LI is finished, for the moment, with the Nemesis thread. We are planning on a love and suicide thread next, starting with the Sorrows of Young Werther.
...
We’ve been slowly preparing an index of the posts that constitute our Human Limit thematalooza. When I finish it, I think I’ll download it to my geocities site and put a link to it – for those interested in the Great Work. Going back to 2006, I can see how certain threads silently converged, enter into the thing itself, spirits called out to, spirits that came, spirits that didn’t. It is back then that I stumbled upon what is still my methodological principle, my version of dialectical materialism, my very own Wicca Marxism: “Comment y arriva-t-on. Sans doute par l’effet si simple du grand principe satanique que tout doit se faire à rebours, exactement à l’envers de ce que fait le monde sacré.” From Michelet’s mouth to my ear. There are two great elaborations of this principle – one, Jehovah’s version, is that we see now as in a glass, darkly – and we know its avatars, up to Bloy and Kraus; the other is Lucifer’s version, or Little Red Riding Hood’s – for that was the wisdom she collected in the woods, that if you go down the path of pins, you will come back by the path of needles. Negative identity, don’t ya know. The satanic history of happiness begins with the inspiration that back and forth are hints that the path is not the same – and not because it is some fuckin’ river you can’t cross twice, but because twiceness is its disease, its spell. My abracadabra against the irresistible motion of history.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
All the money in the world
Bubbles are not, contrary to the new CW in the zona, all bad. Law’s system, some think, actually liquidated the immense debts left by Louis XIV and gave a massive impetus to the restructuring of French agriculture and artisanal industry.
But the Greenspan system seems to have expanded so fast and gotten to such size that it might well engulf all the gains made along the way and then some. A sign of this: the sinking of AIG. Here is a company that is burning its way through 120 billion dollars in 3 weeks time. In three weeks time, he repeated, trying to sound like the George Segal character in To Die For. From today’s story in the NYT:
“These accounting questions [that is, how much of a hole AIG was in because of its position as a counterparty] are of interest not only because taxpayers are footing the bill at A.I.G. but also because the post-mortems may point to a fundamental flaw in the Fed bailout: the money is buoying an insurer — and its trading partners — whose cash needs could easily exceed the existing government backstop if the housing sector continues to deteriorate.
Edward M. Liddy, the insurance executive brought in by the government to restructure A.I.G., has already said that although he does not want to seek more money from the Fed, he may have to do so.”
As I said in my vulture of doom post about the bailout, there is not enough money in all the world to successfully bail out the system. The managers of the great Popping sound (the sound of 100,000 hedge funder penises exploding all at once) have established a nice rhythm for the deathfuck: they come up with a solution and for a month, a relative calm prevails, and then another shoe drops. From last week to this week, the new idea is that the worst is behind us. So the markets go happily upward. But do we have any reason whatsoever to think that counterparties are now protected from the almost sure consequence of housing prices dipping another ten percent? I don’t think so. The write downs have been so many stabs in the dark. Meanwhile, every developed nation has put its government money on the line – a unique event! – to stop the oncoming tide of losing bets. All the money in the world, in other words, is on the line, because more than all the money in the world has been bet. Eventually, many of those bets will simply have to be canceled. Sorry charlie! And as the players don't even know they made the bets - charming megachurch x in San Diego, the school system in Xville, Minnesota, the Icelandic Tuna Fisherman's pension fund, and so on - this will not be happy. As every fan of cheap sadomasochistic entertainment knows, surrender is a long process, but game by game one gets to that final, liquid moment of mutual pain and cumming. It isn’t Wall Street, among the cheesy films of the eighties, that describes the current situation. It is 9 ½ weeks.
“Through spring and summer, the company said it was still gathering information about the swaps and tucked references of widening losses into the footnotes of its financial statements: $11.4 billion at the end of 2007, $20.6 billion at the end of March, $26 billion at the end of June. The company stressed that the losses were theoretical: no cash had actually gone out the door.
“If these aren’t cash losses, why are you having to put up collateral to the counterparties?” Mr. Vickrey asked in a recent interview. The fact that the insurer had to post collateral suggests that the counterparties thought A.I.G.’s swaps losses were greater than disclosed, he said. By midyear, the insurer had been forced to post collateral of $16.5 billion on the swaps.
Though the company has not disclosed how much collateral it has posted since then, its $447 billion portfolio of credit-default swaps could require far more if the economy continues to weaken. More federal assistance would then essentially flow through A.I.G. to counterparties.”
But the Greenspan system seems to have expanded so fast and gotten to such size that it might well engulf all the gains made along the way and then some. A sign of this: the sinking of AIG. Here is a company that is burning its way through 120 billion dollars in 3 weeks time. In three weeks time, he repeated, trying to sound like the George Segal character in To Die For. From today’s story in the NYT:
“These accounting questions [that is, how much of a hole AIG was in because of its position as a counterparty] are of interest not only because taxpayers are footing the bill at A.I.G. but also because the post-mortems may point to a fundamental flaw in the Fed bailout: the money is buoying an insurer — and its trading partners — whose cash needs could easily exceed the existing government backstop if the housing sector continues to deteriorate.
Edward M. Liddy, the insurance executive brought in by the government to restructure A.I.G., has already said that although he does not want to seek more money from the Fed, he may have to do so.”
As I said in my vulture of doom post about the bailout, there is not enough money in all the world to successfully bail out the system. The managers of the great Popping sound (the sound of 100,000 hedge funder penises exploding all at once) have established a nice rhythm for the deathfuck: they come up with a solution and for a month, a relative calm prevails, and then another shoe drops. From last week to this week, the new idea is that the worst is behind us. So the markets go happily upward. But do we have any reason whatsoever to think that counterparties are now protected from the almost sure consequence of housing prices dipping another ten percent? I don’t think so. The write downs have been so many stabs in the dark. Meanwhile, every developed nation has put its government money on the line – a unique event! – to stop the oncoming tide of losing bets. All the money in the world, in other words, is on the line, because more than all the money in the world has been bet. Eventually, many of those bets will simply have to be canceled. Sorry charlie! And as the players don't even know they made the bets - charming megachurch x in San Diego, the school system in Xville, Minnesota, the Icelandic Tuna Fisherman's pension fund, and so on - this will not be happy. As every fan of cheap sadomasochistic entertainment knows, surrender is a long process, but game by game one gets to that final, liquid moment of mutual pain and cumming. It isn’t Wall Street, among the cheesy films of the eighties, that describes the current situation. It is 9 ½ weeks.
“Through spring and summer, the company said it was still gathering information about the swaps and tucked references of widening losses into the footnotes of its financial statements: $11.4 billion at the end of 2007, $20.6 billion at the end of March, $26 billion at the end of June. The company stressed that the losses were theoretical: no cash had actually gone out the door.
“If these aren’t cash losses, why are you having to put up collateral to the counterparties?” Mr. Vickrey asked in a recent interview. The fact that the insurer had to post collateral suggests that the counterparties thought A.I.G.’s swaps losses were greater than disclosed, he said. By midyear, the insurer had been forced to post collateral of $16.5 billion on the swaps.
Though the company has not disclosed how much collateral it has posted since then, its $447 billion portfolio of credit-default swaps could require far more if the economy continues to weaken. More federal assistance would then essentially flow through A.I.G. to counterparties.”
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Answers to All Your Election Questions
LI has found the leftist reaction (for instance, here ) to Obama this election season a little… puzzling.
LI has no qualms about wanting Obama to be president than John McCain. If I made a checklist that included Iraq, Iran, unemployment benefits, dealing with the recession, health care, the environment, Obama would score a 100 against McCain. Hell, if I made the same checklist and contrasted Palin and McCain, Palin would score well above her erstwhile partner. Palin’s lack of experience – that is, her non-processing by the DC factory of conventional wisdom, is a point in her favor. Right, she does wear hick resentment like a uniform, but when she is on her own, making a choice, often her common sense wins out over her talking points. For instance, there’s the cute mistake she made a week ago, in denouncing Obama’s stated policy to talk with Iran without preconditions, when she explained herself by confusing “preconditions’ with “preparations” – coming out solidly against meeting Ahmadinejad without the latter. This was just used to laugh at her ignorance; but I laugh that she naturally locates herself in the Obama camp.
So, the uninteresting political question at the moment is who to vote for. The more interesting question is asking: how can one operate on the conditions of reality at the moment when reality takes a left turn?
Here, it is revealing to contrast the scene that will await Obama’s presidency with that which awaited Clinton’s. Clinton, too, was elected during a recession. But, in distinction from the recession of 2008-, the recession of 1991-1993 did not fundamentally alter the structure of neo-liberal hegemony. Quite the contrary. Stage two of that hegemony was launching at that very moment – the true explosion of the financial sector. Plus, there was the tech bubble – which came about due to the convergence of two things: the socialistic largesse that had allowed a generation of Americans to get relatively cheap secondary schooling at public colleges and universities in the seventies and, partly, in the eighties – and the Reagonomics that had made the U.S. the primary target for foreign investment among the nations of the world.
Given these two factors, Clinton, during the course of his administration, came to think that there was a space for a “left” Reagonomics, a progressive neo-liberalism.
I don’t think that is the situation at present. I am guessing that neo-liberalism has no more cards up its sleeves. And that means that the very structure of it is under assault at the moment.
As I pointed out in my mangle of equality post, neo-liberalism became the dominant policy paradigm in tandem with the expansion of the financial services sector because the latter allowed it political viability.
If I were to pinpoint the launch point for neo-liberalism, it would be 1974. Duncan Campbell-Smith’s review of a book on the history of mutual funds says it well:
The massive switch from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution pensions based on private plans, fully launched by 1974, helped turn mutuals into a household word: they accounted by 2006 for about half of all assets in individual retirement accounts.
This is a shift that should loom symbolically large in any account of the shift from the Keynesian golden years to the years of Reagan and Thatcher. There is a sad little myth that floats around lefty circles that explains the rightward tendency of voters who are working and middle class to be all about cultural, as opposed to economic, values. It is all, we are told, a trick of GOP smoke and mirrors, and if these folks knew their real interests (which are, absurdly, supposed to be separate from their cultural interests), they would never have voted for the nasty Republicans. As we said in the mangle of equality post, this explanation doesn’t hold water. There, we emphasized the free rider aspect of Republican voting. If I vote for x, who wants to lower taxes and gut medicare, I can be pretty sure that lowering taxes will happen, and gutting medicare won’t. Thus, I get to luxuriate in a symbolic vote against big government while continuing to enjoy the benefits of big government. And I get a tax break. However, free riding isn’t the whole story.
The whole story begins with the familiar basics – the crushing of labor’s bargaining power, the decline of household incomes, the extrusion of a second earner into the labor pool, etc. But into this story comes the financial sector, in two ways: first, of course, is the extension of credit as it has never been extended before. But the other part of the story is a story of investment. And here, there is a slight paradox. Let’s say x company does its best to curb the benefits going to its workforce: truckers, middle managers, secretaries, whatever. And let’s say this increases its return on investment, sending its stock price higher. Now, it is possible that the workforce so effected, being pretty much forced to invest and – as is usually the case – settling for investing in the company, benefit from that increase in stock price. Think of it as a sort of mad bet on your own impoverishment. If the bet is such that the margin you gain from the bet exceeds the margin of your immiseration, you’ve gained from the bet.
The system of such bets was, in fact, what made coddling investors a politically advantageous position. It made households accept a world in which, relative to the wealthy, they were falling behind.
The crazy logic of this – borrowing on the one hand, investing on the other – has been dealt a double blow by the zona. One should never bet that the neo-liberal order doesn’t have another trick up its sleeve, but LI is going to boldly suppose that it doesn’t. What does that mean?
We see two options. Either, households will have to rely on that rustiest of tools – organized labor bargaining power – to wrest a fairer share of productivity gains from the investors – or they are going to have to cheapen their living costs. The first option, although it dances like a sugarplum dressed like Vladimir Lenin in my head, is I think a no-go. The second option, however, would entail unimaginable social democratic gestures by the government, from taking over health care costs to lowering the costs of secondary education to getting involved in improving American infrastructure.
This, then, is how I see the conditions for liberal politics at the moment.
LI has no qualms about wanting Obama to be president than John McCain. If I made a checklist that included Iraq, Iran, unemployment benefits, dealing with the recession, health care, the environment, Obama would score a 100 against McCain. Hell, if I made the same checklist and contrasted Palin and McCain, Palin would score well above her erstwhile partner. Palin’s lack of experience – that is, her non-processing by the DC factory of conventional wisdom, is a point in her favor. Right, she does wear hick resentment like a uniform, but when she is on her own, making a choice, often her common sense wins out over her talking points. For instance, there’s the cute mistake she made a week ago, in denouncing Obama’s stated policy to talk with Iran without preconditions, when she explained herself by confusing “preconditions’ with “preparations” – coming out solidly against meeting Ahmadinejad without the latter. This was just used to laugh at her ignorance; but I laugh that she naturally locates herself in the Obama camp.
So, the uninteresting political question at the moment is who to vote for. The more interesting question is asking: how can one operate on the conditions of reality at the moment when reality takes a left turn?
Here, it is revealing to contrast the scene that will await Obama’s presidency with that which awaited Clinton’s. Clinton, too, was elected during a recession. But, in distinction from the recession of 2008-, the recession of 1991-1993 did not fundamentally alter the structure of neo-liberal hegemony. Quite the contrary. Stage two of that hegemony was launching at that very moment – the true explosion of the financial sector. Plus, there was the tech bubble – which came about due to the convergence of two things: the socialistic largesse that had allowed a generation of Americans to get relatively cheap secondary schooling at public colleges and universities in the seventies and, partly, in the eighties – and the Reagonomics that had made the U.S. the primary target for foreign investment among the nations of the world.
Given these two factors, Clinton, during the course of his administration, came to think that there was a space for a “left” Reagonomics, a progressive neo-liberalism.
I don’t think that is the situation at present. I am guessing that neo-liberalism has no more cards up its sleeves. And that means that the very structure of it is under assault at the moment.
As I pointed out in my mangle of equality post, neo-liberalism became the dominant policy paradigm in tandem with the expansion of the financial services sector because the latter allowed it political viability.
If I were to pinpoint the launch point for neo-liberalism, it would be 1974. Duncan Campbell-Smith’s review of a book on the history of mutual funds says it well:
The massive switch from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution pensions based on private plans, fully launched by 1974, helped turn mutuals into a household word: they accounted by 2006 for about half of all assets in individual retirement accounts.
This is a shift that should loom symbolically large in any account of the shift from the Keynesian golden years to the years of Reagan and Thatcher. There is a sad little myth that floats around lefty circles that explains the rightward tendency of voters who are working and middle class to be all about cultural, as opposed to economic, values. It is all, we are told, a trick of GOP smoke and mirrors, and if these folks knew their real interests (which are, absurdly, supposed to be separate from their cultural interests), they would never have voted for the nasty Republicans. As we said in the mangle of equality post, this explanation doesn’t hold water. There, we emphasized the free rider aspect of Republican voting. If I vote for x, who wants to lower taxes and gut medicare, I can be pretty sure that lowering taxes will happen, and gutting medicare won’t. Thus, I get to luxuriate in a symbolic vote against big government while continuing to enjoy the benefits of big government. And I get a tax break. However, free riding isn’t the whole story.
The whole story begins with the familiar basics – the crushing of labor’s bargaining power, the decline of household incomes, the extrusion of a second earner into the labor pool, etc. But into this story comes the financial sector, in two ways: first, of course, is the extension of credit as it has never been extended before. But the other part of the story is a story of investment. And here, there is a slight paradox. Let’s say x company does its best to curb the benefits going to its workforce: truckers, middle managers, secretaries, whatever. And let’s say this increases its return on investment, sending its stock price higher. Now, it is possible that the workforce so effected, being pretty much forced to invest and – as is usually the case – settling for investing in the company, benefit from that increase in stock price. Think of it as a sort of mad bet on your own impoverishment. If the bet is such that the margin you gain from the bet exceeds the margin of your immiseration, you’ve gained from the bet.
The system of such bets was, in fact, what made coddling investors a politically advantageous position. It made households accept a world in which, relative to the wealthy, they were falling behind.
The crazy logic of this – borrowing on the one hand, investing on the other – has been dealt a double blow by the zona. One should never bet that the neo-liberal order doesn’t have another trick up its sleeve, but LI is going to boldly suppose that it doesn’t. What does that mean?
We see two options. Either, households will have to rely on that rustiest of tools – organized labor bargaining power – to wrest a fairer share of productivity gains from the investors – or they are going to have to cheapen their living costs. The first option, although it dances like a sugarplum dressed like Vladimir Lenin in my head, is I think a no-go. The second option, however, would entail unimaginable social democratic gestures by the government, from taking over health care costs to lowering the costs of secondary education to getting involved in improving American infrastructure.
This, then, is how I see the conditions for liberal politics at the moment.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The Less-than-Perfect Shame Machine
LI has been meditating on Ruwen Ogien’s article on “diffuse sanctions” for the past couple days. We have seen more and more in this article. Perhaps we should translate the entire thing. Maybe we should write to Ogien. Maybe he has been translated.
Ruwen’s comments on the “informal moral sphere”, which he uses interchangeably with the “domain of interaction”, helps us a great deal in thinking about one of the great puzzles of happiness – how did happiness ever become a collective passion? How did it happen that, in the eighteenth century, men and women started to dream of the happy community? And how could they ignore a social fact that stared them in the face every day – that often, the happiness of one person is the direct cause of the unhappiness of another person?
To get back to Ogien – Ogien begins with Durkheim’s notion that “sanctions” form a continuum. Whether the sanction is informal, such as being laughed at, or formal, such as being imprisoned, what (negative) sanctions necessarily entail is punishment. This isn’t to say that every legal breach is punished – only that, in theory, the state has to punish criminals. That is involved in the very notion of crime. A crime that encoded no punishment would not be a crime. A criminal could, on the other hand, be pardoned – but the pardon wouldn’t separate crime from punishment in general, but would plead some special instance. In other words, there is a necessary bond between crime and punishment.
Ogien, rather brilliantly, suggests that this is where Durkheim went wrong. Because the legal sanction includes this necessary relation, Durkheim assumes – as he must, if sanctions are simply a continuum – that informal moral sanctions also contain this necessary tie.
Ogien contends that they don’t. Rather, informal moral sanctions are synthetic. If the victim of some shamemaking gesture does not feel shame, does not manufacture within him or herself the appropriate sentiment, the informal sanction fails. Notice, this isn’t true of a crime – the punishment of the crime does not depend on the manufacture of any particular sentiment on the part of the criminal. There is an informal dimension to punishment – the notion that the criminal should repent. But this is separate from the punishment inherent in being judged a criminal.
Ogien casts a wider net for sanctions, which can include positive sanctions in the domain of interaction – praise, for instance.
Now, this is the thing about the informal moral sphere – the sanctions are always synthetic, and thus depend on a certain sentimental education. And that education can go awry – in fact, as nineteenth century psychology and twentieth century psychoanalysis teaches, possibly, it always goes awry. It is more than possible that praise, for instance, can bring up shame in the person so praised. Dostoevsky might have called this whim, Freud neurosis. And Herder would see, here, the ambiguous passage of Nemesis.
Ogien extends his point with an image: the difference between the state’s punishment machines and shame machines. I’ll end here, with an extensive quote from Ogien:
The blamer can count on the fact that this sarcasm will impose itself, but he will never be entirely certain of that. And this incertitude is not a matter of his lack of imagination, nor of the feebleness of the means he possesses. The best organized of police can’t ever guarantee the execution of a punishment if that punishment is shame. And the most satanic pedagogue would have a great deal of trouble to invent a machine to make shame or a dispositif capable of producing it with certainty.
Of course, we can’t say we are lacking in fertile imaginations that have conjured up modes (dispositifs) of diabolical punishments. Lichtenberg, Kafka, Foucault (among others) have given us frightening illustrations of our capacity for imagining the worst for our neighbors: but one shouldn’t think that this is a question of anything other than some horrible utopias. None of these modes could guarantee the effect produced, and this is rather happy.
It is precisely this incertitude in the relation between blame and punishment which gives diffuse sanctions their non-necessary character – synthetic, or casual. Between blame and diffuse punishment (all together: sarcastic remarks, laughs of the audience, shame of the victim, for instance), the relationship is only probable.
However, nothing forbids us from going further in the dissociation, and affirming that the relation between blame and diffuse punishment escapes all regularity and by the same way all possibility of causal analysis. If one wants to be convinced of this, it is sufficient to return to what Kant says of laughter and the difficulty of discovering means to excite it among rational men: “Voltaire said that heaven has given us two means to counterbalance the multiple pains of life: hope and sleep. He might have added laughter, if the means to excite it among reasonable people were easy to discover.”
The enigma of the causality of laughter is as deep as that of the causality of shame (or of every other form of moral sentiment – humiliation, indignation). And it is as difficult, it seems to me, to conceive of a good shame-making machine as one that is efficiently laugh-making. (600)
Ruwen’s comments on the “informal moral sphere”, which he uses interchangeably with the “domain of interaction”, helps us a great deal in thinking about one of the great puzzles of happiness – how did happiness ever become a collective passion? How did it happen that, in the eighteenth century, men and women started to dream of the happy community? And how could they ignore a social fact that stared them in the face every day – that often, the happiness of one person is the direct cause of the unhappiness of another person?
To get back to Ogien – Ogien begins with Durkheim’s notion that “sanctions” form a continuum. Whether the sanction is informal, such as being laughed at, or formal, such as being imprisoned, what (negative) sanctions necessarily entail is punishment. This isn’t to say that every legal breach is punished – only that, in theory, the state has to punish criminals. That is involved in the very notion of crime. A crime that encoded no punishment would not be a crime. A criminal could, on the other hand, be pardoned – but the pardon wouldn’t separate crime from punishment in general, but would plead some special instance. In other words, there is a necessary bond between crime and punishment.
Ogien, rather brilliantly, suggests that this is where Durkheim went wrong. Because the legal sanction includes this necessary relation, Durkheim assumes – as he must, if sanctions are simply a continuum – that informal moral sanctions also contain this necessary tie.
Ogien contends that they don’t. Rather, informal moral sanctions are synthetic. If the victim of some shamemaking gesture does not feel shame, does not manufacture within him or herself the appropriate sentiment, the informal sanction fails. Notice, this isn’t true of a crime – the punishment of the crime does not depend on the manufacture of any particular sentiment on the part of the criminal. There is an informal dimension to punishment – the notion that the criminal should repent. But this is separate from the punishment inherent in being judged a criminal.
Ogien casts a wider net for sanctions, which can include positive sanctions in the domain of interaction – praise, for instance.
Now, this is the thing about the informal moral sphere – the sanctions are always synthetic, and thus depend on a certain sentimental education. And that education can go awry – in fact, as nineteenth century psychology and twentieth century psychoanalysis teaches, possibly, it always goes awry. It is more than possible that praise, for instance, can bring up shame in the person so praised. Dostoevsky might have called this whim, Freud neurosis. And Herder would see, here, the ambiguous passage of Nemesis.
Ogien extends his point with an image: the difference between the state’s punishment machines and shame machines. I’ll end here, with an extensive quote from Ogien:
The blamer can count on the fact that this sarcasm will impose itself, but he will never be entirely certain of that. And this incertitude is not a matter of his lack of imagination, nor of the feebleness of the means he possesses. The best organized of police can’t ever guarantee the execution of a punishment if that punishment is shame. And the most satanic pedagogue would have a great deal of trouble to invent a machine to make shame or a dispositif capable of producing it with certainty.
Of course, we can’t say we are lacking in fertile imaginations that have conjured up modes (dispositifs) of diabolical punishments. Lichtenberg, Kafka, Foucault (among others) have given us frightening illustrations of our capacity for imagining the worst for our neighbors: but one shouldn’t think that this is a question of anything other than some horrible utopias. None of these modes could guarantee the effect produced, and this is rather happy.
It is precisely this incertitude in the relation between blame and punishment which gives diffuse sanctions their non-necessary character – synthetic, or casual. Between blame and diffuse punishment (all together: sarcastic remarks, laughs of the audience, shame of the victim, for instance), the relationship is only probable.
However, nothing forbids us from going further in the dissociation, and affirming that the relation between blame and diffuse punishment escapes all regularity and by the same way all possibility of causal analysis. If one wants to be convinced of this, it is sufficient to return to what Kant says of laughter and the difficulty of discovering means to excite it among rational men: “Voltaire said that heaven has given us two means to counterbalance the multiple pains of life: hope and sleep. He might have added laughter, if the means to excite it among reasonable people were easy to discover.”
The enigma of the causality of laughter is as deep as that of the causality of shame (or of every other form of moral sentiment – humiliation, indignation). And it is as difficult, it seems to me, to conceive of a good shame-making machine as one that is efficiently laugh-making. (600)
Monday, October 27, 2008
Two divas
LI has lagged the Brit news. And what news! First, the trumped up charges against her for driving without a license, taken to a jury trial – I’ll say it again, a jury trial – by an out of control LA D.A.’s office were eviscerated by the common sense of ten jurors, who, alas, couldn’t persuade the ringer. And then, quite rightly, there was the triumph of Ms. Spears for her Piece of Me video at the MTV awards – the scene of her moment of authenticity last year, when she decided to wander around and make the lipsynching plain, shed the burden of the Mickey Mouse club, of a decade of numbers that she could no longer tolerate – shades of Brecht in her mind - all of which initiated the crazy Brit meme in the press, the panic in the industry. So her return is good news for us Britneyologists, right? Well, the rule of thumb here is to remember that we see now as in a glass darkly. Years from now, Spears is going to look back at this “crazy” interval as her most creative year. As for her return…
Well, Womanizer. It is a return of sorts. Her controllers obviously scotched the more interesting song to her moron ex, childsnatcher, which I would have loved to see and which would have been fabulous Spears. Fuck. Britney begins naked, which made the news. Britney naked is a regular news standby. She does some good clothes and wigs, the trademark hair whipping, the song has a great beat and the chorus repeats womanizer enough to burn it lightly into the brain cells after repeated viewings.
It made me go back into the Spears video archive to try to figure out if they have ever let her have a voice. One of the excellent things about Piece of Me is that Spears voice, briefly, emerges. It even does in Gimme More. More naked than Brit in the sauna in Womanizer is the voice of Brit going It’s Britney, bitch. Without any adjustment! As her driver’s license tells us, this is a gal from Louisiana. A place I happen to have lived in. Northern Louisiana. Spears long ago lost that voice in the place you go to to you’re your voice – California – but, hopelessly, the true Britophile waits to hear just a hint of the real voice. My stint listening to Britney Spear’s hits past, I understood that … that her voice has become a very Aristotelian vacuum, which nature fears, and those paragons of anti-nature, music producers, love. Because it has no quality that would interfere with the voice that they want to create. Into the vacuum of her voice in Womanizer, they have layered and edited and created a voice that is even, at points, vaguely and jarringly British.
There is something magnetic, however, about Britney Spears acceptance of this kind of thing – she is so infinitely malleable that I think she might be prophetic, interplanetary, a figure from the future. Her voice has as smoothly slipped the bonds of biology and history as her face, hair and body did. There are no norms for Britney Spears.
… And on the other side of the Atlantic, Ysa Ferrer. Ysa’s new video, Faire l’amour, is taken from the imaginaire pur album, which I believe has now launched. And LI’s lucky French readers can catch her on tour, at the Nouvelle Eve on November 7 and 8. After Obama is elected!
Also, like Britney, Ysa is doing some nude stuff for this album – if you want to see YSA FERRER NUDE (always good for a few hits, that), check this out. I admit Ysa’s lovarium idea of a parallel universe is like a bad Arsan novel, but what can I say? it is also as irresistible as she is. Similarly, I can’t knock an album with Bi or Not to Bi, but I think it is unfortunate that Ysa chose on fait l’amour as the ‘bullet” for her tour. Frankly, it is not worthy of Ysa. Great beat, but the lyrics make me cringe. And the video – unlike the live videos released for To bi or not to bi – lack that charming mixture of silliness and cabaret. Compare this to this , (the handmotions to Made in Japan kill me. They just kill me). Plus, the Ysa of my dreams is always sloping into the arms of her athletically gay dancers, or being lifted up by them, or standing on them. As is proper for a manga girl. Now, I’m not going to knock the sequence with the makeup girl who powders her bosom, and who she later blurrily ‘makes love” to. But I’m a little disappointed in the tour's turnout vid.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Diffuse Sanctions
Jeanne Becu, known to history as Madame du Barry, was presented to Louis XV’s court on April 23, 1769. The king was sixty. His old mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was dead. Long before she died, she had become his procurer, along with his valet, finding an endless stream of girls for his majesty to have sex with. Oddly enough, given this history, Louis seemed to be enchanted and surprised by Jeanne’s sexual prowess. Who'd have thought the innocent with the girlish voice would know so many bed tricks? Jeanne herself was a former servant and window dresser. She’d caught the eye of a certain Jean du Barry, a minor nobleman and a major pimp. She was his ticket, the best thing he’d ever bet on.
The King’s highest official, Duc de Choiseul, cordially detested Jeanne – or rather, uncordially. That she was a peasant and that her mother was a servant made it impossible for him to like having to tolerate her presence at Versailles. More than that, though, he detested her pimp. Choiseul had met Jeanne before the king had encountered her. She’d come to his office to beg, on behalf of Jean du Barry, for the contracts supplying the government in its pacification of Corsica, a major source of graft. Choiseul, after the disaster of the Seven Years War, had been trying to stamp out graft, which, he correctly saw, was destroying the monarchy.
Given Choiseul’s disgust, his strategy was clear. Paris began to fill with anonymous pamphlets about Jeanne Becu. Choiseul had access to the police file on Jeanne, which was ample. A obscene song about her went the rounds, and was even sung at Versailles.
Choiseul overreached. The King was infatuated. Eventually, Jeanne won the tug of war. The Duc de Choiseul was exiled to his estate near Toulouse. Jeanne and her corrupt cronies had the ear of the King. Louis’ popularity plummeted even further. Du Barry prefigured Marie Antoinette - although the later couldn't stand the former, and had her put in a nunnery after the King her lover died.
Now, here’s the question. From the sociological point of view: what was the meaning of those libels, that song?
This question may seem at some distant disjuncture from our current thread about Nemesis. Bear with us.
In an excellent essay (Sanctions diffuses. Sarcasmes, rires, mépris)
in the Revue française de sociologie, (1990, Volume 31: 4), Ruwen Ogien goes back to a distinction between diffuse and organized social sanctions made by Durkheim in the Rules of Sociological Method, and goes forward to Goffman’s interactionism, to help us understand laughter as a social phenomenon.
Durkheim’s example of a diffuse sanction is, indeed, the laugh. “If, in dressing myself, I paid no attention to the usages followed in my country and class, the laughter that I would provoke, the distance at which I would be held, produces, even if in an attenuated manner, the same effects as a penalty (peine).
Ogien thinks that Durkheim’s notion is good, even if he doesn’t make enough of it himself. There is an informal moral economy, which Ogien thinks has some commonality with Goffman’s domain of interactions. In Durkheim’s view, the laugh and the prison are two degrees on the same continuum of the sanction. The diffuse sanction is applied without “the mediation of a constituted and defined body.” The organized one is applied by such bodies.
Ruwen writes:
“Thus, Durkheim’s diffuse sanctions circumscribe a system of rights and responsibilities distinct from the Law and Morality and permitting us to identify a quite specific name that we only have to name.”
Because we can make predictions about the informal moral sphere, we can operate on it. In fact, this is what Choiseul’s strategy depended on. Court societies – and fragments of court societies, such as the social circles described by Proust - are factories of the diffuse sanction. It is when the interaction becomes dense, heavy with hints and rules, that we see our three familiar figures, the adventurer, the politician, and the writer begin to merge.
Nemesis has a home outside the breast. It has a footing.
More on this in a later post.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Social Darwinist Rats Leave Ship - Dog bits Man
We have probably expressed the opinion in the past – LI is nothing if not copiously opinionated – that James Buchan is the best writer on money who we have ever read. Not the best theorist, mind – he doesn’t try to compete in the heavy lifting department - but the best essayist. We missed his review of Neill Ferguson’s new book in praise of lucre, when it came out last week. That was a mistake.
Now, the truth is we have a sneaking liking for Ferguson, bloody imperialist and Thatcherite that he is. His history of the British Empire, which makes a stout attempt to defend that worldwide pillage on the premise that it was made on behalf of civilization – with the pillagers blindly creating a better world as they thought they were creating their own fortunes - makes the best case for colonialism that can currently be made. In the end, of course, it suffers from that foundational problem which Jesus, a carpenter and thus eminently familiar with construction specs, once pointed: a house built on sand cannot stand. Similarly, while the benefit to the UK of destroying the Indian textile industry, dispossessing the Amerindian nations, selling massive amounts of opium to the Chinese, exporting 6 million Africans into slavery and all the rest of it might be argued for, it is difficult to see why three cheers should emanate from the victims. Victims are stubborn like that.
Buchan notices that Ferguson’s new book, The Ascent of Money, is not very good until it reaches the nineteenth century… ah, but such a swift summary makes a sober porridge of Buchan’s acerbic prose, which has to be quoted for itself:
“Ferguson's reputation is so high that if he were a stock one would short him. The very title of his book, The Ascent of Money, is a screaming sell signal, like the shoe-shine boys trading stock tips at the door to Grand Central Station in New York in 1929. In fairness, Ferguson recognises that and his pages are hot with proof-stage tyre-marks, as he goes into violent reverse to escape from under collapsing arguments. None the less, his book is very readable indeed and the television series for which it is a sort of trailer, will, I am sure, be even better.
Ferguson believes money was invented to record and discharge debts, and he passes rather quickly on to the rise of banking in the Middle Ages, the issue by governments of annuities and other bonds, the origins of insurance and the establishment of joint-stock companies. As with all economist-historians, Ferguson's soul is at war with itself. History tells him there is such a thing as history. Economics tells him there is none, for everything is always and ever subject to unvarying laws (which just happened not to be discovered till the other day).
The result is that the book is not very interesting until it approaches our times. No philologer, Ferguson assumes pecunia means money in the sense that money means money. His account of the rococo Scottish financier John Law and his Banque Royale of 1719-20, based on no source older than 1969 and none in French, shows absolutely no feeling whatever for the character of his great countryman or the manners and laws of the French regency.
Yet Ferguson really understands the Rothschilds, and the 19th century in general, and he writes a long and marvellous chapter on the growth of house ownership as a civic right and the rise of mortgage finance. It was the depression itself that created the home-owning ideology and the credit institutions to pay for it, such as the Federal National Mortgage Association or Fanny Mae (which has just had to be rescued).”
As Buchan drily notes, Ferguson, in one of those sentences in which (as often happens with him) the historian is ambushed by the pundit, assures the reader that : "The only species that is now close to extinction in the developed world is the state-owned bank." This, of course, is “the precise reverse of observable reality.”
Which, of course, is where Ferguson ends up, much of the time. In a funny, violent tyre reversing in today's Guardian interview with him, he has just backed out of his support for the invasion of Iraq. And even gives the heave ho to John McCain, who he was advising this spring. However, since Ferguson believes ardently in the Social Darwinist gospel of the struggle for existence, it is perhaps not unexpected that he'd put a knife today in the positions he espoused yesterday. He is not going down, if he can help it, on anybody's ship.
Now, the truth is we have a sneaking liking for Ferguson, bloody imperialist and Thatcherite that he is. His history of the British Empire, which makes a stout attempt to defend that worldwide pillage on the premise that it was made on behalf of civilization – with the pillagers blindly creating a better world as they thought they were creating their own fortunes - makes the best case for colonialism that can currently be made. In the end, of course, it suffers from that foundational problem which Jesus, a carpenter and thus eminently familiar with construction specs, once pointed: a house built on sand cannot stand. Similarly, while the benefit to the UK of destroying the Indian textile industry, dispossessing the Amerindian nations, selling massive amounts of opium to the Chinese, exporting 6 million Africans into slavery and all the rest of it might be argued for, it is difficult to see why three cheers should emanate from the victims. Victims are stubborn like that.
Buchan notices that Ferguson’s new book, The Ascent of Money, is not very good until it reaches the nineteenth century… ah, but such a swift summary makes a sober porridge of Buchan’s acerbic prose, which has to be quoted for itself:
“Ferguson's reputation is so high that if he were a stock one would short him. The very title of his book, The Ascent of Money, is a screaming sell signal, like the shoe-shine boys trading stock tips at the door to Grand Central Station in New York in 1929. In fairness, Ferguson recognises that and his pages are hot with proof-stage tyre-marks, as he goes into violent reverse to escape from under collapsing arguments. None the less, his book is very readable indeed and the television series for which it is a sort of trailer, will, I am sure, be even better.
Ferguson believes money was invented to record and discharge debts, and he passes rather quickly on to the rise of banking in the Middle Ages, the issue by governments of annuities and other bonds, the origins of insurance and the establishment of joint-stock companies. As with all economist-historians, Ferguson's soul is at war with itself. History tells him there is such a thing as history. Economics tells him there is none, for everything is always and ever subject to unvarying laws (which just happened not to be discovered till the other day).
The result is that the book is not very interesting until it approaches our times. No philologer, Ferguson assumes pecunia means money in the sense that money means money. His account of the rococo Scottish financier John Law and his Banque Royale of 1719-20, based on no source older than 1969 and none in French, shows absolutely no feeling whatever for the character of his great countryman or the manners and laws of the French regency.
Yet Ferguson really understands the Rothschilds, and the 19th century in general, and he writes a long and marvellous chapter on the growth of house ownership as a civic right and the rise of mortgage finance. It was the depression itself that created the home-owning ideology and the credit institutions to pay for it, such as the Federal National Mortgage Association or Fanny Mae (which has just had to be rescued).”
As Buchan drily notes, Ferguson, in one of those sentences in which (as often happens with him) the historian is ambushed by the pundit, assures the reader that : "The only species that is now close to extinction in the developed world is the state-owned bank." This, of course, is “the precise reverse of observable reality.”
Which, of course, is where Ferguson ends up, much of the time. In a funny, violent tyre reversing in today's Guardian interview with him, he has just backed out of his support for the invasion of Iraq. And even gives the heave ho to John McCain, who he was advising this spring. However, since Ferguson believes ardently in the Social Darwinist gospel of the struggle for existence, it is perhaps not unexpected that he'd put a knife today in the positions he espoused yesterday. He is not going down, if he can help it, on anybody's ship.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Irrevocability: hope of mankind (Nemesis again)
LI has been considering Chamfort in the light of Herder’s Nemesis not simply because Chamfort is another late Enlightenment writer, but because both Herder and Chamfort would seem, by their intellectual silhouettes, to be the kind who would go easily into the anti-revolutionary column. Herder with his doubts about the enlightenment “man”; Chamfort with his ferocious pessimism.
Yet neither were reactionaries. Herder never renounced the revolution, but retired from all comment upon it after the Terror. And Chamfort…
Well, Chamfort threw himself, body and soul, into the revolution. He impoverished himself, he wrote speeches for Mirabeau and Tallyrand, he, it is said, suggested the title for Sieyes critical pamphlet (Qu' est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? Tout. Qu'a-t-il? Rien) which neatly summarizes what, actually, all modern political revolutions are about – the struggle between what is really All – the working class – and its false political position – what does it have? Nothing.
A title that is echoed in one of Chamfort’s maxims:
“Me, all; the rest, none: thus it is with despotism, aristocracy, and their partisans. Me, this is an other; an other, this is me: thus it is with the popular regime and its partisans. After this, decide yourself.”
That Chamfort the pessimist, Chamfort the executioner of the Enlightenment smile of reason, was also Chamfort the revolutionary, Chamfort the anti-monarchist, this became the paradox that stuck in the throats of the reactionary writers in the 19th century, up to and including Nietzsche. They took comfort in the lineaments of a monstrous Chamfort conjured up by his sotie, his double, the charming salon reactionary Antoine de Rivarol, who, before the revolution, ran in the same circles as Chamfort, wrote for the same journals, cultivated the same leisurely cynicism. Afterwards, in exile, he became Chamfort’s most bitter critic, and it is from his pen that flowed the rumors and scandals about Chamfort that created his reputation in the 19th century as a sell out of the philosophes, a nihilists, a revanchist who, not content with the epigram, picked up the guillotine at the first opportunity. But Rivarol was not the only one of Chamfort's companions to be shocked: Chamfort seemed to especially burn the anti-revolutionary crowd, who saw in him one of themselves. He was the philosophe who went ultra. Into the bushes. Unlike Tallyrand, whose motives seemed transparent – greed – Chamfort seemed to have reached his conclusions coherently; he seemed to have thought they unfolded from his dethronement of God and his corrosive view of man. There was, in the reactionary view, a pit even under cynicism, and Chamfort was its guardian devil. Thus, among the conspiracy minded among them (and the exiles from the French revolution were massively inclined to theories of conspiracy – De Quincey rightly compared their visions to that of an opium smokers) Chamfort must be accounted for as a kind of intellectual criminal master mind. After all, it was Chamfort who came up with the slogan that smelled of blood and jacquerie: War on the castles! Peace to the huts! (Guerre aux chateaux! Paix aux chaumieres!) under which, in effect, the countryside of France seemed to be reorganized. In 1810, Marmontel, an old litterateur, publishes his memoirs and includes an anecdote about Chamfort – long dead, of course, by 1810, another victim of the Terror. I’ll quote from Pellison’s biography:
‘The passage is curious – we have to cite it. When Marmontel objected to Chamfort’s reform projects, [saying] that the better part of the nation will not let any attack be carried through on the laws of the country and the fundamental principles of monarchy, he (Chamfort) agreed that, in its foyes, in its counting houses, in its workshops, a good part of the stay at hom citizens would find perhaps that the projects bold enough to trouble their repose and their enjoyments. But, if they disapprove, that will not, he said, be but timidly and quietly, and one has in had to impose upon them that determined class which has nothing to lose in the change and believes it sees much to gain. In order to organize them into a mob, one has the most powerful motives, famine, hunger, money, alarms and terrors, and the delirium to blaze a path and the rage by which one will strike upon all minds. You have not heard among the bourgeois but the eloquent speakers. Know that all your tribune orators are nothing in comparison with Demosthenes at a quid per head who, in the cabarets, in the public places, on the quais announce the ravages, the arsons, the sacked villages, flooded with blood, the plots to starve Paris. I call those gentlement the eloquent ones. Money principally and the hope of pillage are omnipotent among the people. We are going to make a test of Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And you won’t believe how little it costs the Duc D’Orleans [The rival of King Louis XVI] to have the manufactury of honest Reveillon sacked, which was the living of one hundred families. Mirabeau has gaily upheld the idea that with a thousand Louis D’or one can create quite a pretty insurrection.”
Thus spake Chamfort, the Goldfinger of his time. Evil keeps a book, and ticks off in it just what he will do: destroy the living of a hundred innocents, spread rumors, dethrone culture. Did Chamfort really put the fear of God into Marmontel? The conversation is recorded years after one of the major participants committed a very bloody suicide, so we don’t know what Chamfort did. We don’t know whether this was mockery. The note about the Duc D’Orleans sounds, at least, significantly false, the sort of crackpot notion that all the reactionaries loved. But the more fundamental falsity at the bottom of this is Marmontel's sense that Chamfort is betraying a pact. The pact, unspoken, unwritten, was that those who “came from the people”, the intellectuals, and adhered to the aristocracy even while savaging the superstitions that held back the nation, could never go back to the people. Hence, the place of the Duc D'Orleans -surely Chamfort must be operating on behalf of some powerful figure. The reactionaries had a hard time accepting that a revolution is not a fronde. As Chamfort wrote:
“All who emerge from the class of the people are armed against it to oppress it, from the militia man, the mercant become the secretary to the king, the preacher who comes from a village to preach submission to arbitrary authority, the historian son of a bourgeois, etc. These are Cadmus’ soldiers: the first armed turn against their brother and jump on them.”
Chamfort is one of Cadmus’s soldiers who, to the surprise of all, turns not against his brothers, but strikes at Cadmus the King. There was a part of him that did accept the bitterest consequences of the revolution:
“In the moment that God created the world, the movement of chaos must have made one find the chaos more disorganized than when he rested in the midst of it in its peaceful state. Likewise, among us, the the embarrasment of a society reorganizing itself having to appear as an excess of disorder.”
This is what makes Chamfort stand apart – his notion of the irrevocable is not a nostalgia for what is lost, not a view of the present as an obstacle in our way, but expresses instead the hope that the irrevocable will bury the past, expressed in a language that brings the revolution and Genesis together.
Yet neither were reactionaries. Herder never renounced the revolution, but retired from all comment upon it after the Terror. And Chamfort…
Well, Chamfort threw himself, body and soul, into the revolution. He impoverished himself, he wrote speeches for Mirabeau and Tallyrand, he, it is said, suggested the title for Sieyes critical pamphlet (Qu' est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? Tout. Qu'a-t-il? Rien) which neatly summarizes what, actually, all modern political revolutions are about – the struggle between what is really All – the working class – and its false political position – what does it have? Nothing.
A title that is echoed in one of Chamfort’s maxims:
“Me, all; the rest, none: thus it is with despotism, aristocracy, and their partisans. Me, this is an other; an other, this is me: thus it is with the popular regime and its partisans. After this, decide yourself.”
That Chamfort the pessimist, Chamfort the executioner of the Enlightenment smile of reason, was also Chamfort the revolutionary, Chamfort the anti-monarchist, this became the paradox that stuck in the throats of the reactionary writers in the 19th century, up to and including Nietzsche. They took comfort in the lineaments of a monstrous Chamfort conjured up by his sotie, his double, the charming salon reactionary Antoine de Rivarol, who, before the revolution, ran in the same circles as Chamfort, wrote for the same journals, cultivated the same leisurely cynicism. Afterwards, in exile, he became Chamfort’s most bitter critic, and it is from his pen that flowed the rumors and scandals about Chamfort that created his reputation in the 19th century as a sell out of the philosophes, a nihilists, a revanchist who, not content with the epigram, picked up the guillotine at the first opportunity. But Rivarol was not the only one of Chamfort's companions to be shocked: Chamfort seemed to especially burn the anti-revolutionary crowd, who saw in him one of themselves. He was the philosophe who went ultra. Into the bushes. Unlike Tallyrand, whose motives seemed transparent – greed – Chamfort seemed to have reached his conclusions coherently; he seemed to have thought they unfolded from his dethronement of God and his corrosive view of man. There was, in the reactionary view, a pit even under cynicism, and Chamfort was its guardian devil. Thus, among the conspiracy minded among them (and the exiles from the French revolution were massively inclined to theories of conspiracy – De Quincey rightly compared their visions to that of an opium smokers) Chamfort must be accounted for as a kind of intellectual criminal master mind. After all, it was Chamfort who came up with the slogan that smelled of blood and jacquerie: War on the castles! Peace to the huts! (Guerre aux chateaux! Paix aux chaumieres!) under which, in effect, the countryside of France seemed to be reorganized. In 1810, Marmontel, an old litterateur, publishes his memoirs and includes an anecdote about Chamfort – long dead, of course, by 1810, another victim of the Terror. I’ll quote from Pellison’s biography:
‘The passage is curious – we have to cite it. When Marmontel objected to Chamfort’s reform projects, [saying] that the better part of the nation will not let any attack be carried through on the laws of the country and the fundamental principles of monarchy, he (Chamfort) agreed that, in its foyes, in its counting houses, in its workshops, a good part of the stay at hom citizens would find perhaps that the projects bold enough to trouble their repose and their enjoyments. But, if they disapprove, that will not, he said, be but timidly and quietly, and one has in had to impose upon them that determined class which has nothing to lose in the change and believes it sees much to gain. In order to organize them into a mob, one has the most powerful motives, famine, hunger, money, alarms and terrors, and the delirium to blaze a path and the rage by which one will strike upon all minds. You have not heard among the bourgeois but the eloquent speakers. Know that all your tribune orators are nothing in comparison with Demosthenes at a quid per head who, in the cabarets, in the public places, on the quais announce the ravages, the arsons, the sacked villages, flooded with blood, the plots to starve Paris. I call those gentlement the eloquent ones. Money principally and the hope of pillage are omnipotent among the people. We are going to make a test of Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And you won’t believe how little it costs the Duc D’Orleans [The rival of King Louis XVI] to have the manufactury of honest Reveillon sacked, which was the living of one hundred families. Mirabeau has gaily upheld the idea that with a thousand Louis D’or one can create quite a pretty insurrection.”
Thus spake Chamfort, the Goldfinger of his time. Evil keeps a book, and ticks off in it just what he will do: destroy the living of a hundred innocents, spread rumors, dethrone culture. Did Chamfort really put the fear of God into Marmontel? The conversation is recorded years after one of the major participants committed a very bloody suicide, so we don’t know what Chamfort did. We don’t know whether this was mockery. The note about the Duc D’Orleans sounds, at least, significantly false, the sort of crackpot notion that all the reactionaries loved. But the more fundamental falsity at the bottom of this is Marmontel's sense that Chamfort is betraying a pact. The pact, unspoken, unwritten, was that those who “came from the people”, the intellectuals, and adhered to the aristocracy even while savaging the superstitions that held back the nation, could never go back to the people. Hence, the place of the Duc D'Orleans -surely Chamfort must be operating on behalf of some powerful figure. The reactionaries had a hard time accepting that a revolution is not a fronde. As Chamfort wrote:
“All who emerge from the class of the people are armed against it to oppress it, from the militia man, the mercant become the secretary to the king, the preacher who comes from a village to preach submission to arbitrary authority, the historian son of a bourgeois, etc. These are Cadmus’ soldiers: the first armed turn against their brother and jump on them.”
Chamfort is one of Cadmus’s soldiers who, to the surprise of all, turns not against his brothers, but strikes at Cadmus the King. There was a part of him that did accept the bitterest consequences of the revolution:
“In the moment that God created the world, the movement of chaos must have made one find the chaos more disorganized than when he rested in the midst of it in its peaceful state. Likewise, among us, the the embarrasment of a society reorganizing itself having to appear as an excess of disorder.”
This is what makes Chamfort stand apart – his notion of the irrevocable is not a nostalgia for what is lost, not a view of the present as an obstacle in our way, but expresses instead the hope that the irrevocable will bury the past, expressed in a language that brings the revolution and Genesis together.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
IN THE CROSSFIRE OF THE FASHION SYSTEM
“And now, being received as a member of the amiable family whose portraits we have sketched in the foregoing pages, it became naturally Rebecca's duty to make herself, as she said, agreeable to her benefactors, and to gain their confidence to the utmost of her power. Who can but admire this quality of gratitude in an unprotected orphan; and, if there entered some degree of selfishness into her calculations, who can say but that her prudence was perfectly justifiable? "I am alone in the world," said the friendless girl. "I have nothing to look for but what my own labour can bring me; and while that little pink-faced chit Amelia, with not half my sense, has ten thousand pounds and an establishment secure, poor Rebecca (and my figure is far better than hers) has only herself and her own wits to trust to. Well, let us see if my wits cannot provide me with an honourable maintenance, and if some day or the other I cannot show Miss Amelia my real superiority over her. Not that I dislike poor Amelia: who can dislike such a harmless, good-natured creature?--only it will be a fine day when I can take my place above her in the world, as why, indeed, should I not?" Thus it was that our little romantic friend formed visions of the future for herself.”
LI does not find it shocking that Sarah Palin’s handlers bought her a campaign wardrobe worth $150,000. Becky Sharp was aware from the moment she set foot in Vanity Fair, or rather, in the household of old Pitt Crawley, that the rules were made for her, here. She began under several disadvantages, and if they had had it back in 1812, she would have come in second in the Miss Alaska contest, too. But Becky knew she had a good figure and the wits to know who to please, who to tease and who to crush.
“With Mr. Crawley Miss Sharp was respectful and obedient. She used to consult him on passages of French which she could not understand, though her mother was a Frenchwoman, and which he would construe to her satisfaction: and, besides giving her his aid in profane literature, he was kind enough to select for her books of a more serious tendency, and address to her much of his conversation. She admired, beyond measure, his speech at the Quashimaboo-Aid Society; took an interest in his pamphlet on malt: was often affected, even to tears, by his discourses of an evening, and would say--"Oh, thank you, sir," with a sigh, and a look up to heaven, that made him occasionally condescend to shake hands with her.”
The newspapers and Slate are just fascinated with the wardrobe. For one thing, it gives newspaper people a chance to play the the bluntnosed working journalist, Walter Matthau in the Front Page, as though they were down to a few undershirts in the apartments they rent - so of the people! So we have Marc Fisher of the WAPO writing:
“I've never been to any of the stores listed in Sarah Palin's shopping spree, so the idea that it's possible to spend $5,000 on a dress, $75,000 at Neiman Marcus and $4,716 on hair and makeup is kind of mind-boggling, especially by someone who who portrays herself as being "just like you." But I'm also startled to read about the $1,500 that Barack Obama spent on a suit and the $528 that John McCain spent on his Ferragamo shoes. I don't expect these folks to shop at Payless, but these extravagances are so far at the other end of the scale as to represent nothing but disdain for the people they claim to understand and represent.”
The idea that Marc Fisher has never been to Neiman Marcus is something I find equally as mindboggling. Or Saks. Has the guy been to NYC? Underneath that astonishment that you can spend $5,000 on a dress, we spy Tartuffe, in the aw shucks, captain American mode.
Becky’s foothold in Vanity Fair comes from a vain old man. Becky knows how to follow a rule with vain old men: feed the amour-propre.
Instead of Marc Fisher, we’d urge LI readers to turn to Roland Barthes. In an article in Annales, vol. 12, 1957, Barthes sketched out a theory of the system of clothing that later served as the basis for his book on the fashion system. We’ve been interested in fashion since having worked, this summer, copyediting captions for the Autumn fashion issue of Texas Monthly. That was merely sticking our petit orteil into the vast ocean of la mode, so to speak, but we are not immune to the frisson of retifism, the poetry of the silhouette, and the scented non-sense of the barkers of hip. We understand the divide here: for fashion is all about a certain aura in which the dollar operates as paraphilia, while to those outside the aura, the dollar is, depressingly, only a dollar, a cipher that accumulates to create another cipher.
Barthes’ idea was that he could use the classic Saussurian pattern – parole, or speech act, vs. langage, or the language system – to analyse clothing choice, or habillement, vs. fashion, or coutume.
“The oppositiong costume/habillement can besides only serve the sociological point of view: in strongly characterizing costume as an institution and in spearated that institution from the concrete and individual acts by which, so to speak, it is realized, we are lead to research and to disengage the social components of costume: age groups, sex, class, degree of culture, locales, as much as clothing remains an empirical fact, essentially submitted to a phenomenological approach: the degree of disorder or dirtiness of a vestment being worn, for example, is a fact of clothing, and has not sociological value, save if the disorder and the dirtiness function as intentional signs … and inversely, a fact which takes up apparently less space, like the differential mark of the vestment of married women and young girls in such and such a socity, is a fact of costume: it has a strong social value.
The fact of clothing is constitued by the personal mode that the wearer adopts (or badly adopts)…
The fact of costume is the proper object of sociological or historical research…
Facts of costume and facts of clothing can seem sometimes to coincide, but it isn’t difficult in each case to re-establish the distinction. The squareness of the shoulders, for example, is a fact of clothing when it corresponds exactly to the anatomy of the wearer, but it is a fact of costume when its dimension is prescribed by the group in the name of facsion. It is evident that there is, between clothing and costume, an incessant movement, a dialectical exchange that one could define a propos langue and parole as a true praxis.”
“Your India muslin and your pink silk, dearest Amelia, are said to become me very well. They are a good deal worn now; but, you know, we poor girls can't afford des fraiches toilettes. Happy, happy you! who have but to drive to St. James's Street, and a dear mother who will give you any thing you ask. Farewell, dearest girl,
Your affectionate Rebecca.
P.S.--I wish you could have seen the faces of the Miss Blackbrooks (Admiral Blackbrook's daughters, my dear), fine young ladies, with dresses from London, when Captain Rawdon selected poor me for a partner!”
Taking Barthes division as a starting point, we can immediately see that the 150,000 dollars is a hotpoint because it crosses the wires, so to speak – habillement, which is “proper” to the hockey mom, is crossed with coutume, which costs a bundle and comes from the female mysteries that are beyond Marc Jacob’s ken. To LI, though, the comedy here begins with the notion that the hocky mom is only clothed in clothes. There is a comic soundtrack, made no doubt by a flute, playing whenever Sarah Palin is around – clothing and costume gets all confused. For, before ideology or party, Palin stands for becoming suddenly famous – for celebrity in its purest state is sudden. It is in this way that I understand her frequent lapses into incoherence – they don’t denote a mind that doesn’t think, but one that is thinking all the time of being famous. And there is nothing more trivial, to celebrity, than meaning.
“And so--guiltless very likely--she was writhing and pushing onward towards what they call "a position in society," and the servants were pointing at her as lost and ruined. So you see Molly, the housemaid, of a morning, watching a spider in the doorpost lay his thread and laboriously crawl up it, until, tired of the sport, she raises her broom and sweeps away the thread and the artificer.”
It is not so much Sarah Palin who is the comedian here, but the “C” level press corps, writing the script. Sarah Palin didn’t direct the buying of the clothes, any more than Cate Blanchett would supervise the design of clothing for some movie she was starring in. In Palin’s case, the movie was high concept. It was hockey mom. Nobody, of course, knows what that means. That is the genius of it. Like Dog Detective. Like any mutt that results from crossing one film with another – Gone with the Wind meeting the Exorcist, perhaps. Of all the money the McCain campaign has wasted, they got good value, at least, for the Palin costume. She wears them well – the reds! The boots! To which she has contributed the signature glasses.
So, Sarah Palin has been cast to play Sarah Palin in the role of a hockey mom, with clothes from Nieman Marcus. If only this were all the movie. But, like many a high concept production, the film has only one gimmick to milk over and over again. The gimmick overshadows logic, motivation, and sense. Logic crumbles before FX, but the FX look used, second hand. The McCain campaign movie is a straight to video product. What I wonder is: what Palin will get out of it. I’m bettin’ on her.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Election thoughts
I have quoted this passage from Merezhovsky on Gogol before – but the current election season makes this seem all too relevant:
“Everyone can perceive evil in great violations of the moral law, in rare and unusual misdeeds, in the staggering climaxes of tragedies. Gogl was the first to detect invisible evil, most terrible and enduring, not in tragegy, but in the absence of everything tragic; not in power, but in impotence; not in insane extremes, but in all-too-sensible moderation; not in acuity and profundity, but in inanity and planarity, in the banality of all human feelings and thoughts; not in the gratest things, but in the smallest.” –58
This, of course, describes the American election year to a t.
When, in the holy years of democracy, the revolutionary period from 1776-1793, the election in its modern form was created, the inventors had high hopes. The election was to be the poetry of the people, the highest expression of their choice. And what was their choice? Their choice was to be of their rulers, who would be chosen not as choice was made among court factions – where bribery, family blood lines, and charisma held sway, and the choice was made by the sovereign – but rather, as the will of the people would dictate.
The people’s will is foe to the reactionary and the conservative – who took a long time to understand that the election, far from being the beast unleashed, operated institutionally to skew the popular will righwards. That is, to skew the popular will to the most banal choice. Elections, it turned out, would not be about “ideas” or policies, but about what was and was not out of bounds. What was taboo, or what could be made taboo. The all-too-sensible moderation of the pundits and the devil would preside as the judge of all that was electable. And woe betide the candidate who did not make the first move, which consists of being scandalized by his or her opponent. Rival scandals are what is at issue. And other issues are drowned, or given the once over by an establishment which lives off of denying tragedy – all the unconscious buffoons of the platitudinous.
LI early this spring scoped out this election. What was obvious by March was that the economy was going to fall on its face in the fall – although even LI, ever the dupe of street corner apocalypses, didn’t imagine the zona would blow so hard. This counted out the GOP candidate – or at least made his victory unlikely. Of the Democratic candidates, it was obvious that Hilary Clinton would benefit most from a bleak economy. Since Hilary Clinton has been a consistent warmonger, this was not good news for LI. Luckily, Barak Obama ran a genius campaign – we live close enough to his upset of Clinton not to fully appreciate it. And, LI thought, Obama is essentially a peacemaker. It is how he rose, it is who he is. He would garner fewer votes than Hilary, but he would win.
Well, we still think that Obama is a campaign genius, and we still think he will win, but the election has been disheartening.
Our issue, more than anything else, has been peace. Fuck the idea that middle class Americans are running up against their credit card limits – we are much more interested in the idea that the U.S. won’t be pimping mass murder in Iraq. And, earlier this year, when Obama went to Afghanistan and Iraq, we thought he got it. He got, that is, that the Dems can no longer allow the Republicans to own our foreign policy.
For a long time, the Democratic strategy has been to play possum on foreign policy. A craven me-too-ism, with some progressive dressikng thrown in, has been at the center of Democratic foreign policy views. The D.C.-centric, Truman-esque wing of the party, which has no support among the grassroots, but a powerful army of pundit platitudinists, is the very pivot of foreign policy thinking. The platitudinists, with their usual inability to distinguish cause and effect, moan that the American people distrust the Dems because they are too soft. Of course, the root of the distrust of the Dems on foreign policy is the Vietnam war, which Johnson conducted partly because he didn’t want the Republicans to think he was soft.
Myself, I thought, in spring, that Obama was tempted, oh so tempted, to lay down a few truths. This was when he visited Iraq and Afghanistan. This was when his timetable was accepted by Maliki and swallowed, with grumbling, by the Bush administration.
The truths, of course, are outside the bounds of the sayable. For instance, one of the truths is that the U.S. has been far from the central actor in its own occupation of Iraq. Rather, in the first stage of the war, the Saudis made their move, financing the Sunni insurgency and supplying the bulk of the foreign jihadis. What were the Saudis fighting against? It was a step in the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia – just as Pakistan’s nuclear capacity was a step in the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the Saudi’s paying for the nuclear weapon research. During the second stage of the fight, what the Saudi’s were fighting against came to pass: the hardline Iranian Shi’ite party came to power. The Da’wa party, which has come out on top of the coalition, was forged under Khomeini, and made its mark as Hezbollah’s consistent ally – Hezbollah even conducted a kidnapping campaign in Beirut in the eighties with the goal of freeing the Da’wa thirty, captured in Kuwait. It was on account of that kidnapping campaign that the Reagan administration opened a surreptitious channel to Iran.
These facts are as plain as day to anybody who actually lives in the Middle East, and are the most remote exotica to Americans, who have been systematically buffered from reality by the platitudinarians – although this might well give that later group too much credit for rationality. In truth, the D.C. centered elites really do think they are running the world.
Now, a foreign policy that is in complete disconnect from reality is much like a neurosis – it needs a talking cure. And I thought Obama was just the doctor to deliver one. But no – he calculated, evidently, that this would cost him too much, and entangle him with the cherished delusions of the elite. Instead, Obama has brilliantly campaigned on being scandalized – he has turned a campaign that McCain hoped would concentrate on Obama’s various transgressions into a campaign about the campaign. Liberals are all in an uproar about McCain’s rallies, and Palin’s rhetoric. In other words, this is another election about nothing. Or, rather, an election about inanity and planarity. The devil has won the round.
Nevertheless, we are going to vote tomorrow for Obama. And we are happy to do so.
“Everyone can perceive evil in great violations of the moral law, in rare and unusual misdeeds, in the staggering climaxes of tragedies. Gogl was the first to detect invisible evil, most terrible and enduring, not in tragegy, but in the absence of everything tragic; not in power, but in impotence; not in insane extremes, but in all-too-sensible moderation; not in acuity and profundity, but in inanity and planarity, in the banality of all human feelings and thoughts; not in the gratest things, but in the smallest.” –58
This, of course, describes the American election year to a t.
When, in the holy years of democracy, the revolutionary period from 1776-1793, the election in its modern form was created, the inventors had high hopes. The election was to be the poetry of the people, the highest expression of their choice. And what was their choice? Their choice was to be of their rulers, who would be chosen not as choice was made among court factions – where bribery, family blood lines, and charisma held sway, and the choice was made by the sovereign – but rather, as the will of the people would dictate.
The people’s will is foe to the reactionary and the conservative – who took a long time to understand that the election, far from being the beast unleashed, operated institutionally to skew the popular will righwards. That is, to skew the popular will to the most banal choice. Elections, it turned out, would not be about “ideas” or policies, but about what was and was not out of bounds. What was taboo, or what could be made taboo. The all-too-sensible moderation of the pundits and the devil would preside as the judge of all that was electable. And woe betide the candidate who did not make the first move, which consists of being scandalized by his or her opponent. Rival scandals are what is at issue. And other issues are drowned, or given the once over by an establishment which lives off of denying tragedy – all the unconscious buffoons of the platitudinous.
LI early this spring scoped out this election. What was obvious by March was that the economy was going to fall on its face in the fall – although even LI, ever the dupe of street corner apocalypses, didn’t imagine the zona would blow so hard. This counted out the GOP candidate – or at least made his victory unlikely. Of the Democratic candidates, it was obvious that Hilary Clinton would benefit most from a bleak economy. Since Hilary Clinton has been a consistent warmonger, this was not good news for LI. Luckily, Barak Obama ran a genius campaign – we live close enough to his upset of Clinton not to fully appreciate it. And, LI thought, Obama is essentially a peacemaker. It is how he rose, it is who he is. He would garner fewer votes than Hilary, but he would win.
Well, we still think that Obama is a campaign genius, and we still think he will win, but the election has been disheartening.
Our issue, more than anything else, has been peace. Fuck the idea that middle class Americans are running up against their credit card limits – we are much more interested in the idea that the U.S. won’t be pimping mass murder in Iraq. And, earlier this year, when Obama went to Afghanistan and Iraq, we thought he got it. He got, that is, that the Dems can no longer allow the Republicans to own our foreign policy.
For a long time, the Democratic strategy has been to play possum on foreign policy. A craven me-too-ism, with some progressive dressikng thrown in, has been at the center of Democratic foreign policy views. The D.C.-centric, Truman-esque wing of the party, which has no support among the grassroots, but a powerful army of pundit platitudinists, is the very pivot of foreign policy thinking. The platitudinists, with their usual inability to distinguish cause and effect, moan that the American people distrust the Dems because they are too soft. Of course, the root of the distrust of the Dems on foreign policy is the Vietnam war, which Johnson conducted partly because he didn’t want the Republicans to think he was soft.
Myself, I thought, in spring, that Obama was tempted, oh so tempted, to lay down a few truths. This was when he visited Iraq and Afghanistan. This was when his timetable was accepted by Maliki and swallowed, with grumbling, by the Bush administration.
The truths, of course, are outside the bounds of the sayable. For instance, one of the truths is that the U.S. has been far from the central actor in its own occupation of Iraq. Rather, in the first stage of the war, the Saudis made their move, financing the Sunni insurgency and supplying the bulk of the foreign jihadis. What were the Saudis fighting against? It was a step in the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia – just as Pakistan’s nuclear capacity was a step in the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the Saudi’s paying for the nuclear weapon research. During the second stage of the fight, what the Saudi’s were fighting against came to pass: the hardline Iranian Shi’ite party came to power. The Da’wa party, which has come out on top of the coalition, was forged under Khomeini, and made its mark as Hezbollah’s consistent ally – Hezbollah even conducted a kidnapping campaign in Beirut in the eighties with the goal of freeing the Da’wa thirty, captured in Kuwait. It was on account of that kidnapping campaign that the Reagan administration opened a surreptitious channel to Iran.
These facts are as plain as day to anybody who actually lives in the Middle East, and are the most remote exotica to Americans, who have been systematically buffered from reality by the platitudinarians – although this might well give that later group too much credit for rationality. In truth, the D.C. centered elites really do think they are running the world.
Now, a foreign policy that is in complete disconnect from reality is much like a neurosis – it needs a talking cure. And I thought Obama was just the doctor to deliver one. But no – he calculated, evidently, that this would cost him too much, and entangle him with the cherished delusions of the elite. Instead, Obama has brilliantly campaigned on being scandalized – he has turned a campaign that McCain hoped would concentrate on Obama’s various transgressions into a campaign about the campaign. Liberals are all in an uproar about McCain’s rallies, and Palin’s rhetoric. In other words, this is another election about nothing. Or, rather, an election about inanity and planarity. The devil has won the round.
Nevertheless, we are going to vote tomorrow for Obama. And we are happy to do so.
the executioner's melancholy
“… writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in a beyond of language, it develops like a seed and not like a line, it manifests an essence and threatens with a secret, it is a counter-communication, it intimidates. We will find in all writing the ambiguity of an object which is at the same time language and coercitation: there is, at the bottom of writing, a “circumstance” that is foreign to language, there is something like the glance of an intention that is already no longer that of langauge. This glance can very well be a passion for language, as in literary writing; it can also be the threat of a penality, as in political writing: writing is then charged to join in a single dash the reality of acts and the ideality of ends.” – Barthes, The Degree Zero of Writing
(…l'écriture, au contraire, est toujours enracinée dans un au-delà du langage, elle se développe comme un germe et non comme une ligne, elle manifeste une essence et menace d'un secret, elle est une contre-communication, elle intimide. On trouvera donc dans toute écriture l'ambiguïté d'un objet qui est à la fois langage et coercition : il y a, au fond de l'écriture, une « circonstance » étrangère au langage, il y a comme le regard d'une intention qui n'est déjà plus celle du langage. Ce regard peut très bien être une passion du langage, comme dans l'écriture littéraire; il peut être aussi la menace d'une pénalité, comme dans les écritures politiques : l'écriture est alors chargée de joindre d'un seul trait la réalité des actes et l'idéalité des fins)
The common approach to Chamfort’s ‘maxims’ and “anecdotes” has been to consider them as a philosophy – and to eventually dismiss them as a philosophy. Pellison, his nineteenth century biographer, remarks on the similarity of temperaments that seems to exist between Chamfort and Schopenhauer. But Chamfort was, Pellison concedes, not a systematic thinker.
The notion that a philosopher must work within a ‘system’, which figured largely in the 19th century, still has an influence on the definition of philosophy – in fact, the teaching of philosophy often comes down to a puppetshow of conflicting systems – if you claim x, you are a critical realist, and if you claim y, you are a nominalist. Etc.
Barthes was concerned with another system – the system of ecriture. This has a lot more relevance to Chamfort. Chamfort wrote his “Products” out of a reaction to, a consciousness of, the writerly function. That function – which, as with all middleman positions, has an unearthly relation to the basic one of pandering – is both under attack in the Maxims – from the beginning, the very idea of the maxim is ridiculed as the idea of a mediocre mind – and, inevitably, chosen as Chamfort’s instrument. What other instrument is there? But the notion of maxim, of a rule, if only a rule of thumb in the Repulic of Thumbs, puts us on the track of Chamfort’s sense that his writing was political. It is to this that the reflection tends; political scandal is the whole point of the anecdotes he carefully amassed. When his listeners at Mme Helvetius came away from his conversation with the sad sense of being present at an execution, it was no accident.
So, what was this politics?
Because Chamfort was intentionally freeing up his writing from the literary – and thus the systematic – it is easy to quote him, but hard to point to one passage or another that would provide the key to him. It is this very freedom that “intimidates”, to use Barthes term. But to threaten politically implies an order that can be violated, a standard from which one can judge. And there are many passages from the Maxims that hint at this order – that, as it were, give us the mythic foundation for the series of sacrifices, of executions, that space themselves in both the Maxims and the Anecdotes.
This passage from the first section of the Maxims, for instance.
‘I have often noticed in my reading that the first movement of those who have performed some heroic action, who have surrendered to some generous impression, who have saved the unfortunate, run some great risk and procured some great advantage – be it for the public or for some particulars – I have, I say, noted that the first movement has been to refuse the compensation one offered them. This sentiment is discovered in the heart of the most vile men and the last class of people. What is this moral instinct that teaches men without education that the compensation for these actions is in the heart of he who has done them? It seems that in paying ourselves for them, they have taken this from us. [Il semble qu’en nous les payant on nous les ote]” OC 1812, 2:28
The insistence of the writen, here, is caught in that repetition of “I have often remarked” – its way of pointing to the superfluity of the oral, the way, in the economy of speaking, repetition serves to organize a series that is continually disappearing, going beyond the attention of the listener, which is strictly not needed in writing (for after all, the reader has merely to glance back) and that appears there nevertheless to ‘glance beyond’ the written object, to connote the theater of conversation. But the major economic instance, here, is of course the gift – or the sacrifice. The gift – the heroic act, the generous impulse - initiates an internal circuit in which the outward gift (the true gift) is compensated by an inward gift (which is marked, already, as a compensation). But it is a circuit that is taken from us when we impose upon it another economy – that of payment.
This is, of course, a very Rousseau-like stance. However, it joins Rousseau to a moralist theme – of self satisfaction. Or at least of self compensation. As in Rousseau, nature is identified with a primary process – with spontaneity. The secondary process is that of payment. Chamfort does not, here, reflect on the connecting link of compensation – that there must be compensation of some kind is assumed.
The executioner’s melancholy arises from the perception that the rupture between the regimes of compensation has corrupted us in such a way that there is no going back. It is an irrevocable movement.
“Society is not, as is commonly believed, the development of nature, but rather its decomposition and entire remaking. It is a second edifice, built with the ruins of the first. We rediscover the debris with a pleasure mixed with surprise. It is this which occasions the naïve expression of a natural sentiment which escapes in society. It even happens that it pleases more, if the person from whom it escapes is a rank more elevated, that is to say, farther from nature. It charms in a king, because a king is in the opposed extremity. It is a fragment of ancient doric or corinthian architecture in a crude and modern edifice.”
(…l'écriture, au contraire, est toujours enracinée dans un au-delà du langage, elle se développe comme un germe et non comme une ligne, elle manifeste une essence et menace d'un secret, elle est une contre-communication, elle intimide. On trouvera donc dans toute écriture l'ambiguïté d'un objet qui est à la fois langage et coercition : il y a, au fond de l'écriture, une « circonstance » étrangère au langage, il y a comme le regard d'une intention qui n'est déjà plus celle du langage. Ce regard peut très bien être une passion du langage, comme dans l'écriture littéraire; il peut être aussi la menace d'une pénalité, comme dans les écritures politiques : l'écriture est alors chargée de joindre d'un seul trait la réalité des actes et l'idéalité des fins)
The common approach to Chamfort’s ‘maxims’ and “anecdotes” has been to consider them as a philosophy – and to eventually dismiss them as a philosophy. Pellison, his nineteenth century biographer, remarks on the similarity of temperaments that seems to exist between Chamfort and Schopenhauer. But Chamfort was, Pellison concedes, not a systematic thinker.
The notion that a philosopher must work within a ‘system’, which figured largely in the 19th century, still has an influence on the definition of philosophy – in fact, the teaching of philosophy often comes down to a puppetshow of conflicting systems – if you claim x, you are a critical realist, and if you claim y, you are a nominalist. Etc.
Barthes was concerned with another system – the system of ecriture. This has a lot more relevance to Chamfort. Chamfort wrote his “Products” out of a reaction to, a consciousness of, the writerly function. That function – which, as with all middleman positions, has an unearthly relation to the basic one of pandering – is both under attack in the Maxims – from the beginning, the very idea of the maxim is ridiculed as the idea of a mediocre mind – and, inevitably, chosen as Chamfort’s instrument. What other instrument is there? But the notion of maxim, of a rule, if only a rule of thumb in the Repulic of Thumbs, puts us on the track of Chamfort’s sense that his writing was political. It is to this that the reflection tends; political scandal is the whole point of the anecdotes he carefully amassed. When his listeners at Mme Helvetius came away from his conversation with the sad sense of being present at an execution, it was no accident.
So, what was this politics?
Because Chamfort was intentionally freeing up his writing from the literary – and thus the systematic – it is easy to quote him, but hard to point to one passage or another that would provide the key to him. It is this very freedom that “intimidates”, to use Barthes term. But to threaten politically implies an order that can be violated, a standard from which one can judge. And there are many passages from the Maxims that hint at this order – that, as it were, give us the mythic foundation for the series of sacrifices, of executions, that space themselves in both the Maxims and the Anecdotes.
This passage from the first section of the Maxims, for instance.
‘I have often noticed in my reading that the first movement of those who have performed some heroic action, who have surrendered to some generous impression, who have saved the unfortunate, run some great risk and procured some great advantage – be it for the public or for some particulars – I have, I say, noted that the first movement has been to refuse the compensation one offered them. This sentiment is discovered in the heart of the most vile men and the last class of people. What is this moral instinct that teaches men without education that the compensation for these actions is in the heart of he who has done them? It seems that in paying ourselves for them, they have taken this from us. [Il semble qu’en nous les payant on nous les ote]” OC 1812, 2:28
The insistence of the writen, here, is caught in that repetition of “I have often remarked” – its way of pointing to the superfluity of the oral, the way, in the economy of speaking, repetition serves to organize a series that is continually disappearing, going beyond the attention of the listener, which is strictly not needed in writing (for after all, the reader has merely to glance back) and that appears there nevertheless to ‘glance beyond’ the written object, to connote the theater of conversation. But the major economic instance, here, is of course the gift – or the sacrifice. The gift – the heroic act, the generous impulse - initiates an internal circuit in which the outward gift (the true gift) is compensated by an inward gift (which is marked, already, as a compensation). But it is a circuit that is taken from us when we impose upon it another economy – that of payment.
This is, of course, a very Rousseau-like stance. However, it joins Rousseau to a moralist theme – of self satisfaction. Or at least of self compensation. As in Rousseau, nature is identified with a primary process – with spontaneity. The secondary process is that of payment. Chamfort does not, here, reflect on the connecting link of compensation – that there must be compensation of some kind is assumed.
The executioner’s melancholy arises from the perception that the rupture between the regimes of compensation has corrupted us in such a way that there is no going back. It is an irrevocable movement.
“Society is not, as is commonly believed, the development of nature, but rather its decomposition and entire remaking. It is a second edifice, built with the ruins of the first. We rediscover the debris with a pleasure mixed with surprise. It is this which occasions the naïve expression of a natural sentiment which escapes in society. It even happens that it pleases more, if the person from whom it escapes is a rank more elevated, that is to say, farther from nature. It charms in a king, because a king is in the opposed extremity. It is a fragment of ancient doric or corinthian architecture in a crude and modern edifice.”
Scrounger’s Ball day 2
PATRONS OF LI
LI got a few contributions yesterday, but we are far from our goal. This is our week to pick the pockets of our readers: please contribute via the paypal button!
Monday, October 20, 2008
chamfort
Chamfort was not his real last name. In fact, it is still not certain whether his name was really Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, son of a Clermont grocer, or whether he was the bastard child of a Clermont canon. Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, like many another Enlightenment demi-sage, came up through the ranks from a seemingly engulfing provincial obscurity by inventing himself in a different milieu.
His success as a writer falls in the period of the 1770s. He earned money from a hit play; he wrote for enlightened journals; he found an aristocratic patron. And he enjoyed eating, drinking, talking and fucking. He mingled with some of the big names, wrote a catty little verse about Candide, received a letter of praise from Rousseau. His life, although he didn’t know it then, was falling into a pattern of anecdotes. For instance, on the subject of making love, his biographer Pellison recounts that a woman told him, once, “this curious thing. I don’t love smart men in love – they are watching themselves parade on by.” [impossible to capture the phrase, ils se regardent passer- ‘they are people watching themselves’ might be a better translation]. A remark that sticks with Chamfort, and that he records, later.
He was a good looking young man. Another biographer, Arnaud, records that he was the lover of an actress, Mlle. Guimard, “famous for the perfection of her bosom and who did her makeup each day before the portrait that Fragonard had painted of her.” [xiii]
But already, at twenty five, Chamfort’s life had changed much for the worse. Famously. As Remy Gormount wrote: “Chamfort’s secret, why use periphrases that don’t trick anybody, is in the syphilis that tormented him for a period of thirty years, during the time first of his greatest genital activity, and the second, and then in the third, the more discrete but more conscientious and refined period.” His looks fell away. He recovered, but with a disfigured face. Much like Mirabeau – to whom he has a strange, doppelganger relationship – Chamfort had experienced the down side of the libertine moeurs in his body, and he didn’t like it. An anecdote – how they trail our man, how they dog him like devils – from Abbé Morellet, a habitue of the Madam Helvetius’ salon, where Chamfort was a faithful attendee:
“I saw him, he said, in the society of Saurin and Mme Helvetius… this happened to me twenty times at Auteuil that, after having heard him for two hours in the morning recounting anecdote after anecdote and making epigram after epigram with an inexhaustible talent, I would leave with my soul as saddened as if I was leaving the spectacle of an execution. And Mme. Helvetius, who had much more indulgence than I do for that kind of wit, after having amused herself for hours listening to his malignity, after having smiled at each ‘hit’, told me, after he had parted: Father, have you ever seen anything as tiring as the conversation of Chamfort? Do you know that it makes me blue for the entire day? And this is true.”
For between 1780 and 1788 – the decade in which Herder is inspired by his discovery of Nemesis – Chamfort ‘retires’ from the circles of the intellectuals and the long stays as a house guest at the estates of the nobility. He was in his forties. It is now that he leaves behind poetry and the theater and begins writing down his epigrams and anecdotes. He has a sense that this will make a book, and calls the project – in one of those flashes of mordant wit that depressed Mme Helvetius – Produits de la civilisation perfectionnée.
This is one of Chamfort’s maxims:
“Hope is only a charlatan who ceaselessly tricks us. And, for me, only after I’ve lost it does happiness begin. I would gladly place over the gate of paradise the verse that Dante put over that of hell: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.
a scrounger's plea
Patrons of LI!
I was so hoping to avoid my usual scrounger’s week this year – the week in which I beg for contributions to maintain LI as a viable blog. But, after floating through this year in a shimmer of good luck, Nemesis, the Devil and little baby Jesus all spotted me crawling about on the earth whistling a happy tune, and intervened to throw a little shit into my life, financially speaking. Last Thursday, my decade old computer gave up the ghost. I went to have it repaired at a computer shop stocked with used computers, and under the suave ministrations of the pirate at the counter, was pursuaded to purchase a better computer from that golden year, 2004. Mistake! It turns out I was dealing with the computer shop of horrors, a veritable den of lemons. Things have changed in ten years. Computer shops used to be run by computer geeks – a band of mostly young men obsessed with the ins and outs of the machine. A band who had switched off their Oedipal affection for the mother and switched on their Oedipal affection for the motherboard. No longer, alas. Computers have sunk to the level of automobiles, and computer shops are now run by the kind of people who used to wear the gray grease stained work suits and the gimme caps, the people who used to say, looks like the transmission. That’s gonna cost ya!
The upshot of which is that I had many adventures with the lemon that I, in all innocence, purchased, all of them of the bad medecine kind – and finally, late Saturday afternoon, I extracted a workable computer from the shop of horrors and hightailed for home with it.
Thus, my plea: Please contribute to LI – via the handy Pay Pal button – if you have ten plus buckos and are feeling in the generous mood. I’ll beg and plead some more this week, and hopefully round up enough to pay for LI's computer. And you, lucky reader, will benefit too, from the infinite verbiage that will pour off the keyboards. Thanks!
I was so hoping to avoid my usual scrounger’s week this year – the week in which I beg for contributions to maintain LI as a viable blog. But, after floating through this year in a shimmer of good luck, Nemesis, the Devil and little baby Jesus all spotted me crawling about on the earth whistling a happy tune, and intervened to throw a little shit into my life, financially speaking. Last Thursday, my decade old computer gave up the ghost. I went to have it repaired at a computer shop stocked with used computers, and under the suave ministrations of the pirate at the counter, was pursuaded to purchase a better computer from that golden year, 2004. Mistake! It turns out I was dealing with the computer shop of horrors, a veritable den of lemons. Things have changed in ten years. Computer shops used to be run by computer geeks – a band of mostly young men obsessed with the ins and outs of the machine. A band who had switched off their Oedipal affection for the mother and switched on their Oedipal affection for the motherboard. No longer, alas. Computers have sunk to the level of automobiles, and computer shops are now run by the kind of people who used to wear the gray grease stained work suits and the gimme caps, the people who used to say, looks like the transmission. That’s gonna cost ya!
The upshot of which is that I had many adventures with the lemon that I, in all innocence, purchased, all of them of the bad medecine kind – and finally, late Saturday afternoon, I extracted a workable computer from the shop of horrors and hightailed for home with it.
Thus, my plea: Please contribute to LI – via the handy Pay Pal button – if you have ten plus buckos and are feeling in the generous mood. I’ll beg and plead some more this week, and hopefully round up enough to pay for LI's computer. And you, lucky reader, will benefit too, from the infinite verbiage that will pour off the keyboards. Thanks!
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Nemesis and the pursuit of happiness
I want somethin different, I want somethin
special
Oh no, honey, not for ten dollars…
In Herder’s essay, the beauty of Nemesis is an aspect of her indifference –or is it that here indifference is an aspect of her beauty?
It was, of course, one of the less discussed problems with founding a society on happiness, or the pursuit of happiness. It isn’t self-evident that everyone is happy about the happiness of others. The chthonic Nemesis, the frightening Nemesis, is always in pursuit of the happiness of others. The evil eye is buried beneath the tolerant society, the society in which all interests busily converge, drawn by invisible threads. The chthonic Nemesis can be pictured with one foot on the neck of some iconic image of Superbia. For the exceeding happiness of one pulls at the others. The threads fray. In a Borges short story which is in the form of a report about some jungle community, the explorer remarks that the inhabitants all cover their mouths when eating, since to be seen eating is immodest. Immodesty, nakedness, is a continually reinvented thing in this world, with many aspects, many codes – and where nakedness exists, Nemesis exists. The older aspect of the goddess, the ugly aspect, must be appeased somehow. Often, this takes the form of crushing the happiness of children. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, there was a fashion for doing just that in Victorian England. And the happiness of children still has the power to evoke a peculiar social anger. But that anger is directed at other instances of happiness, too: the happiness of foreigners, strangers, other races, the happiness of women. It is a blithe and altogether too hasty assumption that happiness is socially reconciling, a binding force.
Which brings us to the beautiful and indifferent Nemesis, the judge. For here, Herder correctly sees, is a great triumph of civilization. In that indifference, there melts away the desire to crush the happiness of others. But it holds back, too, from sweet fusion with the mass, that other form of social cohesion. It coldly dislikes the even temporary erasure of the line separating the self from others in such fusion.
Herder’s two aspects of Nemesis preside over the castles and dungeons of Sade. It is always a question of Nemesis for Sade’s fuckers, all of them born under the sign of superbia.
special
Oh no, honey, not for ten dollars…
In Herder’s essay, the beauty of Nemesis is an aspect of her indifference –or is it that here indifference is an aspect of her beauty?
It was, of course, one of the less discussed problems with founding a society on happiness, or the pursuit of happiness. It isn’t self-evident that everyone is happy about the happiness of others. The chthonic Nemesis, the frightening Nemesis, is always in pursuit of the happiness of others. The evil eye is buried beneath the tolerant society, the society in which all interests busily converge, drawn by invisible threads. The chthonic Nemesis can be pictured with one foot on the neck of some iconic image of Superbia. For the exceeding happiness of one pulls at the others. The threads fray. In a Borges short story which is in the form of a report about some jungle community, the explorer remarks that the inhabitants all cover their mouths when eating, since to be seen eating is immodest. Immodesty, nakedness, is a continually reinvented thing in this world, with many aspects, many codes – and where nakedness exists, Nemesis exists. The older aspect of the goddess, the ugly aspect, must be appeased somehow. Often, this takes the form of crushing the happiness of children. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, there was a fashion for doing just that in Victorian England. And the happiness of children still has the power to evoke a peculiar social anger. But that anger is directed at other instances of happiness, too: the happiness of foreigners, strangers, other races, the happiness of women. It is a blithe and altogether too hasty assumption that happiness is socially reconciling, a binding force.
Which brings us to the beautiful and indifferent Nemesis, the judge. For here, Herder correctly sees, is a great triumph of civilization. In that indifference, there melts away the desire to crush the happiness of others. But it holds back, too, from sweet fusion with the mass, that other form of social cohesion. It coldly dislikes the even temporary erasure of the line separating the self from others in such fusion.
Herder’s two aspects of Nemesis preside over the castles and dungeons of Sade. It is always a question of Nemesis for Sade’s fuckers, all of them born under the sign of superbia.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Notes on the Zona 1
LI, as we hope we have made clear, has been disgusted with Nader and the Green party for years. Yet, in 2000, we voted for Nader, under the delusion that the Green party was something more than a vanity movement that existed to keep Nader’s name in the papers. But we’ve never regretted that vote. We regretted that Gore ran a suck campaign and then, insanely, didn’t contest all Florida precincts immediately, demanding a recount.
Well, ho ho ho, it turns out that all the things Nader and the anti-corporation crowd were railing at – the failure to regulate the derivatives market, the failure to reign in corporate abuses, the use of lobbyists to stifle regulatory agencies that were warning about things like the abuse of accounting rules –well, they were all correct. It is like the 100 percent correct record. That’s nice. Meanwhile, the bipartisan oohing and ahhing over Maestro Greenspan has now started to settle in the national stomach a little badly, like a cannibal stew. Such, of course is the zona.
Read the WAPO account of the attempt by Brooksley E. Born to stop the oncoming train wreck.
"The meeting of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets on an April day in 1998 brought together Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. -- all Wall Street legends, all opponents to varying degrees of tighter regulation of the financial system that had earned them wealth and power.
Their adversary, although also a member of the Working Group, did not belong to their club. Brooksley E. Born, the 57-year-old head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, had earned a reputation as a steely, formidable litigator at a high-powered Washington law firm. She had grown used to being the only woman in a room full of men. She didn't like to be pushed around.
Now, in the Treasury Department's stately, wood-paneled conference room, she was being pushed hard."
Remember the days of yore, when economics would be pulled out of politics, and the private sector would chug along and do all the good things for the good little boys and girls? Sure you do. Uncle Thomas Friedman wrote a book about it. LI, in a prescient little review for the Austin Chronicle, reviewed said book.
Well, ho ho ho, it turns out that all the things Nader and the anti-corporation crowd were railing at – the failure to regulate the derivatives market, the failure to reign in corporate abuses, the use of lobbyists to stifle regulatory agencies that were warning about things like the abuse of accounting rules –well, they were all correct. It is like the 100 percent correct record. That’s nice. Meanwhile, the bipartisan oohing and ahhing over Maestro Greenspan has now started to settle in the national stomach a little badly, like a cannibal stew. Such, of course is the zona.
Read the WAPO account of the attempt by Brooksley E. Born to stop the oncoming train wreck.
"The meeting of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets on an April day in 1998 brought together Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. -- all Wall Street legends, all opponents to varying degrees of tighter regulation of the financial system that had earned them wealth and power.
Their adversary, although also a member of the Working Group, did not belong to their club. Brooksley E. Born, the 57-year-old head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, had earned a reputation as a steely, formidable litigator at a high-powered Washington law firm. She had grown used to being the only woman in a room full of men. She didn't like to be pushed around.
Now, in the Treasury Department's stately, wood-paneled conference room, she was being pushed hard."
Remember the days of yore, when economics would be pulled out of politics, and the private sector would chug along and do all the good things for the good little boys and girls? Sure you do. Uncle Thomas Friedman wrote a book about it. LI, in a prescient little review for the Austin Chronicle, reviewed said book.
The Spirit of the Ultimate Game
Come on pretty boy
Can't you show me nothing but surrender
Economists call it the Ultimate Game. James Surowiecki gives a good description of it:
The Ultimate Game has been known since the beginning of civilization. Among other things, the Iliad might be considered to be a poem about the Ultimate Game. Naturally, it is presided over by a divinity, in this case, the goddess Nemesis.
LI finds it curiously stirring that Herder turned to Nemesis in 1787, two years before the French Revolution (of which he was, to begin with, an ardent supporter – and even after the Terror, he never lost his sense that ultimately, the Revolution was a good thing), at the very peak of the culture of enlightened hedonism.
Classicists today still find Nemesis a puzzling figure. She was a double goddess, or a goddess with two aspects. Herder’s essay on Nemesis is an attempt to understand this mystery – and to understand it on behalf of bright Nemesis, the fair goddess, mother of Helen.
The psycho-social heart of his essay is about happiness and indifference. He tries to understand how one deals with another’s happiness and unhappiness. In particular, why is it that “we sympathize more immediately and strongly with the unhappy than the happy”?
“And so the lightest kind of Nemesis was born, that is actually not envy, not jealousy, but a kind of indifference, that allows us no pleasing fusion with another. By raw spirits this breaks out in cold repulsion [Unwillen]; and the more the other shows off his happiness, the less he understands how to put a pleasing disguise over his advantages, the more he arouses, when not envy, yet repulsion against himself. For even those who would grant him his happiness, become indignant over the fact that he doesn’t enjoy it more wisely and know how to be measured in his enjoyment. This Nemesis lies in all hearts; it was even, as the Greek idioms show, the first that the language and mythology observed. It is, when it wildly breaks out, a daughter of the night, the companion of quarrels, hatred and schadenfreude; in brief, the Nemesis, who Hesiod describes in his Theogony as an evil Goddess. In noble spirits on the other hand, just this cold observation of the ethos of others in their happier hours preserves its pure essnce, and since it mixes neither with pain [Leide] or with pity [Mitleiden], it thus becomes the sharpest point in their scale of judgment. This is the good Nemesis, that looks on, cold and indifferent; but it also must be assuaged or reconciled, then it is an incorruptible judge of virtue and truth.
And how does one most honorable reconcile it? No otherwise than that one makes oneself the observer of one’s happiness and ethos; look there, the goddess with the measuring rod and bridle, who drives away black envy. She drives it away since she hats all passionate presumption and binds the presumptions of men with her bridle; and in this way alone does the good Nemesis defeat the evil one.” [141]
His biographer, Haym, writing in the 1880s, calls this essay an “archaeology of antiquity”. As LI has already pointed out, the appearance of an essay on Nemesis in the time period that saw the first fine extension of happiness from a mere passing feeling to both a norm concerning one’s total life and a norm concerning the political and economic arrangements of the social life already signals a certain dissent. This is Haym’s judgment:
“There is nothing so distinctive as the fact that just at this time, in the 80s, Herder was mightily grasped by this symbol. It is the symbol for the beautiful equilibrium into which with his being he committed his activity and art as a writer. This symbol could not have been predicted by the writing of his earlier period. After the thrusting and enthusiasm, the numerous incidents that lacked measure and that stepped over the line, in which his views, his appearance, his ambitious striving, his unbridled hate and love itself, his style, the whole way of being and art in which he moved, he was now at the point of recognizing the mean, adherence to noble forms, submission to necessity, to decorum, like Goethe, and expressed this with the appropriate words, as Goethe did with other words. He had to pay homage to Nemesis after his Sturm und Drang period had passed as Goethe had already, after traveling through Switzerland in 1779, wanted to erect an altar to Fortuna, Genius and Terminus.” (329)
Can't you show me nothing but surrender
Economists call it the Ultimate Game. James Surowiecki gives a good description of it:
“Take two people. Give them a hundred dollars to split. One person (the proposer) decides, on his own, what the split should be (fifty-fifty, seventy-thirty, or whatever) and makes the other person a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If he accepts the deal, both players get their share of the money. If he rejects it, both players walk away empty-handed.
The rational thing for the second person to do is to accept the offer, whatever it is, since even one dollar is better than nothing. But in practice this rarely happens. Instead, lowball offers are almost always rejected. Apparently, people would rather throw away money than let someone else walk away with too much. Other experiments illustrate the same idea. Essentially, people are willing to pay to punish those they think are free-riding or acting unfairly, even when doing so brings them no material benefits.”
The Ultimate Game has been known since the beginning of civilization. Among other things, the Iliad might be considered to be a poem about the Ultimate Game. Naturally, it is presided over by a divinity, in this case, the goddess Nemesis.
LI finds it curiously stirring that Herder turned to Nemesis in 1787, two years before the French Revolution (of which he was, to begin with, an ardent supporter – and even after the Terror, he never lost his sense that ultimately, the Revolution was a good thing), at the very peak of the culture of enlightened hedonism.
Classicists today still find Nemesis a puzzling figure. She was a double goddess, or a goddess with two aspects. Herder’s essay on Nemesis is an attempt to understand this mystery – and to understand it on behalf of bright Nemesis, the fair goddess, mother of Helen.
The psycho-social heart of his essay is about happiness and indifference. He tries to understand how one deals with another’s happiness and unhappiness. In particular, why is it that “we sympathize more immediately and strongly with the unhappy than the happy”?
“And so the lightest kind of Nemesis was born, that is actually not envy, not jealousy, but a kind of indifference, that allows us no pleasing fusion with another. By raw spirits this breaks out in cold repulsion [Unwillen]; and the more the other shows off his happiness, the less he understands how to put a pleasing disguise over his advantages, the more he arouses, when not envy, yet repulsion against himself. For even those who would grant him his happiness, become indignant over the fact that he doesn’t enjoy it more wisely and know how to be measured in his enjoyment. This Nemesis lies in all hearts; it was even, as the Greek idioms show, the first that the language and mythology observed. It is, when it wildly breaks out, a daughter of the night, the companion of quarrels, hatred and schadenfreude; in brief, the Nemesis, who Hesiod describes in his Theogony as an evil Goddess. In noble spirits on the other hand, just this cold observation of the ethos of others in their happier hours preserves its pure essnce, and since it mixes neither with pain [Leide] or with pity [Mitleiden], it thus becomes the sharpest point in their scale of judgment. This is the good Nemesis, that looks on, cold and indifferent; but it also must be assuaged or reconciled, then it is an incorruptible judge of virtue and truth.
And how does one most honorable reconcile it? No otherwise than that one makes oneself the observer of one’s happiness and ethos; look there, the goddess with the measuring rod and bridle, who drives away black envy. She drives it away since she hats all passionate presumption and binds the presumptions of men with her bridle; and in this way alone does the good Nemesis defeat the evil one.” [141]
His biographer, Haym, writing in the 1880s, calls this essay an “archaeology of antiquity”. As LI has already pointed out, the appearance of an essay on Nemesis in the time period that saw the first fine extension of happiness from a mere passing feeling to both a norm concerning one’s total life and a norm concerning the political and economic arrangements of the social life already signals a certain dissent. This is Haym’s judgment:
“There is nothing so distinctive as the fact that just at this time, in the 80s, Herder was mightily grasped by this symbol. It is the symbol for the beautiful equilibrium into which with his being he committed his activity and art as a writer. This symbol could not have been predicted by the writing of his earlier period. After the thrusting and enthusiasm, the numerous incidents that lacked measure and that stepped over the line, in which his views, his appearance, his ambitious striving, his unbridled hate and love itself, his style, the whole way of being and art in which he moved, he was now at the point of recognizing the mean, adherence to noble forms, submission to necessity, to decorum, like Goethe, and expressed this with the appropriate words, as Goethe did with other words. He had to pay homage to Nemesis after his Sturm und Drang period had passed as Goethe had already, after traveling through Switzerland in 1779, wanted to erect an altar to Fortuna, Genius and Terminus.” (329)
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
the smell of cognitive dissonance in the morning
The Republican re-election plan, such as it is, has been to blame GSEs- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – for the subprime crisis. Meanwhile, the Republican administration’s new plan is – to make every bank a GSE! LI loves the smell of cognitive dissonance in the morning!
So, basically, the developed countries (save for China, the new home of the free market) have put their treasuries on the line. This will be an interesting game. As we pointed out before, the shrinking that is going to come will wipe out a lot, as in hundreds of trillions, of value, namely as the 550 trillion dollar pool of derivatives comes back to earth. Since nothing on earth – including the combined treasuries of all the richest nations – has that much money, the decision that is coming up is how to let it go. LI advises readers to check out the popping of John Law’s system for pointers. Or ... the Grimm’s tale about the Fisherman’s wife who wished to be God.
So, basically, the developed countries (save for China, the new home of the free market) have put their treasuries on the line. This will be an interesting game. As we pointed out before, the shrinking that is going to come will wipe out a lot, as in hundreds of trillions, of value, namely as the 550 trillion dollar pool of derivatives comes back to earth. Since nothing on earth – including the combined treasuries of all the richest nations – has that much money, the decision that is coming up is how to let it go. LI advises readers to check out the popping of John Law’s system for pointers. Or ... the Grimm’s tale about the Fisherman’s wife who wished to be God.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Nemesis and the Zona
- When Pompey was finally defeated, his head was cut off and sent to Julius Caesar in Egypt. Caesar buried the head in a spot of ground especially dedicated to Nemesis.
- Events keep fucking with LI’s general strategy. I should be writing about the varieties of eighteenth century hedonism. But I am watching the money culture blow up before my eyes, like a dream. Things I have written on this blog long ago about inequality and its effects, or the meltdown in pensions, etc., have leaped into the coldblooded half reality of the headline world.
- My brother Doug likes to say that I think I know all the answers. This is true. The prophetic vocation is in my bones. However, so far in my life, none of the answers have matched any of the questions anybody is asking. The answers were all torn from literature, a thing that has long been laid aside in that place where the dead bury the dead. These are tv washed days in the land of Cockagne, the artificial Paradise, and he not busy doing crack is busy lining his footsteps to the grave with asset based securities. I have watched the best minds of my generation discover that the mind is a ludicrous entity that the system could synthesize for itself, just as it could manufacture its own imagination from zeros and ones, its own virtual emotions (better than any felt by DNA based creatures), and its own cyber others to hate. Fuck off and die is written on my forehead, and yes, I’ve been looking forward to the latter part of that admonition. But I suddenly feel all relevant.
- All of which means that my bittersweet topic, the Human Limit, is now all the more pressing. It is just the time for sowing doubts about the entire direction of this here civilization.
- What are the roots that clutch?
- So: Herder’s essay on Nemesis, written in the 1780s, has been on my list of references for a while. Now that the Zona is blowing, it is time to address Nemesis – that limit to happiness itself. To start with, here is a quote about Nemesis from Mathew Grumpert’s book, Grafting Helen:
“
Aristotle asks at 5.5.17-20: what is it that holds the city together? and answers: the equitable exchange of disparate goods. That means, in essence, setting up equivalences between them: “all things that are exchanged must be somehow comparable. It is for this end that money had been introduced and... becomes... an intermediate[meson]; for it meaures all things. ... money “has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name money [nomisma] – because it exists not bey nature but by law [nomos]” E. Laroche, in “Histoire de la racine nem- en grec ancien” notes that in the earlest instances of nemesis, conventionally defined as blame, the term is always used to make a “value judgment” (1949:93), in both an ethical and economic sense. Both are central to the act of assessment at the walls of Troy, as the elders gaze upon the face of Helen (3.156) ou nemesis Troas (surely there is no blame if Trojans...). Helen is, indeed, a form of nomos, a powerful generator of equivalences, but ruthlessly pursued – like money – as a possession in her own right.
Helen as nemesis suggests the financial abuses described by Aristotle in the Politics: she provokes an economy fueled entirely by desire, as opposed to demand. And the face of Helen is, to use Aristotle’s definition of nomos, a “representative’ of desire, as opposed to demand.” (2001:61)
Friday, October 10, 2008
The Mangle of Inequality
Marx, that old mole under the boards, must be laughing. Under the detritus of the non-speak in the papers, this is clearly a business “correction” that points to the inherent crisis-prone strain in capitalism. Marx, of course, wasn’t the first to see that the tendency of the margin of profit of a commercial enterprise is to decline, but he had the larger vision of how that decline was embedded in society.
Apparently, however, nobody quotes Marx or alludes to Marx on TV. On TV, the recession just fell out of the sky. Such was LI’s conclusion, lying in a gigantic hotel room in Sarasota Springs, NY, the past couple of days, channel jumping the wasteland, looking for reports on the Zona. We’d traveled North to attend the wedding of our friend, S. The leaves were red, and the Yankees we met were kind, boisterous, full of family histories and drink. And those accents...I actually experienced that traditional ecodisaster, the pre-wedding limo party. I was a hit for suggesting we find some poor people and run over them (my best material always comes from Baudelaire, God Bless Him). S., of course, shimmered in her wedding gown on the day (and the crosshatched lace action of the back of the gown was, uh, quite phenomenal). Her husband, M., a professional massage therapist and part time punk rocker, assembled part of his band for the reception, and I hopped up and down to the music like a shaved ape escaped from some Pharma concentration camp where they were researching dopamine.
But in the late night off hours, I pondered the pisspoor state of political reporting (that political reporters are surprised that the campaign in October is about the state of the economy means that they really are braindead – did they read nothing about what was happening starting in January?) and watched the group fumble on the news stations to explain what was unfolding.
The place to start, of course, is the seventies. Suddenly, after thirty years, we are starting to recognize the shift that began to occur then. Let me remind you – the shift consisted of 1., the crushing of the bargaining power of labor; 2., the de-manufacturing of America – which was partly connected to the fact that manufacturing workers were the most militant, and partly the inevitable effect of the ability of capital to find other, cheaper regions in which to place factories; and 3, the dissolving of traditional constraints on credit.
These events occurred in response to the most serious crisis in capitalism since 1945. Galbraith’s New Industrial state, the liberal Keynesian economy, had created structures that were supposed to resolve such crises. These included the management of aggregate demand by the state, the moderation of labors’ older, utopian demands for a slice of the power in return for a steadily rising paycheck, and management’s movement away from optimizing profits in exchange for lessened volatility. The Keynesian moment unwound for a number of reasons – labour, with increasingly less interest in the political dimension that originally animated unions, became much more vulnerable; the government management of aggregate demand, combined with the government dependence on War, had finally unleashed inflation; and the ROI of the Fortune 500 corporations was finally causing an investor revolt. However, of the three factors I am listing in the shift to the new, Reagonomic paradigm, one and three seem oddly disjoint. How is it possible to diminish the bargaining power of labor – which results in the stagnation of wages – and at the same time dissolve traditional constraints on consumer and other credit?
Of course, from the neo-classical point of view, that makes a lot of sense. Instead of the government actively managing aggregate demand, the private sector, with a freer credit market, can take over. And in fact, even if wages stagnate, household incomes rise. The house itself as an asset appreciates, for one thing; more investment vehicles are made available to the public, for another thing; and finally, there is the great entry of women into the labor market.
Credit, then, is the keystone. It is from this moment on that the financial services sector, which had been relatively unimportant in the Keynesian regime, returns in force. It is what I would call the mangle of inequality – playing on Andrew Pickering’s term, mangle of practice. Contemporary capitalism in America has to effect a straddle – the economy depends on consumption, and yet, the majority of the consumers engross less and less of the productivity gains accrued by the system. Freeing the financial markets had two effects – one was to re-vamp the consumer’s financial horizon. Instead of worrying about making a wage sufficient to live the good life, the consumer worries about making a wage sufficient to have a good credit history – which is the magical key to the world of cars, plasma screen tvs, houses, and all the rest. The other was to make the consumer a shareholder in the system. For simplicity’s sake, call this the 401k world – that stands at the symbolic center of a system by which the ordinary person was hooked into the market. And the market could, consequently, use vast flows of capital to keep easing credit. A virtuous feedback, so to speak.
It had another, symbolically resonant significance. The triumph of the state in the 20th century was in providing for retirement. The state successfully created, within a capitalist economy, a mass ability to finish one’s life without poverty or utter family dependence. It was the template for the structural goods that the state, in a mixed economy, could provide – when the demands of distributive justice could not be aligned with the price creating market in a good or service. Consequently, social security has earned a special hatred from the right. The American system of encouraging private investment was meant, on the surface, to complement social security, but the ultimate aim was always to replace it.
The mangle of inequality, then, was not – as in Marx’s time – a head to head confrontation between classes. It is a more complex machine, in which class interests are blent so that head to head confrontation is systematically differed. The political triumph of the system is that the blending disenfranchised populism, since it became unclear who would really benefit from populist practice.
These are the roots that clutch. Fast forward to yesterday’s NYT article about Alan Greenspan, and notice the graph about the derivatives market. Notice that, supposedly, the world added 400 trillion dollars worth of value in the last six years. At least in the derivatives market.
This is, of course, entirely spurious. But the logic of the mangle of inequality has driven that financial bubble, and its effects are going to be real. We should not be comparing our situation to the Great Depression. This Zona goes back to John Law’s system. And just as Law’s system produced numbers incompatible with the real world, so, too, has Greenspan’s system. It is about to fall. We are about to see the melting away of 400 trillion dollars, give or take a penny.
The mangle tells us something about what comes next. In the past, recession has been economic sector oriented, which often means region oriented. We’ve seen in with industry and agriculture. The most malign effect of this recession, however, will be concentrated on an age demographic: the over 60s. Their entire world was built on the credit system I have outlined. Ironically, the elites, chattering away about “reforming” social security, never noticed that the real weakness in the retirement system is in the private “complements” to social security. Pensions are already underwater, and have been for some time. Having hooked the generation that was thirty to forty during the Reagan years into the financial system, the policymakers, economists, rightwing think tankers, and the vast sales forces of the financial system brought in the kind of capital that allowed for the speculative bubble. The bubble bursting, that money won’t be there any more. And the over 60s aren’t going to like it.
As for Marx, well, who is that knocking at the door?
Don Giovanni, a cenar teco
M'invitasti e son venuto!
Apparently, however, nobody quotes Marx or alludes to Marx on TV. On TV, the recession just fell out of the sky. Such was LI’s conclusion, lying in a gigantic hotel room in Sarasota Springs, NY, the past couple of days, channel jumping the wasteland, looking for reports on the Zona. We’d traveled North to attend the wedding of our friend, S. The leaves were red, and the Yankees we met were kind, boisterous, full of family histories and drink. And those accents...I actually experienced that traditional ecodisaster, the pre-wedding limo party. I was a hit for suggesting we find some poor people and run over them (my best material always comes from Baudelaire, God Bless Him). S., of course, shimmered in her wedding gown on the day (and the crosshatched lace action of the back of the gown was, uh, quite phenomenal). Her husband, M., a professional massage therapist and part time punk rocker, assembled part of his band for the reception, and I hopped up and down to the music like a shaved ape escaped from some Pharma concentration camp where they were researching dopamine.
But in the late night off hours, I pondered the pisspoor state of political reporting (that political reporters are surprised that the campaign in October is about the state of the economy means that they really are braindead – did they read nothing about what was happening starting in January?) and watched the group fumble on the news stations to explain what was unfolding.
The place to start, of course, is the seventies. Suddenly, after thirty years, we are starting to recognize the shift that began to occur then. Let me remind you – the shift consisted of 1., the crushing of the bargaining power of labor; 2., the de-manufacturing of America – which was partly connected to the fact that manufacturing workers were the most militant, and partly the inevitable effect of the ability of capital to find other, cheaper regions in which to place factories; and 3, the dissolving of traditional constraints on credit.
These events occurred in response to the most serious crisis in capitalism since 1945. Galbraith’s New Industrial state, the liberal Keynesian economy, had created structures that were supposed to resolve such crises. These included the management of aggregate demand by the state, the moderation of labors’ older, utopian demands for a slice of the power in return for a steadily rising paycheck, and management’s movement away from optimizing profits in exchange for lessened volatility. The Keynesian moment unwound for a number of reasons – labour, with increasingly less interest in the political dimension that originally animated unions, became much more vulnerable; the government management of aggregate demand, combined with the government dependence on War, had finally unleashed inflation; and the ROI of the Fortune 500 corporations was finally causing an investor revolt. However, of the three factors I am listing in the shift to the new, Reagonomic paradigm, one and three seem oddly disjoint. How is it possible to diminish the bargaining power of labor – which results in the stagnation of wages – and at the same time dissolve traditional constraints on consumer and other credit?
Of course, from the neo-classical point of view, that makes a lot of sense. Instead of the government actively managing aggregate demand, the private sector, with a freer credit market, can take over. And in fact, even if wages stagnate, household incomes rise. The house itself as an asset appreciates, for one thing; more investment vehicles are made available to the public, for another thing; and finally, there is the great entry of women into the labor market.
Credit, then, is the keystone. It is from this moment on that the financial services sector, which had been relatively unimportant in the Keynesian regime, returns in force. It is what I would call the mangle of inequality – playing on Andrew Pickering’s term, mangle of practice. Contemporary capitalism in America has to effect a straddle – the economy depends on consumption, and yet, the majority of the consumers engross less and less of the productivity gains accrued by the system. Freeing the financial markets had two effects – one was to re-vamp the consumer’s financial horizon. Instead of worrying about making a wage sufficient to live the good life, the consumer worries about making a wage sufficient to have a good credit history – which is the magical key to the world of cars, plasma screen tvs, houses, and all the rest. The other was to make the consumer a shareholder in the system. For simplicity’s sake, call this the 401k world – that stands at the symbolic center of a system by which the ordinary person was hooked into the market. And the market could, consequently, use vast flows of capital to keep easing credit. A virtuous feedback, so to speak.
It had another, symbolically resonant significance. The triumph of the state in the 20th century was in providing for retirement. The state successfully created, within a capitalist economy, a mass ability to finish one’s life without poverty or utter family dependence. It was the template for the structural goods that the state, in a mixed economy, could provide – when the demands of distributive justice could not be aligned with the price creating market in a good or service. Consequently, social security has earned a special hatred from the right. The American system of encouraging private investment was meant, on the surface, to complement social security, but the ultimate aim was always to replace it.
The mangle of inequality, then, was not – as in Marx’s time – a head to head confrontation between classes. It is a more complex machine, in which class interests are blent so that head to head confrontation is systematically differed. The political triumph of the system is that the blending disenfranchised populism, since it became unclear who would really benefit from populist practice.
These are the roots that clutch. Fast forward to yesterday’s NYT article about Alan Greenspan, and notice the graph about the derivatives market. Notice that, supposedly, the world added 400 trillion dollars worth of value in the last six years. At least in the derivatives market.
This is, of course, entirely spurious. But the logic of the mangle of inequality has driven that financial bubble, and its effects are going to be real. We should not be comparing our situation to the Great Depression. This Zona goes back to John Law’s system. And just as Law’s system produced numbers incompatible with the real world, so, too, has Greenspan’s system. It is about to fall. We are about to see the melting away of 400 trillion dollars, give or take a penny.
The mangle tells us something about what comes next. In the past, recession has been economic sector oriented, which often means region oriented. We’ve seen in with industry and agriculture. The most malign effect of this recession, however, will be concentrated on an age demographic: the over 60s. Their entire world was built on the credit system I have outlined. Ironically, the elites, chattering away about “reforming” social security, never noticed that the real weakness in the retirement system is in the private “complements” to social security. Pensions are already underwater, and have been for some time. Having hooked the generation that was thirty to forty during the Reagan years into the financial system, the policymakers, economists, rightwing think tankers, and the vast sales forces of the financial system brought in the kind of capital that allowed for the speculative bubble. The bubble bursting, that money won’t be there any more. And the over 60s aren’t going to like it.
As for Marx, well, who is that knocking at the door?
Don Giovanni, a cenar teco
M'invitasti e son venuto!
Friday, October 3, 2008
the zona
Ah, there is nothing so fine as comments sections. The NYT and the Washington Post have been filling up with indignant comments since Paulsen’s Wall Street Cargo Cult plan – (buy holy objects, wait until spirit appears, sell again) – shocked the complacent American householder. And, surprisingly, from shore to shore, they’ve been hardworkin’ savin’, scrimpin’ and so squeakily virtuous that heaven looks down in envy! Who would have guessed? All the time I thought it was the householders that elected Bush twice, looked on with bloodlust and shiteating grins as we invaded Iraq, took out 800 billion dollars in home loan equity, and watched with greed and no inclination to question as housing prices became the little guy’s stockmarket – bound to go up! Are these the same people who resided in a country most known, for the last eight years, for its trade deficits and its charming deal with China – buy our T-notes and we will buy your bloodspeckled plastic toys! I musta been livin’ in the wrong country.
And now, of course, the bills for the fun filled political vacation come due. When Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, the first thing he did was Charge IT! – to a round of cheers from those scrimpin and savin’ burgermen, working all day, thinking of Jesus Christ all night. After all, why pay for the structures you need every day when – as Mr. Magician said in that beautiful Christmas Classic, It’s a Wonderful Reagan-y Kinda Life, – the magic of the marketplace makes lower taxes bring in more revenue! We owe it to ourselves! We can’t surrender to terrorists! We can’t return to the days of tax and spend! Class warfare! As the man says:
Quelli che son dentro la merda fin qui, oh yeah
Quelli che con una bella dormita passa tutto anche il cancro, oh yeah
Quelli che, quelli che non possono crederci anche adesso che la terra e’ rotonda, oh yeah, oh yeah
Quelli che hanno paura del aeroplano, oh yeah
Quelli che non hanno mai avuto un incidente mortale, oh yeah
Quelli che non ci sentiamo
Quelli che a un certo punto della vita ci vorrebbe una arma segreta, ostia, oh yeah
I’m sure there are whole sections of Abu Ghraib that are on lockdown, so intense is the sympathetic weeping for those who trying to sell their McHummers, those calling in about the “minorities” getting special deals from the government and hasn’t this brought the whole fuckin’ thing down, those who have to eat out less, those who have to tell their kids, we’ll go to the dentist next year... oh yeah!
You can tell LI is deeply, deeply moved. I like the timing of the California plea (dear Santa, send us Eight billion dollars and we promise to be good all year!) as the Cargo Cult bill is signed by the Great Fly himself, going out of office in high drama – tough and weathered, a cowboy who has brought us Victory with a V, not white flags with a W, in Iraq – and don’t you feel so much freer? Constipation gone? Song in your heart? Perhaps you are triphoping down HangSaddam Avenue this very afternoon! I know I am.
This is the Zona. The “ghost wind.” The Fore have a long history with the Zona. When it blows, the victims of kuru tremble. Others pile up leaves, dirt and excrement and carefully store it in their huts, thinking that it will turn into metal. The Zona is in control here, people. I am merely its scruffy little pissant prophet.
And now, of course, the bills for the fun filled political vacation come due. When Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, the first thing he did was Charge IT! – to a round of cheers from those scrimpin and savin’ burgermen, working all day, thinking of Jesus Christ all night. After all, why pay for the structures you need every day when – as Mr. Magician said in that beautiful Christmas Classic, It’s a Wonderful Reagan-y Kinda Life, – the magic of the marketplace makes lower taxes bring in more revenue! We owe it to ourselves! We can’t surrender to terrorists! We can’t return to the days of tax and spend! Class warfare! As the man says:
Quelli che son dentro la merda fin qui, oh yeah
Quelli che con una bella dormita passa tutto anche il cancro, oh yeah
Quelli che, quelli che non possono crederci anche adesso che la terra e’ rotonda, oh yeah, oh yeah
Quelli che hanno paura del aeroplano, oh yeah
Quelli che non hanno mai avuto un incidente mortale, oh yeah
Quelli che non ci sentiamo
Quelli che a un certo punto della vita ci vorrebbe una arma segreta, ostia, oh yeah
I’m sure there are whole sections of Abu Ghraib that are on lockdown, so intense is the sympathetic weeping for those who trying to sell their McHummers, those calling in about the “minorities” getting special deals from the government and hasn’t this brought the whole fuckin’ thing down, those who have to eat out less, those who have to tell their kids, we’ll go to the dentist next year... oh yeah!
You can tell LI is deeply, deeply moved. I like the timing of the California plea (dear Santa, send us Eight billion dollars and we promise to be good all year!) as the Cargo Cult bill is signed by the Great Fly himself, going out of office in high drama – tough and weathered, a cowboy who has brought us Victory with a V, not white flags with a W, in Iraq – and don’t you feel so much freer? Constipation gone? Song in your heart? Perhaps you are triphoping down HangSaddam Avenue this very afternoon! I know I am.
This is the Zona. The “ghost wind.” The Fore have a long history with the Zona. When it blows, the victims of kuru tremble. Others pile up leaves, dirt and excrement and carefully store it in their huts, thinking that it will turn into metal. The Zona is in control here, people. I am merely its scruffy little pissant prophet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
