Air

Coming up for air. There is something essential about that expression. George Orwell used it to entitle one of his essay collections, I believe. Hegel was not the first to compare doing philosophy to swimming – complaining that Kant wanted to learn to swim on dry land – and Melville, in one of his great letters to Hawthorne, spoke of ‘deep divers”. The Melville letter is too quotable, so let me paste a little of it here:

“I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his once in Putnam's store -- that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture. -- To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. -- Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctualy perceptible. This I see in Mr Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; -- then had I rather be a fool
than a wise man; -- I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plumet that will. I'm not talking of Mr. Emerson now -- but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world
began. “

This was written in March, 1849. The deep diver I’ve been following, Marx, is busy writing for the Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung that year of the bitter backwash from the revolutionary year, 1848. And there I will leave him, for a moment, and come up for air – as one comes up for air in these things, a reader avoiding the bends in the heavy flow of prose through which he mounts, hopefully, having speared himself a truth, an opinion, a flash of something in the dark – by moving to another writer, Georg Simmel. Simmel’s ponds are not so deep as Marx’s oceans, but a gnat can drown in a teardrop, can’t he? As I have been following the flickering light of alienation and its effects, I want to draw some attention to an article by Jorge Arditi entitled “Simmel’s theory of alienation and the decline of the irrational”.

Alienation has characteristics in Simmel that derive from the German philosophical tradition, with its image of some merger of the impossibly jostling subject and object, that cutter’s game – take the knife to skin and muscle and press as hard as you can, the subject will not bleed out, not there, not ever.

Arditi nicely surveys the meaning of the rational and ‘nonrational”:

“The definition of the nonrational as a capacity, as a fundamental condition of being which the growth of the rational makes increasingly difficult to express, contrasts with the prevailing concepts of the rational and the nonrational in sociology today. Although many disagree significantly about the specifics of the terms, to sociologists rationality and nonrationality are attributes of action, not of persons. To Parsons ([1937] 1968:60ff.) and Alexander (1982:72ff.) … the terms must be understood primarily in an instrumental sense, denoting the extent to which action is or is not guided by considerations of pure efficiency. … Rational choice theorists' focus on rationality derives from an emphasis on goal orientation-a characteristic of action, not people. Indeed, but for a few exceptions-the most telling being Weber's image of the person underlying his concept of "affectual action"… -men and women are seen as basically rational, calculative beings…”

Caught in this paradigm like a whale in a mousetrap, alienation loses its gravity and pull – or to put it in other terms consonant with LI's obsessions, imagination loses its claims on our existence. Simmel, characteristically, considers these definitions of rationality more as reflections of a certain social order, in the throes of monetizing human relationships – thus, rationality is captured and used in a local sense that does not reflect its sweep. And, similarly, the non-rational – which in the positivist schema, becomes the inefficient – also ‘thins out’:

“Rationality and nonrationality, then, should be seen not only as attributes of action, but, first, as attributes of the person. To Simmel, action is not rational or nonrational because of some objective criterion of rationality, of some principle derived from the internal logic of action itself, but, rather, because of the particular elements of a person's inner life-his or her intellect, emotions, faith, or aesthetic sensibility-that come to orient practice. According to Simmel, the nonrational is a primary, essential element of "life," an integral aspect of our humanity. Its gradual eclipse in the expanses of a modem, highly rationalized world implies, then, an unquestionable impoverishment of being.”

Simmel’s use of a subject/object terminology is as traditional as a lectern in a classroom. Things get lively, though, when, instead of thinking of their separation as a conceptual property, Simmel thinks it through as social and physical distance. It is here that we carve a new entrance into the circuit of connodities against money, and the circuit of money against commodities.

“Toward the end of The Philosophy of Money ([1907] 1978:470-477), Simmel defines the concept of distance. Imagine, he suggests, an arrangement of life's elements in a circle, the individual at its center. "Whatever our object may be," he writes, "it can, with its content remaining unchanged, move closer to the centre or to the periphery of our sphere of interests and concerns" ([1907] 1978:472). The relationships between a self and an object can be therefore characterized "by the illustrative symbol of a definite or changing distance between the two ... whereby the diversity of the innermost relationship to objects (not only in distinctness, but also in the quality and whole character of the images received) is interpreted as a diversity in our distance from them" ([1907] 1978:472-473, emphasis added). "Distance," then, is a heuristic concept that helps us conceive the connection between subject and object in relative, variable terms.”

To be continued

cut and continue here:

Simmel, like Marx, was a man who could see a series when it shoved him – or his culture – in the back. Unlike Marx, for whom the series of objects must be put into relation to the history of their making, Simmel brackets the labor theory of value. Instead, he’s concerned about their effects, and organizes them in terms of distances. Social distance, in Simmel, is not physical distance. It combines other senses of distance – for instance, what one means by saying that some person is ‘distant’. Arditi points out that, for Simmel, the emotion that annuls distance – or aims to – is love.

“Remoteness, that is, does not set in because people have nothing in common, but because the things they have in common are, or have become, too common. Likewise, nearness results not from an absence of similarities but from the specificity and exclusivity of these similarities.

At its ideal state, nearness becomes the equivalent of "love."13 Like love, to be perfectly close to someone implies apprehending that person without introducing between the I and the other meanings that extend beyond I and other. In this sense, nearness implies the sharing of what we could call existentially generated meanings. These meanings surely exist only in relation to some other, nondistinctive meanings that make them seem distinctive.”

This, it seems to me, does not do justice to the phenomenology of love, although it does speak to what one might call the relational inertia to which it is subject, and which becomes the great maker of crises in the system of love-based marriages.

However, let’s pass on by this somewhat simplistic view of love, because it is only a step towards the main thing I want to highlight in Arditi’s interpretation of Simmel. The main thing has to do with the modern regime of emotions coordinate with the modern regime of desires for objects. Love is a model emotion, for Simmel, in as much as it makes clear that the relationship of the subject and the object is one of degrees of distance. And it is on those degrees of distance that the capitalist regime, with its emphasis on exhange values, presses:

“… the objectivization of exchange provokes an irreversible expansion of social distance in society-a distance that, although made more puzzling by the multiplication of emotional responses it makes possible, takes further expression in, and is further reinforced by, the subsequent intellectualization of the a posteriori.15 People are deprived of their specificity, of their subjective concreteness, and therefore become "ob- jects," impersonal entities with no individual meaning. They come to perceive one another primarily in utilitarian terms and lose their capacity to create direct, authentic relationships with others. And all this happens in such a way that this new form of being in the world becomes ingrained in people's personalities.”

As I have pointed out before, there is a curious lack of correspondence between, on the one hand, the utilitarian absolute of egotism – the egotism of one of Sade’s great fuckers – and the egotism of the capitalist, or the capitalist ‘subject’. Its egotism seems anything but the expression of the ‘self-made man’ or the independent self – rather, it seems pathetically attached to the approval of others, and the way that approval is socially expressed. Simmel’s theory of social distance is one way of approaching this paradox:

“According to Simmel, with the decline of our nonrational capabilities part of our authenticity disappears and the wholeness of the ego breaks up. And neither effect, he suggests again and again, can be overridden by our gain in self-determination or by the new plurality of feeling. If the world becomes more complex and in some sense even richer, if it opens to us in ways unknown before, our inner experiential scope nonetheless decreases. If mediated by a larger number of intellectual contents, the variety of our emotions increases, their intensity weakens irremediably, and the meaning of being human consequently changes-for the worse.”

If we dispense with Simmel’s nostalgia, what we have here is a start on something key in modernity – the increase in the variety of our emotions, and the decrease in their depth.

…
I am less concerned with Simmel’s rightness or wrongness about love than about the affectual effects of a world of mediate and immediate objects. Here Simmel is helpful in making us think about alienation not as a relationship of the individual worker to his or her circumstances, but also of the individual worker to other workers. For if workers are supposed to unite, that association – if we hold to a richer sense of alienation, one that is generated and politically exploited within the capitalist system – must somehow deal with the alienation of workers inter se. In other words, one must ask what that appeal for unification means in terms of social practice, especially as it is an appeal erected on the very modern erasure of family metaphors. Although Marx does his best to make it very plain that, given the international scope of capital, any labour movement that is not international will fail under the burden of its role in universal history – there seems to be a blindspot on all sides here as to why the international workers of the world did not unite, and – even in the climate of international corporate power – still have not united. The simple answer is that the power of money is greater than the power of labor associations. The more complex answer has to do with the appeal of nationalism as a tool developed by the bourgeoisie that somehow clouds the worker’s vision. And I don’t reject either answer as false – both are partially true. But both should lead us back to asking the question that I’ve been toying with – what is class interest? What alienating force operates within the working class to defeat its feeling of solidarity, workers for workers? And how can one appeal to solidarity if one’s theory strips the worker to the bone and presents us with merely another power player in the computer game of universal history?

the end of brotherhood: Marx in London, 1847

Die Kerntruppe des Bundes waren die Schneider
(the militants of the Bund were tailors). – Friedrich Engels, On the History of the Communist League.

Where were we?
Where were we in 1847?
We, the gods of this voice, the gods who float – or so we pretend – slightly above this history. Our divine edge is that we know the fates of the players.

Or so we pretend. The godlike pretense that not only do we know these fates, but that we, ourselves, are fate – that our contemporeneity is the secret to history, and don’t you forget it – is, I think a step too far. And yet it is the step too far that is the premise, so often the premise, of our myths about the world. This step too far definitely has a name. Hubris. I would even go so far as to say – foolishly, with no evidence for this argument, that I will not make in this place – that hubris is just the point in the system in which the system generates, behind its own back, its de-systematization. Hubris is a thing fate deals harshly with – and that is, itself, a question I’ve posed and will pose again a lot in these posts. Nemesis, the goddess excluded from the happiness culture. And who… you have no need to worry on this account… who does not chase you. In the end, you will find that you have been chasing her. In the end, you will even catch up with her.

These are words from myth, but we are approaching a supremely non-mythical moment.

The revolutionary ‘troops” which Marx and Engels were dealing with in 1847 were mostly urban artisans. The proletariat, for one thing, had little time – it was of course difficult to organize under the killing schedule of factory work. The artisans, of course, had been the shocktroops of the trans-Atlantic revolutions for 75 years. Tom Paine, Toussaint L’ouverture, the female artisans – independent seamstresses, many of them – who, as Dominique Godineau has pointed out, were a very important and excitable group in the first wave of disturbances in Paris from 1789-1790; this was especially true of the radical movement in Britain.

However, how serious was this audience from Marx’s point of view?

From Engels account:

“The association soon named itself: the League of Communist Workers. And on the membership card stood written the sentence: All men are brothers in at least twenty languages, if here and there with some linguistic mistakes. Just like the public League, the secret band soon took on a more international character; firstly in a limited sense, practically through the different nationalities of the members, theoretically through the insight, that any revolution that would be victorious, must be European. Further than that, one did not go; but the foundation was given.”

In 1847, at the second congress in London, two things happened. One became world famous – Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a Confession of Faith, which eventually became the communist manifesto. The second was not so full of history. But it leaves a trace that I have been looking at in my last couple of posts. Here’s Engels again:

“The second congress occurred at the end of November and the beginning of December of the same year [1847]. Here, Marx was also present and represented in long debates – the congress went on for at least ten days – the new theory. All contradiction and doubt was finally resolved, the new principles were unanimously affirmed, and Marx and I were deputized to generate the Manifesto. This happened immediately afterwards. Some weeks before the February Revolution it was sent to London for printing. Since then it has traveled around the world, been translated into almost all languages, and yet serves today in different countries as the guideline for the proletarian movement. In place of the Bund motto, all men are brothers, stood the new battle cry, “proletarian of all countries, unite!” which openly proclaimed the international character of the struggle.”

It still does, of course. The workers of the world have still not united, though the corporations of the world have. And we have what we have.

But this is not my real concern in this post. Engels, I think, is as good a witness as we have to what Marx said about this slogan. One of the keys to my reading of Marx is surely this international character, which Marx was always at pains to emphasize. Marx sees the proletariat as Universal history, armed. Although universal history is being made at this point not by the proletariat, but by what made the proletariat possible- the capitalist liquidation of traditional modes of production and the consequent collapse of traditional orders. Secreted by the new order of the exchange of commodities, the proletariat rise up as the universal class precisely in having had their past radically cleared of past relationships. Marx stands at the crossroads, there, trying to get a bearing on this recent history and its radical discarding of history.

There is a dimension of this event that decisively divides the capitalist order – which includes its oppositon – from the enlightenment. The key, here, is the erasure of the family description that once graced the membership cards of the league. Brothers.

Marx, in 1847, is brooding on the ultimate destruction of all patriarchal norms in the forge of capitalism and the substitution of the principle of substitution, money, for previous social relations. His developing understanding of this moment is, I think, related to the notion of alienation as he had worked it out in 1844. But it is a bit misleading to call this a thread. Sometimes, Marx loses the point of view provided by alienation, and sometimes he welcomes alienation as the limit experience of the worker. Sometimes he finds it again. This is natural: Marx waas no fool. He did not perform his Herculean task of research, which took him to the edge of destitution, for the hell of it. He was not a Bakunin, who, at a certain point, stopped deepening and challenging his first impulses. Marx is always repairing, rediscovering, jettisoning. While I am quite certain that the romantic Marx can be seen within all the other figures to the end – old Moor – he is unlike the romantics in that all his search is not for the same thing – as it is for Faust, or Dr. Frankenstein. The search impinges on the object searched for. If the general outline remains the same, its lines can change their valences depending on the content under consideration.

Thus, what may look like a simple tactical move by Marx is, I think, part of the program of gigantically digesting the advances of the bourgeoisie, of being modern. The first modern German. One of the great modernist gestures is not only to subordinate the family to the marketplace, but to conclude, from the point of view given by that subordination, that it has occurred successfully. From that point of view, it is easy to jump to the belief either that the family has no proper economy, or that if there is one – say gift giving – that it is aleatory and ‘not serious’. For an economy must be serious.

Of course, this could sound like nostalgia for warmer ties. It is, I think, not. Since nostalgia implies nostos, return, and there is no question of return here, for the ties continue to exist, and even support the vast bulk of the economy. Any earthquake survivor will tell you as much. At the same time that brotherhood and fraternity is being replaced by class and solidarity, the real players in the economy are wrestling, as they will to this day, with their own sense of what is and what is not fungible – what can be bartered, what can be given, what reciprocity consists of, etc. By a thousand threads, these link feeling to the ‘social life of things’ – to steal a phrase from Simmel scholar, Arjun Appadurai.

top 9 chansons pour Julie

I wanted to do a nine song countdown for a recently arrived Parisienne named Julie. Thise nine songs were meant, ideally, to fit between July 2009 and February 2010. I did a little cheating - but not much!


Neko Case
This tornado loves you


Röyksopp 'This Must Be It'

Metric
Sick Muse


Atlas Sound
Recent Bedroom


Handsome Furs
I’m confused


Dominique A –
Immortels (OKAY, this came out in March, 2009. I’m cheating!)


Jean-Louis Murat
M le Maudit


Charlotte Gainsbourg
IRM

Massive attack
Saturday comes slow

Not a bad 9 months!

the flowers of evil in a Brussel's estaminet

I like to think of Marx in Brussels, that capital of compromise, sitting in Le Cygne – apparently his favorite estaminet – thinking about the course of events. The young Marx, who felt that the course of events was going in his direction, rather than the older Marx, aware that events are tricky and baffling things. Both, though, already feel – such is my novelistic intuition – that the scale of their thought exceeds the scale of their audience. This is, perhaps, the great modernist anxiety – exactly at the same time that the popular press brings an unparalleled audience to certain writers, it seems, capriciously, to exile others. And yet, what is the correlation between the embodied work and the scale of the readership? In one domain after another, one sees that intellectual production is standardized and put on a schedule for the widest possible use, while at the same time it suffers an interior trivialization as it is wrenched out of the relationships – that mode, ultimately, of connected friends and allies – in which it used to exist. It is in this sense that I – rather imaginatively – connect Marx’s exile in Brussels with Baudelaire’s later self-inflicted exile in the same city.

It is under such Baudelairian auspices that certain of Marx’s writings from this period have a certain satanic nuance to them. None more so than the litany that ends a draft entitled Wage Labor [Lohnarbeit]. There are reasons that this reminds me of Baudelaire’s poem, Abel et Caïn, which is nobody’s favorite poem from Fleurs de Mal – and yet, somehow, has stuck in my head since I first read it when I was a wet behind the ears fifteen year old (read Baudelaire as a teen and it screws you up for life – I can testify!)

Race d'Abel, dors, bois et mange;
Dieu te sourit complaisamment.

Race de Caïn, dans la fange
Rampe et meurs misérablement.

Race d'Abel, ton sacrifice
Flatte le nez du Séraphin!

Race de Caïn, ton supplice
Aura-t-il jamais une fin?

Race d'Abel, vois tes semailles
Et ton bétail venir à bien;

Race de Caïn, tes entrailles
Hurlent la faim comme un vieux chien.

Marx’s litany is different, but in a sense, it picks up Cain’s complaint and turns it against the bourgeois Abels. I think of it as the dark pole of Marx’s thinking – later, in the Grundrisse, he will return to this with more care – but I believe he never quite saw the error in this litany, which is to define private household relations by direct correspondance to a macrostructure of feudal relations. It is where Marx needs to be corrected by Simmel, and Simmel by recent research on the emotional economy of the household. Dissolving all ties in the money culture – which Marx here posits as Cain’s witchy path to emancipation – has, as we all know now, actually crippled Cain, since the fungibility of all relationships destroys labor’s solidarity and eats into the ability to resist capitalism’s seedy little totalizing gestures. I should point readers, here, to Nina Power’s latest essay for a nice, succinct overview of the conjunction of feminist ideals and consumerist marketing – which of course arises from the destruction not only of the patriarchal, but of the private domain in general, that web of reciprocities, traumas, joys, sweetnesses, tiredness that winds directly into our affectual being.

However, this is not to stint or complain about the dark pole in Marx’s writing - I understand it, rather, as a necessary view point – to use the vocabulary of my last post – from which one can go outward to understand how modernity encompasses different economic systems that cannot so easily be subsumed in an ideology of ‘progress’. The feudal and archaic, to put this in the framework of one of Hirschman’s stories, may rightfully support the intimate. In fact, the destruction of the intimate may just be the destruction of the working class as a class. Which, I hope, reveals my hand in the question of defining class ‘interests’.

Here is Marx’s litany. I’ll come back to this in my next post.

Positive Aspect of Salariat

Before we conclude, let us draw attention to the positive aspect of wage labour [Salariat].
[a] If one says “positive aspect of wage labour” one says “positive aspect of capital”, of large-scale industry, of free competition, of the world market, and I do not need to explain to you in detail how without these production relations neither the means of production — the material means for the emancipation of the proletariat and the foundation of a new society — would have been created, nor would the proletariat itself have taken to the unification and development through which it is really capable of revolutionising the old society and itself. Equalisation of wages.
[b] Let us take wages themselves in the essence of their evil [Kern der Verwerflichkeit – kernal of the reprehensibilness – from such kernels, the flowers of evil grow – R], that my activity becomes a commodity, that I become utterly and absolutely for sale.
Firstly: thereby everything patriarchal falls away, since haggling, purchase and sale remain the only connection, and the money relationship the sole relationship between employer and workers.
Secondly: the halo of sanctity is entirely gone from all relationships of the old society, since they have dissolved into pure money relationships.
Likewise, all so-called higher kinds of labour, intellectual, artistic, etc., have been turned into articles of commerce and have thereby lost their old sanctity. What a great advance it was that the entire regiment of clerics, doctors, lawyers, etc., hence religion, law, etc., ceased to be judged by anything but their commercial value. [And here we seem to miss this note in the German text: [<(von Marx eingefügt) National-Klassenk[ampf], Eigentumsverhältnise> - added by Marx, National class struggle, property relations]

(Thirdly: since labour has become a commodity and as such subject to free competition, one seeks to produce it as cheaply as possible, i.e., at the lowest possible production cost. All physical labour has thereby become infinitely easy and simple for the future organisation of society. — To be put in general form.)

Thirdly: as the workers realised through the general saleability that everything was separable, dissoluble from itself, they first became free of their subjection to a given relationship. The advantage both over payment in kind and over the way of life prescribed purely by the (feudal) estate is that the worker can do what he likes with his money.

ps. Qlipoth has a good rundown of the context of Marx's notes here - plus his disagreement with my reading.

The mysteries of Marx: on secrets

Someday, when historians look back on today’s communication technologies, they will marvel at the lag between our cut and paste technology, which is state of the art, and our sad blog commenting machinery, which gives you small squares and limited amounts of characters to work with. Now, as those of us who are longwinded, garrulous and quarrelsome – in other words, the philosophers and philosophes manques among us– well know, our best arguments tend to get diluted, chopped and lost as we pursue our labyrinthian arguments in this wilderness of faulty mousetraps.

Thus, I’m replying to Duncan in a post. Although LI has long become a blog in which the private language provides all the dim lighting – like a dying lightbulb in a refrigerator, spastically blinking on and off every time you open it – most of the time, I do try to be at least a little clear. But this will make no sense if you haven’t followed our argument in the post before last.

So, Duncan…
I heartily agree with your opening move in reading the German Ideology. It is a mistake that is often made to think that Marx invented ideology critique. Instead, Marx in the German ideology is criticizing the Young Hegelians exactly for their ideology critiques.

But your second step, I think, trips you up. What Marx is not doing is negating Ideology critique as a form. What he is doing here is best seen by comparing it with the critique of the classical economists. He does not say, your labor theory of value is wrong. Far from it. In the case of the labor theory of value, he does want to firmly base the classical economic theory on abstract, or socialized, labor – but this is just the entering shot in Marx’s campaign. Rather, he wants to know why the classical labor theorists go wrong. In other words, he wants to pull out of their models “points of view.” This is the overt language in which the section on the Commodity fetish is cast, until we come to the point of view of the commodity itself – and we end, significantly, on a line from a play. A play, of course, is in its dialogic form the narrative correlate of points of view. My thinking on this, of course, is overwhelmingly Pepperrelian. She has definitely demonstrated this, at least for me.

The usual word for this – immersion, or immanent critique – still tries to bottle up the irretrievably social element – that which constitutes the point of view – in terms of a purer logic. This, I think, is still a bad move. To use an analogy from old technology – you can take the needle off a record a little way or a long way – but the decisive moment is when you take the needle off the record. To get the music, you have to adhere to the text and its moves.

Now, the similarities in the wording of the German ideology and the section on fetishism are striking – as, I would say, are the approaches. Whether one takes the re-editing of Capital as simply pulling out its method, or, like Amie, thinks this signals an effect of the history of the Paris commune, the editorial reworking still gives us a text in which the approach and wording seems to fall more strongly along the lines that Marx laid down in the late forties.

I’m going to take up one of those similarities – the use of the term ‘secret’. But first, to continue the thread about the approach: it is a mistake to think that opposition, in Marx’s text, is the same as negation. While it is easy to say this, it is sometimes a difficult rule to follow. Thus, the object of ideology critique in Germany is, Marx thinks, a sign of Germany’s primitive development. One of the reasons Marx was so attractive, post WWII, was his sensitivity to issues of development – by the by. But the form of ideology critique is, in fact, employed in The German ideology with abandon. It is this that makes it – to use your words – a whacko text itself. As Engels worried, what possible use is this loggorheic settling of accounts with an obscure group of German professors? Especially when one has to challenge the wordy cabinetmaker Grun and his Proudhonist tendencies in the League!
Engels, however, was, in the end, wrong. He sort of acknowledged this in his famous letter to Mehring that Benjamin quotes in Eduard Fuchs:

“Namely, we have all put – and had to put - the major weight upon the deduction of political, legal and otherwise ideological ideas, and the actions mediated through these ideas, from the fundamental economic facts. But in so doing, we have neglected the formal side over the content of them, and the way in which these ideas, etc., emerge. That has given our opponents a lot of welcome allowance for misunderstanding. Ideology is a process that comes to completion in the consciousness of the so called thinker, but with a false consciouness. He doesn’t know the actual motives that drive him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process. He imagines for himself false or pseudo motives.Because it is a thought process, he deduces its content as well as its form out of pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with pure thought material that he unconsciously takes in as though produced through thought and otherwise investigates no further from processes independent of thought; it is certainly the case that this is self evident to him, since to him all actions are mediated through thing and even inn the last instance appear to be grounded in thought. The historical ideologue (‘historical’ stands in here the political, juridical, philosophical, theological, and in brief all disciplines that belong to society, and not simply to nature) – the historical ideologue has thus in every scientific field independent material that has been shaped out of the thinking of earlier generations and its complete and proper development has been processed through the brains of the generations succeeding one another. Clearly external facts, that may belong to one or another field, could have co-determinedly affected this development, but these facts are according to his silent premise again simply fruits of a thought process; and thus we remain always in the realm of simple thought, which has happily digested even the hardest facts. It is this semblence of an independent history of conceptions of the state, or the legal system, the ideological ideas in each special field, that do the most to blind people. When Luther and Calvin ‘overcome’ the catholic religion, or when Hegel does this with Fichte and Kant, and Rousseau with his contrat social does it to the constitutional Montesquieu, this is a process that remains within theology, or philosophy, or the political science, represents a stage in the history of these fields of thought, and allows nothing to spill out of the field of thought. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and last instance-ness of capitalist production has come to this as well, the same thing applies to the overcoming of mercantilism by the physiocrats and Adam Smith as a simple victory of thought, not a the cognitive reflex of changed economic facts, but as the finally achieved, correct insight into the continuing and ever present factual conditions.” [My translation – I can’t find the german text of the whole letter, but this much is published in Masaryk’s work on Marx].

In fact, that reading within disciplinary lines is depressingly present in most secondary literature dealing with Marx. All too often, it becomes a matter of Marx ‘overcoming’ Hegel, or whatever. One of the things I like about Amie’s putting the editing of Capital in relation to actual events and an actual audience of French workers, who Marx will know, very well, have had a certain experience of revolution, is that it breaks through these disciplinary boundaries. Frankly, here I suppose I should confess that my own libidinal investment in Marx is not in the man who ‘responds’ to Hegel, but in the man who responds to the history happening around him, and is never too stiff to change. That change, however, does I think emphasize – as NP puts it in another great post here – the structure that was always already there in Capital. But I think it significant that to emphasize that structure, the commodity fetishism section is expanded. It is expanded using a rhetoric that casts us back, indeed, to the German Ideology. Indeed, commodities, abound in “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” – and if there is one book in which Marx goes into “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” with a vengeance, it is The German Ideology. I’m not going to clinch the case by some inexhaustible rundown, cause I don’t have time, but I think the link between the metaphysicians who are critiquing religion in Germany and the Political Economists who are theorizing capitalism in England runs through the commodity fetishism section.

But let’s remember the title of that section: Der Fetischcharakter der Ware und sein Geheimnis. When Secret appears in a title, it has a certain semantic force that shouldn’t be overlooked. Because the English translators didn’t want to make it seem – o double fetish, fetish of a fetish – that the fetish itself has a secret, they translated this phrase, infelicitously, as The fetish character of commodities and the secret thereof. Which acknowledges that a secret is “of something,” and “for some point of view”.

Now, in the “Holy Family”, we have already met some dealers in secrets – “Geheimniskramer”. They happen to be the critics of criticism – o double critique! The whole of the chapter is a catalogue of secrets, which are attributed to the great dealer in secrets – “The secret of the critical presentation of the Mystères de Paris is the secret of speculation, of Hegelian construction.

This is, to say the least, an interesting and –shall we say – ideological use of the notion of the secret. The secret, here, is not found in the substance of the text – as certain actions, in Mysteries of Paris, are kept quiet from the reader and the characters in the novel – but instead, the secret is in the very form of the text. It is, then, a secret instrument. But what is the secret of this instrument? One should remember that the doubleness we have seen with fetishism and with critique seems to reflect the structure of one kind of secret – for secrets possess the Hegelian charm that form and substance, here, intervene on secrecy. A secret of content that is a known secret – say, for instance, a phrase blanked out in a document released by the CIA – is a secret of a different type than a secret in which the fact that it is a secret is a secret – say, the operation that the CIA performed that, until the document about it surfaces, was not publicly known. A secret this is known to nobody, however, is no secret at all. Socially, then, secrets divide us, by definition, into insiders and outsiders.

The moves that Marx makes in the German Ideology mark him as an insider, in that he does understand the Young Hegelian jargon. In fact, here, as with the political economists, one of Marx’s character masks is the whistle blower. He has immersed himself in political economics so that – unlike the dumb French socialists, the crapauds, who don’t know what is happening across the Channel – Marx does. And it is his value as a whistle blower that he does not want to keep the secret.
But it is at this point that Marx ceases to be simply an informer. Both with the critical critics in Germany and with the political economists, his inside experience leads him to a secret that neither the one nor the other know. They can’t decypher it. They can’t read it. It is part of the very structure of their thinking – the form of their thinking. Which, in turn, is part of where they sit in society – their own insider/outsider relationship with entrenched power.
But more later on. I must do some work today!

d'un pas irrégulier

Readers should check out the comments in the last post, between Duncan and me. One thing we bring up - to disagree about - is Amie's essay on The German Ideology, which LI is especially proud to have published. I hadn't read it in a while, I was impressed not only by the text, but by how much I have taken from it.

Today I believe is going to be a special day for Amie and Michel, so I figure it is time to bring out Les Rita Mitsouko:

..les amants le font de coeur parce que l'union fait la force...
...et leur traits s'uniffiront jusqu'à se ressembler...
...pour le pire et le meilleurs jusqu'à y creuver leur forces...
...ils marchent sans sourcillier d'un pas irrégulier...

Revolution as method

In my post a few days ago, I proposed one way of looking at the ideology critique that runs through Marx’s writings – namely, in terms of a synchronic and diachronic grid. At the center of the grid, at the defining source of the synchronic and the diachronic, is an impossible present – which, from the Derridian perspective, joins – and logically can’t join – the synchronic and the diachronic, the modern and the historical. To my mind, this point is defined by revolution. Revolution here is the ground of the possibility of Marx’s own writing – his own thought, his own liberation. Marx is a unique social theorist in as much as his understanding of modernity, while it uses the apparatus of the positivist truth procedure and even offers predictions, such as those having to do with the crises of capitalism, does not stand or fall with the truth procedure, but with this revolutionary moment. Marx recognizes that the political economists are playing a kind of fixed game by presenting us with models that serve as the unquestioned reference points of our truth procedure. They, too, have a problem with the moment that ties together the synchronic and diachronic axes of their interpretation – but their strategy is to get around this moment by adopting infinite deferral, by changing the conversation, by promising to reform and repair a system that their very models mystify. The bourgeoisie have, indeed, made universal history possible – and in this sense have, indeed, operated on a worldwide revolutionary basis – but have done so within a sort of neurosis – to use a very non-Marxian term. The neurosis, or ideology, systematically trivializes its founding discovery – freedom – while encouraging the penetration of an economic system of commodity fetishism into every sphere of our private life. Marx likes to exaggerate this penetration – in fact, almost three hundred years after Adam Smith, altruism and a patchwork of non-fungible economic relationships are still the basis of private life. Prostitution has not replaced marriage; nor has the egotism of the marvelous Sadean fucker replaced the altruism of the harried parental unit.

In this sense, Lukacs is right in History and Class Consciousness:

“Materialist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic. This definition is so important and altogether so crucial for an understanding of its nature that if the problem is to be approached in the right way this must be fully grasped before we venture upon a discussion of the dialectical method itself. The issue turns on the question of theory and practice. And this not merely in the sense given it by Marx when he says in his first critique of Hegel that “theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses.” [1] Even more to the point is the need to discover those features and definitions both of the theory and the ways of gripping the masses which convert the theory, the dialectical method, into a vehicle of revolution.”

While, at first glance, one might classify Marx, in Bakhtinian terms, as a great monologist, in actuality he is always pursuing a dialogue. The dialogue is not just with the masses – or rather, it is with the masses in the same way the dialogue of actors in a play take as a dialogue partner the audience that listens to them. Rather, his dialogue partners are very much in the mode of the figures that the Nephew of Rameau parodies in Diderot’s dialogue. Marx is an indefatigable ventriloquist. Like other highly sensitive post-Romantics – Flaubert, Baudelaire, Karl Kraus – he has such sensitive skin that the misuse of language can give him a rash. And so one feels him furiously scratching as he imagines his dialogue partners, from Adam Smith to Bastiat.

Thus, even as he pursues a serious theme, like commodity fetishism, and seeks to demonstrate the ideology that makes the classical economist attribute exchange value to nature, he goes off – like a blister in the sun – to do something more than argue against the ideologue. It is in this sense that he is more dialogic than monologic – by refusing the protocols of turntaking that structure argument, and using, instead, the full register given to him by world literature, that recent event to which he gives special mention in the Communist Manifesto.

Here’s an example of how sense and speech act cannot be separated in Capital:

“Since the commodity form is the most universal and most undeveloped form of bourgeois production – and for that exact reason is the first to emerge – although not in the same dominant, and thus characteristic manner as today – its fetish character seems relatively easy to see through. By concreter forms even this semblence of simplicity itself disappears. From whence stems the illusions of the monetary system? It isn’t in looking at the gold and silver themselves, for they are presented as money for a society’s production relationship, although in the form of natural things with curious social properties. And doesn’t the fetishim become palpable in the modern economist, who with a high and mighty air grins down at the money system, as soon as it is a question of capital? For how long has the physiocratic illusion been dissipated that rents on land grow out of the earth, and not out of society?

But yet in order not to get ahead of ourselves, it is enough here to mention an example with relation to the commodity form itself. If commodities could speak, so they would say, that our use values might concern men – but they don’t concern us as things. What thing-lishly concerns us, is our value. Our own intercourse [Verkehr] as commodity things shows this. We are related only as exchange values with each other. Now listen as the economist speaks out of the soul of the commodity. [Man höre nun, wie der Ökonom aus der Warenseele heraus spricht]
As so often in the first book of Capital, the serious point here is put in terms of a joke, a killing joke, so to speak.

As poor as a machine: from the economic philosophical manuscripts

“And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”.

“Während die Teilung der Arbeit die produktive Kraft der Arbeit, den Reichtum und die Verfeinerung der Gesellschaft erhöht, verarmt sie den Arbeiter bis zur Maschine. Während die Arbeit die Häufung der Kapitalien und damit den zunehmenden Wohlstand der Gesellschaft hervorruft, macht sie den Arbeiter immer abhängiger vom Kapitalisten, bringt ihn in eine größere Konkurrenz, treibt ihn in die Hetzjagd der Überproduktion, der eine ebensolche Erschlaffung folgt.”- Marx

“While the division of labor increases the productive power of labor, and the wealth and refinement of society, it leads to the impoverishment of the laborer until he sinks to the level of the machine. While labor incites the accumulation of capitals and thus the increasing well being of society, it makes the laborer ever more dependent on the capitalist, thrusts him into a greater competition, drives him into a rush of overproduction, from which follows an equivalent slump.”

Kolakowski has correctly written that Marx, unlike the socialists of the 40s, had a firmer grasp of the fact that capitalism was rooted in de-humanization. His economic analysis does not marginalize this insight, but builds upon it – which is why Marx never puts the market at the center of economic analysis, even as he is able to represent the reasons that mainstream economists do so.

In the Economic-Philosophical manuscripts, the figure for that de-humanization is the machine.

Not, I notice, an animal. Traditionally, the poor were compared to animals. I’ve done a number of posts on this already – see the posts beginning with this one, on animals and personhood - the conclusion of which was that Sergio della Bernardina was correct to see that the concept of the person, outside of philosophy, is a matter of degrees and situations, and not an absolute. Which means that how personhood intervenes in social practice can’t necessarily be predicted from our definition of personhood – in the cases Bernardina examines, the tormenting of a bear or a bull before it is killed does not happen because its tormenters lack a sense of the animals personhood, but precisely because they want to provoke aggression on the part of the animal to which they can respond, shifting the blame for the animal’s death to the animal itself as a person responsible for lashing out, for acting badly.

In the Christian tradition, it is only recently that environmental historians have pursued the thesis that Christianity, by entrusting nature to man, devalued the environment. I think, again, that this is a mistake. Christianity, in the broad ancient tradition, certainly did not ascribe property to animals. They owned nothing. Yet they did have holes and nests. They had families. Christian iconography is actually replete with peaceful animals, with the redeemed sheep, with the dove, etc.

The animal might not have a property relationship with the world – they could be hunted, they could be sacrificed, they could be eaten – but they were, of course, God’s creation.

Not the machine. The machine not only has not property claim on the world – it has no home. It has no family. The son of man would not say, the chariots have sheds, the hammers have a box – although he’d know it, being a carpenters son. In the double logic of the dissolution of the human limit, when Descartes and the early modern natural philosophers compare the animal to the machine – and man, too – they both advance a new claim about the human relationship to the world (dissolving any limit to its use) while advancing a new and unrecognizable form of human – the man machine, the Other – as the human subject.

The poverty of the worker, who sinks to the state of a machine, is the flip side of the glory of the proletariat, the Other who is the subject of universal history. What does the poverty consist in? Marx sees it, of course, in terms of wealth – but also refinement – the “Verfeinerung der Gesellschaft.” I would call this poverty an imprisonment in routines. It is hard to resist jumping ahead to Freudian terms, having to do with obsessive behavior and neurosis, which, after all, is the mechanical coming to the surface – the arm or leg that doesn’t work, that has returned to dead matter.


p.s. I should say a little more about the machine. It is easy to forget that the Descartes or Le Mettrie’s machine was an automaton, an entertainment. Court societies love F/X, whether it is Versailles, Hollywood or D.C. – but in real material terms, the automata did nothing more than demonstrate the uses of a winding mechanism. What Marx is talking about is not that kind of machine.

As Schivelbusch nicely puts it at the beginning of The Railway Journey, the Europe of the eighteenth century, which was still the Europe of wood and woods, of energy supplied by streams and forests, was losing its woods. He quotes Sombart – and I am going to give some elbow room here to exaggeration and the blind eye turned to the forests in America. Still, wood was becoming more expensive, and in this way an opportunity opens up for other means of energy and structure – notably, coal and iron. To which one must add that water, too, but in a new form – as steam – is part of the complex. In one of the historical ironies that the economic historian scrupulously skirts, even the Corn laws, decried for two centuries, actually contributed to the industrial revolution, for, by raising the price of grain and thus of keeping horses, they “helped replace horsepower by mechanical power in much the same way shortage of wood in 18th century Europe had accelerated the development of coal production.”

So, the older elements of life – that obsession of the romantics in perhaps the last final bloom of eotechnical Europe – were being reconfigured before Marx’s eyes. When Marx was expelled from Paris in 1845, he took the messagerie – the stagecoach – to the Belgian border. In 1848, when he was kicked out of Belgium, he took the train back to Paris.

So, the machine like worker is not, here, the automaton, but rather the new machines which incorporated an unheard of precision and standardization.

Schivelbusch, interested in how the consciousness caught the phenomenological changes being wrought by the machine, quotes a wonderful passage from an advocate of steam engine powered transport in 1825, who describes the imperfect movement of the horse: ‘the animal advances not with a continual progressive motion, but with a sort of irregular hobbling, which raises and sinks its body at every alternate motion of its limbs.”[12] Similarly, Schivelbusch notes that the steam boat was admired at first because it did not tack – it could move against the current and the wind.

A culture picks up in its proprio-phenomenological net such major changes to its habits, but often doesn’t express their novelty, because the vocabulary to express it is lacking. Marx is a monument of the modern moment because, among other things, he understood that the vastness of the changes taking place around him called for the deployment of an entirely different understanding of the world.

The fabulous freaks are leaving town

The fabulous freaks are leaving town

The concept of ideology in Marx must be located on two axes. Diachronically, ideology substitutes the individual for the work of the system. This gesture is present not only in the Enlightenment Robinson myth, which gives us the origin of society in the story of some one individual, but also in the attribution of systematic effects to the ideas of some individual. In reality, those ideas are grounded in the possibilities opened up by some specific historical situation. Marx happily would say the same thing about his own work, which he consciously places in relation to his education, his experience in a Germany emerging from the old order and plunging, inconsistently, into the capitalist order, the social advances produced by the French Revolution, etc. This is, by the way, Marx’s supremely irreligious gesture – although as a romantic writer he adopts a prophetic tone, he characteristically disclaims the prophetic relationship to the world.

Synchronically, ideology names the process of naturalizing the social. This, it is easy to see, is not synonymous with the diachronic axis. Far from operating in terms of individuality, here ideology appeals to such natural instincts as that of appetite, or the instinct for barter, etc., which orients the market in such a way that it can’t be interfered with. Iron laws rule there. Where the Marxist would claim that our future is in the hands of men, the ideological claim is that men are always subject to the iron laws of the market. Derivatively, the class structure of society will then reflect some natural hierarchy – those on top are alpha males, or whatever. Whereas, going back to the diachronic axis, Marxists would discuss the workings of the cultural system, while ideology would see the ideas and inventions of great men.

This is, obviously, a delicate interpretative grid. From the Derridean perspective, it is one that grounds itself in an impossible present which simultaneously joins the synchronic and diachronic and pulls them apart. Or, as Hamlet might say, the time is out of joint.

I meant, when starting this, to quote a lively bit from the Grundrisse. But just to mess up the implications of this post, or at least play with them, a quote, instead, from Bataille’s Interior Experience:

Small comic recapitulation. Hegel, I imagine, touched the extreme. He was still young and he thought he was going mad. I even imagine that he elaborated his system in order to escape (every kind of conquest, without doubt, is performed by a man fleeing a menace). To finish with it, Hegel arrives at satisfaction, turns his back on the extreme. Supplication is dead inside him. If someone searches for salvation, so it goes, and continues to live, one can’t be sure, one has to continue to plead. Hegel gained, living, salvation, killed supplication, mutilated himself. He left behind only the handle of a shovel, a modern man. But before mutilating himself, without doubt he touched the extreme, knew supplication: his memory carried him to the abyss he had perceived so he could annul it. The system is annulation. [EI, 56]

ps - I just saw that Nicole has written two new posts at Rough Theory about Marx. As usual, they are revelatory. Go here.

Cantrip

Many of LI's readers may recoil our friend and foil, Paul Craddick. Paul's been rather out of the blogging scene, but he sent me an email alerting me to a group he and his wife have formed, Cantrip. Go to Myspace and check them out! And then inundate EMI with letters and phonecalls demanding that these two get a ten year contract.

Selling my promise to y to z: money, the universalizer of universal history

A good part of our intellectual apprenticeship is spent learning truths about the world that completely deny our experience. Sometimes, this is a good thing. The earth moves around the sun, who would have thought it! Sometimes, this is an ideological thing. Every philosophy freshman is duly impressed by the proof that altruism is actually an impossible ideal, since behind the act of a man of a man jumping in the river to save a stranger, one can find the flicker of the ego’s satisfaction with itself. What is rarely done is to turn the play of the cards and inquire if there is, in fact, any egotistic action at all – since, as we all know, our days are most organized by and for others. In this sense, egotism is a mere epiphenomena, and altruism, crushing altruism, is the very base and bread of our days. So why do we dwell, with such delight, on the ironic discoveries of the moralistes, without of course the saving irony? Because interest, self interest, has to be posited in order to make the capitalist machine work. We learn to demystify our motives in order to more thoroughly mystify our system.

Thus, the work of demystification turns out to be a more complex game than one expected. The career of Karl Marx is proof of this. It is rare that one man held so consistently, so desperately to the project of demystification – which is why one instinctively groups him with Nietzsche. Both, like the creature in Kafka’s Burrow, restlessly paced their own structures.

It is in terms of the burrow that I like certain of Marx’s texts above all others. Not just the brilliant political writing, but, as well, the notebooks. The Grundrisse. All commentators are agreed that the Grundrisse shows a Marx who has still not yet subdued the philosophical vocabulary to his plain work. And I must grant it is a little unfair to compare the notes, which perpetually retain the freshness of writing on the verge of one’s great themes, with the finished work, in which that freshness is subordinated to mastery. Marx is preeminently a maitre – Engels, that blessed spirit, understood this right away, irritated as he was, sometimes, by Marx’s tendency to excess.

I have been so entirely wrapped up, lately, in my editing work that I haven’t had the time I wanted to use Faust as my totem for Marx – my way of thinking through the metaphoric of transformations within the money/commodity nexus. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as I get older, start crowds me more and more – no matter how little sleep I get, I, like poor Faust, fall behind.

So: I wanted to make the connection between the organized and unorganized faces of freedom as Simmel sees them to Marx’s approach to money. The commentators say: there are two traditions concerning Marx’s theory of money. One is that he is, at root, a metallist – that, in order to make money as a commodity coherent with the labor theory of value, Marx is forced to mystify gold and silver as the universal types of money. The other is that the commodity theory leads him to see money primarily as a measure – and thus, puts him both in the camp of the nominalists and leads him to the same problem that the classical and neo-classical economists have – he can’t really distinguish the money economy from the barter economy. Or, as Ingham, the man who presses this critique the hardest, says, Marx missed the meaning of money-in-general because of his attachment to the labor theory of value. In an article in Economy and Society (2001), he sums up his desideratum like this:

“It is extremely important for the general analysis of money that the distinction between credit and credit-money is made clear from the outset. The new forms of money in question were not simple credit in the sense of deferred payment. Nor could they be adequately understood as direct symbolic ‘paper’ representations of precious metal, whether or not this was in coin or bullion form. Rather, these
first forms of credit-money were ‘money’ in the sense that mere ‘promises to pay’ circulated as means of settlement (payment). It was only later that they were backed by gold. I shall also contend that this negotiable (or transferable) debt – that is, ‘depersonalized’ debt that can be used as means of payment to a third party – is a form of money which is specific to capitalism.” (see Ingham 1999).

Later, in the same article, Ingham makes another neat point:

“Actually existing capitalism, as opposed to the ‘village fair’, was constituted by a new form of ‘dematerialized’ credit-money. From the early beginnings in late medieval Italy, state and bank debts – that is, their promises to pay – became accepted means of payment. In other words, debts could be discharged with a higher ‘quality’ form of debt that was trusted and/or enforced. This transformation
in the form of money required the signi. cant social structural change of the depersonalization and transferability of debt. It involved the transformation of a personalized bilateral debt relation (for example, an IOU) into the means of paying a third-party creditor (see Ingham 1999; Rowlinson 1999). A debt could be paid with another debt.20 It is precisely this fact – that money is constituted by a social relation of credit–debt – which mainstream economics, in its unremitting materialist preoccupation with the individual calculation of the utility of commodities, has found difficult to comprehend.”

Orthodox Marxists will tell you that Ingham is missing the fulcrum of capitalist history – abstract labor power – in this account. Myself, I think Ingham has the right intuitions about Marx’s formal model, but underestimates another theme in Marx – that of universal history. Universal history, in Marx’s hands, is not the history of unconvering the universals that really constitute mankind, but the history of the universalizing of mankind through force and the productive forces unleashed by capitalism –whch, remember, is represented in the Communist manifesto not just by free trade, but by World literature.

Marx prefigures Simmel in understanding barter and money in terms not just of their social relations, but in terms of different social circles. If I promise a friend to do x, because my friend has done y, I do not ‘sell’ my promise to my friend z – although one notices that, indeed, married couples, or long time couples, often tend to treat debts incurred by one of them as fungible enough to be ‘paid’ by the other. In my family, for instance, my mother often represented her gifts as coming from my father. She wasn’t being dishonest – this was exactly the way she saw – and he saw – the essence of being married. One flesh is one debt and one repayment.

Here’s Marx, noticing the way in which the social circle and barter are mutually determinative:

“Meanwhile the point we want to approach is the following: gold, in relation to the commodities in as much as it is supposed to be fixed as a coherent measure, is determined through barter, immediate acts of exchange; as the relationship of all other commodities to each other. In barter is, in the meantime, the exchange value of the product only in itself; it is the first phenomenal form of the same; but the is not yet posited as exchange value. Firstly this definition does not extend over the total production, but only its overflow [Uberfluss – surplus] and is thus more or less superfluous (as exchange itself); an accidental expansion of the circle of satisfactions, enjoyments (relations to new objects). It emerges then only in a few points (originally there, where the organic community stops being in contact with the foreign one), is limited to small circles and informs the ephemeralities, the supplements of production; extinguished as accidentally as it arises. The exchange act in which the superfluity of one’s own production is contingently exchanged against that of some stranger is only the first appearance of the product as exchange value in general and is determined through contingent needs, desires, etc. But if it becomes extended, as a continuing act, that contains in itself the means to its continual renewal, by and by there comes, just as externally and contingently, the regulation of mutual exchange through the regulation of mutual production, and the production costs, that are finally all resolved in labor time, will become the measure of exchange. This shows us how exchange becomes and the exchange value of commodities.”

Freedom and Money

As every amateur of economics knows (fellow cranks gather round!), money is a mystery that no classical or neo-classical theory has ever solved. Or rather, given the usual fictions of perfect markets with zero transaction costs, there would be no need for money. Thus, the hired, petty visionaries of the capitalist system have devised a model of that system that does not distinguish money from barter – a most embarrassing situation.

Whether Marx did any better is a much disputed question. Keynes, on the other hand, does seem to have grasped the nature of money more fully than others. In the General Theory, he wrote that “the second differentia of money is that it has an elasticity of substitution equal, or nearly equal, to zero; which means that as the exchange value of money rises, there is no tendency to substitute some other factor for it; - except, perhaps, to some trifling extent, where the money-commodity is also used in manufacture or the arts. This follows from the peculiarity of money that is utility is solely derived from its exchange value, to that the two rise and fall pari passu, with the result that as the exchange value of money rises there is no motive or tendency, as in the case of rent-factors, to substitute some other factor for it.”

What this brilliantly points to is that money is the socially materialized form of the principle of substitution itself, and in this way, the money system does compete against the barter system. The latter, of course, is far from a primitive form of the economy – it is, in fact, in millionfold daily use in the U.S.A. Whenever a man says to a woman, I went to see x film with you, now you have to watch x tv show with me; whenever a child says to another child, I gave you half of my M and Ms, now you have to let me play with your game; etc., the barter system is alive and well. It is an adhoc system of socialization, and it is certainly as important as money. The competition between the money system and the barter system also goes on a millionfold daily. At a certain point, one ‘feels’ the threat of the money system to our identifying social acts of barter, which is why such rule of thumb adages about not loaning money to relatives and the like float on our breaths.

But more to my present purpose – the advent of the money system as one in which the substitution principle enters as the unsubstitutable moment was felt to have something alchemical or uncanny about it. This is captured in Faust the second part. And it was also a significant dimension in the discourse about Freedom that became so important in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. On the negative side, there is no substitute – no alternative – to the principle of subsitution. On the positive side, this frees us from the bondage of the various, infinite and intimate forms of the barter system. Simmel, in the Philosophy of Money, makes a crucial distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to”. He uses the example of a schoolboy who, graduating from the gymnasium, steps into the freedom of his college days – a freedom that is “quite empty and almost unbearable” – and so quickly throws himself into other activities, for instance student organizations, that enforce a whole new set of rules of behavior upon him – in contrast to a businessman, who works to receive freedom from a regulation because, once that regulation is dissolved, he can expand his business in a certain way – the “freedom to” is defined by expectations that will concretely materialize upon the moment of ‘liberation”, while the ‘freedom from” is defined by the lack of any clear expectation beyond the point of liberation.

“In brief, every act of liberation shows a specific proportion between the emphasis and extension of the overcome circumstance and that of the one gained.”

Introducing the principle of substitution as the universal rule of the economic sphere does create freedom from, but – as Simmel points out – it also creates a certain alienation. I’ll end this note with this bit from Simmel (who I hate to translate – his language is almost impossibly hooked together in German so as to make translation a drag):

Beginning with the peasant who wins his freedom by the extension of the money system: “Clearly, it was freedom that he gained; but only freedom from something, not freedom to something; evidently, a seeming freedom to all – because it was simply negative – but actually without any directive, with any determined and determining content and thus disposing to that emptiness and lack of restraint, which is produced by every extension without resistance of that accidental, delusive, and seductive impulse – corresponding to the fate of the unfettered person who has given up his gods and thus won “freedom” only to give space for making an idol out of every arbitrary momentary value. It isn’t any different with many businessmen, for whom, burdened with the care and labor of his business, makes it his cherished goal to sell it. When he finally, with the price in his hand, is really ‘free”, there ensues often enough that typical boredom, that sense of the pointlessness of life, that inner disquiet of the rentier, that drives him to the most wonderful, and to inner and outer sense most irrational business ventures, by which he only constructs a substantial content for his freedom. It is just like the bureaucrat, who wants only to reach a stage as quickly as possible where his pension will allow him a “free” life.”

Hirschman's four interpretation of market society

The less you are, the less you manifest [äußerst] your life, the more you have, the greater is your divested [entäußertes] life, the more you accumulate on your alienated essence. Everything that the economist takes from you in terms of life and humanity, he substitutes it for you in terms of money and wealth, and everything that you can’t do, your money can do. It can eat, drink, go to the ball or the play, it knows art, learning, the historical curiosities, the political power, it can travel, it can assimilate all that for you; it can buy everything; it is true capability. But the thing that does all this may do nothing else than make itself, buy itself, for everything else is really its servant, and when I have the lord, then I have the servant and I don’t need its servant. All passions and acts must thus submit to greed. The worker must only have as much as he needs to live, and he must only want to live, in order to have.” – Marx, economic philosophical manuscript.

Albert Hirschman wrote a famous essay in the eighties entitled Rival Interpretations of Market Society, in which, like a structuralist pulling the motifs and variants out of a fairy tale, he delineated the four canonical interpretations of Market Society. Before he gets started, he notes that these interpretations all presume that the social order is justified in that it produces happiness. That notion, he claims, arose in the eighteenth century. He doesn’t say very much about how that notion arose or what humor or temperament justified the social order before that time – he merely supposes that before the rise of modernity, happiness was a matter of accident. My own story, as my readers know, is much more complicated and bears down harder on what ‘happiness’ as a total social fact is. However, I’m more interested in the way he generates the four canonical interpretations of Market society – and I should say, these interpretations are about the collective moral effect of market society.

The story, as Hirschman tells it, is that the eighteenth century philosophes discovered or created two themes. One theme was that happiness could be ‘engineered’ by changing the social order. This theme ‘arose at the same time as the idea of the unintended consequences of human action’. “The latter idea was taken to neutralize the former: it permitted one to argue that the best intended institutional changes might lead, via those unforeseen consequences, or ‘perverse effects’, to all kinds of disastrous results.”

This distinction isn’t novel, nor is the idea that the radical vein in modernity emphasized the engineering of happiness and the notion of perverse effects was used to argue for laissez faire. The latter, it should be noted, did not argue against the overriding idea that happiness was the ultimate test against which all social orders were to be judged. Rather, it viewed the market as the place where ancient oppression is annulled, our wants our satisfied, and we avoid the danger of investing power in those who would annul oppression merely as a prelude to the oppressions they themselves would then practice.

One of the unusual things about this quarrel, Hirschman thinks, is how little the two traditions communicate with each other. But be the ideologist a defender of the market or a critic, there have been in general four interpretations of the market. One of them – the earliest, the eighteenth century interpretation that Hirschman associates with Montesquieu and Hume – is the notion of doux commerces – gentle commerce. In essence, the effect of the market is to soften the warrior, to defuse the fanaticism of the priest, and to make us all concerned with at least the façade, or impression, of probity, honesty, and responsibility.
“There is here then the insistent thought that a society where the market assumes a central position for the satisfaction of human wants will produce not only con- siderable new wealth because of the divi- sion of labor and consequent technical progress, but would generate as a by-prod- uct, or external economy, a more "pol- ished" human type-more honest, relia- ble, orderly, and disciplined, as well as more friendly and helpful, ever ready to find solutions to conflicts and a middle ground for opposed opinions. Such a type will in turn greatly facilitate the smooth functioning of the market. In sum, according to this line of reasoning, capitalism which in its early phases led a rather shaky existence, having to contend with a host of pre-capitalist mentalities left behind by the feudal and other "rude and barbarous" epochs, would create, in the course of time and through the very practice of trade and industry, a set of compatible psychological attitudes and moral disposi- tions, that are both desirable in them- selves and conducive to the further expansion of the system. And at certain epochs, the speed and vigor displayed by that expansion lent considerable plausibility to the conjecture.”

Countering this, there is the assumption that a mastering greed will annihilate all traditional bonds, and with them the very anchors of morality. Hirschman believes that Marx – while not dwelling on this – certainly evokes it in the Communist Manifesto.

… capitalism corrodes all traditional values and institutions such as love, family, and patriotism. Ev- erything was passing into commerce, all social bonds were dissolved through money. This perception is by no means original with Marx. Over a century earlier it was the essence of the conservative re- action to the advance of market society, voiced during the 1730s in England by the opponents of Walpole and Whig rule, such as Bolingbroke and his circle (Hirsch- man, 1977, pp. 55-56). The theme was taken up again, from the early nineteenth century on, by the romantic and conserva- tive critics of the Industrial Revolution. Coleridge, for example, wrote in 1817 that the "true seat and sources" of the "existing distress" are to be found in the "Over- balance of the Commercial Spirit" in rela- tion to "natural counter-forces" such as the "ancient feelings of rank and ancestry" (1972, pp. 169-70).

This corrosion does not only dissolve morality, but ultimately dissolves the market society itself. Probity becomes a mask, behind which anything can be justified for gain’s sake. Of course, there are various ways this can be read. The recent moral panic about people leaving their overpriced houses and walking on their mortgage is one reading – the corruption of the oligarchs has now reached down into the populace itself. Schumpeter was certain that the wealth that could be taxed and redistributed as social welfare would create lazy and spoiled dependents on the system. Although Hirschman does not include this in his overview, what this interpretation is really about is the death of sacrifice, which no longer has any foundation in a society in which success is judged strictly in terms of gain.

Another interpretation, which also emerges in Marx, is just the opposite. It isn’t the bourgeois revolution that lends the market society a corrupt taint, but just the opposite: its weakness. Its failure to liquidate feudal remnants. Here, Hirschman mentions Arno Mayer’s The Persistence of the Feudal regime. Marx, of course, diagnosed Germany’s problem not only in terms of the exploitation endemic to capitalism, but the feudal relics that added another layer of oppression on top of that, and made it so much the harder to organize the proletariat. Hirschman calls this the Feudal Shackles thesis.

And, finally, there is the lack of Feudal Shackles thesis. This is, for instance, Louis Harz’s interpretation of American history. Because there was no saving Feudal pull, Americans never developed a strong sense of public wealth – it was always private wealth that counted for them. Hence, the impossibility of rooting European style social welfare programs in American soil.

I like this fourfold picture. I think it looks much different, however, once you posit that the triumph of happiness as both a total social fact and the ultimate legitimating term for the social order was always contested and always ambiguous. From this point of view, those stories look a bit different.

ps - it occurs to me that Derrida's convocation of the spectral logic in Marx plays within the framework of the narrative opposition between Feudal Shackles, on the one hand, and the lack of Feudal Shackles, on the other, which are in turn oriented towards the thesis of doux commerce or of the self-subversion of the market society. The history of the human limit that I've been following with all the attention to linearity of a drunk beatle includes a section on the war against superstition - I'll find some of my posts on that later. The reason that this is an issue at all when trying to understand the happiness culture becomes more obvious once we start to think of Marx's ghosts as important figures in his entire work, where they become the totems of temporality.
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the expulsion of the court alchemists and the ascension of John Law

I'm sorry my posts have been so rare, lately. But not since I was a lad of 20, working the grass game, have I been driven as hard as recently. Surely by the end of this month my work load will have fallen, but at the moment I am sweating it out, like a dumb donkey.

So, a brief scribble...

As Derrida’s séance over Marx raised up the spirits that were in his work, in this, the era of his supposed ‘death’, so too, Marx, in metaphoric and word, raised up the spirits in the classical economists, all of which hover around the fetishism of commodities. It is odd that Derrida seems to be the first to have taken Marx’s gothic streak seriously – he was, after all, a child of German romanticism, and who learned more from Heine’s prose style? … well, perhaps Nietzsche, as Mann points out.

When Marx overlays the transformations of money into commodity and commodity into money with the parodic language of alchemy, he is following a theme that goes back not only to Faust, but to the beginning of the theory of the political economy. About which, Carl Wennerlib has written an essay entitled “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England.” Wennerlib proposes that the 17th century natural philosophers took the alchemical proposal of creating wealth out of nothingness – or the base – quite seriously. And, vice versa, when the Bank of England showed in 1694 how credit-money could function, there was a rapid falloff in the patronage of alchemists…”

Curious phrase, credit-money. We would now simply say money, since it wouldn’t occur to any possessor of same to assume that the material ot of which the money was made was equal in value to the money. You won’t get much for a strip of green paper that doesn’t have the magical symbols of U.S. power on it now, will you? Of course not.

“Credit-money… served as a means of payment and had the capacity to circulate widely. These paper notes were wholly or partially convertible into assets or income streams designated as security. As such, they could fully complete a transaction and serve as a store of value…” In the system of political thinking that held at the time, this was as miraculous as the transmutation of metals promised by the Philosopher’s stone – or so our author claims. It is for this reason that the two things – the bank and the alchemist – were held in the same field, as substitutes one for the other. Or rather, the bank, by the alchemical feat of creating value out of de facto currency, drove out the alchemists, who’d been patronized by the Stuarts. ‘This transition from alchemy to credit was swift and complete, perhaps nowhere more dramatically evidenced than in the Duke of Orleans’s dismissal of his court alchemists in favor of John Law’s land-backed paper currency.”

Wennerlib takes a rapid survey of the literature produced by alchemists and those with suggestions concerning wealth, and finds a mixture of terminology, particularly around money – which a seventeenth century writer compares to “Materia Prima, because, though it serves actually to no use almost, it serves potentially to all uses.”

All of which had to do with England’s problem in the Early Modern Era – a shortage of specie. The solution proposed by some members of the Hartlib circle – the most advanced philosophers in England, including Boyle and William Petty – was to fund experiments to turn tin into gold.

All of which Goethe gets right in Faust, Part 2. It was not that long ago from the time he was writing in that these notions had been floated about. Indeed, for the Gnostic historian, looking for the event that emits the intersigne, surely the expulsion of the alchemists and the entrance of John Law marks a large step towards the great transformation.

Mephistopheles and the image of the limited good

And the devil sings dut, da dut, dut ta dut dut da dut…

In the first act of the second part of Faust, the King opens his court to the complaints of his followers. Complaints, doleances, Goethe’s seen a few. While the second part of Faust is written in the midst of the reactionary years, the years of legitimacy, Goethe is well aware of the weakness of the whole schema of legitimacy, within which the advances of the bourgeoisie were – according to the best laid Burkean plans – to be absorbed into the organic tissue of a society based on tradition, religion, respect. Goethe himself has advanced into the elite of a very small state, and of course his genius – and even his vanity - is large enough to judge how small.

There is a thesis, advanced by Arno Mayer, that claims that the nineteenth century was not, as we sometimes like to think, the time of the Great Transformation – but rather saw only the gradual withering of the ancien regime. Although it may appear that Mayer’s thesis is contradictory to another recent thesis – that of Charles Tilley, which locates the start of capitalist relationships in Europe’s rural regions in the 17th century – both of them are reactions to the periodization advocated by a school going through Adam Smith to Karl Marx, which takes industrialization, and especially advanced heavy industry, to be at the very heart of the nineteenth century. Mayer has the figures: except for England, “agriculture persisted as the single largest and weightiest economic sector until 1914”; (34) furthermore, ‘until 1914 consumer manufacture outweighed capital goods industry in the nonagrarian sector of each national economy”. (35)

One should never take arms against a sea of statistics – because here Marxian ‘materialism’ will find itself well and truly drowned, as anybody who has perused the volume after volume of a certain kind of econometric Marxist history that proceeds with a sort of amnesia that what we are looking for are the relations of preduction, not board feet of pigiron produced in 1900. Mayer, I should say, is not one of those econometricians. I refer to him here in order to set up the tension between the spirit of the time and the time – a tension to which Derrida pays attention, under the rubric of a time out of joint, in the Specters of Marx. Although it is not Hamlet that is in question, here – the vengeance thematic is muted, and – for those who have the eyes to see it – put at the margin, where it becomes the larger thematic of Nemesis, of balance.

But again … the king has called together his councilors, and complaints have been made until the king asks his new fool for his complaints – and the fool – Mephistopheles – responds that he is a blithe spirit just to be here. He then surveys the complaints so far in this speech:


Mephistopheles.
Where in the world is there not a lack of something?
The this, the that – well here it’s money that’s missing.
You aren’t going to pluck it from an ostrich, that’s true
Yet wisdom knows how to bring the deepest depths in view.
In mountain’s veins, under the base of walls we find
Gold that is coined, and the uncoined kind.
And you ask me – who will bring this all to light?
The force of human nature and his spirit’s fine flight.
(Okay, I took some liberties with that last line. So sue me.)

(Wo fehlt’s nicht irgendwo auf dieser Welt?
Dem dieß, dem das, hier aber fehlt das Geld.
Vom Estrich zwar ist es nicht aufzuraffen;
Doch Weisheit weiß das Tiefste herzuschaffen.
In Bergesadern, Mauergründen
Ist Gold gemünzt und ungemünzt zu finden,
Und fragt ihr mich wer es zu Tage schafft:
Begabten Manns Natur- und Geisteskraft.)

It is, as we would expect, man’s nature and spirit that causes the controversy. But let’s linger on the suggestion – which is held within the image of the limited good. For after all, what is the good of gold? Whether found as part of a treasure (under walls) or mined (from the veins of mountains), gold is an oddly medieval product upon which to bring the attention of man’s “spirit”. Although of course there were a number of gold rushes in the nineteenth century – California, Alaska, Australia – yet the gold rush was symbolic of the spirit of the age only in as much as it was a leveling wealth, a wealth that depended on the chance of discovery apart from social position (putting to one side – oh that side! – the indigenous people’s whose streams and land were calmly seized by the white male gold seekers). In an earlier post in which we first recognized the importance of the image of the limited good to explain the rise of the happiness society,- here we discussed German treasure hunting via an article by Johannes Dillinger and Petra Feld, Treasure-Hunting: A Magical Motif in Law, Folklore, and Mentality, Württemberg, 1606 –1770. We will leave that and the subsequent posts that followed it as allusions.

Unsurprisingly, it is at the moment in which the image of the limited good confronts the image of growth that the devil and all the specters pop up. About which more later.

Transmigration of the fool

The Money. The narcissism. The Artificial human.

All these themes, and so little time to go through the woods.

After a preface, we begin, in Act one of the second part of Faust, in the throne room of the Imperial Palace. The king greets his retainers who have come from far and wide, but notices one is missing: where is the fool?

And here a substitution happens which is not simply a routine from stock theater. It is one of those substitutions that will become symbolic for the nineteenth century playbook, one of those gestures in which Mann saw Goethe the wizard. As one secondary character tells another, the old fat fool – Fett-Gewicht – collapsed on the steps, drunk or dead, and was carted away. And on those steps a new fool has appeared – this one dressed richly, and not fat at all – a stave, someone says, to the old fool’s barrel – although this skinny fool is ‘fratzenhaft’ – full of pranks. A skinny fool is a sinister fool. We cycle through the transfigurations from Sancho Panza to Rambeau’s Nephew – which Goethe translated – to this moment.

For as we know as readers – reading the names assigned to the speeches, which the speakers don’t see – know, this is the very devil, Mephistopheles. Come lose from his sage, his Faust. The old rule says that for every sage there is a fool. But the loss of weight and the rich clothes indicate that there has been a change somewhere, there has been a distinct change in class position, in worlds.

That the substitution occurs on that place of transition between the up and the down – the stairs – is no accident. Mephistopheles in this scene will be, as it were, the very spirit of the steps.

Whom does each hear gladly named?
What nears the steps of your throne?
What has exiled itself?

Wen höret jeder gern genannt?
Was naht sich deines Thrones Stufen?
Was hat sich selbst hinweggebannt?

The uncanny, if Freud is right, starts with the ‘who’ becoming a what – the human becoming a female doll, the doll becoming the “who” who reveals her ‘what’ to her addled lover, thus of course driving him mad. The King correctly recognizes that his new fool is speaking in the fool’s chosen idiom of riddles, but not the what propounding the riddles. In any case, he accepts the substitution:

Mein alter Narr ging, fürcht’ ich, weit in’s Weite;
Nimm seinen Platz und komm an meine Seite.

My old fool has gone, I fear, beyond the beyond
Take his place and stand at my side

And as this scene makes its turn towards Geist and Geld, I’m going to make a turn too. First to this quote from Simmel’s Philosophy of Money.

“The division between subject and object is not so radical as the practical scientific world would make us believe about these categories subject otherwise to this completely legitimate division. The soul’s life [seelische Leben] begins rather in a circumstance of indifference, in which the I and its object remain still undivided, satisfying the impressions or ideas of the consciousness without it being the case that the bearer of this content has divided itself from itself. That in the determined, momentary real circumstance he has a subject that is to be distinguished from the content, that he has, that is at first an affair of a secondary consciousness, an afterthought analysis. The development obviously leads pari passu into the fact that the person says I to himself, and that he recognizes independently standing objects outside of this I. If metaphysics so often likes to tell us that the transcendental essence of being was to be absolutely one, beyond the subject-object opposition, its psychological pendant is found in this simple primitive fulfillment [Erfuelltsein] with relation to an idea content, as it is with children that don’t yet speak of themselves as I, and in a rudimentary manner this is to be observed occurring one’s whole life long. This unity, out of which the categories of subject and object first develop in the face of one another in a as yet to be explained process, appears to us subjective only because we encounter it after we’ve developed the concept of objectivity, and because we have no correct expression for that kind of unity, yet are accustomed to naming it after one of the onesided elements the co-effects of which appear in our subsequent analysis.”

And now let’s think a bit about narcissism.

the grimoire of political economics

Damn - in an earlier version of this, I didn't notice that the stuff I wrote didn't copy to the blog. Sorry sorry sorry! The only thing that copied was the translation I made from Marx. Damn. Anyway, this is what the post is supposed to look like.

In the section of the Grundrisse that Marx’s editors – I believe entitled, The Method of Political Economics, Marx asks what it means to look at a nation from the political economic viewpoint.

It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, thus, for example, to begin, in economics, with the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. Yet by a nearer observation this appears to be false. The population is an abstraction if I leave aside the classes of which it consists. These classes are an empty phrase when I don’t know the elements out of which they are made, for instance, wage labor, capital, etc. … For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Therefore, If I begin with the population, it would be a chaotic representation of the whole; and thus I through nearer analysis come upon ever simpler concepts; from this conceptualized concretum towards ever thinner abstractions, until I arrive at the simplest determinations. From there I commence the trip backwards until I finally final arrived at the population again, this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and connections. The first way is that which the economists took historically in the beginning… As soon as these individual moments [R: of value, division of labor, money] were more or less fixed and abstracted, the economic systems began, climbing up from the simple, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the state, the exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the weaving together [Zusammenfassung] of many determinations, hence the unity of the manifold. In thought it appears as the process of the weaving together, as a result, not as a starting point, although it is really a starting point and thus also the starting point for intuition [Anschauung] and idea. In the first way, the full idea volatilizes into abstract determination; in the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.”

The path down and the path back up, the way of pins and the way of needs, the negative identity between forwards and backwards – LI has hammered on these ideas until we are afraid that, like a bad carpenter, we have crooked our nail. But it is a pattern we meet all too often among the nineteenth century aliens, who, looking back, have noted with horror that universal history somehow took a wrong turn. The method of political economy, here, looks – not accidentally – not only like an alchemical process a la Faust, but like exploration - and here, again, the epistemic operator that Foucault, strangely, passes over in silence, ‘discovery’, throws around its historical weight. To the source of tears, to the vital liquids, to the volatilized moment – such is the great work. What I’m calling weaving together might be better called, following this metaphoric, concentration as in the standard translation of the Grundrisse.

In a sense, what Marx did was follow Faust’s path of reversal – in the late thirties, writing his articles on windfallen wood, he started out – much like the beginning in this passage – with the state. The great abstraction of the state. Law and philosophy had taught him to regard the state as the fulcrum of society. What he learns, in the forties, is that the path he is on leads him to levels below the state – which no longer, logically, can be the fulcrum. He sinks down to the underworld of daily activity, of production and reproduction, in which the categories of the surface – for instance, of individuality – have no hold. And then he turns – realizing that this is the turn taken by political economists – and makes his way back to the surface. The philosophical mistake was to confuse the way this unrolls in one’s head – for it can unroll in no other social space – for the force that drives the whole. Invention is the tricky doeppelgaenger of discovery.