A good day to talk about taxes: reprising the problem with the liberal board game metaphor

 

the liberal myth of the economy as a board game

“Only through the forgetting of this primitive metaphor-world, only through the hardening and rigidifying of the primitive capacities of human fantasy that flowed out originally in a hot stream of images, only through the unbeatable belief, this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in brief only through the fact that man forgets himself as a subject and really as an artfully creative subject, does he live with some rest, certainty and consequence. If he for one moment could escape out of the prison walls of this belief, immediately his self consciousness would be over and done with. Already it costs him some effort to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives a whole other world than humans, and that the question, which of both world perceptions is more correct is a completely senseless one, since here we have to measure with the standard of the correct perception, that is, a standard that is not at hand.” -Nietzsche



The metaphor-world of economics is never more entangled in its antinomies – like a crippled spider in its own web – than when it comes up against the odd question of the distribution of wealth. The neo-classic mainstream exists, in fact, in a world that it only recognizes as an irritant on the way to the utopian moment when the market absorbs all its children in a heavenly rapture – but if it were entirely blind to the fact that the state, that enemy of the good honest corporation and firm, plays a major role in economics, it would face the danger of being merely comic. The liberal solution to the endless differing of market heaven is that the state exists to create a “level playing field”. Mark Thoma, who runs the excellent blog, Economist’s View, just published an article on income inequality that contains a canonical version of this notion:

“I’ve never favored redistributive policies, except to correct distortions in the distribution of income resulting from market failure, political power, bequests and other impediments to fair competition and equal opportunity. I’ve always believed that the best approach is to level the playing field so that everyone has an equal chance. If we can do that – an ideal we are far from presently – then we should accept the outcome as fair. Furthermore, under this approach, people are rewarded according to their contributions, and economic growth is likely to be highest.
But increasingly I am of the view that even if we could level the domestic playing field, it still won’t solve our wage stagnation and inequality problems. Redistribution of income appears to be the only answer.”

I wrote a little response to this paragraph on Mark’s site.

“I've never understood the popularity of this belief in America. It seems a contradiction in terms. How can you "level" the playing field, and at the same time allow any unequal outcome? These are in direct contradiction with one another. Any 'playing field' in which one of the players gains a significant advantage will be vulnerable to that player using some part of his power or wealth to 'unlevel' the playing field to his advantage. There is no rule of any type, there is no power that will prevent this. The problem is thinking of the playing field as a sort of board game. You play monopoly and you accept the outcome as 'fair'. The problem of course is that in life, unlike monopoly, you don't fold up the board after the game is over and begin it all again - in other words, the economy isn't a series of discrete games that are iterated at zero.
Thus, the whole "equality of opportunity" ideology has never made sense. If it succeeds, it will dissolve itself as those who succeed most make sure that we do not go back to zero, and that our idolized 'competition' is limited to those in the lower ranks - for among the wealthiest or the most powerful, the competition is, precisely, to stifle and obstruct competition in as much as it injures wealth or power.
To not understand the latter fact is to understand nothing about the incentive for acquiring wealth or power. It is as if economists truly believe that billionaires are searching for the next billion to spend it on candy, instead of seeing them as political players building a very traditional structure of status that will allow them the greatest possible scope for exercizing power, including helping their allies and family and injuring their enemies.”

I am not satisfied that I have spelled out the structural dilemma here. In trying to build an economy with a non-interfering state that only guarantees that the ‘playing field’ is levelled, you are building, in reality, a massively interfering state. There is no point at which equality of opportunity will, as it were, work by itself. This is because the economy does not exist as a chain of discrete states – rather, what happens in time t influences what happens in time t1. The board game metaphor, however, exerts an uncanny influence over thought here. From Rousseau to Rawls, the idea of an original position has, unconsciously, created the idea that society is like a board game. That is, it has beginnings and ends; a whole and continuous game came be played on it; that game will reward people according to their contributions. And so on. Here, classical liberalism still has a grasp on the liberalism that broke with it to develop the social welfare state. Both liberalisms, for instance, can accept that the price of an apple is not ‘earned’ by the apple, but both bridle at thinking the price of a man – his compensation – is not ‘earned’ by the man. It must have some deeper moral implication.

As we have discovered, the liberal hope, in the sixties, that the social welfare system would so arrange the board game of society that equal opportunity is extended to all, and so dissolve – was based on the false premise that the players all recognize a sort of rule in which they would not use their success in making moves to change the rules of the game. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the incentive in this ‘board game’ – success consists precisely in changing the rules in your favor. It does not consist in getting rewarded for one’s contribution to the aggregate welfare of the players of the game. The billionaire is of a different kind than the saint. And each, to use Spinoza’s phrase, must continue in their being in order to be at all.
The anti-liberalism of the last thirty or forty years is rooted in this liberal blindspot. On the one hand, the liberal allows his rhetoric to be taken hostage by a pro-forma anti-statism – surely we don’t want the corrupt state to reward the lazy and unscrupulous! Thus, social welfare is presented with a wholly utilitarian justification – it exists solely to help the industrious and the respectable. So the liberal concedes that the protector state is a second best arrangement – and slides easily into bemoaning middle class ‘entitlements’, as if surely the middle class should stand on its own. On the other hand, the state engineered by the liberals does keep growing – it keeps growing because the middle class desperately needs it to maintain their life styles, and it keeps growing because the wealthy use it as a reliable annex to acquire various monopoly powers and as a cheap insurance plan.

What the liberal seemingly can’t acknowledge is that a democratic republic, can only afford the ‘board game’ of private enterprise if the state uses its powers not simply to redistribute or to produce, but to limit – that is, to hedge in and countervail the vested influence of the wealthiest. Thus, the democratic state taxes not only to provide income to the state, or to redistribute money to the less ‘worthy’ – it also does so to materially weaken the wealthiest. Otherwise, the wealthiest will rather quickly take over the state and make a mockery of democracy.

Taxation is the guillotine by other means. Joseph de Maistre once wrote that the compact between god and the state is sealed by the blood shed by the hangman. Wrong about god, de Maistre was certainly right that all social contracts are sealed in blood. No democracy can survive if it forgets this fact.

The mock-confession

 

The innocent have nothing to confess. Thus, by a social logic founded in both the jurisdictional and the sacred, if you confess, you cannot be innocent.

Foucault traces this logic in Discipline and Punish, going across social spaces in the 18^th and 19^th century to show how it was implemented – how the disciplinary regime encouraged speaking, telling, confessing, creating great rituals of it. The subject, in the Foucaultian paradigm, confesses, and becomes dependent on confession.

In the 1970s, Foucault turned away from literature. He was no longer writing about Raymond Roussel or Magritte.  A pity, for the complement to his work on the disciplinary society was the rise of the mock-confessional novel.

The roots of this novel type – under which  I would include Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground, Hamsun’s Hunger, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Chris Kraus’s I love Dick – are found in the 18^th century. Two texts stand out: Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew and Rousseau’s Confessions. The Rousseau text went against the social logic of confession, in as much Rousseau’s account of his corruption, or his various acts of corruption, was pitched against a certain core and impenetrable innocence. It was the latter that enabled Rousseau to write the  Confessionsthemselves.  His career as a writer was shaped by his experience as an innocent, although it was an innocence that,  in the real world, was continually denied by his actions and situation. While the memoirs of adventurers were quite popular in the eighteenth century, they were shaped as adventure stories, reports akin to the reports of the explorers which had become long established as a European tradition by then. Confession, with its implications – guilt and expiation – was a different kind of thing, and Rousseau was a different kind of adventurer. 

Yet, as he was well aware, confession was shaken by the decline in the old confidence in a Christian world order. In the world presided over by a benign, rational deity, confession held a diminished sacredness. It was on the verge of being wholly taken over by forensics and psychology.

That is the world in which Diderot operated, both as propagandist and analyst. Rameau’s Nephew is a figure who foreshadows the dark side of the dialectic of the enlightenment. His confession is cynical, a game that  springs not from the desire to expiate, but from the gamemaster's desire to brag, to show his tricks. He is the enlightened parasite, and even hints that enlightenment makes possible a whole new world of parasites:

“In all of this, he said lots of the things we all think, and which guide what we do, but which never get said out loud. And here, in truth, we have the most significant difference between my man and most of the people around us. He admitted to the vices he had and which everybody else has, but he wasn’t a hypocrite. He was neither more nor less horrendous than anyone else, he was simply more open, and more logical; and occasionally, he was profound in his depravity. I trembled to think what his child would become with such a master.”

The composition of the Nephew of Rameau is as mysterious as everything else about it (it first appeared, in a German translation by Goethe, 30 some years after Diderot’s death). Diderot had been friends with Rousseau, but they had broken up before the Confessions were written. Whether Rousseau influenced Diderot or not, both were responding to some epistemic need abroad in the land for reckoning with the breakup of the old order. 

So much for the confessional side– but why the 'mock'?

Mock genres were also popular in the eighteenth century, especially the mock-heroic. The fashion for the mock-heroic grew out of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. In a dialectical slight of hand, the conservatives, the defenders of the ancients, in reaction to the moderns, generated a fashion for a very modern variation on satire – cutting the heroic down to scale. This playing with scale is literal in Gulliver’s Travels, and animates some of Pope’s best work, as well as Voltaire’s. The human scale, the conservatives imply, is anti-heroic, just as a fully modern society is anti-heroic. It is this theme that insinuates itself into the Confessional novel, serving as an appropriate devise to allegorize the disenchantment of  a society in which, potentially, the quality of mercy has been well lost – in which emotions found, at best, an expression in commodity accumulation, and at worst, turned inward and created madness.

Mock, according to 19^th century etymology, was connected with the gesture of pursing your lips; according to more recent etymologies, it comes from the Germanic word for mutter. Interestingly, the word migrated by one of those fatal associations that are so hard to trace, and so easy, retrospectively, to see,  from derision to imitation. We copy not just out of admiration, but also out of the impulse to caricature. One of the sure jibes of childhood is to simply repeat what someone else says – it becomes a game as the person who is copied tries to get the copier to stop it.

The mock confession, then, has a relation to the confession as the child who imitates someone else in the mocking game has to the person imitated – a weaponized echo.

One of France’s most lauded mock-confessional novels is hardly known to Anglophonia: Le Bavard, or the Talker, by Rene-Louis des Fôrets. It is so unknown that it hasn’t been translated, in spite of the fact that its admirers included George Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot wrote an essay about it, which has oddly enough been translated  (it is included in Friendship) – so non-French readers can read about a  novel that has never been translated into English.  Blanchot’s essay is written in that prose of his, which sometimes leads to a teasing high – the reader seems to be attuned, enthrallingly, to  the sound of existentialism shattering in a thousand St. Germain apartments in the mid twentieth century evening – and sometimes leads to a nose clogging sense that all the Ciceronean abstraction is not leading us anywhere.  In my opinion, Blanchot goes wrong as soon as he treats literature as one block, separate from the talk in the streets and the inventory work of the critics – his a-historicizing gesture.  In this way, Blanchot overlooks the book’s enrollment in the line of the mock-confession, though he references it:  

“The book is entitled Le Bavard (The Talker), which could have been the title of a bit by Le Bruyère, but the novel is not the portrait of the Talker. Nor are we in the presence of one of those characters in Dostoevsky, inveterate talkers who, in their desire to make provocatory confidences, give themselves away at every moment for who they are in order to shut up all the better, even if the extenuating force of Notes from the Underground often emerges anew here. We may be tempted, as well, looking for some connection, to evoke the movement which traverses the work of Michel Leiris and in particular that page of The Age of Man where the writer finds no other source for his penchant to confess than in the refusal of saying nothing, showing that the most irresponsible utterance, that which knows no limits and no purpose, originates in its own impossibility.”

One wonders why Blanchot lifts these examples up, only to dismiss them. In particular, Leiris does give a clue, in his book, about the confessional mode – that mode that is a particular form of utterance – by calling it a catharsis.  Surely this is at the heart of the mock confession – the social failure of catharsis in a society in which mercy has been replaced by the bureaucracy of punishment.

The Talker (Le Bavard has also been translated as the Chatterer, and one could suggest other names – the Man who couldn’t shut up, for instance – but being a talker, in English, often means someone who says a lot and means little) is a small novel of three chapters. The first chapter establishes the tone and the curious lack of content. The narrator tells us things about himself, his habits, and establishes a rapport with his audience of reader/listeners, without telling us some critical facts: what he does, where he comes from, where he lives. Novelistic density is sacrificed for another kind of density – that of psychological observation. And yet that psychological observation is hedged about with caveats, and a sort of reaction, on the narrator’s part, to the hostility held, he assumes, by his listeners/readers. This is not at all the kind of tale told to people of like kind, as in one of Conrad’s novels. Just as the narrator – who opens the novel by looking in the mirror and proceeding to analyze that gesture, rather than tell us what he sees in the mirror, i.e. physically describe himself – substitutes elaborate and defensive reflection for the usual fictional “showing”, so too he attributes to his audience a sort of ambient enmity that seems closer to paranoia than some anchored relationship taht we would expect in a novel of confession: say taht of a prisoner to his guard, etc.

Within this cloud of too much and not enough knowing, the narrator recounts his first and second “crisis” –  moments when he felt a Tourette’s like impulse to talk. Characteristically, the firsr crisis occurred when there was nobody around. He was stretched out on a beach. Characteristically, too, what he actually said, or didn’t say is not represented in the book. The narrator’s account accrues, oddly, around a hole – the talk of the talker.  If is as if the phenomenology of discourse – the aboutness – has been cut adrift. This is a book that doesn’t need quotation marks, even though it is a book about talking. The second crisis occurs in a low dive, to which  the narrator, half drunk, is taken by some friends. The friends, of course, are portrayed as actually hostile to him – rather like the “friends” of the narrator in Notes from the Underground. In the dive, the narrator spots a beautiful woman dancing with a clownish, red haired man. The woman is, the narrator implies, a sex worker of some sort. The narrator butts in, dances with the woman, then buys her a drink, while her redhaired friend fumes a few tables away. And then the narrator is carried away by another Tourette-like impulse, and talks and talks to the dancer. His talking attracts a bit of a crowd, which is mostly hostile to his more and more cynical tone. Again, though, though we have an elaborate analysis of the scene, there is a hole at the center – the hole of what the narrator actually said. At the end of the monologue, the woman gets up, goes to another table, and starts laughing loudly – apparently at the narrator.

In chapter two, the narrator flees the low dive, humiliated. After threading a labyrinth of streets, he ends up in a park, where he is beaten by the red haired man, who has followed him. He awakens from his concussion in the snow of the park, and hears a chorus of schoolkids from the yard behind the wall that abuts on the park. The sound leads to something close to an epiphany. 

In chapter three – spoiler – the narrator claims that none of this ever happened. The readers - now treated as a hostile group, just outside the narrator's circle - have been tricked. And whether they like it or not, the narrator doesn't care. The end.

There is a tendency among readers of The Talker to take the third chapter as true – but in actuality, there is no more reason to believe the third chapter than to believe the first one. What is true is the tonal logic – The Talker is a move to a sort of meta-mock confession. It is as if Hamsun’s unnamed narrator, or Dostoevsky’s unnamed narrator from Notes, took everything back in the end. Although in neither case would we be utterly surprised. 

Catharsis in the mock-confession will never reach a satisfying conclusion, we will never be pure, because purity is just a way of kidding ourselves. In modernity, we can no longer rely on any absolute division between the pure and the impure. We all confess. 

 

 

 

 

 

Ms. M.M. visits Wallace Stevens - Karen Chamisso

 

When Ms. M.M. visited Wallace Stevens

At his office building where there were

“eleven or twelve white marble columns along the façade”

(her famous precision on parade

but not too much – there’s the fatal “or”

to remind us of what poetry is for

and of what good manners requires as well)

and a wide window, otherwise indescribable

letting the banal Connecticut sunlight through.

No doubt Mr. Stevens had a lot to do

But he did show M.M. his secretarial pool

 

where the actuarial tools

were applied, and procedures for getting reimbursed

if your property had been cursed

by fire, theft, or a smell in the air.

The girls all smiled. “They aren’t bothered with strikes there;

the girls at the Hartford have it nice.” 

Said Ms. M. M. – do her words take a slice?

Or were they just words, and thus  meant quite sincerely?

Then it was over as begun, over merely.

 

Neither one showed the other the truth

- that they were monsters, monsters on the loose.

 

 

 

two cheers for cancel culture

 From the now defunct willetts site:

Cancel culture was born on October 18, 1924, when a pamphlet was thrust upon the world entitled: A Cadaver. The subject of the pamphlet was Anatole France, a Nobel prize winning author whose death, on October 12, 1924, was announced on the front page of the New York Times under the headline: Anatole France Great Author dies … Author of “Thais” and “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame” Classed as Leader of Modern Stylists”. The writers of A Cadaver (Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, etc.) were having none of this. The pamphlet was a surrealist action of the most violent and definitive kind. Breton classed Anatole France with the “cops”, and wrote: “With Anatole France, a little human servility goes out the door.” Eluard, under the heading, An Old man Like the Others,  wrote mockingly to France: “The harmony, ah, the harmony, the knot of your tie, my dear corpse, your brain on the side, everything arranged beautifully in the coffin and the tears that are so sweet, aren’t they?” But it was Louis Aragon who really ripped poor Anatole France’s corpse another asshole. Under the heading: “Have you ever slapped a dead man?” Aragon attacked the whole idea, the stink and the shallowness of “beautiful writing”, and wrote: “I declare that every admirer of Anatole France is a degraded being.” It is polemic in the highest ranting style:

What flatters you in him, what makes him sacred, please leave me in peace, is not even the talent, which is arguable, but the vileness, which permits the first louse that comes along to exclaim : How is it that I never thought of this before !

And, the peroration:

“Today I am in the center of that mildew, Paris, where the sun is pale, where the wind entrusts its horror and its inertia to the smokestacks. All around me I see a dirty, poor busy-ness, the movement of the universe where all greatness becomes an object of derision. The breath of my interlocutor is poisoned by ignorance. In France, they say, everything ends up as a song. Let he who dies in the heart of the general beatitude go up in smoke in his turn! There is little that remains of a man. It is even more revolting to imagine that one, who was, in any case, a man. On certain days, I dream of an eraser that could wipe out all of this human stain.”

This is how you do cancellation, my droogs.

In this case, the surrealists succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. By 1930, literary lights like Blaise Cendrars were claiming that France was “boring,” and Andre Gide put in the boot by saying that his oeuvre was “not considerable”. Yet when he was alive, Anatole France held a position in the overlapping worlds of literature, culture and politics that was similar to that held by, for instance, Saul Bellow in the U.S. It is hard to imagine Saul Bellow being spit on to this enormous extent when he died…

Except that Bellow did, in a sense, imagine it. Bellow sampled his own heckling by students in 1968 by working up a similar scene in Mr. Sammler’s planet:

“A man in Levi's, thick-bearded but possibly young, a figure of compact distortion, was standing shouting at him.

"Hey! Old Man!"

In the silence, Mr. Sammler drew down his tinted spectacles, seeing this person with his effective eye.

"Old Man! You quoted Orwell before."

"Yes?"

"You quoted him to say that British radicals were all protected by the Royal Navy? Did Orwell say that British radicals were protected by the Royal Navy?"

"Yes, I believe he did say that."

"That's a lot of shit."

Sammler could not speak.

"Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It's good he died when he did. And what you are saying is shit." Turning to the audience, extending violent arms and raising his palms like a Greek dancer, he said, "Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He's dead. He can't come."

At the time Mr. Sammler’s Planet came out, George Orwell had already assumed a rank at the top of the pantheon of brave “truth-tellers”, so the cancellation of Sammler and of Orwell together in one taunt – such a bearded and testosteroned one too! - was loaded with voltage. Of course, Bellow’s characters are always haunted by a ghost at the heel, taunting them with the idea that they are only ham actors, all of their beautiful thoughts only occasions for various big wig louses to say, how had I never thought of that before! Charley Citrine has Von Humboldt Fleisher, and Herzog of course is in flight from Valentine Gersbach. But in this gallery Sammler is special, since his cancellation moment is so entirely public, and so entirely on terms that Bellow felt were the only real terms – such was Bellow’s problem with women. 

Twitter has become, for the media establishment, what the heavily bearded young man was for Artur Sammler – an emblem of the end of the world in sheer barbarism and blasphemy and insulting of George Orwell. Of course, in the media establishment, it is very hard to get canceled. Noam Chomsky managed to do it by criticizing American foreign policy after the Vietnam war, when the wound was healed and all bien-pensant American “thought leaders” agreed that America had the most adorable and charming plans for the rest of the world (and was only being misunderstood as it spent trillions on the military and put these plans into effect by invading Panama City here, helping the stray Salvadorean death squad there, droning (accidentally!) some Yemeni wedding over in the corner, and so on). Otherwise, you will never find the deck chairs changing very much on the opinion pages of the great dailies, nor will you find Meet the Press or that ilk of tv inviting on anybody ‘foreign” or really anybody except its usual quota of great white male politicos and pundits. Even when a figure, like Mark Halperin, is discovered to be a serial groper and goes down, his media friends have a hard, hard time letting him go – as do his friends in both party establishments – and they keep campaigning to uncancel that pitiful mook.

Of course, the media establishment does not extend this courtesy to the rest of toiling humanity. The NYT business page looks on with equanimity when a corporation, stuffed to the gills with cash, decides a mass layoff is just what they need. You will never hear the words “cancel culture” applied in such cases. Rather, it is a matter of cash flow. When Uber recently “downsized” its work force, this is how the New York Times reported it:

“In response, Mr. Khosrowshahi has shaken up Uber’s top ranks and tried to cut costs. After cutting jobs in the marketing team in July, he instituted a monthlong hiring freeze and instructed executives to re-evaluate the size of their teams. In addition, he pushed out top executives, including his chief operating officer and chief marketing officer. Uber’s board has also undergone some turnover.”

When, on the other hand, a twitter user made a joke about Bret Stephens being a bedbug, the NYT not only permitted Stephens to write a whole column about it in which the great Stephens compared himself to all those who suffered at Auschwitz, but various member of the media, who gathered around Bari Weiss at her recent coming out party, sniffed loudly about the de-platformin’, generally wrong-headed youth, spiritual descendants of Louis Aragon, louts all:

MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle, who has frequently hosted Weiss on her morning show, deplored “cancel culture.” “On a regular basis,” she said, “people say to me, ‘I wouldn’t say that in public.’ As soon as people start to retreat and not share their views, it’s bad for society and culture.” – from Boris Kachka, New York magazine http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/bari-weiss-book-party.html

Times, admittedly, have changed since an Anatole France could be celebrated as a master “stylist” on the front pages of great American newspapers. Bourgeois society’s need for intellectual legitimation – for a certain protective, brainy smugness – is now supplied by a legion of pop scientists, mostly white, male, and willing to consider the tough questions: such as, why does nature shower white males (such as me) with such genius and brilliance and money? And the answer they come up with is – it must be the genes! The function, though, is the same. Anatole France, it must be said, was not as much of a smug idiot as our current iterations of Steven Pinker. His reputation went into a tailspin, but one has to say that a man who could attract kudos from such various sources as Edmund Wilson, who devoted a chapter of Axel’s Castle to him, Ford Maddox Ford, who named Conrad, James and France as the great novelists of his younger days, and Kenneth Burke, was not a total loser. Proust took certain elements from France’s life and made him into the character Bergotte, which is, sadly (for France, at least), how he is best remembered in the Anglophone world. 

Still: hooray for the surrealists! And hurray for the twitter mob! There is something so, well, right about Stephanie Ruhle’s friends whispering their sweet little bigotries in her ear and then admitting that they are afraid to say them in public. Not, of course, that they won’t – to the chauffeur, to the maid, to the clerk at the store, or to any unfortunate who serves them at a restaurant, over and over again.

The hallmark of cancel culture is the fact that the firing, the layoff, so admired in America – Trump is, literally, president because he starred in a reality show that was all about firing people – has now been seized by the fired. They are, as it were, firing back. Louis Aragon, at least the Louis Aragon who, as a mere cricket, shit on all the literary bigwigs, would be pleased.

 

 

reading the classics

 

Calvino begins his essay, Why read the Classics, by defining them in terms of a characteristic phrase: “I am re-reading x” The classics are haunted, as it were, by re-reading. We re-read in the classroom to answer questions (a site Calvino, I think mistakenly, throws out of consideration – an awful lot of reading is tied to the classroom, and it often seems that when we re-read on our own, the ghost of a classroom desk trails behind us, with its pencil groove and its slight, metallic smell – mixed in my case with the smell of a brown bag and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in wax paper ). We re-read outside of the classroom because, a, we are defensive about not having read,and want to make it known that we, too, have already read, and b, (the meat of Calvino’s theme), even when reading the first time, the classic imposes it scale on us, one that suggests an infinity of re-readings. When reading a classic, we cannot “escape” its design. In this sense, the classic is the opposite of escapist literature. We read that to get “lost”, by which we mean ‘lost’ from our everyday routines, our ordinary world, the one outside the book. It isn’t that we do not get lost in the classics – but it is a different kind of lost. It is all about disorientation and fate. Freud, in his essay on the uncanny, tells a story about getting lost in Rome, and finding that, over and over again, he has taken the wrong roads, which keep leading him back to a doubtful neighborhood. A neighborhood, we assume, that is a redlight district. Thus, in one sense, from the perspective of the super-ego Freud is lost, but, from another, more chthonic perspective, that of the libido, he is following the line of his fate.

This is the lostness experienced inside the classic. We are uncomfortably aware of some exterior intentionality that we have somehow swallowed – we are possessed.

Of course, the classics of high modernism show an acute awareness of the other kind of lostness. Leopold Bloom is a great admirer of Paul de Kock, a nineteenth century author of lubricious fare. And the lostness in the popular novel that is a rush – we read it all at once –is mimicked in prose that gushes with consciousness – in Ulysses, in To the Lighthouse, in Sound and the Fury, among others. And yet that enactment of being lost, carried away, is highly stylized – it is in fact just the kind of thing you don’t find in a popular novel. These moments are, as well, re-readable – in fact, if there are degrees in the infinity of re-reading in which the classic lives, they are even more re-readable than more conventional prose.

Oddly, Calvino misses a trick by confining the notion of re-reading to the classic text and not comparing it to oral ones – for there are stories that we tell about ourselves that we seem to tell over and over again. Years and years ago, I visited Monterray, Mexico, with a friend. I have found myself telling the story of that visit to dozens of people since. I’m not sure why that story has stuck with me so much, but as I tell the story, it becomes more and more devoid of living memory and more and more full of intentionality – of rhetorical memory, if you will. I have other stories like that as well. I think most people have a canon of stories they tell about themselves – their own classics. But in contrast to the re-telling that these stories seem to compel, there is a certain shyness about telling the same story twice. We are frankly embarrassed to be caught telling the same story twice. It is boring. Or it shows some fatal lack of memory – one should remember that X person has already heard the story.

And this gives us another clue to the nature of classics: they are eerily unembarrassed. They are not embarrassed about incest, about patricide and matricide, about dimemberment, and rape, about suicide – all the stories tumble out. They are even not embarrassed about boredom.

This is what sets the contemporary taste on edge about the classics. There is nothing more dismissive than the phrase, “that’s boring.” In a sense, the fear of boredom and the fear of age are connected in the ordinary norms of our everyday life. Youth sticks in the windpipe of the middle aged, they can’t cough it up or swallow it. And boredom is especially something to be fled. In both cases, the organic reality – that we age, and that there are large necessary patches of boredom in our lives if we actually do anything – are subject to a repression that expresses itself in the aesthetic sphere – a sphere that we tend both to diminish (it is only entertainment) and present in social situations to the exclusion of anything else. In the classics, boredom is intended. This seems utterly mad to those of us weaned on the entertainment industry’s quest to never, ever bore. Of course, that quest is itself mad – it dulls, and it excludes re-reading, which runs counter to surprise and sensation. The intentional boredom in the classic doesn’t entail that we will always re-read the boring patches and be bored – it does entail that the possibility not only exists, but is embraced. In the Library of Babel, there are an infinite number of boring texts, and texts that are even more boring, interpreting these boring texts. A classic that bored completely would not be re-read – but one that interested completely , that dispelled boredom, would not be re-read either, for it would have been trapped in its own successfully dealt with suspense, just as a good joke is trapped by its punchline. To repeat a good joke after telling it violates the rule of good jokes, and to re-read an entertainment violates the rule of entertainments. But the ideal entertainment is impossible - something within it will tend, however shyly, to the status of re-readability. Our favorite reads, even if they are Harlequin romances or porno fan fics, can not expel that classic instance.

Poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome

 

O greenhorn who looks for Paris in Paris

Who comes to my house and looks for my home

Know: before the closed door our lares

Crouches, quiet as a, hungry as a tomb.

 

It guards the groans, ruckus future, ruckus past.

I pretended for years to be the ghost

Of my parents’ marriage. Also, Last

Of the Mohicans, hostess with the most

                                                                           -est.

 

Until I came at last to be the proud proprietor

Of my own closed door.

To the Census: “Troubleman. Feed Pump Man. Field Operator.”

This quorumed I sez  to sleep: you are a bore.

Notes on Neoliberalism and the New Class

 Why is the Left is either disorganized or a minority in every country where it used to form that one real opposition party or, sometimes, even the governing party. From the 40s to the 70s, even in countries like Italy, where the Christian Democrats tenaciously held onto power, the tide was to the left. From social policies to real advancement towards economic equality between the working class and capital, this was the direction the world was moving in.

But since the 80s, the movement is all the other way. And instead of forming an opposition, the Left has taken on a role as facilitator. It is no wonder that a recent headline in the Guardian formulated the political situation in France as the center vs. the extreme (by which was meant Le Pen). Melanchon is almost unknown outside of France. Inside, the former Left is riven by personal domain issues. The absence of a Left response to Macron’s farcical “Great Debate” was painful.

I suspect that the alt right moment is the result of this huge fucking hole in our ideological choices – in Europe, in the Anglosphere, in Elsewhere. The tear is evidently caused by what I’d call Lordon’s paradox: Left parties systematically moving right, while retaining the label and symbolic capital of being Left. My name for it comes from Frédéric Lordon, the French philosopher and economist, who stated it in a scathing review of a book by a well known French historian and political philosopher, Pierre Rosanvallon, who was one of the co-founders of Fondation Saint-Simon in the eighties. Rosanvallon has always been associated with the Socialist Party in France, but the FSS was very actively against the kinds of things that socialism is traditionally associated with : namely, understanding the limits of the market – and never taking the market as a model for the social whole. These precepts were reversed. And instead of simply supporting the right, these intellectuals remained on the “left,” becoming a vector for propagating a neo-liberal message into the Mitterrand era coalition of the « Left ». That message was wrapped in moral scolding : the idea was that the Left in the twentieth century had been criminally complicit with Stalin, and then with, oh, Pol Pot, and the only way to purge its sins was to embrace Milton Friedman.

This is a caricature, but not a very broad caricature. If you read Débats, the journal associated with FSS people, you get the message.

That historians figured so strongly in it – Francois Furet was also a cofounder – was essential to the project, since the de-legitimisation of socialism was laid out on revisionist historical lines : thus, beaucoup attention was paid to the terror under the Jacobins of the French revolution, and zip attention was paid to the 150 years of terror endured by the African population that was shipped to Haiti, whose stolen labor, shortened lives, broken families and tortured rebels – not to speak of the hundreds of thousands of bodies littering the Atlantic from collateral casualties – provided much of the wealth of the ancien regime. If attention were paid to the latter, then it was easy to claim that political correctness was messing things up, and perhaps the objections were even connected to Stalin, Lenin and that arch-criminal, Marx. The FSS historians held up the American Revolution, minus the genocide and the slavery, as a model, and the French revolution was downgraded to an advertisement for the coming attractions of the Gulag.

All of these elements were checked by Lordon, who asked: why has nobody ever examined, with sociological seriousness, this strange interior hollowing out of the Left?

My own tentative theory is that the historical argument mounted in the 80s was, in a way, window dressing; what was really happening was that, within the parties of the Left, the leadership and policy was being captured by a group that  was, by family ties, education, and outlook, indistinguishable from the  bourgeoisie who ran rightwing parties. The old influence of the working class – by way, for instance, of unions, or politicians who came from the working class – at the highest levels of the left was no longer a ‘thing’. The suspicion, or dislike, of the working class, common to the bourgeois right, was shared, less overtly, by the bourgeois left. There was a family resemblance between the two establishments.

In 1959, Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslavian dissenter, wrote a book entitled « The New Class » about the party bureaucrats in the communist countries who, in effect, had become a governing class, with all the perks, due to their position as the elite guard of the « revolution ». This book was immediately enrolled in the arsenal of the Cold War. See, communism leads to feudalism. And since the end of the Cold War, it has been forgotten. But the new class, in broad outlines, does provide one answer to Lordon’s paradox. It explains one aspect of the  ideological hole in our present political spectrum.

In one country after another a kind of third way became the norm: globalization, massive wealth and income inequality, and the neoliberal penetration of capitalism into every sphere of private life, was embraced by the third way. Which still claimed, however, a tenuous link to the Left. But if the Left did not represent the working class, who did they represent?

They came to represent not a position in the class struggle defining capitalism, but a moral stance.

Half this tale has never really been told, to cop a Bob Marley line.  To recap this rather hazy chronology: The emptying out of the Left is a story of the march of the New Class. It started out as the New Left in the late 60s and 70s, and became the new non-Left Left in the period of neo-liberal ascendance. We could divide this roughly into stages: the moral stage, which involved indignation about the Gulag and the identification of anti-colonialism with Pol Pot and Ayatollah Khomeini; the pragmatic « liberalism » of the 80s, which accepted Thatcherism but proposed to soften it; the final rejection of egalitarianism as an ideal in the 90s, which implied that social democracy as a political structure could rest on an economic framework resembling the Gilded age of the 1920s. In this last stage, which is still with us, investment in public goods  was radically downplayed while the Left’s thinkers turned to more sweeping privatizations – in the argot, “reforms” – to accomplish the welfare sustaining function of the government. 

Often, this tale is told without putting the political economics of the EU and Anglosphere into the global context of the foreign policies pursued by the “former” imperialist countries, which is where much of the moral energy of the New Class Left was discharged.  By the late 90s and 00s, the much reviled Tiers-mondist position was dead. In its place was a new ideology of human rights “interventions”, eerily reminiscent of the gunboat diplomacy of the early 1900s.  The New Class formed a tacit alliance with the military-industrial complex which, in their youth, they had denounced. HI operated as preliminary propaganda, laying down its barrages in the media that was intertwined with the New Class. Much was made of the monstrous torture chambers of some selected dictator in Elsewhere, and little to nothing was made of the instruments of destruction, the shock and awe, the drones, the new doctrine of long distance assassination.  Then the show was over. Mostly, the country broke apart – as in Iraq and Libya or starved to death – as in Yemen – and no investment whatsoever on a scale to make up for the breaking apart, not to speak of the massive human disasters (for instance, the two million refugees from Iraq), took place. Victory was declared, and the Others in Elsewhere had to clean up the bodies and wonder whether the three hours of electricity per day was enough to make a meal or heat water in. Besides, of course, wondering what paramilitary would be out tonight, whether they would use guns or drills, and whether the kids would survive.

Meanwhile, in the “humanitarian intervener” states, investment in the industrial-military complex in the U.S., and sales of military equipment to the Gulf states, did make for profits all the way around, which created a huge incentive for perpetual aggression.  

I would argue that the hollowing out of the Left as a working class force had everything to do with the way in which the New Left concern with human rights was turned, in the neo-liberal order, into a series of aggressions and profit opportunities. Elsewhere, it should be mentioned, often struck back, feeding their terrorism buzz – and ours: under the delusion that paramilitaries in the Middle East, who’d been armed to the teeth by twenty years of Western arms sales to the various countries they emerged in, would never dare strike Europe, Francois Hollande, for instance, ordered bombing in Syria without, apparently, considering blowback, or consulting the population at large or hinting that France had declared war against Daech, and that Daech fought by its own on the ground shock and awe. So Hollande made the same elementary mistake made by Jose Aznar in Spain in 2004, when the Spanish alliance to the Coalition of the Willing made Spain a target for terrorist attack. Aznar fell. Hollande fell. And the HI group learned nothing. 

This, too, tore a hole in the former ideological balance of Left and Right. The Left’s enthusiasm for military strikes and trade treaties giving multi-national corporations unheard of governance powers – its pilgrimages to both the Pentagon and Davos – were decisive breaks with the old anti-colonialism and the old internationalism of labor. It was the internationalism of the consumer that the Left elevated. But the consumer could well see that cheap tat did not replace an environment from which public investment was withdrawn, wage freezes, and large price increases in lifestyle goods like health and education.

I am of course painting in broad strokes. There is another broad stroke I should add, because it is crucial to the alt-ness of the alt-right. If the Left no longer represented the working class, the New Class establishment did have a constituency: an educated, middle to upper class that understood and assimilated, at least mentally, the demands of the civil rights struggles of the 60s. This was the one great positive advance to which the New Class could point – even if, in actuality, it did not organize those protests, and it did not supply, for the most part, the protesters. Yet it did recognize the moral progress in making formerly oppressed groups citizens. This became its cause – its so-called identity politics. Yet even this advance brought with it unsuspected dialectical problems.  I’ll mention two of them.

The first was the notion, founded on the New Class’s mirroring of class characteristics of the bourgeois Right, of a tacit moral exchange. Just as liberals and leftists adopted the economic precepts of the Chicago school of economics, so they convinced themselves that the Right adopted the civil rights results of the 60s onward – that officially, at least, the right condemned sexism, racism, and even homophobia.

The second was in the self-image that the Left erected. Because if the Left bourgeoisie was hip to women’s, or gay, or black cultural products – if, being so media-centered, they were especially sensitive to verbal abuse of formerly oppressed groups – that does not mean that they were hip to changing the structures that underlay homophobia, sexism or racism. When Third Way politicos were able to get elected, their politics reconciled the abandonment of egalitarianism and the egalitarianism by the civil rights movement by making the latter a case of formal legal advancements. Thus, a certain schizophrenia of approaches became the norm. For example, if the Obama administration could, on the one hand,  finally embrace gay marriage – full civil rights for gay people – on the other hand, they had no problem with deporting a record number of illegal immigrants – 2 million – and doing everything that went with this, including separating children from their families. They did this without, as it were, seeing it. If the Left constituency abhorred and watched for verbal racism in the public forum, they were blind to, or even helped facilitate, the mass incarceration of African-Americans. I’m using American models, but one can find similar patterns in Blair’s Labour, and Hollande’s PS. Meanwhile, the ranks of the political establishment in the Left remained persistently dominated by white males, and a patriarchal perspective. 

This provides a general outline, I think, of positions within the EU and the Anglosphere, where the left has collapsed the hardest. Without that collapse, this moment would look much different. We might even, given a real Left, be able to act on the fact that climate change is going to be the greatest catastrophe human beings have ever faced.

Euphemism leftism in the neoliberal era

 

For some time, a group has been waging a graffiti campaign against femicide and other violence against women in France. I saw some graffitis in Montpellier this summer. I think, however, that the largest wing of the campaign is taking place in Paris. This morning, there was a slogan on our building: “I am not free until all women are free.” A supposed quote from a famous writer.

This bugged me. I’ve thought most of the grafittis were good – some of them were long narratives, some were stats, some were cries of rage. But this graffiti struck me as, forgive me, typical neoliberal leftism.

Let’s take it for a moment that the slogan is true. If so, one has to ask what “not being free” has actually meant to this famous writer. Is she in chains? Is she out of work? Is she beaten every night? Or does she appear at conferences? Are her words printed in mainstream journals and newspapers? Does she have an academic position, a good retirement lined up, and investments?

If the latter is the case – and I would bet it is – her state of “not-freedom” would be envied by most women in the world. All of which puts into question the valaue of "freedom" - what is it worth? What does it mean? To my ear, the slogan really devalues freedom, putting it in the category of inspirational, as opposed to existential, goods. .

But is the slogan false, then? I don’t think it is false, either. There is a sense in which freedom is systematic. There is a sense that the richest bastard in the world is actually morally and existentially injured by the misery of women who are beaten, raped and killed.

Instead, I would call this an exercise in false consciousness.

To get to this conclusion, let’s use substitution to measure the soundness of such slogans. What does it mean when I substitute, in a situation in which I am a woman who does not happen to have been beaten by a partner last night, or the night before, or maybe ever, the slogan. “I am beaten as long as women are beaten.” Or, even, if I, as a man, make that statement? What it does conjoin a truth– there are women who are beaten – with a lie (I am not being beaten, I do not have a domestic situation in which I am beaten, and all the beaten women of the world do no make me, X, beaten). Instead of showing solidarity, it falsifies solidarity. It leads to purely verbal action – a kind of euphemistic liberalism that substitutes, in the cruelest way, theatrical gesture for real social action.

One of the results of the vast breakup of organized labor as a force and a culture is that solidarity increasingly means: slogans and the maintenance of the order as it is, with platforms given to those who criticize it – even violently - without ever really doing anything to change it. To this extent, the criticism of cancel culture or “wokeness” has a point. Unfortunately, that criticism is not usually aimed at overturning the system either – it is rather sticking the tongue out at those who sense that the order is rotten and unjust. Social life is complex, and there is a struggle on the plane of history, of attitude, of what is said, all of which is imbricated in the social struggles of ordinary life – those struggles that would result in justice for beaten and murdered women, and structures that would make women safe – safe on the most primitive level.

I think, even, that there is a connection between the false bottom of the slogan and the con artistry of that Jewish woman from Kansas city, who claimed to be Afro-Rican.

What the anti-femicide group is doing is, I think, a nation-wide charivari. Eugen Weber has pointed out, in Peasants into Frenchmen, that the charivari, a ritualized riot, was a form of social control in peasant societies that controlled, to an extent, violence against women, in as much as it often targeted men who beat their wives. Of course, 19th century peasant societies were not exactly friendly to women, but social control was exerted at those whose violence went beyond the conditions that the village could tolerate. The anti-femicide charivari doesn’t need neoliberal inspirational slogans (although I understand well that inspirational slogans are part and parcel of what the people want. It is a dark, harsh world, and we want some light).

 

poem

 

In the pool at Aquaboulevard

the swimmers bob in the denatured wave

for five minutes every hour.

 

I check the affiche for the slides

which grades them for difficulty and age.

Adam wants to do them all.

 

Here’s the mangrove hot tub!

Here’s the 20 person jacuzzi!

The naiads are all dead.

 

Poor dears, they lived fearful lives

singing the blues under crystalline rivulets.

I do not think they will sing for us.

 

We invented fun

in the headlong 20^th century

grading our sensations accordingly.

 

Screaming down the intestinal turns

of the Aquaraft

I forgot my connection to the greater whole.

Martin Buber and the tree 1

 

Freud once famously said thaat sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. In fact, the Freud who said this might well be the folklore Freud. Still, the Apocrypha counts. Derrida famously tried to show that an example is never just an example, although as far as I know, he never approached Freud’s cigar ( he confined himself to Baudelaire’s tobacco use).

I’m with Derrida on this. The cigar example is a good example of an example that goes a bit far, part of the identikit of Freud with the masculine-marked brown tube in his mouth. What is interesting about the fake saying is that it is supposed to be an example of something that isn’t an example, that will stubbornly remain the thing that it is, just the thing that it is. And in making it exemplarily non-exemplary, the fake Freud is offering us a counterfeit, something  parasitic on a systems of markers of value that isn’t, as it happens, what it seems to be. How was the cigar chosen to be this exemplary non-example – that is the question.

I don’t want to ask that question of the cigar, though. I want to take up the logic of self-identification and its melodrama as it applies to the tree.

I ran into the tree while reading, for the first time, Martin Buber’s I and You (I and thou in the English translation, although the “thou” is a bit too muschmouthed for the plain old German “du”). I have never read this book because Buber has a vague reputation, one I can’t quite pin down, as one of the middle class prophets, the wise men who talk about the “crisis of man”, to borrow the title of Mark Greif’s book. And just as Humbert Humbert is (unjustly) snobby about Charlotte Haze’s “Great Books”, I, too, have been unjustly snobby about the American wisemen of the fifties – the Niebuhrs, the Herschels, et al. – and the Europeans that were published under their aegis – a gallery that definitely included “I and Thou”, published by Simon and Schuster, and licked by the PR department ever since. The term “dialogue”, which had quite the history at the height of American liberalism in the 1960s, owes a debt to Buber.

Snobbishness is the counterfeit of good taste. I’ve laid it down and laid it down as I’ve gotten old and gray. And I occasionally remember that what I know about intellectual history is based, ultimately, on the Will and Ariel Durant books that I read in the seventh and eighth grade – still a good place to get an education, albeit a Eurocentricl one.

To summarize a bit: Buber starts out contrasting the I-you and the I-it relations. He elides the third person, at first, altogether. There’s an anecdote in a wonderful essay on Buber by Avishai Margalit for the NYRB, November 4, 1993, that backgrounds the he/she/they aversion:

“Buber describes an encounter he had in Berlin with the aged, influential pastor Wilhelm Hechler. After several hours of conversation Hechler was suspicious of Buber and before they parted asked him directly, “Do you believe in God?” Buber tried to reassure Hechler that he did, but the answer he thought he ought to have given him, the answer he spent his whole life trying to articulate, came to him on the way home: “If belief in God means speaking about Him in the third person, then I don’t believe in God. But if belief means being able to speak to Him in the second person, then I do believe.’”

For Buber, the I-you relationship creates the possibility for there being a moral and religious domain – or I should perhaps put this in reverse: that there is a moral and religious domain points to the possibility of there being an I-you relationship. Although, unlike Kierkegaard, Buber does not want us to clearly distinguish the moral from the religious. This is an important point: Buber’s supposed existentialism differs in significant ways from other existentialists.

Post-Shoah Jewish philosophers, strongly influenced by Levinas, begin the moral and religious realm with the face. The human face.

Buber, however, begins not with the human face, but with a tree.

A tree.

  “I and You” was published in 1923. Like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, it reflects both the pre-war sense of an old world coming apart and the catastrophe that occurred when the old world committed suicide by trench. There are textual commonalities: although we now look at the Tractatus as a philosophy text, in comparison with philosophy treatises both then and now. It doesn’t reference other arguments, or rarely, it is all about stating (The world is all the case is), and of course at the end of the book it pulls the ladder up and reveals that the book, in as much as it has been philosophical, has been nonsensical .  Wittgenstein once remarked that he wondered if philosophy could be written as a joke book – forgetting that he’d already done that with the Tractatus.

Buber had different teachers – notably George Simmel – and was evidently influenced by the Expressionists, who were evidently influenced by Zarathustra. I and You looks like a philosophical poem, just as Simmel’s sociology often looks like Baudelaire’s poems in prose.

Like Simmel, Buber was fascinated by links, connections, relations. For him, these are primary. In this, he’s following not only Simmel, but a Kabbalistic thematic. Marc-Alain Ouaknin, in Lire aux eclats (1993), writes of the dialogue between the masters of the Midrash or Talmud (the mahloquet) ax proceeding in a space of between that reflects on and in the interval.

“Thought is the thought of the interval, of the entre-deux. Rather than a distinct and certain point of view, each perspective represents a crossing of threads knotted interiorly, an infinitely complicated network, always turning and always subject to turn.”

Ouaknin is a rabbi, while Buber was a non-practicing Jew. As a Rabbi, Ouaknin resists the absolute overturning of hierarchies and oppositions that would destructure, for instance, man/animal (for instance) (that is quite an instance( (an overdetermined instance that turns and is subject to turn).

Buber was not so sure.

I lie to power

 

I lie to power – I never tell the truth.

Power comes in through the wiring and  mail

and from sharp instruments they keep in the booth

of the GP’s office, tap tap; any frail

 

who thinks she’ll win first place for speaking

out her version to the proper guys,

 will find soon enough that her life is leaking

out in big bad droplets down her thighs.

 

Power loves the truth – as long as you’re telling it

they’ll jot it down and file it with your pass.  

Lie to the authorities, whisper when you’re yelling it

- never let them know  when you’re showing them your ass.