Limited, Inc.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Monday, March 18, 2024
The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve
Sunday, March 17, 2024
The Great American Novel - a poem by Karen Chamisso
1.
The black out man, the white out man
All the muses of the Company
Busy
Forgetting the nation’s memory
In our hidy holes, we eat the reports:
who was who and who was where
When the torturer took the stair
To the top of the tower with the cash in his
Pocket
And assassinated the president
(name redacted) of the country
(name blacked out).
This, too, is happening .
Oh oblivion my darling
Principle Researcher: (name blacked out)
“he also prepared a paper on the magician’s art
and the covert communication of information (mind-reading).”
2.
When your electronic veils all come undone
and nobody’s left for your kinda fun
take a (redacted) pill in the noonday sun
your mind to stun.
3.
“I can feel a calmness on the sidewalk—where before I felt a
defiance only”
He sez, speaking for me, me, me
Though I look like a million bucks today
And have the coat to prove it.
I put my calmness in a cute little Benz and drove it over
The bones over the bones of the road
Built on an old Indian hunting trail:
As per Uncle Dunny’s table conversation.
“The liquor laden car he was driving
Plunged from the road” - and into the gnatter
of insect splatter
on the windshield of our family memory.
4.
I was born too late to be a poet who writes “all”
And means it through sermon and circumstance
Until I’m mummified among grasshopper and vine
- My all’s a smaller thing, all mine
and has its America, its hurricane glass
Its anecdotes of life in 1999.
It thinks that driving across the country will be
An exercise in all-creating liberty
signed and sealed by polaroid
like Ed Ruschka’s or Warhol’s
of the whiteline insignificant that haunts
every all with its tics and taunts.
My all is out of whack today
My all has drizzled quite away
My all is in drops and droops its head
My all is the lights out of the dead.
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
On Kissing
Daniel Harris’s “The Romantic”, from 1999, made the surprising argument – or
rather, exhibited the surprising implication – that the Production Code, the
Catholic-generated censorship manual for movies in the era between the
beginning of the talkies in the thirties to the late fifties – actually encoded
a device that pornographers now generally use.
“During the
heyday of romantic Hollywood films, the cinematic kiss was not a kiss so much
as a clutch, a desperate groping, a joyless and highly stylized bear hug whose
duration was limited by official censors who also stipulated that the actors'
mouths remain shut at all times, thus preventing even the appearance of French
kissing, which was supplanted by a feverish yet passionless mashing of
unmoistened lips. This oddly desiccated contact contrasted dramatically with
the clawing fingers of the actresses' hands which, glittering with jewels,
raked down their lovers' fully clothed backs, their nails extended like claws,
full of aggression and hostility long after the star had thrown caution to the
winds, abandoned her shallow pretence of enraged resistance, and succumbed
wholeheartedly to her illicit longings. … The stiff choreography of this
asphyxiating stranglehold suggests apprehension rather than pleasure, the
misgivings of two sexual outlaws who live in a world in which privacy is
constantly imperilled, in which doors are forever being flung open, curtains
yanked back, and unwanted tea trolleys rolled into occupied bedrooms by
indiscreet maids.”
I am not
sure I find the “desperate groping” and the “clawing fingers” of the beringed
femmes fatales as joyless as does Harris. Desperation and joy are not enemies.
But I like it that Harris throws himself into a matter that has long fascinated
anthropologists: the culture and cult of the kiss.
An Italian
semiotician, Marcel Danesi, in his History of the Kiss! (the exclamation mark
strangely kissing the sober title, in effect raking its back with clawing
fingers), makes the immodest claim that kissing today is an artifact of the
literature of the middle ages. Or, perhaps, the literature of the middle ages,
like a seismograph, recorded the surge of kissing as the patriarchal household,
where women were the chattel that sealed alliances, started to collapse. Along
the way he gives us such fascinating facts as this: that there is a science of
kissing and it is called philematology. This is crossword puzzle knowledge
gold. Plus, now, when I am asked what I do for a living, I will reply,
serenely, philematologist, and give the questioner a daredevil look while I
glide away like Groucho Marx with a rose in his teeth.
In
actuality, to return to the subject of desperate kisses, the Legion of Decency
permitted only three seconds. I must admit, I don’t recognize that desperate
groping in, say, the kiss Grace Kelly gives Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window.” Was
Hitchcock breaking the rule? But there is something to Harris’s vision in the
kiss that Rita Hayworth gives Orson Welles in the San Francisco aquarium in
Lady From Shanghai. “Take me quick”, she says, and quick it is – although the
three seconds are cleverly extended by a cut away to the unwanted presence of a
group of school children, who in that instant come around the corner and see
them. This kiss was long in coming – at the center of the movie is a fight
between rich plutocrats aboard the yacht of Hayworth’s rich, crippled husband,
which was followed by a song from la belle Rita with the sign off line: “don’t
take your lips or your arms or your love … away”. This is a case of illicit
longings indeed, with the camera lingering on Rita’s lovely unkissed lips.
Even if I
don’t take Harris to be accurately describing the entirety of the heyday of
romantic Hollywood films, he is onto something in the censored administration
of a kiss.
“Hollywood
kisses are carefully arranged compositions that invite the public, not only to
approach the necking couple, but to slip between them and examine at close
range every blush and gasp of an act that, on the one hand, optimizes the
conditions for viewing and, on the other, makes a bold pretence of solitude, of
barring the door to the jealous intruder and excluding the curious stares of
gaping children who stumble upon adulterous fathers while seeking lost toys in
presumably empty rooms. Lovers are frequently filmed in stark silhouette
against a white background so that, for purposes of visual clarity, their
bodies don't obscure each other, a bulging forearm blocking from view a famous
face, the broad rim of a stylish chapeau a magnificent set of wistful eyes
brimming with desire - a cinematic feat of separation similar to that performed
by pornographers who create a schematic type of televisual sex by prying their
actors so far apart that they are joined, like Siamese twins, at the point of
penetration alone.”
Harris has,
I think, definitely read his Robert Coover.
Ah, the
cathected interdiction, the fetishized prohibition! Bataille’s insight, which
was taken up by Foucault, was that here, sexual desire is secondary to its
interruption. Power is not repressive so much as productive, a maker of the
perversions it spends its times blotting out.
However,
Harris’s promising start on the kiss as spectacle devolves into a romantic view
of realism that seems to me to have no historical basis whatsoever:
“The
exaggeration of privacy in a culture that has become, relatively speaking,
morally lenient is symptomatic of the distortions that occur in novels and
films when artists can no longer satisfy the demands of narrative by drawing
directly from their daily experiences, since actual behavior and its fictional
representations are drifting further apart.”
They seem
to have been drifting apart since Moses was a pup. In fact, of course, this
account of some realistic paradise in which artists satisfied the demands of
narrative – a curious phrase, as though narrative were some hungry domesticated
animal – with their “daily experiences” curiously trashes the idea of the
imagination. The aesthetic trend of the post-code era – of the sixties –
encouraged the idea that “daily experience” was equivalent to the authenticity
that would allow us to enjoy imagined stories and poems without being accused
of being childish and non-productive. At a same time, a response to this notion
of authenticity formed, under the slogan: eat the document. Thus mixing our
sensual and ideological categories.
But let us
not kiss off the kiss like this. Danesi quotes the evidence that is often used
to claim that there is something unique about the Western cult of the kiss. For
instance: Sheril Kirshenbaum writes: “In the Vedic texts no word exists for
‘kiss,’ but the same word is employed to mean both ‘sniff ’ and ‘smell,’ and
also has connotations of touch.” I find the deduction from the lack of a word a
little suspicious, since a “word” is not the only designator of a “thing”. A
phrase can obviously have the same weight as a word. In the Kama Sutra, there
is a chapter on kissing that is much more extensive than any comparable text in
the West.
“The text
goes on to describe four methods of kissing—moderate, contracted,
pressed,
and soft—and lays out three kinds of kisses by a young girl or virgin: nominal
kiss (the girl touches lips with her lover but does not herself do anything),
throbbing kiss (the girl, setting aside her bashfulness a little, responds with
her lower but
not upper
lip), touching kiss (the girl touches her lover’s lips with her tongue, closes
her eyes, and lays her hands on her lover’s hands).”
This is not
the letter of the Code, but it is the spirit – directives that choreograph
kissing.
Danensi
quotes enough evidence from the Bible, the Greeks and the Romans to cast doubt
on his thesis. But I find the thesis interesting anyway:
“Because
the kiss originated as a need to subvert the extant religious and patriarchal
order in medieval Europe, it acquired great appeal wherever it was introduced
through narratives, poetry, and visual art.”
Although
this might be overstating the case, the idea that our set of romantic behaviors
is transmitted through narratives, poetry and visual art has a lot of appeal
for me, getting us outside the notion that “experience” and these aesthetic
forms can be usefully reified as antitheses.
This is, I
think, where the moment of realism comes in. Contra Harris, the ideology of
realism is always a matter of showing that daily experiences are always
drifting away from narrative – from the stories we tell ourselves about
ourselves. Julian Sorel, the “realist” hero par excellence, gets his narrative
about himself not from his daily experiences, but from his reading of
Napoleon’s memoirs. The “demand” of narrative is actually the demand of the
narrator, who, grammatically and existentially, is the one who can demand.
Encoded in this idea of some fatal drift between the daily experience of the
artist and the art is the sovereign consumer, the hero of neo-classical
economics, whose choices have an unimpeachable logic, follow Arrow Debreu’s
theory of preferences, and has no personal tie to limit his only reason for
existence – accumulation.
Still,
outside of this detour through my pet peeves (and the image of art and
experience as kissers caught in the moment of separation, lips coming off of
lips), I have to give kudos to Harris for seeing that the cut and edit of the
kiss scenes in classic Hollywood cinema could accidentally give rise to to the
loops of porno films: which, although seemingly all about unending coupling
are, in reality, as time constrained as Rita Hayworth’s kiss. Once one begins
mapping sexual desire to the time of its representation, sexual desire becomes
another factory made assemblage – a matter of intentional efficiencies. Kisses
roll right off the assembly line. Is there, in the behavioral sciences, a basis
for the three second kiss metric? I wonder. But its arbitrariness creates a
basis for further metrics and transgressions of metrics. For instance,
Hitchcock, in Notorious, got around the three second by having Cary Grant and
Ingrid Bergman kiss for two seconds, stop, then kiss again, and so on.
How this
influenced the natural history of kissing in America is a curious question I
leave to all of you philematologists out there.
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
The high modernist zen masters
There’s an
anecdote in Ellman’s biography of James Joyce that I really love, since it
shows Joyce to be a master Jesuit after all:
“… one day
he dined with Vanderpyl and another writer, Edmond Jaloux, at a restaurant in
the rue St. Honore. As they drank champagne and Fendant de Sion, Jaloux, who
happened to be carrying a copy of Flaubert's Trois Contes, began to praise the
faultlessness of its style and language. Joyce, in
spite of his own admiration for Flaubert, bristled, 'Pas si bien que ca. II
commence avec une faute.' And taking the book he showed them that in the
first sentence of'Un Cceur simple,' 'Pendant un demi-siecle, les bourgeoises de
Pont-l'Eveque envierent d Mme Aubain sa servante Felicite,' envierent should be
enviaient, since the action is continued rather than completed. Then he thumbed
through the book, evidently with a number of mistakes in mind, and came to the
last sentence of the final story, 'Herodias,' 'Comme elle etait tres lourde, ilss
la portaient alternativement.' 'Alternativement is wrong,' he announced, 'since
there are three bearers.”
Oh that
High modernism! So elegant, so intelligent. What Joyce does to Flaubert here is
what Flaubert, in his letters, did to Balzac – he trumps the master.
Masters.
Zen masters, really. Who could hear the sound of one hand, clapping.
The
implication is that a literary text is something made with precision. A word
Robert Musil liked too. Soul and precision. It is like a sailing ship, where
every plank must be tongue-and-grooved closely with every other plank to resist
the elements.
Yet put
this way, it seems wrong. Shouldn’t the novel seek, instead, to be penetrated
by the elements? Or at least to reflect them – as per Stendhal’s image of the
mirror walking down the road. Isn’t the mistake in Herodias, in fact, related
to the fact that the description – the mirroring – involves three bearers?
Of course,
Stendhal’s mirror shows up in Ulysses as the cracked looking glass of a serving
girl. The crack is not simply a matter of distortion, but a reminder that the
mirror’s smooth surface doesn’t really model what is happening in writing.
Writing has parts and dimensions – words and sentences and paragrahs and
chapters, among the parts, and denotation, sound, connotation and history,
among the dimensions. I look at the page and see a smooth surface that I
recognize as the printed page, but when I read, when I am initiated into what
is going on, the surface breaks up. Joyce, that Jesuit, saw the old Latin alter
in alternativement. It was the kind of second hearing that Flaubert had, too.
But for the novel to work, one hand must clap, I think. Impossible to the
secular ear, but not to the ear inside the ear.
Still: the
ship metaphor that I used seems not to capture what is going on here, although
it does suggest that the text resists – it resists first. But that resistance
must not be so great that it doesn’t move. Joyce might correct Flaubert’s
French, but recognizes that these corrections grow out of the spirit of
Flaubert’s scruples.
But I don’t
want to discard the ship image just yet, because it leads me to one of my
favorite passages in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Here, too, the story
becomes an image for a view of language and its effects:
“Le
vaisseau Argo ~ The ship Argo
A frequent
image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the
Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship,
without having to alter either its name or its form. This ship Argo is highly
useful: it affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not
by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions
(which cannot be caught up in any mystique of creation): substitu-
tion (one
part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is in no way
linked to the stability of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one
and the same name, nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no
other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.”
Argo is,
ultimately, a variable.
I think
Joyce would have been intrigued by this passage, but I don’t think he would
have quite agreed with it. Make Argo too much of a variable and you will forget
what you are doing with it: going to find the very specific Golden Fleece.
And yet,
couldn’t one say that the infinite circularity of Finnegan’s wake leads us to
Barthes conclusion? There, in a dream language precision driven crazy by the
latin roots of alternitivement, movement is always back to where movement
started.
Monday, March 11, 2024
Untitled - Karen Chamisso
In the deadpan of poetry
Like any other mutant in the American grain
“speakers do not mark prosodically punch lines or jab lines”
But let it all sink to the bottom.
Bottom’s up! Such is the burden of the song.
And sometimes this can go on all night long
When the pills don’t kick in and the street noise interferes
With the dreams that are buzzing around my ears.
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Horror: genre and politics
“We read in the Salut publique de Lyon: an English
photographer, M.s Warner, had the idea of reproducing on the collodion the eye
of an ox some hours after its death. Examining that assay with a microscope, he
distinctly perceived on the retina the lines of the paving stones of the
slaughterhouse, the last object that had affected the vision of the animal,
bowing its head to receive the blow of the butcher’s knife.” – Villiers de
l’Isle-Adam
Since the Revolution, terror has had a leftward aspect. The
Right (for instance, Edmund Burke and Joseph De Maistre) had a strong
consciousness of the sublimity of putting the royals on the chopping block, as
well as dissolving the very names of the nobility. Terror and shock, in various
guises and platforms, was long the effect sought by anarchist and socialist. A
healthy shock to the system, for the union leader, and for the poet, an
amassing of dynamite underground. The poet-anarchist Laurent Tailhade produced
a famous slogan at the time of the bombings in Paris in the 1890s: “Qu'importent
les victimes, si le geste est beau!». In due time, those numb to beautiful
gestures like to recall, Tailhade himself lost an eye to one of the bombs.
The working class culture of anarchy seems to have died,
although its memorials are lovingly preserved on many sites on the internet –
see, for example, the Maitron site (https://maitron.fr/).
Where once we sympathized with the terrorist, we now – we the entertained –
turn to horror for our sublime.
This is usually an intro to some meditation on horror as the
defining effect of various fictions. My own sense of things is that horror as a
genre can’t be understood without understanding horror in fact, from urban
murders to concentration camps, that span the “modern period.” Foucault’s
description of the drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens, which of
course happened in a public space and was meant as punishment and spectacle, could easily be fitted in an anthology of horror. Even at this time, though, there were enlightenment philosophers that were
doubtful of it as punishment but, as well, as spectacle. Napoleon, famously,
banished abattoirs to the extremities of Paris because he did not like the
populace being dulled to the spectacle of execution – given the populace’s
actions during the Revolution. Yet as the spectacle of execution was confined
more and more to state enforced restricted areas, printed media was invested in
the grotesque and the horrid.
A lot of the literature on horror is devoted to horror as a
genre. It is a genre, but what happens when the genre wall comes down is that
one misses the capillary connection between the genre and the world outside the
genre. Literature – and film and song and painting – are in the street and in
the newspapers and the laboratories. Horror as a genre is stylistically marked,
so often, by upfronting the capillary source. Poe, for instance, used mesmerism
a lot, which made perfect sense in his struggle with the transcendentalist
culture of New England. In England, de Quincey’s The art of murder was not just
the beginning of modern true crime, but was a way of writing horror that fed on
the Newgate tradition of reported crime. Poe’s followers in France picked up on
the peculiarly capillary adaptedness of horror. When, in Villiers de
L’isle-Adam’s story, Claire Lenoir, the narrator, a horrid savant named
Tribulet Bonhomet describes himself as a “Saturnian of the second epoque”,
which, as the Pleiade editors have pointed out, is a direct lift from a manual
on handreading, Les mystères de la main révélés et expliqués, by Adolph
Desbarrolles, which is still in print today. When, more currently, Stranger
Things looks for its jump scare, it attaches to the very real MKULTRA program
of the CIA, which supposedly ended in the late 60s – but actually just changed
its name. To my mind, one of the great resources of genre is this capillarity.
It is why it often feels more current, more plugged in, than the mainstream
literature forms. The modernist device was to embrace that capillarity – which you
see in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ullyses, Mrs. Dalloway, etc. The Lyric
Realist homing in on the upper middle suburban or urban household is as wary of
this inlet from the outside as the upper middle class burger is of crime.
Friday, March 08, 2024
Social utility of fat cats
Social utility of fat cats: the
use and limits of wealth
We need to discuss the social function of rich people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, and the rare inventor, I see two functions: administration and investment.
The social cost of administration has gone up
considerably since corporations changed their nature, breaking the old postwar
pact between capital and labor. Here, I am going to put to one side the growth
of LBOs and private equity firms that developed new forms of looting
corporations in the eighties in order to concentrate on the radical elevation
in compensation for the highest levels of management. This took off in the 80s.
The explanation for this, from the point of view of intellectual history, is that
neoclassical economists provided a model that justified it. Then, as an institutional
addendum, business schools saw in this issue a chance to create an alliance
with a trend in corporations that would pay great benefits: expanding its
presence both on the campus and in the world of business. Harvard Business
school in particular boasted a team of scholars who cheered on the insane
compensations of the new class of CEO with arguments having to do with
“aligning” the interests of the organization and the management: the famous
principle-agent problem, the solution to which was to massively bribe the
leader. The rationale for this was paper thin – one had only to compare
the compensation for Japanese upper management in the seventies to
Americans in the eighties to see that corporate productivity and return
on investment did not depend on giving the CEOs carte blanche and stock
options.
One must keep in mind, from a political point of
view, that the lowering of the marginal tax rate as a result of bills passed in
Reagan’s first two years in office was the necessary but not sufficient
condition for the subsequent explosion in upper management compensation. The
gesture normalized the transgression of the post war pact, which saw the worker
in some relation to management. It gave boards of directors a material reason
for allowing and even encouraging a practice that, at one time, would have looked
like gouging or an exercise in contempt for the stakeholders in the firm. The
normalization worked: in the nineties, Clinton Dems showed no inclination to
take the punchbowl away from this party, thus cementing the new norm. Rich
upper management types – donors! – were now consulted as oracles instead of
targeted as moneybags. This, crucially, paid extra dividends once one was out
of office. The shadow side of neo-liberalism was the creation of a whole new
strata of well paid consultants, lobbyists, and general wheeler dealers. If
corporation X could not bribe Senator Y, Senator Y’s children or spouse could
perhaps be hired at excellent salaries to lobby, or perhaps to think hard at
think tanks, which like business schools experienced a true boom in the
eighties. These think tanks were being bankrolled by wealthy philanthropists,
who, in time honored fashion, used this instrument to avoid taxes and exert
power. As the CEO class became more and more entitled, there was considerable
trickle down to the political class, which became abettors and scroungers at
the till. Similarly, the CEO model spread to non-profits. College presidents
and museum heads were soon being paid astonishing sums to do what previous
college presidents and museum heads had done for considerably less. There was
no visible increase in the quality of colleges or museums, but this didn’t
matter: that standard was obsolete at this point.
Thomas Picketty, who studied changes in the source
of wealth along with Emmanuel Saenz, targets the income derived from
administration as a major driver of income and wealth inequality in his book
Capital. For a quick rundown of this, I’d recommend Mike Konczal’s excellent essay
in the Boston Review in 2014.
Even so, if the exorbitant sums paid to
administrators had resulted in a great increase in the pay to the median
worker, it might be said that, on some level, it works. But this hasn’t
happened. The very wealthy have seen their income growing by
about 6 percent per year since the
seventies – in fact, the starting point seems to be 1973. The
middle has grown, if at all – it flatlined during most of the 00s – by one
percent per year. The workers who comprise the lower eighty percent have
seen their wealth, in Piketty’s phrase, “collapse”. This reverses the trends
from 1945 to 1973, when it was just the opposite, with the wealthiest having
less percentage gains than the middle.
The left argues that we have no reason to pay these
exorbitant costs for administration. There’s no evidence that these costs have
been worth it to the average worker in developed economies. On the contrary,
they’ve decisively shifted power away from workers. This power is not just
reflected in flatlining wages and increased debt: it is, as well, a matter of
expectations, of seeing the future of one’s society as something in which one
can expect justice, exert political influence, and enjoy the fruits of our
greatly increased national product: making our lives more comfortable, but
allowing us, too, to take risks without facing the chance of being kicked out
on the street. And so on down the generations, ad gloria mundi.
Along with administration, the wealthy play a
positive social role by making investments. The argument here is, it is true,
circular – we need to the wealthy to invest, and that investment makes them
richer, making us need them more – but it isn’t bogus. Investment means that
credit is available to the masses; the making accessible and available credit
to workers, beyond the mingy terms of the company store, was one of the great
capitalist victories of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union died for many reasons,
but one of the unheralded ones was the persistent refusal of the Soviet
planners to create an internal source of credit. This devastated the economy
that recovered very well from World War II, but that, by the sixties, was in
desperate need of credit to renovate and take advantage of the efficiencies
offered by technological progress.
So there’s that. One can accept that the sphere of
financial circulation is necessary, however, without accepting the premium that
is now being paid for investment is necessary or efficient – or accepting
the massive shadow banking system that has developed according to a logic of
its own. The proliferation of financial instruments whose sole purpose is a
quick return – basically, the casinoization of the banking system – has only
been a bad thing. Although it has been an excellent thing for the very rich.
Our tax system mirrors the priorities of the very
wealthy – hence, the flat tax on capital gains. This is a scandal, and
everytime it is pointed out that it is a scandal, everyone is scandalized, and
the moment passes. Here, the wealthy have been very successful at telling a
story that is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx
told. It is perhaps the most successful propaganda ever to spread in America,
if we discount the pseudo-science flogged by cigarette companies to keep regulation
from happening in the fifties and sixties. The success of the cig companies can
be measured in the obituary columns and the hospitals year after year. The
success of the entrepreneur myth can be measured in bankruptcies, debt, and the
decline in public investment is occurring not only in the U.S., but everywhere
in the developed world save China.
The story made up by Schumpeter, and other
conservative economists, went like this: wealth comes about because some
risktaker seizes on an idea – a new invention or service, or a common one that
can be done more efficiently, etc. – and founds a company. The company hires
people, meaning that our risktaker is spreading the wealth. We need this
person! And so the richer he is, the more he deserves our gratitude for
graciously making such wealth for others.
This fairy tale is very popular on the right, and
hardly disputed anymore on the left. Yet it is simply bogus. The wealth of the
risktaker depends entirely on the services and commodities produced by the
workers. The rightwing tale completely and neatly inverts reality. There’s no
Gates, Jobs, or Bezos without the workers that embodied and carried forth the
tasks that made them rich. All honor to their ideas – but they are ideas built
on the labor, services and ideas of others. The indispensibility of the entrepreneur
isn’t even believed by the banker class, which mouths this propaganda. As any
glance at the history of the tech industry – where the myth of the wealthmaking
wealthy is particularly strong – shows, when the idea of the risktaker becomes
an actual company, his funders – those VC angels – in the majority of
cases replace him. The VC angels have no sentimentality about the
“entrepreneur”. They know he’s a replaceable cog. Unless, of course, it is the
man at the top of some Venture Capital company – then he’s an irreplaceable
genius.
So, to put it in one sentence: the entrepreneur
myth inverts cause and effect, for the malign purpose of justifying an
unnecessary premium to the administrator.
But to return to the social function of the
wealthy, it is at the convergence of administration and investment that we see
the need, such as there is, for a wealthy strata. That need is not, however,
for an uber-wealthy strata. We need to allow a premium for investment and for
the higher administrative tasks. At least, given the present form of our
economic system. But a premium can really be limited, and its limits should be
defined empirically, not with an ideological elevator speech about freedom. In
the fifties, the wealthiest level of Americans, the top 1 percent, owned 9
percent of the national wealth. They now own 35 percent. The bottom 80 percent
own ten percent. This has happened in my lifetime. In my son’s lifetime, if
global warming is seriously addressed and there is an America left, we can
correct this. In my utopia, the top 1 percent would own five percent of the
wealth, and the bottom 80 percent would own at least 50 to 60 percent of the
wealth – leaving the next 19 percent with the spoils. That 19 percent is
composed of administrators, professionals and people in the Finance, Insurance,
and Real Estate sectors. These people have seen their incomes and wealth
grow, but not in proportion to the freakishly wealthy upper 1 percent. That one
percent – and even more the .01 percent – dominate the chart.
I’m conceding to the social function of the wealthy
much that depends on the current system. That system itself has to adjust in a
major way to the catastrophe it has generated and refused to confront – and who
can predict just how that adjustment will be accomplished? But it should be
pointed out that ecocide is not just a capitalist product – there was no
country and system more devoted to ecocide than the U.S.S.R. As long as we
refuse to rethink the treadmill of production, we will keep going the way of the
Dead Planet. However, the acceleration in ecocide coincides, and not
accidentally, with the increase in wealth inequality we have seen around the
world. Economists, bizarrely, love to brag that really excessive poverty is
decreasing, as if they had anything to do with it. This means, basically, that
there are more families living on more than 2 dollars a day. Victory! But one
can ask whether the price – a .001 percent that are living on 50 million
dollars per day – is worth it. I for one say no. Inequality and the present
system of industry are both factors in the same death march. One we can stop.
And we can do that without rich people missing a single ten course lunch. The
right will always complain it is a choice between the billionaire and the Gulag,
but that is a false choice. We can choose to keep the wealthy without creating
a wealth aristocracy. That’s the real choice.
The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve
In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nar...
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You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t...
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The most dangerous man the world has ever known was not Attila the Hun or Mao Zedong. He was not Adolf Hitler. In fact, the most dangerous m...
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In messing around in the vaults – the vaults under the surface of history and literature, as per the posts of last week - LI recently came...