change the behaviors that group around the limited good. Without changing those behaviors, the project of modernization - the mobilisation of labor, the industrial system, the genesis of this myth called the market - wouldn't have occurred.

Foster points out that the limited good system changes if it opens up – a very important point for anyone trying to assess the affect of the colonization of the Americas and the East Indian trade on Europe:

“I have said that in a society ruled by the Image of Limited Good there 'is no way, save at the expense of others, that an individual can get ahead. This is true in a closed system, which peasant communities approximate. But even a traditional peasant village, in another sense, has access to other systems, and an individual can achieve economic success by tapping sources of wealth that are recognized to exist outside the village system. Such success, though envjed, is not seen as a direct threat to community stability, for no one within the community has lost anything. Still, such success must be explained. In today's transitional peasant communities, seasonal emigration for wage labor is the most available way in which one can tap outside wealth. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican peasants have come to the United States as braceros in recent years and many, through their earnings, have pumped significant amounts of capital into their communities. Braceros generally are not criticized or attacked for acquisition of this wealth; it is clear that their good fortune is not at the direct expense of others within the village. Fuller finds a similar realistic appraisal of the wealth situation in a Lebanese community: "they [the peasants] realize . . . that the only method of increasing their incomes on a large scale is to absent themselves from the village for an extended period of time and to find work in more lucrative areas" (1961:72).

These examples, however, are but modern variants of a much older pattern in which luck and fate—points of contact with an open systen—are viewed as the only socially acceptable ways in which an individual can acquire more "good" than he previously has had. In traditional (not transitional) peasant communities an otherwise inexplicable increase in wealth is often seen as due to the discovery of treasure which may be the result of fate or of such positive action as making a pact with the Devil. Recently I have analyzed treasure tales in Tzintzuntzan and have found without exception they are attached to named individuals who, within living memory, have suddenly begun to live beyond their means. The usual evidence is that they suddenly opened stores, in spite of their known previous poverty (Foster 1964a). Erasmus has recorded this interpretation among Sonora villagers (1961:251), Wagley finds it in an Amazon small town (1964:128), and Friedmann reports it in southern Italy (1958:21). Clearly, the role of treasure tales in communities like these is to account for wealth that can be explained in no other manner.”

the malthusian afterlife

He came home from the war with a party in his head

One day, in December 1704, Margaretha Schütterin, the wife of a stonemason in Schwaikheim, saw a ghost. The ghost asked her to help him and 16 other souls (who also, apparently, appeared to her) who had been walking for 240 years by finding a treasure they had deposited in Schütterin’s house, hiding it from rampaging soldiers. They were monks in life, and needed the release in the afterlife which would follow upon Schütterin uncovering the treasure and using it, in part, for charitable works.

One of the monks explained that she had been chosen to do this because she had the same horoscope as Christ. Schütterin did what she could, which was to gather money from her friends and family to comply with the various tasks that would free the ghosts and lead to the treasure. This included paying for masses to be read, buying candles, and giving alms. By these means she extracted 912 Gulden out of a local baker, David Fischer.

“When he doubted her assertions, she made him believe that there was a competition between potential creditors. Margaretha Schütterin managed to establish a sort of `investment trust’ of treasure-hunters by promising them profits of up to 100,000 Gulden. The use she allegedly made of the money given to her, i.e. to donate it to pious causes in Catholic churches, could not easily be checked by the creditors. She finally left her husband whom she probably managed to deceive with her ghost story, too, and fled with the money. When Fischer denounced Margaretha SchuÈ tterin after her flight, he was sentenced to a fine of 14 Gulden for unlicensed treasurehunting, although he maintained that she had assured him that the treasure hunt had been permitted by the duke.”

This story is reported in a fascinating article on Treasure Hunting in Wurtemburg by Johannes Dillinger and Petra Feld, Treasure-Hunting: A Magical Motif in Law, Folklore, and Mentality, Württemberg, 1606 –1770 in German History (20:2). Following my theme of superstition as the jagged edge where a proto-capitalist mentality met a pre-capitalist mentality – or, to put it less schematically, where a weak notion of the human limit meets a strong notion of the human limit - I fell in love with Dillinger and Feld’s footwork among the legal archives. It turns out that the kind of magician Lichtenberg laughed out of Gottingen often made side money helping out in hunts for treasure. Dillinger and Feld turn here, to explain the obsession with treasure, to George Foster’s work on the limited good – or the zero sum economic attitudes of Mexican peasants. Luckily for us, George Foster’s major article is up on the web: Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good*. This article, published in 1968, is, I am starting to recognize, crucial to my Polanyi-ish leanings, which I am following as I uncover the roots of the happiness culture.

I have to quote this bit from the Foster’s article, about which I am so overwhelmed with things I could say that I will just... not, for the nonce:

In this paper I am concerned with the nature of the cognitive orientation of peasants, and with interpreting and relating peasant behavior as described by anthropologists to this orientation. I am also concerned with the implications of this orientation-and related behavior to the problem of the peasant's participation in the economic growth of the country to which he may belong. Specifically, I will outline what I believe to be the dominant theme in the cognitive orientation of classic peasant societies,* show how characteristic peasant behavior seems to flow from this orientation, and attempt to show that this behavior—however incompatible with national economic growth—is not only highly rational in the context of the cognition that determines it, but that for the maintenance of peasant society in its classic form, it is indispensable.4 The kinds of behavior that have been suggested as adversely influencing economic growth are, among many, the "luck" syndrome, a "fatalistic" outlook, inter- and intra-familial quarrels, difficulties in cooperation, extraordinary ritual expenses by poor people and the problems these expenses pose for capital accumulation, and the apparent lack of what the psychologist McClelland (1961) has called "need for Achievement." I will suggest that peasant participation in national development can be hastened not by stimulating a psychological process, the need for achievement, but by creating economic and other opportunities that will encourage the peasant to abandon his traditional and increasingly unrealistic cognitive orientation for a new one that reflects the realities of the modern world.

2. The model of cognitive orientation that seems to me best to account for peasant behavior is the "Image of Limited Good." By "Image of Limited Good" I mean that broad areas of peasant behavior are patterned in such fashion as to suggest that peasants view their social, economic, and natural universes—their total environment—as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply, as far as the peasant is concerned. Not only do these and all other "good things" exist in finite and limited quantities, but in addition there is no way directly within peasant power to increase the available quantities. It is as if the obvious fact of land shortage in a densely populated area applied to all other desired things: not enough to go around. "Good," like land, is seen as inherent in nature, there to be divided and re-divided, if necessary, but not to be augmented.