The downfall of Trump: a trail of murders

 The downfall of Trump is being counted in murder victims. Minneapolis, the 117 and counting fishermen in the Carribbean and Pacific, the measles victims in Texas and Kansas and South Carolina. On the one hand, murder is murder. On the other hand, in a normal state with a normal opposition party, these murders would be hung around the neck of the murderers and their forces would be squeezed shut by militant defunding.

I believe in the Downfall, but I also believe that the hollow, spineless immoral oppostion leaders also have to go. No return to the status ante - no Schumer, no Jeffries, no tricks and pics of the Dems laughing it up with their Republican colleagues.
Between that belief and what is actionable - that's the question. The social media style is to issue little pronunciamentos, as if one were the commandante of a faithful troop. Well, I'm no commandante and my pronunciamento's are worth zip. The main thing is to keep the idea going - we all, and that includes cowards like me, can do this. A country that has taken this dystopian turn can, while resisting it, make giant strides towards a more utopian order. Of course we've been played before - that was the lesson of the 2008 electon. But we aren't condemned to be suckers.

The ghost of William Walker floats through: in the American grain

 

1. William Walker was certainly of the type – the Barbaric yawper, the opportunist, the man who made mistakes out there in the territories – who could have been included in William Carlos William’s Plutarchian attempt to get down the American grammar of character, In the American Grain. It was always a bit too reductive: grain. For such a pesticide treated, multi-wood, laminated,  two by four thing as America.

Williams was aware of the trickiness of going about poetry under the aegis of history.

“But history follows governments, and never men. It portrays us in generic patterns, like effigies, or the carving on sarcophagi, which say nothing save, of such and such a man, that he is dead. That’s history. It is concerned with only one thing: to say everything is dead.”

Walker, the most famous filibuster, didn’t make Williams’ cut. Sam Houston was the closest he got to that. Daniel Boone’s zen, that was something Williams’ saw. And after the Grain book, in his Imaginations, he nailed it for good and all, however problematically:

 

The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth…

The rascality of the American product, its galumphing lack of dignity even as it made orotund and dignified gestures, this was a bit too Mencken-ish for Williams to put in. William Walker was just such a type of young American hoss.

2. I take from Williams words at the end of the Houston chapter a manifesto like notion that we can look at what is happening, on all fronts, in the present American dissolve, from the perspective of the American grain and its secret, libidinous dynamics.

“However hopeless it might seem, we have no other choice: we must go back to the beginning; it must all be done over; everything that is must be destroyed.”

The do-over – we all, good householders, know this urge! Throw out the old wedding presents, repaint the rooms, find the new job, move to another state, stop answering the phone and the emails, seek company among lowlives or revolutionaries, do something to stop the appalling, encroaching staleness!

However, that something at the moment might be much quieter. The woke metaphor that our era of reaction is all coiled about is, partly, waking up the beasts, those seemingly dead things that actually still exist in the very air we breathe. We can see the beast of Calhoun, the “Marx of the Master Class”, as Hofstadter called him, or more simply our proto-Nazi theorist, our Alfred Rosenberg sprung from old planter schemes, as it presides over the  Roberts Court, just itching to reinstate the Dred Scott decision,  to which we still bow (but for how long, Lord?). And we see the filibusters, those arrogant, masculinist, pirate imperialists, weaving into being an ad hoc foreign policy under Trump. Foreign policy’s a piss-elegant name for robbery on a global scale. The robbers this time come unmasked and full of thief’s jargon.

Trump is a great channeler of American history – he knows so little about it that he is a perfect blank through which the malevolent spirits move. Republicans have an addiction to the type. Warren Harding, George W. Rotarians, ignorant shitkickers, reality tv stars. We get what we deserve.

3. Walker -  I can see his type. When I was a kid, it was the leader of the playground. The boy who the other boys somehow always ended up allowing to organize things. Who all the other little boys loved, in their way. Love, fear, wanting to be the best friend.

The playground leader is often the athlete, but not the best athlete. He’s that boy follows out his reflex arc with the  superb confidence of a born imposter, and this is his visible sign of grace. But further than that arc – into techne, a skill to be taught, - or what amounts to being  against his “nature”, his liking – there he cannot go. Or at least he goes reluctantly, against his grain. Into the field of questions. To be taught means to submit, to let that ego, that reflex arc, go. Suspend it. Drop the imposter. And this is a drama.

The playground boy is against teaching and teachers as a policy and instinct. He’s all recoil.

In the American character museum, the playground leader is connected by a thousand threads to the Jack of all Trades. I’m from a Jack of All Trades myself. Pa. Farmer, carpenter, airconditioning man, small business owner, builder of his own house. And the spell got into me. I oriented myself by writing, but have never settled down to the little matter of earning money, and now I’m in the retirement years. It happens.

4.  Once, when America was mostly farm and woods, the Jack of all Trades filled a great space. Now, of course, America is all apps and buzz, and the Jack of all Trades lies bleeding, here an obscure rocker, there the guy who knows how to fix computers in your apartment or neighborhood, who you call on. The proto-professional, the amateur with the Youtube channel, the explainer. Once though the Jack of all Trades did a stage on steamboats, sold lots in Florida, mined in California, shot buffaloes on contract for the U.S. army in Wyoming. The Jack of all Trades was manifest destiny on two scratched up legs.

The types exists way past frontier’s close in our popular culture. For instance, Paul Newman’s Brick. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, paired with sizzling Elizabeth Taylor, both in their physical superbia. Brick, who has numbed his reflex arc and its approaches to reality with drink. Who has met his nature (supplied by Tennessee Williams, of course) in Skipper, his best friend, a suicide for whom Brick has felt the reflex arc in his groin, but never followed through. And now can’t follow through with all Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor’s) superbia to help him find the Dao.  Brick, who never figured his reflex arc was going to steer him into this kind of territory.

A fifties movie, with the American Freudian notion of the libidinal as our crackable code. But we need more than a view of the character as so many detours to a fuck to get us to the Americanness of this. I’d propose here we are encountering, on the verge of the Sixties and its New Frontier rhetoric, the social etiolation of the Jack of all Trades position. The adventurer on his crutches, the playground leader with a repressed longing for his suicided football teammate – this seemed, at one time, the end of the figura.

Ending as tragedy, returning as farce – don’t we know the routine?

5. William Walker was Tennessee-framed, which meant something in the antebellum imagination. It meant a six foot tall talltaler, all forest furs, long rifle, Bowie knife at his belt. Crockett and Bowie, in fact, died as quasi-filibusters in the defence of that useless warehouse, the Alamo. The whole Texas enterprise was Tennessee-framed, a matter of carving out slave territory under the name of freedom.

But in fact, Walker was small, smooth. Robert May observes that he was “five feet six inches tall and weighing about 115 pounds; besides, his smooth, freckled face lacked the whiskers and rough features of so many of the day’s military adventurers.” He was a banker’s son, born in Nashville and educated at private schools, trained to be a physician, even making the traditional tour of Europe under the idea that he was going to come back a doctor. But he didn’t live up to his Dad’s ideas – William Walker had ideas of his own. He went to New Orleans to study law. There, he ended up a journalist, and part owner of a newspaper, the New Orleans Crescent. But it was no go, and in the autumn of 1849 Walker had to find some other way to make his money.

Tennessee-framed. Cormac McCarthy is dead right to start his anabasis, Blood Meridien, with a Tennessee boy. And with a band of freebooters, scalphunters, who are whipped into shape by characters like Walker, drunk on rhetoric and high ideals, under which they idealize themselves, disasterously. An anabasis of atrocity, in which the instruments that move the enterprise undermine the principles under which the enterprise was launched, until it became largely atrocity for atrocities sake, hide and seek among monsters and victims. As it was, and as it will always be. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

The instrument, the drone: such a clean way to shed blood:  Obama’s little helper.

But Trump, a man who is has a love of dirt for its own sake, a copraphile in spirit, has gone back to the bombardment. We know all to well how taking a shit and dumping bombs equate in Trump’s old brain.

And so we come to the awakening of Walker, with the news of gold being discovered in California, and the beginning of his real life. At 30.  It is to California he goes, by boat. But not before one characteristic, Tennessee touch: according to his biographer, William O. Scroggs (whose book, Filibusters and Financiers (1916), bears the mark of that  Americanist style, half Mencken, half muckraker):  ‘Before leaving New Orleans, however, he showed something of the fire that smouldered under the quiet exterior by seeking out one of the editors of La Patria, a tri-weekly Spanish-American paper, and giving him a severe flogging  on account of the publication of an article at which he took personal offence.”

6.  In a memorable essay in Orion Magazine, September, 2006, Rebecca Solnit showed how the San Francisco Bay and the watershed of the Sierra Nevada, including the Sacramento River, are still affected by the Gold Rush. Its geological aspect. 7600 tons of Mercury were dumped in those waters. Mercury was the element used to bind to gold particles in ore, creating an amalgam that is then heated to free the mercury as fumes and leave the gold. “Overall, approximately ten times more mercury was put into the California ecosystem than gold was taken out.” A ratio one might metaphysicalize as a standard to measure American rapacity versus the products of Manifest Destiny. The mercury is still in those waters.

“The volume of mercury-tainted soil washed into the Yuba was three times that excavated during construction of the Panama Canal, and the riverbed rose by as much as eighty feet in some places. So much of California was turned into slurry and sent downstream that major waterways filled their own beds and carved new routes in the elevated sludge again and again, rising higher and higher above the surrounding landscape and turning ordinary Central Valley farmlands and towns into something akin to modern-day New Orleans: places below water level extremely vulnerable to flooding. Hydraulic mining washed downstream 1.5 billion cubic yards of rock and earth altogether.”

The past isn’t even past. Gold rush or rush to conquer Mexican, Central American or Caribbean territories, the same Dramatis Personæ populate the scene – the rascal, the commander, the troops, native or American, the villagers (shot or “freed”), the steamboat, the navies of imperial powers. Walker fell in with this or that group of chancers until, in 1852, he and some others struck upon the idea of an American colony in Mexico. They were following in the footsteps of other chancers, such as a Frenchman, Count Gaston Raoul de Raousset-Boulbon, built on the lines of Louis Napoleon (who was behind the expedition of Maximilian to Mexico, which led, at least, to Manet’s very great painting of Maximilian’s execution), who arrived in San Francisco for whatever treasures beckoned and mustered some troops to take Guaymas, Sonora and see what came of it.

7. There’s a detail, here. A historical anomaly. The scalphunters in Blood Meridien bumped into it solid. In 1804, a report was filed by a Habsburg official named Merino who was reporting from the frontlines on the pacification of the nine groups of Apaches. He accords them respect a chronicler owes to a minor kingdom: “This  nation inhabits the vast empty expanse lying between 30 and 3degrees of latitude and 264 and 277 degrees of longitude, measuring from the island of Tenerife, extending from the vicinity of the presidio of Altar in the province of Sonora near the coast of the Red Sea [Rojo] or Sea of Cortes, to that of La Bahia del Espiritu Santo, which is seventeen leagues from the bay of San Bernardo, in Texas.”

A vast territory, and of course absolutely empty to the snake eyes of the white predator. Edward Dorn also stopped in Apacheria, after it was broken, after Geronimo was captured, after Olson, counterculture, and his own conversation with Blake’s America. Dorn discovered how the Apaches were captured and shipped by the Americans, under the command of General Miles in railroad cars, chained up, to Fort Marion, Florida. 1886.

Dorn’s verse:

As the train moves off at the first turn of the wheel
With its cargo of florida bound exiles
Most of whom had been put bodily
Into the coaches, their 3000 dogs,
Who had followed them like a grand party
To the railhead at Holbrook
                                            Began to cry
When they saw the smoking creature resonate
With their masters,
And as the máquina acquired speed they howled and moaned
A frightening noise from their great mass
And some of them followed the cars
For forty miles
Before they fell away in exhaustion.

8. Telling a story like this, we want bold iconographic scenes, neat bits of landscape and event. We want some flat method, something that is not perspective at all, something that is more like putting your nose to a body.

Walker failed in Sonora, after the French nobles had done their worst; but undaunted, that pale man with the hair greased over to the left side in the Brady photograph tried his hand again, in Central America. The famous one, the one success, at least for a time, in Nicaragua. He managed to capture a city, Granada. He founded a newspaper that immediately proceeded to praise the “grey eyed man of destiny” -  for like any wrestler, he knew the value of a cool sobriquet. In 1855, at 35 years of age, he could look around the precincts of the capital (one of two) of a divided Nicaragua and dream of the canal that would connect the Atlantic and the Pacific, from which he’d get a fabulous cut.

“On October 13 Walker’s troops took the enemy capital of Granada; and days later Walker executed the secretary of foreign affairs in the Legitimist régime, who had been taken into custody, after news arrived that Legitimist forces had fired on American civilians crossing  Nicaragua, killing some of them. The seizure of Granada and Walker’s threats of more executions induced the Conservative general Ponciano Corral to agree to a treaty ending the hostilities and creating a fourteen-month provisional, coalition government…”

Walker’s luck lasted for two years. In 1857, other Central American powers, backed by the British navy, put an end to Walker’s venture.

Like the detritus of the gold rush, the detritus of these adventures still comes to us – as “illegal immigrants” that must be stopped or hunted. There is something fun and funny and funky in the higher, prophetic sense (from fonne Middle English fool or stupid) that these prey are bringing down the American house in its current zodiacal configuration.

9. But fast forward is the way this history goes. Walker took up an amazing amount of space, during these years, in public opinion and its correspondent, the newspaper. Walker’s adventures took up almost as much space as the conflict between the slave states and the free. The  Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave laws, the John Brown raid, all in the other columns.   His next venture, in Honduras, gives us this:

He's brought to Truxillo, Hondurus, on September 12, 1860. His troops had done badly, and to save himself he’d surrendered to the British, who were represented by Norvell Salmon, Commander of the H.M.S. Icarus. Walker relied on the British sense of fair play. Bad mistake. Instead, chained in his prison cell, he was informed that his execution was imminent. No sooner said then a squad of soldiers came in to do it, marched him out of town, stood him by a tumbledown wall, and divided into two. The first squad shot him; the second squad shot him again, to make good and sure he was killed.

The business was completed, but in the papers there was other news of succession threats and election business. The Walker chapter was closed.

Entertainment ego sum

This is a paragraph from an essay Musil wrote about Bela Belazs’s famous book about film, Visible Man:

The observations that I will add in the following concern these luminal surfaces. The question of whether Film is an independent art or not, which is the entering point for Balazs’s effort to make it one, incites other questions that are common to all the arts. In fact film has become the folk art of our time. “Not in the sense, alas, that it arises from the spirit of the folk, but instead in the sense that the spirit of the folk arises from it,’ says Balazs. And as a matter of fact the churches and the cults of all the religions in their millennia have not covered the world with a net as thick as that accomplished by the movies, which did it in three decades.”

As is so often the case with these Viennese intellectuals, Musil is astonishingly sensitive to the changes being wrought by modernity – with the wisdom of nemesis perched on the apocalyptic battlements. His reference is shrewdly to religion, rather than to other forms of art – that is, his reference is to the community of souls. The soul as Musil knew was dying out as an intelligible part of modern life. Modernism – or perhaps one should say the industrial system, under the twin aspects of the planned economy and capitalism – operated as a ruthless commissar in the great purge of interiority- and in that purge, killed, as a sort of byproduct, the humanist notion of art. In retrospect, the whole cult of art stood on the shakiest of foundations. What was really coming into being was something else – the entertainment complex. Film’s effect was not some technological accident, but a phenomenon in the social logic that was bringing us to where we are today, when the primary function of the subject is not to think – that antique cogito – but to be entertained.

Here we are now, entertain us – Nirvana’s line should have a place of honor next to cogito ergo sum in the history of philosophy, I am entertained, or I am not entertained – these are the fundamental elements of subjectivity. God himself, within these parameters, is nothing other than the first entertainer, world without end.

The three line novel

 “I did very well for the store for six years, and it’s just time to move on for me,” Mr. Domanico said. He said he wanted to focus on his other businesses, including selling gun-related items.”

I clipped this little slugger of a quote from the article in the NYT about the closing of a Trump store in Philadelphia.
It made me think of you, Félix Fénéon!
Fénéon is most famous as the Uncle Sam looking geek painted by his friend, Seurat. But among a small, hardcore fan group, he is known as the author of the three line novel – forging fictitious fait divers for the newspaper Le Matin, in which three sometimes disjunct sentences throws into relief a whole long narrative – a baggy novel bagged, so to speak, in the narrowest of forms.

Mr. Domanico, who seems like a hybrid figure, part underground cartoon villain, part bitplayer from one of Updike’s Rabbit novels, was, of course, always going to focus on selling gun-related items. He was born (from the union of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a ironing board) to move from selling Maga hats to Smith and Wesson mitten-ware.
Out of the news item, out of the Weegee photo, out of the insatiable quest for jigsaw puzzle fact which makes up the newspaper’s imaginary, we have unleashed so many Mr. Domanicos. Millions of them. What to do with them is our Nobodaddy question of the day.

The Anti-Pareto

 

1.  There was a period in my life when I got obsessed with Pareto. Why did I get obsessed with Pareto? Well, at the time, I had some vague notion of Pareto’s theories as the crackable code of neoliberal economics. Also, I love the name, Pareto. A beautiful name which should designate some resort locale on the Adriatic, where it is all luxe and beach towels – and instead, it designates this acerbic rightwinger. So, it makes me poetically indignant.

Where to start? I’ll start here.

2. Vilfredo Pareto has never been a well known name, outside of economics and a part of sociology. He has, however, entered popular culture due to his so called “80/20” law, a power law that is often used by conservatives to indicate that inequality is not caused by social arrangements but transcends them – is rooted, in fact, in human nature.

In many ways, Pareto, who lived during a time when the classical liberal order was dissolving, prefigured neoliberalism. He advocated for two theses that have become part of neo-liberal doctrine. The first is that inequality isn’t bad, poverty is: thus, growth is the way out of poverty, and the only real economic concern of the state. The other thesis, which he called the “circulation of elites”, is that family wealth – wealth attached, as it were, to the house – does not secure a specific elite over time. In other words, social mobility is such that the rich become poor and some of the poor become rich.

These two theses make up the apologetic for capitalism in our time. It is for this reason that taking a critical view of Pareto is a politically charged act.

It is one of the peculiarities of the secondary literature on Pareto that so few are interested in the sources from which he took his statistics to derive his  famous “law” of the distribution of income. Admittedly, Pareto himself simply articulated a power law in which the significant variable {a} could be a bit different. Still, he was very sure that he had stumbled upon a statistical relation that must, somehow, be rooted in human nature, and he claimed that he did so empirically: by looking at statistics about total income and its distribution in various countries. In other words, Pareto didn’t bring his power law to these stats, they brought the power law to him. Pareto used that law to attack socialistic schemes for equality. Go to twitter and advocate for equality, and [by a special power law I will entitle Gathmann’s law] before the string of replies is complete, someone will have invoked the 80/20 law, or some distorted form of it. It has become business school wisdom, which is where all truisms go to be shined up for perky MBAs to pour forth to the workers.

According to Jean-Sebastian L’enfant’s study of the Pareto law, Pareto viewed statistics from colonial Peru as an affirmation of what he had (supposedly) found in studying income distribution in Europe – his 80/20 law.

“Ainsi, lorsqu’il constate que sa loi peut tout aussi bien décrire la répartition des revenus au Pérou, à la fin du XVIIIème siècle 14, il n’hésite pas à y voir une confirmation et un motif de généralisation : “une coïncidence fortuite est possible mais peu probable, et il se pourrait qu’une même cause eût produit les mêmes effets observés” (Pareto, 1897a, 46). C’est en tout cas un indice supplémentaire que la distribution des revenus n’obéit décidément pas au hazard. [Thus, when he observed that his law could describe, as well, the distribution of incomes at the end of the 18^th century, he didn’t hesitate to see in this a confirmation and a motive to generalization: “a fortuitous coincidence is possible but not very probable, and it could be that the same cause produces the same observed effects.” In any case this was a supplementary index that the distribution of incomes did not obey mere chance.

This statement interested me. Knowing that statistics for colonial Peru, especially as they were available to a historian who was writing in the late eighteenth century in Britain, were unlikely to be extensive, I went to Pareto’s text. Pareto writes:

Curious information is furnished to us by W. Robertson on Peru, at the time of Spanish rule, at the end of the 18^th century. They sold there a certain [papal] bull, said to be from the crusades, and everyone bought it, Spaniard creole or mulatto, at a price fixed by the government.. the price of the bull varied according to the rank of persons.”

Robertson gives us the numbers of persons who bought the bull. We find here, approximately, the law that we saw presiding over the distribution of total income.”

Pareto then constructs a little table of figures derived from Robertson. It is all very neat. Yet when we look at what Robinson says, huge gaps appear in this account. It should be said Robertson uses the figures on the issuances of the bull to make an estimate at the population of Peru, since he has no census figure, (evidently he was not  familiar with the Peruvian census of 1740 – which he would not have had access to anyway in the 1790s). Even so, these figures themselves are shaky. In Robertson’s account, from whence Pareto derives his numbers, the reference source is not quoted, and Robertson falls back on numbers of copies of the bulls printed, not bought.  And one thing Robertson tells us straight out: the figures tell us nothing about the Indian population, since so few Indians bought the bull from the government,  even though he estimates that the Indians were perhaps the majority of the population. Other sources – not Robertson – have implied that there was a strong secondary market in the bula – it was, basically, a bull of indulgence. Thus, Indians may not have bought it from the government, but they did from salesmen who bought it from the government. So we are talking about a product that was bought both for consumption and for sale – which already tells us that we cannot use these figures as a proxy for income distribution, any more than we could use figures about television sets that mix up wholesale and retail sales. Robertson never gives his source for the sales of the bull, although he claims that he believes they are accurate. He gives an estimate for the Indian population as around 2,600,000 from another source before he gets to the bulls.

 “According to an account which I have reason to consider as accurate, the number of copies of the bull of cruzada exported to Peru on each new publication, is 1,171,953; to New Spain, 2,649,326. I am informed that but few Indians purchase bulls, and that they are sold chiefly to the Spanish inhabitants, and those of mixed race.”

Comparing Pareto’s source to what Pareto claims Robertson says, we do have to say that chance plays probably plays little role in the emergence of Pareto’s power law, here. What seems to play the biggest role is Pareto’s own obsession. The printing of these bulls, at different prices, from an indeterminate source, over a period of at least two hundred years, does not offer empirical confirmation except through the most hazardous of conjectures. We have Robertson’s numbers, at best, for the “last predication”, which is undated, although the selling of these bulls goes back to the sixteenth century. So what we have is the essence of an unsound method for making statistical analysis. Far from being an independent confirmation of the Pareto law, the Robertson quote seems to be a confirmation of a hermeneutic tendency: to assume the law and look for instantiations.

 

Yet I have yet to read any doubt about Pareto’s method for gathering his data. And perhaps his data set  from Italy is sound. Pareto’s leaping upon confirmation in his reading of a hundred year old text about Peru, in spite of its own author’s cautions, gives me pause, though.

3. In his General Sociology – I’m using the French version – Pareto writes of two categories of “new” man in the ranks of the governors. The one consists of those who spend nearly as much as they gain, and the other is “constituted by those who take away from their gains not only the amount needed for supporting their great expenditures, but still more, what they have constituted for their patrimony.” And he observes how the modern economy works in Italy: “in Italy, one can observe that almost all the great, recently constituted patrimonies come from government concessions, the construction of railroads, enterprises subvented by the state, tariff protections, and that in this way a number of people have elevated themselves to the ranks of first honor in the state.” (1471)

Although Pareto is the idol of the classical liberal school a la Hayek, his observation rings much truer than Hayek’s fantasy that there existed a golden liberal period in which the great fortunes were constituted by some pure operation of grace in the private sphere, ‘without Government interference.”

Of course, Pareto believed these new men were violating his optimization principle – which is why he could call down upon them the wrath of the economist, rather than the moralist, scorned. But from the political point of view, Pareto starts a unique and little followed critique of democracy by pointing out that democracies don’t, in fact, interrupt the process by which the governing class operates to aggrandize its position. Here, I think, our experience makes us think that Pareto must be right. As – to use the terms of Donzelot – capital lost its place as the distributor of all the world’s evils in the 1970s, and was succeeded by the “state”, an international democratizing movement sprang up, flowered, and, in the 2000s, experienced its decadence: for it was in the 00s that we discovered that bringing democracy to others had to be done, regrettably, by strangling it at home. And thus was completed the second moment of a-politicization of state functions: first, in the 90s, the state suddenly had no business ‘interfering’ in business; and second, in the 2000s, the citizens had no business in ‘interfering’ with the executives right to make and continue war. The disempowerment of the people was accompanied by a politics of scandal that intensified the feeling around meaningless symbols and incidents, crimes with no real scope, the chance remark captured by the open mike, etc.

Pareto’s idea of what might be called the position creep of the governing class is expressed like this:

“We see that, in sum, whatever be the form of the regime, the men who govern have on average a certain tendency to use their power in order to maintain themselves in place, and to abuse it in order to obtain advantages and particular gains, that sometimes they do not distinguish from the gains and advantages of party, and that they almost always confond with the advantages and gains of the nation. It follows from this: 1, that, from this point of view, there will not be a great deal of difference between different forms of regime. The differences reside in the background, that is to say in the sentiments of the population: there where the latter are more or less honest; 2 that the uses and abuses will be all the more abundant as the intromission of the government in private affairs is the greater; in the degree to which the matter to be exploited is augmented, what one can take away is augmented too; in the U.S., where one wants to impose morality for the law, one sees enormous abuses, errors which emerge where this constraint does not exist, or exists in the lesser proportions; 3 that the governing class tries to appropriate the goods of others not only for his own usage, but also for sharing them with the governed class which the governing class defends, and which assures the power to do so, be it by arms or ruse, with the support that the client gives to the patron; 4 that most often, neither the patrons nor the clients are fully aware of their transgressions of the rules of morality existing in their society, and that, even if they perceive it, they easily excuse it, be it that in the end, others do the same, or under the commodious excuse that the ends justify the means.” (1474-1475)

Pareto’s mixture of logic and history here is surely peculiar, as – if we concede that he is correct – it would seem to put into question just what are the ‘goods” of “others”. They would seem, in the end, to result from previous generations of government in which the same logical force applied. And so they are sanctified as private goods after a decent interval has dulled our sense of them as public thefts.

Around this corner, of course, we come to the idea of how those private goods are earned synchronically – and to Marx, with the idea of surplus labor value.

Of course, once one concedes that these 4 moments occur under every regime, throughout the existence of human society, we are less inclined to find the moral argument for not appropriating the goods of ‘others’ to the governed class – that mass of clients. And given that the making of wealth so often is the result of government concession – Pareto’s examples can be multiplied a thousandfold in today’s world of inflated and bogus IP – the virtuous others become such a shrinking part of the total that they are like the legendary hidden dozen just men that keep God from punishing the world – an invisible mass in the world’s visible masses.

4. “His belief in man's freedom of thought and action, whether in the marketplace, in the press or in the university lecture halls remained unshaken till the end of his life. His economic liberalism was similar to that of the classical school; he upheld the freedom of markets, defended the merits of a free competitive system and was responsible more than any other economist for turning economics into a positive science, devoid of ethical considerations.”

Such is the summing up of Pareto’s work by one of his modern admirers, Renato Cirillo. The last phrase, with its combination of the petit bourgeois and Nietzschian grandiosity, is meant seriously. But of course it is nonsense: you do not uphold the ‘freedom of the markets”, or think that “freedom” even has a meaning in relation to ‘markets’, unless you are jammed full of ethical considerations, unless they dictate your whole view of the social hierarchy.

Pareto optimization, or “efficiency”, has been enfolded in the neo-classical tradition as something like a law of economics – or at least that branch which deals with ‘welfare”. Now it may seem that efficiency has little to do with needs and satisfactions except as, at best, a measure of the number of steps involved in performing an action. But efficiency has been elevated from humble origins far above the other conceptual gods by the economists, who have found in it a mantra to defend every kind of inequality and turn the tables on the carpers. The classical formulation of the Pareto axiom is this, from Alan Peacock and Charles Rowley: “if any change in the allocation of resources increases the social welfare of at least one person without reducing the social welfare of any other person, then this change should be treats as improving total social welfare.”

It is a dog’s body of a formula, but of course one can see at a glance that – skipping lightly over the exploitation of labor, which we will now pretend never happens and has nothing to do with value – from a neo-classical point of view, this is nearly heaven. To justify the enormous fortunes of the wealthy on the grounds that they somehow earned it runs into the absurdity of ‘earning’ millions for sitting at a desk and making decisions, or for having come up with a nifty device once upon a time in one’s youth, etc. Far better, then, to derail the whole critique by boldly claiming that the rich not only harm no one, but improve the total social welfare every time the dividend check comes in the mail.

Pareto’s own formulation of this maxim is heavily mathematical, which is, of course, another strike in its favor. Mathematizing relations is a very handy way of avoiding the conceptual analysis of same.

Otherwise, of course, this oracular pronouncement seems unlike to help us understand almost any real situation of “allocating” resources.
Let’s go for the first and most obvious problem, which is the presumption that the social welfare is defined in terms of positive gains. As anybody knows, though, this is simply not a general rule for life. In fact, it is often the worst rule to follow. If the allocator of ice cream at the party allocates me a bowl and my friend, Mr. Cardiac Arrest, a bowl, his social welfare would be improved if I stole his bowl of ice cream. Such situations of limits and overindulgence, writ large and small, are all over our “social welfare”.

Which, of course, gets us to questions of the allocator. The allocator is a strange beast, having no self interest of its own, but begin able to read exactly what the self-interest of all individuals in the collective are. Even the neo-classicals back away from this idea – which is why they prepose the much more wooly idea that interest and aggrandizement of goods is the same. Of course, this shreds into little synchronic strobe lit bits the true temporal dimension of the social. That x get wealthy and I don’t may, at time 1, seem to be no skin off my nose – but it is one of the funny things about wealth that you acquire it to acquire power. Wealth is as much a part of a position vis a vis others as it a quantity of purchasing power. This means that there exists a distinct possibility that, at some time in the future, the wealthy man will use his wealth to raise the bar to entry for the non-wealthy man.

How, of course, is our magic allocator to know this? The neo-classical solution, of course, is to pretend that this allocator is dumb to such things, and make a virtue of that dumbness. It is dumb because the future is uncertain! This distributor of cards, this dealer behind the curtain, turns out to be, of course, the market. The, as they like to say, “free market”. And furthermore, we are to believe that this free market is exquisitely sensitive to our needs and wants. Like a tongue tied beau, it woos us with poetry. The market’s poetry happens to be prices.

Even granted that something like “a market” can be extracted from the thousands of real markets in existence in this world – which, I confess, I doubt – the idea that the market is extremely smart and extremely dumb at the same time is curious. In fact, as one of Pareto’s commentators sheepishly admits, Pareto just assumed Say’s law – that markets always clear. Say’s law is the black sheep of neo-classical economics – it dare not speak its name, but – of course – it is believed with the ardor of true love among their ranks.

 

5.  It is a tale often told by the economist, this one of Pareto optimization. The tale goes that, in the Pareto optimal state, we reach a sort of distributional heaven, in which no person can gain any utility without that gain being made at the expense of somebody else in heaven. But the tale contains a paradox, of the kind associated with Zeno. To advance to this state, we must move through Pareto superior arrangements. These arrangements subtly reverse the terms of the optimum. A Pareto superior arrangement is one in which one party – or shall we say the owners? – may gain utility, but without any other party in our heaven losing it. This, we are assured, improves the entire set – all of heaven rejoices when one sinner is forgiven – or when one of the archangels receives a nice golden parachute and stock options amounting to 400 million dollars.

This, of course, is the neo-liberal heaven on earth, and the dispensation by which our rulers rule us. It is, however, a curious idea. For one thing, the ‘gain’ of utility seems to come ex nihilo – surely we are far removed from the labor theory of value here. Ex nihilo, in bureaucrat-speak, is exterior – it is an exogeneous gain. If it were, after all, endogenous, then we would have to ask about who created it, which would lead us to the question of whether, indeed, the other party wasn’t losing utility here. Which brings us to the other perplexing moment in this paradise. For the assumption, here, seems to be that there is no future - it is all present states. Heaven indeed! We transcend time, in Pareto superior states. For the inequality that must hold between the parties is eternally static.

But if our heaven is not in eternity, but in the sublunar flux of time – if all things in this heaven are mutable – then we see that, indeed, what looks like no skin off the nose of the drudge – what does he care if the boss makes his 400 million, as long as the drudge himself makes enough to buy the entertainment center, the car and the house on easy credit terms of 9 percent per annum (with the creditor holding the right to readjust interest at any time)? – might actually not be such a good deal. Heaven has a flaw. The devil’s disciples, from Machiavelli to Marx, have noticed it. The flaw is called power. In fact, a part of the 400 million dollars might well be used to block the poor drudge’s socially upward mobility, by making the cost of entry into a higher class too expensive – say, by making college tuition too expensive, or dentistry, etc. It might even be that the 400 million dollar Moneybags sees that limiting the upward mobility of his employee can be a moneymaker in itself. He has to get to work, and nobody is buying that car. So the drudge has to buy the car, and the moneybags, with his investment in Tesla stocks, is the beneficiary.

And so on. La di da, we dance this dance as our lifestyle begins to seem less like a path to a better life for our kids and more like the fall of the house of Usher.

 

 

Distraction action

 

So… I’m sitting in the classroom of one of my son’s science teachers at the College and we are “conferring”. It is a parent-teacher conference, one of the many that night,  all being scheduled before the Winter vacation. And we talk of this and that, grades, behavior, when the angel of the Zeitgeist passes above us and the science teacher talks about concentration and distraction in terms of teaching. Students now, she says, with their permanent cell phones, can search and find answers almost immediately. But when you are teaching something, that something only gradually becomes an answer to a question on a test – it doesn’t immediately start out as one. It requires a certain amount of time. That amount of time is in contradiction with the immediate answer time of Google. And as the immediate answer time becomes the norm, the old latency between teaching some content and that content, in some form, becoming an answer begins to seem more like frustration than like initiation.

So…  I have lightly translated what she said into my own Hegelian speak. But this is the essence of it, and I found it really interesting. Frustration and distraction are, after all, the highly political bywords of our time. And we all associate it with our machines – the phone that is no longer a phone, the channels on social media, etc. This right here – this post right here, which I fling into the “internet” thingy – is machine driven, a little bubble of messaging from an old swimmer in the internet from forever – is tied down to the machines more thoroughly than Gulliver was tied to the ground by the Lilliputians.

Jonathan Crary is the man for the attention problem of the nineteenth century, whose book – Suspensions of Perception – threads an amazing path through the interface between sensation and psychology  that seemed, when it was published in 2000, to give us a useable past and seems, in 2026, to be the cry of woe of a doomscroller outside the walls of Ninevah.

I take this oddly optimistic – even Whitmanesque – bit about Mallarme:

“In the summers of 1871 and 1872, while in England, he wrote a

series of short, pseudonymous articles reporting on the first two of the four London

International Exhibitions (1871–1874).85 The firsthand and clearly disorienting experience

of a world’s fair, especially of the exhibits in the interior of the newly

completed Royal Albert Hall, disclosed to him a smooth space on which the

boundaries between the domains of art and industry had collapsed. Mallarme´ does

in fact characterize the proliferation of products on display within the historical

problem of “decadence,” but there is a complete absence of Ruskinian censoriousness

of manufactured shoddiness or any nostalgia for artisanal craft in his account.

Instead, Mallarme´ declares his intention to explore the new “double-sidedness”

of modern commodities: the paradox that machine-made, hastily produced mass

objects can nonetheless possess an aggregate aura that is as affecting as the aura

of singular and rare objects of premodernity. Rather than lamenting the disintegration

of an older model of authenticity, Mallarme´ sees the delirious array of hybrid

and historically eclectic products, such as clocks, armchairs, tapestries, lamps, mechanical

toys, candelabras, dishware, perfume burners, pianos, even exotic live

animals, as a tantalizing surface of experience. “I predict the following: the word

authentic, which was for many years the sacramental term of antiquarians, will no

longer have any meaning.” What a joy, he continues, that “Grand Art” has been

displaced from our domestic living spaces by “the irresistible virtue of Decoration

itself.”87 For Mallarme´ the ocean of bric-a-brac he observed at the London exhibitions

and the panorama of fashion commodities he detailed in La Dernière Mode

were part of a compensatory decorative veneer both concealing and announcing

the absolute vacuity at the heart of everyday life. The distracted quality of this

unintelligible contiguity of styles, cultures, and forms was, for Mallarme´, a reprieve

from a primal intuition of absence.”

 

So…  right up to a point, Stephane! Sure, existential dread lifts. But as the flood becomes an environment, we replace dread with panic. We even seek out panic, living with panic-making objects produced, as we can all see, by companies run by the worst people for the worst purposes. At one point, when neoliberalism was a rosy little baby, the triumphalists looked about and told us don’t worry! If evil people make stuff people don’t like, they won’t make a profit and the market, acting as the best little guard dog ever, will eat them up! But now we know that the market will just keep betting on them even when they make nothing, zip, a big trillionish negative – because the market can be a bubble longer than you can breath. And not being able to breath is definitely a primal intuition of absence.

You try it, Mr. Mallarme.

Joseph Roth On the Newspapers:

 

The Literary World was one of the bright, nervous, easily smashable cultural products of the Weimar period in Germany. Its editorial policy was faddishly pro-bolshevik, but it published all kinds. One of its characteristic gambits was to ask a “rundfrage” – a question about some trending topic – to a number of literary highfliers, as well as journalists, artists, etc. For instance, the magazine would ask, what do you think about the cosmopolitan idea? And get Thomas Mann to answer. Or what is the “german spirit” and get Unamuno and Ilya Ehrenberg to answer. It is a cheap way to get some big names in the mag.

The magazine was always interested in the newspaper business. In one of their round robin questions, they asked reporters about what they hushed up.  They got interesting responses, but the most interesting, retrospectively, was from a reporter for the new, flashy tabloid, the 8 Uhr, which warned that the press of the “old world” was going to go to the dogs if they did not adapt and respond to the challenge of the American news media. Specifically, he warned against the “New York” tendency: that the reporter can say everything and only hush up one thing: his own opinion. “Perhaps the young world on the other side can be lead by the democratic principle of neutrality, but the old world is more advanced. It needs the personality behind the story, it needs to pull conclusions from the material it publishes, it needs [to show] its values.”

In 1929, the magazine asked a number of writers and journalist about their experience of the mass media – the “Tagespresse als Erlebnis”. Joseph Roth was one of the respondents. His answer is a very good, compressed meditation about the press – not in the Karl Kraus manner (Roth was very unimpressed by Kraus’s thunder) but in the manner of someone who is a familiar of the newsroom, knows how the type is set and how the proofreaders do their work. Knows, in essence, that the newspaper is a factory product, which makes a decisive difference in what the “news” is.

Joseph Roth, in the last two decades, has been amply translated. The Hotel Years contains translations of a lot of Roth’s journalism. But it doesn’t contain a translation of his response. I think I’ll translate a bit of it here.

“I read the newsper in order to hear something (or many things) about “current affairs” without forgetting for a moment the distance that divides a fact and a reported story [Nachricht]. In order to know the truth, I try to keep in mind all the approximations under which the story comes to be: for instance, the dumbness or cluelessness of the reporter on the other end of the line from the correspondent [Roth is referring here to the practice of dictating a story on the phone to the ‘reporting secretary’], the natural tendency of the newspaper to highlight “interesting” or “pointed” or “important” stories (which can, of course, be true); the gullibility of an editor who is badly paid and overworked, who is easily driven into heavyhandedness; the rigidities under which the print setter and proofreader have to work and through which simply typos can arise. After I have reflected on all these side issues, there remains little of the newspaper story worthy of notice.

If the newspaper were as immediate, as sober, as rich, as uncontrolled as reality, it could, like this, really communicate experiences. But it only gives us inexact, sieved reality – and when we say it is badly formed, we are really saying: it is falsified. Because there is no other objectivity than an artistic one. Only it can represent a state of affairs as it truly is. Any other kind of presentation is private, which means: incomplete. The correspondent on the one end and the reporter on the other are mostly not artists. Their stories, reports, descriptions are like private communications in a letter, but addressed to the public. It is not an accident that the source of the newspapers are called correspondence and correspondents. Their reports remain private letters: however much lived materials they offer us! But they even their wound the secrecy of the letter by writing for the hundreds of thousands and to to one alone – thus losing the experiential, scattering it to the wind, that finally bears it as “printed matter”.”

I like Roth’s notion that the intermediary is not a clear channel, an independent connector through which fact passes into story and story passes into information. I said that Roth was not Karl Kraus, but there is a glimmer, here, of the Viennese school. Surely we are all to ready to forget that the source of the newspaper is the letter. Although, contra Roth, letters were often, classically, round robins – not for one correspondent alone. I dream, here, of Madame de Sevigne’s letters about the trial of Fouquet, which was perhaps the first instance of an intellectual intervention into a corrupt judicial procedure in France – surely the predecessor of Zola’s J’accuse.

How to preserve the only objectivity that counts – artistic objectivity – in the age of influencers? In the death throes of the newspaper biz? A question I will leave to the Roth-fans among us.