Ilinx in Marx, ilinx r us

In the German ideology, Marx introduced a trope that he used quite frequently to think about the socio-economic relations that underlie capitalism:

“Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, [Wenn in der ganzen Ideologie die Menschen und ihre Verhältnisse wie in einer Camera obscura auf den Kopf gestellt erscheinen] this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”

In my last post, I introduced the anecdote of the masked gamblers in the Redoute to make a number of points – one of which is that you can read any number of biographies of John Law, or you can read Gregory Clarks recent A Farewell to Alms, which concentrates on the developments that produced capitalism in the period between the seventeenth and early nineteenth century, and nowhere will there be any anthropological consideration of that semantic pair with which the business pages are now entertaining us: transparency and opacity. The masks are so much frivolousness.

Well, since the frivole is one of the banners under which a site named, after all, Limited Inc operates, you’ll excuse me if I find the masks, on the contrary, full of meaning, and even find meaning, mythological meanings, in the detachment of the economic facts from the rites and peculiar symbols in which they are instantiated. The masked gambler and the open faced banker (who is a proxy of others, and thus fulfils a masking function, too) have an especial relevance now, when we are told that the transmission of commodities that are essentially nothing other than masks concealing unlikely combinations – securities the composition of which is hardly known to the dealers who sell them, who would even consider understanding the products that they sell to be a waste of time – is the very bedrock of our system.

Ah, the bedrock. And so it is that we get to Marx’s fascination with the inversions natural to ideology, that process of re-casting artifice as the natural. When Marx approaches this topic, some reference to an ur-ilinx situation – that of standing on one’s head – is sure to be in the offing. Or at least in the room next door, listening.

It is a good time to remember this. Lately, we are flooded with the world upside down – the world in which we, the producers, and we, the consumers, are shown to depend on them, the managers, and on them, the financial world – a relationship of dependence that “umdreht” – inverses reality. This inversion penetrates the discourse in unusual ways – for instance, the Fed’s concern with the liquidity of the system is derived from this inverted image, since if we turned the relationship about we would not only transform the central crisis into one of solvency, but we would have to contextualize solvency – and solvency, here, is about the means and modes of the expropriation of the increase in productivity, the fruits of which have been going, since 2001, almost exclusively to the top 20 percent of the income bracket. Since the collapse of the power of labour unions and the unraveling of the collaboration between the state and labour to give labour more bargaining power in the early eighties, this crisis was bound to happen. And it is bound to be seen upside down. Now, standing on your head and then standing on your feet certainly falls under the games of ilinx, which activates a dizziness in the social world. Marx was a man who wanted to seize society and make it stand on its feet – on its own two feet – and in that ambition he was serious – an avatar of seriousness. But since that seriousness was realized in images of standing on one’s head and inversion, his seriousness would slip away into ilinx as he analyzed the upside down society, as he corrected the reigning ideology, as, indeed, he spoke for revolution. For even though revolution was on the side of play, was the realization of the society of seriousness, it was entangled from beginning to end in ilinx – the irrepressible euphoria of the revolutionary act.

Of course, standing on one’s head makes it a question of heads – so often the revolution comes down to heads – and as heads seemed to be designed as perverse machines for the inversion of things, Marx’s tone, around the “Kopf”, always seems to take on a slightly mocking air. Here’s a passage from the introduction to the Critique of the Political Economy:

“Accordingly for the consciousness – and by this we specify the philosophic consciousness – to which the conceptual thinking of real persons and thus the conceived world as such is primarily real, the movement of categories appears as the real act of production – which, unfortunately, requires a shock from the outside to be set in motion – whose result is the world. And this is (this is again a tautology) correct insofar as the concrete totality as a thought totality, as a thought concretum, in fact is a product of thought, of conceptualization; but in no way of the external or above it all thinking intuition and idea and auto-generated concept, but of the working out of intuition and idea in concepts. The whole, appearing in the head as a thought whole, is a product of the thinking head, which assimilates the world in the only way available to it, a way that is different from the artistic, religious, practical-intellectual assimilation of this world. The real subject remain, before as afterwards, outside of the head, independent, as long, namely, as the head relates only speculatively, theoretical. Even then, in the theoretical method the subject, society, must always hover before us as the presupposition of the idea.” (ME 13, 633)

As it was in the beginning, so it is now, in our era of detached heads, tv heads, talking heads. Assimilation of the world through the total distortion of the world – this is what Kraus called the black magic of the press, and what LI calls white magic – for what was black for Kraus, the ink of the newspaper, has become white for LI, the white of the screen.

I came upon a beautiful instance of standing on one’s head, economically speaking, in Washington Post lately. It was in the Q and A with Stephen Pearlstein, the Post’s only intelligent business reporter (for unintelligence when one touches on any practical economic matter, or foreign policy, or anything that does not involve pre-digested nuggets of White House spin, I recommend the Post’s political reporter, Peter Baker, who possesses almost genius ability to totally miss the news in whatever news he is reporting). And this is what an intelligent business reporter thinks:

“Washington, D.C.: Steven, I suppose that additional regulation of the markets will also be accompanied with guarantees of government intervention to "socialize" losses in the financial industry. Bringing "stability" to this powerful and wealthy economic caste may have consequences for national competitiveness, social stability, and the print circulation of Das Kapital.
Steven Pearlstein: Very cute. First of all, you mistake bringing stability to a powerful and wealthy economic caste, in which we have little interest, and bringing stability to ordinary homeowners, workers, investors and the broader economy, in which we do have a societal interest. Often the two go together, so you can always rail against bailing out the big guys. But as I've written before, the bailout here is really for all of us. And I think you play cute intellectual games in dismissing that. There is a legitimate tradeoff between innovation and efficiency on the one hand and stability on the other, and it is hard to do that tradeoff because it is like weighing apples against oranges. But it is one we should do without getting into accusations that one side (my side) doesn't care about innovation or efficiency, which is what the Financial Services Round Table and the Derivatives and Swap Industry Association (or whatever it calls itself) invariably do.”
The bailout is really for all of us. This is a phrase that can lodge in the head, the head that is a factory for making ideas into concepts, or, as I suppose we would now say, conceptual schemas. Especially as it is in conjunction with the class segmentation of society that is both acknowledged and dismissed, with just the right upside down tone – as though we depended on the ‘innovations’ of the ‘big guys’. It is a funny thing, this word innovation. For instance, counterfeiters are innovators. They are continually innovating forms of currency that are supposed to look just like currency. Unfortunately for them, innovation is no excuse. Whereas in the financial sector, which is really about loaning money and receiving payments on those loans – and that’s it – innovation has been borrowed from the annals of engineering to make it seem like we have entered a whole new schema. In a sense that is right. The schema combines the banality of loaning money and receiving payments on those loans with the excitement of counterfeiting. It is all high stakes, piracy, and 45 trillion dollars in derivatives.
But of course that whole world is horseshit. When we cease standing on our heads. If we cease…

But its not them. They don’t decide.

the birth of financial capitalism from under the mask

I feel out of place
Just look at my face...

In volume 5 of Georges Daru’s classic Histoire de la Republique de Venise (doesn’t the mock scholarship of this beginning send a little frisson up your spine? LI is trying out a Poe like style – but hark, we are in the midst of a very non-Poe like parenthesis!), there is a description of the famed Redoute, Venice’s casino:

“The most frequented of the places to play (cassins) was called the Redoute. This was an establishment not unworthy of the attention of the observer. In existence since 1676, it was a vast edifice consecrated to games of chance. Usually, there was sixty to eighty tables, where only the patricians could sit like bankers. They were in their robes, with their faces uncovered, while the other players were masked. but these patricians did not represent the bank in actuality: they were on the payrole of companies who associated for this speculation, that is to say greedy capitalists and even the Jews. They were on a yearly, or a monthly, or a daily stipend. It was a singular spectacle to see around a table persons of both sexes in masks, and grave personages in magistrates robes holding the bank, both the one and the other praying to chance, passing from the anguishes of despair to the illusions of hope, and this without offering a word.”

Among the masked players, we know, was John Law – who went on, in a stroke of genius, to devise something like a twentieth century financial system, and tried to impose it on an economy transitioning from feudalism and an ancient code of war – the France of the Regency – with, of course, disastrous results. And at this point I could start wondering about the chain of chains that I’ve been dragging through this blog, lately – but I’m more interested in those masks. In 1670, on the other side of the world, the Pacific northwest, a very sophisticated mask culture, the Kwakiutl, were using more elaborate masks in ceremonies that, to some extent, survived to be studied by Franz Boas in the early twentieth century. Boas was opposed to the culture evolutionists who would see the gamblers in Venice as a higher civilization to which the Kwakiutl were related as a primitive stage. Rather, he wanted to slice these cultures up into units governed by pattern rules that weren’t in that progressive order one with the other. Certainly at least here, in Venice, the masks under which financial capitalism was born should at least give us pause. But – another promise I have no idea if I will keep - LI will get to Boas later.

As LI pointed out in our Caillois post, we have a feeling that the mask and the game, which Caillois associates with each other, have something to do with imitatio, the segmentation of life according to figures – call them Gods or spirits – attendant upon different ages. It is interesting to think of imitatio as, in some ways, the donning of a mask – a persona.
The mask in “European” culture is mostly studied in relation to the ancient world. There was, for instance, the Roman custom of having a buffoon at a funeral don a mask resembling the deceased. Suetonius tells a famous story about the funeral of Vespasian, famous for being tightfisted: “Even at his funeral, the leading mime actor Favor, who was wearing a mask of his face and imitating the actions and speech of the deceased during his lifetime, as is the custom, asked the procurators how much the funeral and the procession had cost and, hearing that it was ten million sesterces, exclaimed that they should give him a hundred thousand throw him [Vespasian] into the river.”
Herder had the idea that the mask was a form of alienated imperfection – the mask was our ugliness. We are gorillas in masks.
“From this point of view, have you considered what advantages such masks gave Greek art, what nobility they gave the human form? Through them, what distorted our nature, what was unseemly, was cut away from us. All caricature was transferred, classified and ordered. Therefore it remained separated from the noble human body: no Hogarth could be a Prometheus and make images of men; but the child, the boy could play with masks, even Jupiter and Mercury could act in masks, if they so pleased. They were now not gods, but deformed beings: for whoever wears such a mask, thereby certifies that he is now not a man, or god, but the beast, the fool, in whose shape he appears. The noble human form, that for the Greeks reigned over everything, has such a one renounced.”
- Herder, Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (Werke, 5.2 292)

Caillois did not associate masks with games of chance. The more natural move is to associate them, or at least one of their functions – the production of hyperbolic fear – with ilinx, the games that play with vertigo and its avatars.

Okay, enough tonight.

PS – Like Marcel’s aunts in Swann’s Way who combine discretion with politeness to such a degree that the remarks they make to each other when Swann brings the family a gift from his garden, which seem random and a little bizarre, are actually carefully phrased to convey with a surcroit de tact a gratitude that would be entirely spoiled by its open declaration, like a gift presented without any gift wrapping, so, too, I coyly designed this post PLUS boosting the great photograph of the Kwaikutl mask all as a way of enticing a comment from certain of my web pals. But alas, no comment relevant to the substance of this post has been unsheathed in the comments to this thing. I feel like I want to cry.

However, there’s another reason for this postscriptum.

Lately, I’ve been perversely interested in the pro-ana community. That anorexic girls just don’t suffer in exemplary victimhood, but actually go out there, swap malign diet tips and encouraging words has not only destroyed a certain image of anorexia, the ‘silent’cry for help, but it has pushed the envelop of identity politics perhaps beyond the point of no return. Plus, there is the Goddess Ana, a rumor and a collective creation that has made me think a lot. There’s even been some question in U.K., a country that likes to combine the barbarism of the unfettered market place with the hypocrisy of the smothering nanny state, of officially censoring pro-ana sites. Now, I’m not ridiculous enough to be pro pro-ana – that would be a usurpation of experience even LI is not arrogant enough to indulge in.

However:

if I were a therapist, I would take seriously the connection between the elements I am associating here: imitatio, ilinx, and the hyperbolic mask of fear. While this might sound like so much crazy LI shit, it is pretty easy, if you open your eyes, to see this stuff working like a well oiled machine all around us.

Okay, post scriptum is over. And now for some gratuitous pictures of penises. Meanwhile, I think I’m going to use the motto of this site as my sign off line.

I’m so bored. I hate my life.

vorovskoy mir

LI talked with my brother the other day about the shadow financial system. Hey, and then we added on a discussion of black helicopters … but I jest. Who needs black helicopters when you can watch them build a pipeline between the financial casino and the Fed without anybody lifting a hand…

Casino, though, is the wrong word. Casino’s are businesses that work. They work because most gamblers lose. Thus, the house is never in the position to have a solvency problem. On the other hand, the financial system is a vast array of bets premised on the idea that you can have a Casino in which most bettors win. Sure, there are shorts, but the system justifies itself by claiming that spreading the risk around and swapping it allows all parties to win.

In this world, a world that does generate amazing real money compensation packages for the Pigs (excuse me, IT)… the shower fungi that run it, winning and losing are vague concepts. So, today, we have a runup in the market because, ta da – UBS marked down 19 billion dollars. Or, as Yves Smith notes at Naked Capitalism, UBS just announced that in the brief period of 3 months, they lost an amount equivalent to a third of their assets.

In a normal market, this isn’t pat on the back kind of material. So why, in fact, is it getting pats on the back? Well, one of the consequences of being run by a gang of hoodlums laced with people from the financial and private equity sector is – they will simply spread this pain elsewhere. They will take it out in inflation and further wage stagnation on the bottom 80 percent. At the moment, the shower fungi are happy – as you or I would be happy, let’s face it, if given the keys to Fort Knox.

The happiness is a delusion. There’s a limit to thievery even among the vory v zakone who are picking the fat bits from American bones. UBS, as Smith noticed, recently received an infusion of 19 billion swiss francs – and has now put out an announcement that it is in negotiation with some sovereign wealth funds for 15 billion more. Banks shouldn't have burn rates - but UBS is starting to look like a dot com startup. Sovereign Wealth fund is just another name for Surplus Petroleum Profits – and yes, they have to go somewhere. We are fastforwarding through the petro-wealth cycle that has now occurred three times in the past thirty years. It isn’t only that the developed world depends on cheap petroleum, but when it raises in price, it depends on Middle Eastern countries recycling that money through Western economies. It is the neatest little system, and it is one reason that the really untouchable state in the Middle East, for the U.S., is Saudi Arabia.

But all the recycling in the world isn’t going to overcome the roots of this crisis in the widening gap between the rich and everybody else. The rich depend on two things, a consumer class that will keep going blindly into debt to maintain a lifestyle out of synch with their real earnings, and a government that will skew the playing field to grossly favor the oligarchs. There is a sorta sub-Malthusian limit, though, encoded in the supreme principle of economics: you can squeeze blood out of a turnip.

But at the moment, we are pretending you can.

imitatio all over again

I'm going to try to gather my thoughts together about ilinx, the mask of hyperbolic fear, and imitatio sometime this week. O Lord of the Flies, give me a second I can call my own! In the meantime, I'm reprinting this, which is about imitatio, since I want to work on that concept a little bit.


Usually, histories of the radical enlightenment wind through the philosophers and the natural scientists. May LI suggest another path? A primal scene of resistance, no less – which, like all primal scenes, begins with the opening of the eye – although in this primal scene, there are only shadowy proxies for Daddy fucking Mommy. It begins like this:

“Don Quixote raised his eyes and saw coming along the road he was following some dozen men on foot strung together by the neck, like beads, on a great iron chain, and all with manacles on their hands. With them there came also two men on horseback and two on foot; those on horseback with wheel-lock muskets, those on foot with javelins and swords, and as soon as Sancho saw them he said:

"That is a chain of galley slaves, on the way to the galleys by force of the king's orders."

"How by force?" asked Don Quixote; "is it possible that the king uses force against anyone?"

"I do not say that," answered Sancho, "but that these are people condemned for their crimes to serve by force in the king's galleys."

"In fact," replied Don Quixote, "however it may be, these people are going where they are taking them by force, and not of their own will."

"Just so," said Sancho.

"Then if so," said Don Quixote, "here is a case for the exercise of my office, to put down force and to succour and help the wretched."

This is from Chapter 22 of the first book of Don Quixote. It is a key chapter, for it provides the motor that ties together the first book. By freeing the prisoners, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza become, themselves, outlaws. This provides the loose plot into which Cervantes can fit his episodes – a blessed structure, that shows up, in variations, throughout the succeeding centuries of the European novel.

Blockhead!" said Don Quixote at this, "it is no business or concern of knights-errant to inquire whether any persons in affliction, in chains, or oppressed that they may meet on the high roads go that way and suffer as they do because of their faults or because of their misfortunes. It only concerns them to aid them as persons in need of help, having regard to their sufferings and not to their rascalities. I encountered a chaplet or string of miserable and unfortunate people, and did for them what my sense of duty demands of me, and as for the rest be that as it may; and whoever takes objection to it, saving the sacred dignity of the senor licentiate and his honoured person, I say he knows little about chivalry and lies like a whoreson villain, and this I will give him to know to the fullest extent with my sword…" – Chapter 30

The relationship between the intellectual and power has always fascinated intellectuals, who like to think that they are the repositories of true power – the poets will always trump the legislators in that long run where we are not, contra Keynes, all dead – some of us live on in books. But the line of philosophes, sages and, I’ll admit, buffoons who represent LI’s notion of the intellectual elect spring out of that twenty second chapter of Don Quixote.

It is much to my purpose, here, that the whole of Don Quixote can be read as a comically misshapen imitatio. Indeed, Don Quixote is just at the right age – middle age – to have his head so addled by romances that the traditionally strong urging of the middle aged heart in the pre-capitalist world takes its shape not through a meditation on the savior, but through a meditation on the knight redeemer.

Cervantes does not present his knight as a completely deluded man in this chapter. In fact, he raises the moral risks by having Quixote talk to the prisoners. Each confesses to his crime, and one of the criminals is “the famous Gines de Pasamonte, otherwise called Ginesillo de Parapilla,” whose feats have apparently entered into common lore. Unlike the headlong charge against the windmills, here there is no case of hallucination, even if there are comic verbal confusions. At the end of learning that one man is a thief, another a pimp, another a committer of incest, Don Quixote still tells the chief guard to let the men go free – and when he refuses, Don Quixote attacks. Later, in chapter 29, a curate, who has been told of the action by Sancho Panza, will supply the liberal voice of conscience that tells us of the consequences of our knightly acts. Of course, the consequences, as described by the curate, are entirely fictitious:

"I will answer that briefly," replied the curate; "you must know then, Senor Don Quixote, that Master Nicholas, our friend and barber, and I were going to Seville to receive some money that a relative of mine who went to the Indies many years ago had sent me, and not such a small sum but that it was over sixty thousand pieces of eight, full weight, which is something; and passing by this place yesterday we were attacked by four footpads, who stripped us even to our beards, and them they stripped off so that the barber found it necessary to put on a false one, and even this young man here"—pointing to Cardenio—"they completely transformed. But the best of it is, the story goes in the neighbourhood that those who attacked us belong to a number of galley slaves who, they say, were set free almost on the very same spot by a man of such valour that, in spite of the commissary and of the guards, he released the whole of them; and beyond all doubt he must have been out of his senses, or he must be as great a scoundrel as they, or some man without heart or conscience to let the wolf loose among the sheep, the fox among the hens, the fly among the honey. He has defrauded justice, and opposed his king and lawful master, for he opposed his just commands; he has, I say, robbed the galleys of their feet, stirred up the Holy Brotherhood which for many years past has been quiet, and, lastly, has done a deed by which his soul may be lost without any gain to his body."

According to Roberto Gonzalez Echeveria’s Love and the Law in Cervantes, the 1560s saw a typical modern response to a military and economic crisis: the state swelled the numbers of prisoners, who could then be used on galley ships. To do this meant expanding the number of offenses and expanding the role of the police, such as they were, much as such things have been done for twenty years in the U.S. The crimes, of course, are all individual, and fill, link by link, the prison factory space, while the larger crime – a system of criminal law that constitutes itself a crime – is committed by nobody. Don Quixote, charging against the proxy person of the king in attacking those raffish guards on the open road, makes himself a criminal, and turns Sancho Panza into his accomplice. Yet according to his own standards, he remains evermore the loyal knight to a king whose real traits are supplanted by romantic ones.

Without the outlaw knight, the radical enlightenment would be a legalism. With it, it becomes a rich drama of false starts and causes. A true outlaw knight ventures even outside that law which the intelligentsia now imposes on itself – the law of the smart. The law of the test. The law of the grades. The insane chain gangs of meritocracy. It is colder outside, and you might work in a gas station or a grocery store, but … this is where the knights are.

Dating Advice from LI!

The NYT is a mixed bag for LI readers this Sunday. There is the abstinence group article in the NYT magazine, which hangs its hook on the fact that the abstinence group in question forks over tuition at Harvard. I’d prefer an article about a group dedicated to abstinence from writing articles on abstinence groups, myself. It is one of those everyday reminders that the NYT is an incredibly provincial paper, all in all.

The best thing in the paper is James Glanz’ article about the militias in Basra. It almost counterbalances the incredible load of bullshit dumped by Sabrina Tavernise on the innocent reader who desires some clue as to what is going on in Iraq. Think back to the glory days, when NYT journalists were wondering whether Chalabi would be prime minister, or whether the Iraqis would just, unanimously make him king. Tavernise accurately reflects the policy of disconnect and denial that obviously rules in the Bushian Green Zone.

And talking about disconnect and denial – in the Book section there is an essay that drags literature into the ever disheartening world of the Glamour dating quiz by Rachel Donadio. The blogs will be over this like white on rice, and LI, following our new, Lady Bitch Ray driven sprint for popularity, will join them to say that the interesting thing about the essay is the way it tiptoes around a major issue – the startling decline of intelligence among our former lords and masters, the white American male. Ostensibly about conflicting tastes in books and how this plays out in the Indie movie of Valentine Heart relationships that the NYT so cherishes – its bourgeois breath down your neck, you Lords of Acid scumbags – the quotes make it quite clear that the state of play in America is between Dumb and Despairing:

“Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.”

Or this: “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.”

Burroughs, however, shows himself a putz in the next sentence: “As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”

Unwittingly, Burroughs puts his finger on the reason for the stark, hopefully reversible night of ignorance that has fallen on a way too significant portion of the American Male population: the treatment of books as so much fucking impression management in the always popular "hot or not!" contest our dreamland of American Idol judges has cooked up as a national past time. LI could give a fuck about the number of books someone reads, of course - read one, read a hundred thousand. It is the intensity of the third life that counts, the willingness to lose yourself, and to even ask, in the immortal words of my best friend David: what's so important about your life? If you have never gone, like Orpheus in Cocteau's movie, through the mirror, then fuck you, you a nasty motherfucker - that's our general attitude, copped from Kimberley Jones, and we're stickin' with it. The third life switch from literature to action movies and war games affected by the male population is the vast, social wart on our behemoth Uncle Sam’s body – in fact, the wart has taken over the head. Athena’s curse of ate – blindness – is upon the sex. Remember, the next time you hear some bourgeois idiot like Burroughs make fun of some soul reading a used book, or – dating advice from LI! – the man you are going out with calmly states he isn’t a “reader”, look closely at his mouth. The blood of Iraqis is dribbling from his lips.

real news from Iraq and fake American news from Iraq

The American press is stunningly bad at reporting on events in Iraq right now. CNN relies on Michael Ware, which is a bit like relying on Ollie North for an account of the Iran-Contra affair – Ware has all but come out in favor of McCain’s occupation forever line. The New York Times crew evidently is not only incapable of reading or speaking Arabic, but relies mostly on the Green Zone for its framework, and has no sources whatsoever in the Mehdi army. The latter is pretty much the condition of the whole of the U.S. press. In one way, it is understandable – establish a source with the Sadrists and watch the U.S. army take your ass to jail. On the other hand, it makes it impossible to trust the NYT or the Washington Post.

LI recommends the BBC news service translations of what is being said in the Arab press. At the present time, according to the Saudi owned Al-Sharq al-Awsat website, there is a dispute about a message being sent around from Sadr, which says:

In his message, a copy of which "Al-Sharq al-Awsat" has obtained, Al-Sadr said: "I advised you in previous statements to be patient and respect the orders of the Hawzah [Shi'i seminary]. I asked you to stand up to the onslaught by the occupier and his lackeys who are implementing his plans that aim to harm the sons of this noble line. Recent events in Basra, Al-Kut, and Al-Sadr City have proved that the Iraqi Government is pressing ahead, in cooperation with the occupation forces, with the implementation of its evil plan and which coincides with the approaching governorates councils' elections for the purpose of distorting the image of Al-Sadr Trend whose supporters are now suffering from continued arrests in all the governorates." The message added: "The violation of the truce we had announced when we froze Imam Al-Mahdi Army that is happening today... I said when we adopted the freezing of the Imam Army under the current conditions that we believed the interest required this freezing. If the resistance continues in this way, it will drain Al-Mahdi Army's moral and material resources and this might make many of our supporters turn against us in addition to the Shi'i public opinion's view of us." It said: "We believe that protection of Al-Sadri line can only be made by remaining silent at present as long as the occupation is in our territories. The events of Al-Diwaniyah and Karbala were the blows that made us think deeply, so to speak, that the confrontation would provide the government with the justification for exploiting the obnoxious occupier's plan and the pretext for imposing the law enforcement plan so as to strike Al-Sadr Trend's sons in Basra and Al-Sadr City. I say it with deep anguish, so to speak, and with much regret that there are renegades from our ranks who did not obey our orders and hid behind the Imam Al-Mahdi Army's cloak. They helped the government and the occupier against themselves and decided to rebel against our orders."

Rather oblique, but the idea has gotten out that Sadr is ordering a stand down. Which is disputed by a leading Al Sadr trend figure in Basra, Al-Bahadili, who put out his own press release:

“He disclosed that he had a meeting with National Guards elements after they surrendered to the "Martyr Al-Sadr" office in Basra, saying "those who surrendered" told him "they were ordered to come to Basra to pursue the oil and drug smuggling gangs and none among them knew they were coming to fight Al-Mahdi Army and that they would have resigned immediately had they known of this before coming here." He added that "the largest number of police and security forces in Basra are Al-Mahdi Army elements and they left their work and sat at home as soon as they learned about the battles' objectives."

This is from Iraqi tv:

“Privately-owned Al-Sharqiyah focused on military developments on the ground. It began its 1100 news bulletin with the news that forces loyal to Muqatada al-Sadr had taken control of the southern Iraqi cities of Al-Nasiriyah and Al-Shatra. The channel added that Iraqi policemen had "remained in their stations", suggesting that they had refused to fight. Although the channel, which broadcasts out of Dubai, did report statements made by a government military commander saying that 120 Mahdi Army fighters had been killed, it also quoted "medical sources" in Basra as saying that only 60 people had been killed throughout the four days of fighting, which served to contradict the military commander's death toll. Over pictures of Mahdi Army fighters dancing on top of a burnt-out Humvees, the channel said that food was running low in Basra and that a five-day ceasefire may come into effect to allow supplies to reach the city.
Continuing its clear anti-government message, the channel reported that the government had imposed a curfew in the capital Baghdad after demonstrations took place there condemning the military campaign against the Mahdi Army and labelling the spokesman of the Baghdad Security Plan as a "the liar of Baghdad." Al-Sharqiyah then reported that Sadrists were banned from praying in the main mosque in Karbala and that "spontaneous demonstrations" had taken place in the city against the move. The channel concluded its morning bulletins with the news that soldiers of the Iraqi Army's Eighth Division stationed in the town of Al-Nu'maniyah had surrendered their weapons to the Mahdi Army. The channel then ran an excerpt from a telephone interview with an Al-Sadr Bureau official who confirmed this news.”

According to the “Government-owned Al-Iraqiyah” tv station, the name of the campaign is "The Charge of the Knights". Al-Iraqiyah showed clips of pro-government demonstrators, but also: “In its coverage throughout the morning, the channel stressed statements made by "his eminence" Muqtada al-Sadr calling for a political resolution to the conflict.”

Congratulations, North

As all space freaks know, the Shuttle landed safely yesterday. But what is less known is that the shuttle depends on a curious weave between science and the magic cast by Northhanger, who has been working hard to make sure that no evil ondulation threw them off course.

Congrats, North!

And don't be fooled by the disproportion to the all too human eye between high tech and magic. As Thomas Vaughn, that most unsuccessful alchemist, writes in Anthroposophia Theomagica:

“It is a strange thing to consider that there are in Nature incorruptible, immortall principles. Our ordinary kitchin fire, which in some measure is an enemy to all compositions, notwithstanding doth not so much destroy as purifie some parts. This is clear out of the ashes of vegetables, for although their weaker exterior elements expire by the violence of the Fire, yet their Earth cannot be destroyed, but vitrified. The fusion and transparency of this substance is occasioned by the radicall moisture or seminall water of the compound. This water resists the fury of the fire, and cannot possibly be vanquished. “The rose lieth hidden through the winter in this water” (sayth the learned Severine). These two principles are never separated, for Nature proceeds not so far in her dissolutions. When death hath done her worst, there is an union between these two, and out of them shall God raise us at the last day, and restore us to a spirituall condition.”

PS - Also, since we are going on about our bloc on pigosphere, we strongly recommend IT's reports on the Infinite Tour of America, in which IT discovers American currency.

caillois

- photo de C. Monin

LI has been reading a talk Caillois gave in 1963 on a conference on “the robot, the animal, man”. In it, Caillois does that thing which make LI both happy and uneasy – he uses ethology and zoology as though these were collections of myths. In one way, this is simply the kind of sociology that Bataille and Caillois did. And it seems to look back on romantic science, the leap from the feature to the analogy, and from the analogy to some universal force. But in Caillois’ case, he is not looking for some shaping force, or a series of Ur-forms, the kind of sequence that we can all too easily conflate with evolution, but that is, if anything, its opposite – relying on the necessity of a force on the model of the physical forces, rather than the statistical differences given in a population when a chance mutation leads to the spread of some trait. The closest Caillois gets to such thinking is his notion that humans, butterflies, ants and flowers all share a penchant for pleasing shape and color, but this isn’t reified into some odd theory of the universal need to expend energy, a la Bataille. Caillois’ method is much different from Bataille’s lightning like connections. Caillois spreads the animal world out before him, so to speak, on the table as a fortune teller spreads out the cards, and as the fortune teller turns over a card, Caillois turns over the case of an animal – the praying mantis, the squid. Both are concerned with “fortunes” – in Caillois’ case, the fortunes that have shaped human society.

In his talk, Caillois makes a neat point about opportunity costs. His notion goes like this: While the mosquito operates a syringe, or certain ants have developed a sawlike appendage, etc., every animal tool is organically part of the animal – and as part of the animal, can’t be substituted for any other tool. The tool monopolizes the animal. It is here that human beings are different than other animals – and the difference arises out of their animality. Caillois makes the anti-Darwinian point that humans are the animals that don’t adapt to their environment – rather, they make things that adapt them to their environment. Their tools – their syringes, saws, pliers, ropes, etc. – from outside of their bodies. In this sense, the “exterior” can be re-defined as the space of substitutions, a map of opportunities. Rybcynski called man the “prosthetic God” – but even more fundamental than the prosthesis, which is a particular tool for a particular function, is that we can find substitutes for the tool – it exists in a possible rack of tools.

I think this is a very nice point, and one that I’m going to use to talk about the sameness that was the unbearable aspect of capitalist society for the 19th and early 20th century figures I’ve been writing about in my other posts. The image of the ant society, the image of the insect, exercised a sort of negative power in criticizing what European societies were becoming – the disgust that this image was supposed to evoke is at least partly about the idea of the tool monopolizing the man – which would take away a material freedom, the freedom to substitute among tools, a freedom that gives value to one’s preference for a tool insofar as one has a choice to use other tools.

…
Caillois’ talk is divided into a descriptive and a speculative part. It is in the speculative part that he hypothesizes about this common element in man and flower and butterfly. Looking for commonalities between man and beast, he adduces the example of the mask, which, he says, is known among every human society – while the wheel, the lever, the bow, the plow might be unknown to a given people, every group known has employed masks. Which leads him into some lovely speculation:

It is as if man is born masked, as if one of the first tasks of primitive man had been, not to fabricate the mask, but to learn to take it off [s’en débarraser] , just as he learned, by standing on his two feet, to free himself from his quadruped destiny.

The mask has three principle functions: dissimulation: it helps to become invisible; disguise: it helps one to pass as another; intimidating: it is employed to elicit an irrational, and thus, an even more efficacious fear. I have just hazarded the supposition that the moeurs of the praying mantis explain certain religious myths, and deliriums and obsessions of the human species. In the same way, to these three functions of the mask (dissimulation, travestisement, and intimidation) corresponds among the insects some well known behaviors, and among humans, some permanent myths and preoccupations. For the dissimulation, I need only invoke the fables of the invisible man, from Gyges who turned his ring to escape the gazes of others up to the Invisible man of Wells and the kindred stories where the hero had to expropriate a coat, a hat or some other magic accessory which made it so that he couldn’t be seen as he continued to see others. In the second place there intervenes the taste for disguise, [travesty] that is the need to believe oneself an other, or to make other believe one is an other. This need is certainly the source of carnival, of theater and, in general, of all amusements or ceremony where disguise is an element, in beginning with the pleasure that every child feels in believing himself a conqueror, explorer, or cosmonaut, Indian or sheriff, locomotive, submarine or rocket ship, by virtue of the first at hand accessory. As to intimidation, to have fear and to make others fear, I am persuaded, is an essential resource not only of human behavior, but of the entire universe of animals. It is a question here of hyperbolic fear corresponding to no real danger, but which nevertheless provokes a decisive shudder. The fright produced by the mask – still a vain simulacra – remains the most striking example.

Mimetic insects color themselves the gray of bark, or the green of grass or the yellow of sand of the white of snow. Often they brusquely renounce dissimulation and suddenly exhibit ocelles, that is to say, enormous false yellow, black or red eyes. At the same time spasms shake them, they emit strident sounds, they adopt an attitude that magnifies them, they secrete a burning liquid. It is tempting to relate these manifestation of behavior to those of the sorcerer who arises suddenly from the bushes, who, also, extracts a mask garnished with enormous eyes, comparable to the ocelles of insects, surrounded like them with brilliant colors and with the same obscure wells in the middle, the black hole which disguises the eye of which one nevertheless feels the gaze, that is to say, one feels fascinated and terrorized by a pupil which one sees and doesn’t see.”

I leave as an exercise to the reader the connection between the mask arousing hyperbolic fear and American politics, circa 2008.

liberal alienation 3

In the Fourth book of his Principles of Political Economy (1847), John Stuart Mill looked forward to the possible results of the progressive tendency of the free market industrial system, to the vastness of which he had dedicated his book. Among other things, he predicted that the number of servants would go down, and that a fundamental change would occur in the structure of business such that the divide between the owner and the worker would slowly wane. This change would, he hoped, come about by the rise of large scale associations. Perhaps he was sort of hinting at the absentee, stock owned corporations of today, but his words seem more hopeful - perhaps, in the end, capitalism would flow into the utopian scheme of the 1800-1820s, but on a sounder, scientific basis. In any case, the future belonged to large scale heavy industry, as well as larger scale agriculture.

“But, confining ourselves to economical considerations, and notwithstanding the
effect which improved intelligence in the working classes, together with just laws, may have in altering the distribution of the produce to their advantage, I cannot think that they will be permanently contented with the condition of labouring for wages as their ultimate state. They may be willing to pass through the class of servants in their way to that of employers; but not to remain in it all their lives. To begin as hired labourers, then
after a few years to work on their own account, and finally employ others, is the normal condition of labourers in a new country, rapidly increasing in wealth and population, like
America or Australia. But in an old and fully peopled country, those who begin life as labourers for hire, as a general rule, continue such to the end, unless they sink into the still lower grade of recipients of public charity. In the present stage of human progress, when ideas of equality are daily spreading more widely among the poorer classes, and can no longer be checked by anything short of the entire suppression of printed discussion and even of freedom of speech, it is not to be expected that the division of the human race into two hereditary classes, employers and employed, can be permanently maintained. The relation is nearly as unsatisfactory to the payer of wages as to the
receiver. If the rich regard the poor as, by a kind of natural law, their servants and dependents, the rich in their turn are regarded as a mere prey and pasture for the poor; the subject of demands and expectations wholly indefinite, increasing in extent
with every concession made to them. The total absence of regard for justice or fairness in the relations between the two, is as marked on the side of the employed as on that of the employers. We look in vain among the working classes in general for the just
pride which will choose to give good work for good wages; for the most part, their sole endeavour is to receive as much, and return as little in the shape of service, as possible. It will sooner or later become insupportable to the employing classes, to live in
close and hourly contact with persons whose interests and feelings are in hostility to them. Capitalists are almost as much interested as labourers in placing the operations of industry on such a footing, that those who labour for them may feel the same interest in the work, which is felt by those who labour on their own account.”

This was the optimistic side of the 19th century liberal dream. Mill is one of the few classic liberals who foreshadows the course of liberalism in the 20th century, with its comfort with state interference, but its ultimate belief in the social benefit of maintaining a large private sector.

The liberal alienation that Scheler sensed in his 1914 essay on the Bourgeoisie borrowed many of its tropes from the pessimistic tradition, because it was in that tradition that the revulsion against the capitalist order of life was most clearly expressed. Mill, I should say, felt it too – the danger of a certain social flatness. Herzen well understood the object of that revulsion: the first time he entered Europe, he wrote, he immediately saw how things were: it was a society choking on ennui. Tocqueville said the same thing about America: the overwhelming fact, he thought, was the monotony of tone, the sameness.

A certain program was being put together by the liberal critics of the system they had, at least ideologically, helped to create. It went like this. Everywhere, capitalist society produces a deadly sameness. The sameness of goods was the intentional product of the improvement of machinery. The mass use of machinery to produce goods was a dominant feature of the capitalist industrial system. Capitalism dissolved the social distances inscribed in tradition and law that structured the social hierarchy. One infers, then, that the sameness of goods and the leveling of the hierarchy are effects of the same will. Thus, the leveling of unnatural distinctions and the promotion of talent, the utopian liberal hope, produces a monotony of tone and a sameness that eventually covers everything like a pall. The working class, far from being opposed to this sameness, simply want to seize the industrial system and deepen its effects.

These propositions don’t exactly hold together or contain the entire truth of the 19th century social situation. In particular, the dissolution of unnatural distinctions and the leveling of hierarchy is, as one of the political goals of liberalism, contradicted by the economic ideology of liberalism, which supposes that the system works best when all maximize their self advantage – for one of the obvious ways of maximizing an advantage one has gained is to entrench oneself and one’s family in the system in such a way that the social competitor’s costs of entry become prohibitive. The never really realized anarchy of capitalism’s original position, in which all start off at the same place in the race to acquire wealth, contained an obvious flaw that could be deduced by glacing at the real social system in all the capitalist economies. Only the pre-1848 ideologues could naively supposed that all would obey the convention not to jimmy the system from within. So the panic about leveling was, in a sense, misplaced. But it formed a good mythic unity, against which one could weigh an image of some age of aristocratic heros – another pessimistic trope that infiltrated the writing of the alienated liberals.

However, even if equality wasn’t so tightly tied to sameness as in the program I present above, there was a real content to the horror of sameness noted by Herzen. That sameness had a center in the Adam Smith’s fabulous pin factory – lifetimes would bleed out consisting of nothing more than 14 hours a day of repeated, minute gestures. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, a French economist who combined classical liberalism and imperialist, wrote:

“The wisest, borrowing images from the antique fable, have baptized modern civilization with a name that merits keeping, as the concentrated expression of all the griefs: the Sisyphism. We remember the unhappy soul, condemned by Pluto, as a punishment for breaking a promise, to roll a great stone right up to the summit of a mountain from whence it would immediately roll down again, obliging him to again push it up without resting: the sisyphism, that is, impotent and sterile efforts, ungrateful tasks which never diminish. What is meant by the writers who have had recourse to this image is that the more one succeeds in multiplying or perfecting the means of production, the more the duration, the intensity of the work, if not of physical effort than at least of attention, of moral and intellectual effort, increases.” ( Essai sur la répartition des richesses, 1888 411)

Interestingly, besides responding to Proudhon and Marx, Leroy-Beaulieu responded specifically to Mill’s prophecies. But I’ll get to that in my next post.

Lady Bitch Ray, in excelsis dea

For reasons unknown, suddenly Lady Bitch Ray fans have suddenly started flocking to Limited Inc – and no doubt leaving disappointed, as we don’t have the fabulous nude pics. But – never fear! Here's a link to one of the Bitch’s great moments on Austrian TV.

We have sent letters in to get Kino Fest to invite Lady Bitch Ray for her first English appearance – to no avail. What is sad is that, of course, you could get her to come relatively cheaply, now, but in a couple of years, Lady Bitch Ray can ask her own price.

Yes, LI is ahead of the curve in wanting Lady Bitch Ray to extend her empire to the Anglosphere. According to Bild:



Sie beherrscht insgesamt sechs Sprachen, kann neben Deutsch und Türkisch auch noch Portugiesisch, Französisch, Englisch und Latein.

How do I love this woman? Well, a little below the Queen B, of course, but she is rising in my estimate every day! Although – confession – I’m not as happy with Mein Weg as Ich hasse dich, or, joy of joys, Deutschland siktir.

For all your Lady Bitch Ray news, go to the Lady Bitch Ray shrine.

Fotze!

What would Jesus say about the warmongers?

In one of those fits of risking our sanity for the sake of our blog, LI went and read the fucks. We read the fucks last week in the New York Times, explaining what went wrong in the war. Of course, the only way to commemorate five years of pointless slaughter is to ask the fucks who promoted it what they had to say about it. We are so all ears. And we read the liberal hawk fucks over at Slate. Contrarianism out the ass, over there – the general fuck consensus was that the shame of the war is that it is preventing another war on Iraq. Actually, a couple of years ago, in 2005, we made the sick joke that the only good thing about the Iraq war was that it was preventing a war on Iraq. Ah, the fucks – the vampires in their upside down world, rustling their leather wings for the blood, the glory, the shit, the proxyness of it all.

But it was the fuck Ann Marie Slaughter who concentrated our attention, over at Huffington Post. She took the highminded approach of contending that anybody who reminded her that she had helped initiate a slaughter leading to the death of about a half a million people and three million refugees was being so gross in the extreme. And she finished up her heartfelt fuck lament like this:


“I'll start by offering a metric for how to assess any candidate -- and any expert's -- plan for Iraq. The test for the best policy should be the one that is most likely to bring the most troops home in the shortest time (to stop American casualties, begin repairing our military, and be able to redeploy badly needed military assets to Afghanistan), while also achieving the most progress on the goals that the administration stated publicly as a justification for invading in the first place: 1) ensuring that the Iraqi government could not develop nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction (done); 2) weaken terrorist groups seeking to attack us (this goal was based on false premises then, but is highly relevant now); 3) improve the human rights of the Iraqi people; and 4) establish a government in Iraq that could help stabilize and liberalize the Middle East. No policy can possibly achieve all of those goals. But the policy that offers the best chance on all five measures is the policy we should follow, in my view. And applying those measures to concrete policy proposals is the debate we should be having.”

Of course, I’m not telling you a big secret if I tell you that the fuck’s don’t get it, still. To find a comparable mixture of vanity or rather narcissism, bloodlust, entrenched arrogance, blindness, and lack of analysis, you’d have to go through the court records of the Nuremberg trial.

So what don’t the fucks, the newspapers, the politicians get? Well, take a gander at Slaughter’s laughable list and it should strike you right in the face that these so called policy makers think policy is a shopping list. Since there is no chance they will be tried for their crimes and every chance they will be given the spurs and the bridle to mount us once again, hey ho silver, LI decided to give them some advice. When you write a shopping list, perhaps you should make the cost of the list part of your, you know, set of suppositions. To put it simply, five years out and none of these moral entrepreneurs, these specialists in humanitarian sensitivity, have the least clue that war is a project.

Now, here’s a little down to earth reasoning. Projects are constructed around goals, usually incremental goals, towards some end, with some deadline. It is not planned simply by envisioning the great payoff at the end – which comes, if it is successful – but it is always balanced against resources, manpower, and scheduling. In other words, costs are built into projects. Projects that are proposed without costs – such as the fucking insane shopping list presented by the aptly named Slaughter – are not things to be discussed, they are things to be laughed at.

Once a project gets going, it is vulnerable to a lot of things – and, in particular, to scheduling problems. The problem when a project doesn’t achieve step A at a certain time often requires one to adapt and revise the project; at a certain point, in perpetually delayed projects in which no step is achieved that was forecast, the payoff has to be written off, the costs have to be added up, and – most of the time – the project has to be completely reshaped or bagged. Let’s see, what would I say about a project that has burned through 600 billion dollars with projected future costs in addition of another 600 to 700 billion dollars that only has to go another, oh, four more years at the 200 billion dollar burn rate to perhaps achieve, well, we aren’t sure what. What can one say about a project that has succeeded in killing four times the number of people Saddam Hussein killed on his last killing spree – the war against the Shi’ite revolt in the south in 1991 – that has produced ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, a Taliban like state in Basra, three million refugees, and of course 4,000 American military deaths, a thousand mercenary deaths, 20 + thousand casualties – with the promise that those Iraqi deaths will be halved in the next four years. Goody! Only one hundred thousand Iraqi deaths to go! This is, of course, fuck advice from aliens.

So, how have the newspapers reported on the fucked up war? On this fifth anniversary, they still don’t fucking get it. One is amazed at the level of sheer stupidity. Take, for instance, the moaning and groaning about the disbanding of the Iraqi army. Here is what happened. Shinseki advised that the occupation would take 400,000 to 500,000 soldiers. Shinseki was laughed at and is not invited to write scintillating crap for Huffington Post, the New York Times, or Slate. Why did he advise that many soldiers? Did he think they’d be hanging around, handing out candy to grateful kiddies? No. One of the reasons he recommended that is because he knew, as all the fucks knew, as the whole world knew, that Saddam Hussein had an army of about half a million men. If Saddam Hussein surrendered, or was blasted into another sphere, which seemed 90 percent likely, there would still be 500,000 armed men. In these situations, you have to process the armed men, get rid of the bad armed men, and rebuild the army. To do this, you have to have enough soldiers to secure the country while you are processing this amount of armed men. There isn’t a shortcut here, fucks. None – although, being fucks, these people had no personal acquaintance with military life, having other priorities than serving, until of course it was time to give fuck advice. So, Bremer drops his dime, and there’s nobody to provide security, and there’s no way to process the army, and the country is, as anybody could easily predict from a country that has been under sanction for a decade, in fuck shape, and the insurgents start blowing up soldiers, collaborating Iraqis, and etc., etc. Everybody who supported this war knew what the figures were, knew what Bush was saying about the price. Everybody knew that was a gross, fucking lie. Either they knew that, or they are as pig ignorant as, say, Michael O’Hanlon. They, in short, lied American lives into a situation where it was clear they would be unsafe, and it was even clearer that 25 million Iraqis would be very unsafe, and all they have to say now is – hey, here’s my shopping list, where is fucking Santa Claus?

It is a disconnect so vast that it acquires a symbolic meaning all its own. These fucks are representatives of the gated community – not especially wealthy themselves, they are the talking heads for the oligarchy, and in their minds they are removed from it all. Slaughter no doubt thinks of herself guiding the yacht of state over seas of blood while her fellow liberal interventionists sunbathe on deck, occasionally cannonballing in, and laughing and having a good time – although the water is a little grodey, what with the eyeballs, the heads cut off, the dentistdrill holes in the faces of the dead corpses. I mean is that a children’s cute little ripped away finger on your bathing suit? Brush it off, man!

As Jesus said, the fucks you will have with you always, but (let’s see, where’s my Gospel) me, I’d kick their fucking asses if they tried that shit in my time, I really would.

Men in chains 3

Livy’s history was the hunt and peck book for generations of philosophes. Machiavelli wrote his discourses about it; Montesquieu studied it for L’esprit de lois; and, I’d contend, Rousseau opens his Du Contrat Social, an essay that begins with an epigraph from the Aeneid, with a reference to it: “L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.” As LI has been pointing out (with my usual autistic artistry, winding theme around theme) in my Man in Chains posts, the chain looms large in the history of freedom – and it seems that the ideologues of freedom have been a little too hasty in consigning the chain to the figurative, all the better to speak of freedom as a matter of will, or of rights. But the figurative does seem to operate a return of the repressed, a memory of irons, of yokes, of chains, which runs through Rousseau’s essay and contacts the plebian notion of freedom, as expressed in such fons et origo texts as Livy’s history.

In George Dow’s Slave Ships and Slaving, there’s an account by J.B. Romagne of life aboard La Rodeur, a slave ship that entered the Calabar river in 1819, and loaded up with Africans, intending to sell them in Guadaloupe. This was life in the chains completely:

“ Since we have been at this place, Bonny Town in the Bonny river, on the coagt of Africa, I have become more accustomed to the howling of these Negroes. At first, it alarmed me, and I could not sleep. The Captain says that if they behave well they will be much better off at Guadaloupe; and I am sure, I wish the ignorant creatures would come quietly and have it over. Today, one of the blacks whom they were forcing into the hold, suddenly knocked down a sailor and attempted to leap overboard. He was caught, however, by the leg by another of the crew, and the sailor, rising up in a passion, hamstrung him with a cutlass. The Captain, seeing this, knocked the butcher flat upon the deck with a handspike. “I will teach you to keep your temper’, said he, with an oath. “He was the best slave in the lot.’ I ran to the main chains and looked over; for they had dropped the black into the sea when they saw that he was useless. He continued to swim, even after he ahd sunk under the water, for I saw the red track extending shoreward; but by and by, it stopped, widened, faded, and I saw it no more.

”

Dow records an auction of items ‘suitable for a Guinea voyage’, held at the Merchant’s Coffee house:

One iron furnace and copper, 27 cases with bottles, 83 pairs of shackles, 11 neck collars, 22 handcuffs for the traveling chain, 4 long chains for slaves, 54 rings, 2 travelling chains, 1 corn mill 7 four pound basons, 6 two pound basons, 3 brass pans, etc., etc.”
…
In Livy, Book 2, a section is devoted to the first secession of the Plebs – which forms the background, incidentally, to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus – which occurred as the plebians and the patricians fought over liberty in the city after the successful conclusion of three small wars, the final one against the Volscians. The disturbances in the city, according to Livy, were always about the same thing – debt. The first story that gives rise to uproar is this one:

“An old man, bearing visible proofs of all the evils he had suffered, suddenly appeared in the Forum. His clothing was covered with filth, his personal appearance was made still more loathsome by a corpse-like pallor and emaciation, his unkempt beard and hair made him look like a savage. In spite of this disfigurement he was recognised by the pitying bystanders; they said that he had been a centurion, and mentioned other military distinctions he possessed. He bared his breast and showed the scars which witnessed to many fights in which he had borne an honourable part. The crowd had now almost grown to the dimensions of an Assembly of the people. He was asked, `Whence came that garb, whence that disfigurement?' He stated that whilst serving in the Sabine war he had not only lost the produce of his land through the depredations of the enemy, but his farm had been burnt, all his property plundered, his cattle driven away, the war-tax demanded when he was least able to pay it, and he had got into debt. This debt had been vastly increased through usury and had stripped him first of his father's and grandfather's farm, then of his other property, and at last like a pestilence had reached his person. He had been carried off by his creditor, not into slavery only, but into an underground workshop, a living death.
Then he showed his back scored with recent marks of the lash.

On seeing and hearing all this a great outcry arose; the excitement was not confined to the Forum, it spread every where throughout the City. Men who were in bondage for debt and those who had been released rushed from all sides into the public streets and invoked `the protection of the Quirites.' The formula in which a man appealed to his fellow-citizens for help."

Livy mixes news of the wars with news of the uproars of the plebians. Finally a dictator was chosen, and the Volscians were defeated. But still there was debt, the increasing power of the creditors over the debtors.

“The moneylenders possessed such influence and had taken such skillful precautions that they rendered the commons and even the Dictator himself powerless. After the consul Vetusius had returned, Valerius introduced, as the very first business of the senate, the treatment of the men who had been marching to victory, and moved a resolution as to what decision they ought to come to with regard to the debtors. His motion was negatived, on which he said, `I am not acceptable as an advocate of concord. Depend upon it, you will very soon wish that the Roman plebs had champions like me. As far as I am concerned, I will no longer encourage my fellow-citizens in vain hopes nor will I be Dictator in vain. Internal dissensions and foreign wars have made this office necessary to the commonwealth; peace has now been secured abroad, at home it is made impossible. I would rather be involved in the revolution as a private citizen than as Dictator.' So saying, he left the House and resigned his dictatorship. The reason was quite clear to the plebs; he had resigned office because he was indignant at the way they were treated.”

It was then that the plebians made the famous decision to withdraw in a body from Rome. The patricians sent Menenius Agrippa, to address them, “an eloquent man, and acceptable to the plebs as being himself of plebeian origin. He was admitted into the camp, and it is reported that he simply told them the following fable in primitive and uncouth fashion. `In the days when all the parts of the human body were not as now agreeing together, but each member took its own course and spoke its own speech, the other members, indignant at seeing that everything acquired by their care and labour and ministry went to the belly, whilst it, undisturbed in the middle of them, did nothing but enjoy the pleasures provided for it, entered into a conspiracy; the hands were not to bring food to the mouth, the mouth was not to accept it when offered, the teeth were not to masticate it. Whilst, in their resentment, they were anxious to coerce the belly by starving it, the members themselves wasted away, and the whole body was reduced to the last stage of exhaustion. Then it became evident that the belly rendered no idle service, and the nourishment it received was no greater than that which it bestowed by returning to all parts of the body this blood by which we live and are strong, equally distributed into the veins, after being matured by the digestion of the food.' By using this comparison, and showing how the internal disaffection amongst the parts of the body resembled the animosity of the plebeians against the patricians, he succeeded in winning over his audience.”

Thus, the famous apology of Menenius Agrippa. It is striking to me that the stomach, which is described as the hub of the body – it returns nourishment by way of blood to all parts of the body – is maintained by the chain-like actions of the body’s ‘accidents’, its minors, its rude mechanicals – Hands to mouth, teeth to mouth, mouth to stomach. Here the body divides into two, one part of which is linked together by a chain of debt that must be paid to support the other part, the center and hub. An invisible chain links together all those acts by which we survive, and the body’s possibles – its particulars, its bits – become, each separately, slaves, insofar as the slave is defined, practically, as the one who is in irons. Until, of course, we are useless: “…for I saw the red track extending shoreward; but by and by, it stopped, widened, faded, and I saw it no more”

baby steps

LI hears the sounds of baby steps:

“In a document outlining a speech to be given to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said it was important to bring under scrutiny new financial players and older institutions that are doing new things.
“To the extent that anybody is creating credit they ought to be subject to the same type of prudential supervision that now applies only to banks,” said the speech outline.

Mr. Frank proposed that if non-bank institutions wanted access to the Fed’s discount window for cash, they would be subject to requests from the risk regulator for timely market information and be subject to inspections.”

That Frank is the man sticking his neck out here shows what a timid place the bought and sold village of D.C. has become.

Timely market information? What the Government should do is place all securities under the sweeping powers of the same kind of agency that regulates drugs. And, just as drugs are tested for their real effects and approved with regulatory strings, securities too should be subject to testing (which would be in the nature of simulations) and approved, if found not to have malign side effects and found to be useful, only with their own regulatory strings. The ‘shadow’ financial system, as Roubini calls it, has become a giant ectoplasm of iffy puts and options, in a system that really has already developed the vehicles it needs for investment, thank you very much. And, as we have seen, Alien turns to the nanny state as soon as the downside whacks it. Thrust the fuckers into the light. Regulation now, regulation forever.

Fifth year in Iraq

To commemorate Year 5 of the Iraq vanity war, everybody seems to be publishing a retrospective. These two posts are what we wrote on March 17 and 18, 2003:


Monday, March 17, 2003
Remora

The WP headline reads: Baghdad Panicky as War Seems Imminent and the first graf reads:

"People cleared stores of bottled water and canned food, converted sacks of Iraqi currency into dollars and waited in long queues for gasoline. Merchants fearful of looting emptied their stores of electronics and designer clothing, while soldiers intensified work on trenches and removed sensitive files from government buildings. Cars stuffed with people and household possessions drove out of the city."

Surely there must be a mistake. Isn't it the Washington Post that has insisted for over a year that Iraqis will greet American soldiers with flowers? I imagine they are simply stocking up on those essential items now, before their streets, buildings, florist shops, kids and pets are flattened by liberating American bombs. It is so hard, climbing through the rubble, to find good orchids.

This weekend we listened to a call in show -- yes, we are going crazy -- about the war. A woman called in and commented that she supported it. She remarked that the government needs to keep us secure from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. She said that 9/11 proved this.

She seemed like a reasonable American citizen. She wasn't bloodthirsty. There is a standard comment that floats around about this time to the effect that no one wants war. Of course that is nonsense. The Bush administration has wanted war since early 2002. But this woman didn't strike me as the warmongering type. The host of the show was resolutely anti-war. But, as is the case with so many anti-war people, he asked her questions about the morality of killing people. He asked her, in other words, about justifying the war morally. This, we think, is merely doing the devil's work for him. The case against the war doesn't begin with the morality of war in general. It begins with looking at the justification of this war in particular. Remarks like this woman's are simply passed off as [obvious]. This P.O.V. has been released into the American system for a year by the media and the government, to devastating effect. The goal of propaganda is to make you believe what you are told instead of what you see. Here is what we have seen. We have seen two giant structures, two skyscrapers, collapse. We have seen around 3 000 people killed. And we have seen the Weapon of mass destruction that did it. It was two jet airliners. And we have discovered how they did it -- they were hijacked by men bearing boxcutters. We have seen this, and we have decided not to believe it. We have decided, instead, to believe we are threatened by secret weapons stockpiled in secret places that only the U.S. seems to know about. We have decided that Saddam Hussein is not only our enemy, but a threat that requires the deployment of 200,000 troops, the shock and awe of 3,000 missiles, and a conflict that will, according to all accounts, be extended to a two year occupation of Iraq.

The 19 hijackers cost around 1 million dollars, to wine, dine, and train. If our new doctrine is that American security over-rides international law, let's forget the Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse. Any country that is both hostile to the United States and can cough up 1 million dollars is, according to this doctrine, justifiably a target.

This is madness. It is blindness. This war will not end when the press expects it to end, will be paid for out of the skin of the Iraqi people, will destroy the few shoots of civil society that exist in Northern Iraq, will entail an occupation that can only be a temptation, an overwhelming temptation, to the periodic staging of guerilla attacks, and, no doubt, the politiicization of those attacks as the Republicans try to jingo their way to re-election in 2004. The war is a crime, the excuses a sham, the warmongers a junta bound together by bad intents, and led by a man of outstanding ignorance. This is, I think, the beginning of a very bad cycle.

"It may easily be observed," wrote David Hume, "that, though free governments have been commonly the most happy for those who partake of their freedom; yet are they the most ruinous and oppressive to their provinces: And this observation may, I believe, be fixed as a maxim of the kind we are here speaking of. When a monarch extends his dominions by conquest, he soon learns to consider his old and his new subjects as on the same footing; because, in reality, all his subjects are to him the same, except the few friends and favourites, with whom he is personally acquainted. He does not, therefore, make any distinction between them in his general laws; and, at the same time, is careful to prevent all particular acts of oppression on the one as well as on the other. But a free state necessarily makes a great distinction, and must always do so, till men learn to love their neighbours as well as themselves."

Goodnight David. Goodnight ladies. Goodnight sweet ladies. Good night.

March 18, 2003
As I've said before in a previous post, I can only retain my sanity in these maddening times by using second hearing -- which is rather like second sight, except that it goes backwards. I've been hearing the War through Burke -- but Bush's address last night overwhelmed the rather ornate and beautiful structures of Burke's thought. One needs something more scabrous. I looked up a piece Swift wrote, on the art of political lying.

In that Swiftian way, he begins by admiring the devil for inventing the lie, but then registers an objection: the devil's lies, as is often the case with the initial run of a product, were full of glitches. Luckily, man has added an infinite amount of features to the devil's machine, making it much more useful for all ocassions And among the most useful of those occasions is the government of man, herds of which can be entranced by very simple lies, sworn to vehemently by a bunch of cut-throats who are otherwise known as "men of peace," "presidents," "undersecretaries of defense," "editiorial writers" and such others (known, since school days, to be lackies, taletellers, cheats, braggarts and snobs) who are attracted to power but who lack the courage to assault the innocent in the street by night; and so, to the temproary applause of the cowed populace, devise mass murders in their offices by day. About the political lie Swift has this to say:

"But the same genealogy cannot always be admitted for political lying; I shall therefore desire to refine upon it, by adding some circumstances of its birth and parents. A political lie is sometimes born out of a discarded statesman's head, and thence delivered to be nursed and dandled by a rabble. Sometimes it is pronounced a monster, and licked into shape: at other times it comes into the world completely formed, and is spoiled in the licking. It is often born an infant in the regular way, and requires time to mature it; and often it sees the light in its full growth, but dwindles away by degrees. Sometimes it is of noble birth, and sometimes the spawn of a stock-jobber. Here it screams aloud at the opening of the womb, and there it is delivered with a whisper. I know a lie that now disturbs half the kingdom with its noise, which, although too proud and great at present to own its parents, I can remember its whisperhood. To conclude the nativity of this monster; when it comes into the world without a sting it is stillborn; and whenever it loses its sting it dies.

No wonder if an infant so miraculous in its birth should be destined for great adventures; and accordingly we see it has been the guardian spirit of a prevailing party[2] for almost 20 years. It can conquer kingdoms without fighting, and sometimes with the loss of battle. It gives and resumes employments; can sink a mountain to a mole-hill, and raise a mole-hill to a mountain: has presided for many years at committees of elections; can make a saint of an atheist, and a patriot of a profligate; can furnish foreign ministers with intelligence, and raise or let fall the credit of the nation. This goddess flies with a huge looking-glass in her hands, to dazzle the crowd, and make them see, according as she turns it, their ruin in their interest, and their interest in their ruin. In this glass you will behold your best friends, clad in coats powdered with fleurs de Us and triple crowns; their girdles hung round with chains, and beads, and wooden shoes; and your worst enemies adorned with the ensigns of liberty, property, indulgence, moderation, and a cornucopia in their hands. Her large wings, like those of a flying-fish, are of no use but while they were moist; she therefore dips them in mud, and, soaring aloft, scatters it in the eyes of the multitude, flying with great swiftness; but at every turn is forced to stoop in dirty ways for new supplies."

But what am I doing? This is not satire, but pure fact, and as such surely seditious, in the best traditions of our wondrous attorney general.

Storm, clouds, and crack your cheeks.

Liberal alienation 2

Early on in Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber makes a point of asking what the rather “pretentious sounding” word spirit meant. Instead of defining it, Weber plays a game of fort/da with the definition – offering some features of the “spirit”, and then saying that the spirit is only recovered at the end, a composite extracted from the historical details. LI loves this answer. Long ago, in grad school, we worked long and hard to produce a schema distinguishing “epistemic” from “doxic” texts, with the major division being that epistemic texts tended to treat the work of the text as the work of stabilizing signifiers, whereas doxic texts tended to treat the work of the text as a circuit in which signifiers are de-stabilized. To put forward a thesis, a metaphor, a literal term, and then claim that the meaning of the term accrues only at the end of one’s work is exemplary of the doxic text, which recognizes that the text is not a transparent and ephemeral thing but has an unexpected density over which one has limited control. And just as in Freud’s grandchild’s game, it is a game of throwing things out and bringing them back as a buffer against an overriding anxiety that one can’t name. For what is the name of the total collapse of one’s world? And if you do speak its name, won’t that speaking cause it? Weber’s text is about one world collapsing and being supplanted by another. The world, in this case, is the world that Scheler calls “precapitalism” – and Weber, wiser than Scheler, calls modern capitalism, to distinguish it from previous forms, and forms that have flourished elsewhere, as for instance in China.

Another note on the text itself before I get to Weber’s point about modern capitalism. Most philosophy texts, since the Platonic dialogues, have presented themselves as epistemic texts, definitions first, thus completely missing the Socratic point, which is that, as the dialogue carries its participants further, the definitions they begin with unwind, prove to be insufficient, decay, and leave us standing more nakedly before the ideas, no longer in the position of the successful hunter or soldier – the one who captures them – but, rather, in the position of the supplicant. One of the things Weber absorbed from the pessimistic tradition is the possibility of regressing to this moment of Socratic irony within the human sciences – but to go on with this would be to go further out on a tangent than I want to.

Anyway: Weber, famously, compares Benjamin Franklin’s advice (rather cherry picked from Franklin’s works) to a passage in the Fugger correspondence.

When Jakob Fugger tells one of his colleague, who had retired and advised him to do the same, since he had earned enough and should let others earn now, that this was “small spirited” and answered: he [Fugger] had many an other idea, wanted to gain (win) while he could,” the “spirit” of this utterance thus obviously differentiated it from those of Franklin: what was expresssed, in the former, as the overflow of the adventurous commercial spirit (Wagemuts) and of a personal, ethically indifferent inclination, takes on in the latter an ethically colored case as maxims to live by. We are using the “spirit of capitalism” in this specific sense. Of course: of modern capitalism. Then that we are talking, now, of this western European-American capitalism is self evident in the face of the posing of the question. ‘Capitalism’ occurred in China, India, Babylon, in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. But just this particular ethos was lacking to it, as we will see.”

Scheler, in the essay to which we will revert in our next post about liberal alienation, pretty much follows Weber, here. Ourselves, we take ethos to be, among other things, the norms governing self understanding and self fashioning – in particular, with regard to one’s emotions. The spirit of happiness triumphant is not a thesis about some change in what the emotions are, but how they are socially understood, and how that understanding, in turn, changes the organization of the social.

Liberal Alienation

Max Scheler began his essay, the Bourgeois, written on the brink of WWI, with these words:

“

Among the many signs that show us the death throes of the life order under the power and direction of which we still live, I see none as persuasive as the deep alienation in the face of this life order that fills the best heads and strongest hearts of those who inhabit their own particular orders. The history of this alienation is still recent. I find the new attitude that I have in mind firstly – as one might expect – among the scholars and poets – worldly men might say dreams – as for instance Gobineau, Nietzsche, J. Burkhard, Stefan George.”

Scheler was impressed with the work of Sombert, Tonnies and Weber on the “capitalist spirit”, which he took to be a particular social mode of the life order. He sensed something new in the fact that these sober sociologists, surely, if anyone, the inheritors and promoters of liberalism in the German sphere, seemed to have arrived at conclusions that echoed those of the names in the above passage. Although he didn’t use the phrase, what Scheler was talking about was liberal alienation – a dissent, I would say, from the culture of happiness. In January I wrote a post analyzing the dissents, in the nineteenth century, from happiness triumphant, and I tucked them into three classes roughly corresponding to the traditional European tripartite class division – the pessimists who, keenly aware of the irrevocability of the decline of the aristocracy, attacked the ‘decadence’ at the root of that decline; the revolutionaries, who in the name of the working class attacked the bourgeois notion of the consumerist ideal, the salaryman bound in the circle of self-advantage; and then, a much more conflicted group, the bourgeois thinkers themselves – Hazlitt, Mill, Tocqueville, Heine. At the time I wrote that post, I hadn’t read Scheler’s essay, which nicely sets up my point.

So, it is time for me to do a few posts on this essay.

American Adam takes a header

Hyperreality is bullshit, in one way. Most people live, as I do, in the species crashing, bread eating reality for which you have to pay out of pocket most days. But it is real in another way. The form of life of the working class is another reality from the form of life of the superwealthy, and that form of life has gone down the class ladder, becoming a habit for millions of the middle class. Hyperreality has little to do with nerdy headsets and hyper real media, but a lot to do with derivatives and the pooling of mortgages. It has to do with the transformation of the economy by credit.

There is, supposedly, around 60 trillion dollars worth of derivatives out there. Now, that fact alone ought to crash the value of derivatives immediately. There isn’t 60 trillion dollars out there. It is like claiming that the distance from the earth to the sun is actually 400 million miles, if you simply leverage and compound it right. You can fold, spindle, and mutilate yourself, but the distance from the sun to the earth will remain 180 million miles (oops! see in comments below).

So what is that financial stuff made of? Well, it is a form of fiat money, made of collective belief. But the belief is itself leveraged. It isn’t belief in a nation. It isn’t a fetishistic belief in gold. It is simply a belief that a thing exists if it is traded. And if it is traded fast enough, disbelief will never catch up with it.

Bush’s presidency went rotten when two high towers in NYC were destroyed, and now we watch as another highrise, the Bear Stearns building, is, in essence, rifled, to bookend the reign of this man with the brainpower of a garbage fly.

I’d recommend my readers turn to Edward Chancellor’s Devil take the Hindmost for the entertaining account of the origin of derivatives out of the spirit of Goldwater’s America – or, actually, out of a deal between Lee Melamed, president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Milton Friedman to build a market for currency futures. At the time there was no market for such things, and strictly speaking, they were illegal. Friedman wrote a paper, for which he was paid by Melamed, justifying them – Nixon’s treasury department approved – and the International Money Market on the Merc was opened in 1972.

And so it was. In this American Adam’s fall, we sinned all.

ThomasVaughan puts it like this in Anthroposophia Theomagica: “ … his Fall had so bruised him in his best part that his Soule had no knowledge left to study him a cure, his punishment presently followed his trespass: “All things became hidden and oblivion, the mother of ignorance, did enter in.” This Lethe remained not in his body, but passing together with his nature made posterity her channel. Imperfection’s an easy inheritance, but vertue seldom finds any heirs.”

We’ve trusted the mother of ignorance. But her trick, that tricky bitch, is to not remain oblivion always. Sometimes there is the flash of what is inside. And it is nothing.

We have to get the veils up again, otherwise it will be pop goes the weasel.

PS – a lot of people out there in the heartland couldn’t sleep last night because – like me – they were worried about Alan D. Schwartz. He’s a mensch among menschen, the CEO of Bear Stearns, and according to this fluff piece in the NYT, a very well liked guy. A dancer? You talk about suave. A bridge player. Close personal friend of none other than Michael Eisner.

“But there’s some truth to the old aphorism that a financial firm’s assets go out the door every night. Citing people involved in the deal talks, The New York Times said Monday that up to a third of that work force may not come back, involuntarily.
Still, JPMorgan is trying to retain some of that human capital all the same. Up in the air, however, is whether the bank will retain one of Bear Stearns’ most valuable assets of all: its chief executive, Alan D. Schwartz.

It’s notable that in announcing the deal Sunday evening, JPMorgan made no mention of what would happen to Mr. Schwartz or other senior executives if the deal goes through. Bear Stearns has been similarly mum.
JPMorgan has floated a couple of ideas about how to retain Mr. Schwartz, according to people involved in the talks. One idea is to make him a vice chairman and, unofficially, a deal maker at large who can parachute into different situations. Such a position would similar to the post held by James B. Lee Jr., the JPMorgan banker known as Wall Street’s money man.”

So – how are you going to keep a multi-talented guy like this? He’s probably looking around, and let’s face it, he may suffer a little emotionally from presiding over the fall of Bear Stearns, whose value went from 80 dollars a share to 2 dollars per under his golden leadership in the last two months. So, given that the tax payers are making the loan here, and the vig is like whatever you say, JPM – perhaps we could set aside a hundred million, carrying around money for Mr. Schwartz. It would be sweet. Maybe we could have a photo op of Treasury secretary Paulsen, all smiles, writing the check.

I love these people. I really love these people. America does give a guy a second chance is all I have to say.