Busting the joint out

LI hopes, someday, to hammer with his little hammer and nails one little dictum into the American mind (that mountain of quivering balony, that Etna of bullshit): you can not indefinitely support an income spread a la 1900 and a social welfare network a la 1965. Yes, the neo-liberals will claim that the lion and the lamb can lie down together, and that a paradise of growth will infuse us all with the milk of human kindness and good medical coverage.

But besides the fact that growth, when one begins to examine the constituents out of which it is measured, seems to be a funny way of looking at human well being – and besides the fact that growth, inconveniently enough, was much better under the non neo-liberal bad times from 1945 to 1980 – there is, of course, a sort of blindness in this belief. It is as if the neo-libs want to defend the wealthy without ever asking themselves – why be wealthy?

After all, how many lunches can one highly overpaid CEO gobble in a day?

Wealth is power, and power is embedded in the social reproduction of classes. The wealthy need only use a small portion of their wealth to block upward social mobility – and they will gladly do so, if they can. Why shouldn’t they? Wealth, after all, responds to a positional as well as an accumulative logic. You don’t just ‘make a buncha money’ – you use that money to exert power. Which is to homo sapiens what the dew is to the daffodil.

All of which floods the mind in this, the second year of the Zona. As a Christmas gift, we were given the Federal reserve dump, Wednesday, showing how much they loaned and who to and with what interest in the 2007-2010 period. Of course, as Yves Smith has pointed out, they blatantly and illegally kept dark what they took for their loans – in other words, there is a pile of 885 billion dollars in collateral that the Fed, majestically, decided not to disclose to the unwashed. The Fed don’t work for the unwashed.

The numbers have a sort of operetta feeling – the comedy of Randian Wallstreeters running like, to use Dutch Reagan’s phrase, a Chicago Welfare Mother to the Fed should definitely be scored to Offenbach. Today’s Business Week contains this excellent quote:

“Magnetar Capital LLC, the hedge fund which profited from bets against mortgage securities during the financial collapse, participated in the program through Magnetar Funding II, which borrowed about $1.05 billion through seven TALF transactions.
“Magnetar participated in the program on the same terms as the hundreds of other participants in the TALF program, by Magnetar providing ‘first loss’ risk capital in these markets,” Steven Lipin, a spokesman for the Evanston, Illinois-based firm, said in an e-mail.
FrontPoint Partners, a hedge fund unit of New York-based Morgan Stanley, used the facility 48 times through its FrontPoint Strategic Credit Investments for a total of $1.09 billion.
,,,
“On behalf of clients, FrontPoint was an early participant in the government TALF program,” Steve Bruce, a spokesman for the firm said in an e-mailed statement. “With our clients, we were able to support the government in this important initiative.”

I’d like to support the government by taking out a 1 billion dollar loan for 0.0077 percent interest to. Please? I promise to be most patriotic.
This is even more rich for those of us Zona fans with that Long Term Memory – a most unpatriotic property. If there were an operation to get rid of it, I’m sure that , the Dems and Republicans would probably join together in bipartisan harmony to make it tax deductible.

But we remember Front Point from the excellent article by Michael Lewis about the firm that shorted the subprimemarket.
Here’s a quote to go out on. And, if I could only reproduce in prose what is so well done in cartoon, I’d like this quote to be read in a Woody Woodpecker laughing voice, please. The suckers are the American people, and if they don’t rise up and cast aside mock chains and the serious message mongers who insist on herding them into the killing stalls, they deserve what they get:

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But he’d spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. “What most people don’t realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity world,” he says. “The equity world is like a fucking zit compared with the bond market.” He shorted companies that originated subprime loans, like New Century and Indy Mac, and companies that built the houses bought with the loans, such as Toll Brothers. Smart as these trades proved to be, they weren’t entirely satisfying. These companies paid high dividends, and their shares were often expensive to borrow; selling them short was a costly proposition.
Enter Greg Lippman, a mortgage-bond trader at Deutsche Bank. He arrived at FrontPoint bearing a 66-page presentation that described a better way for the fund to put its view of both Wall Street and the U.S. housing market into action. The smart trade, Lippman argued, was to sell short not New Century’s stock but its bonds that were backed by the subprime loans it had made. Eisman hadn’t known this was even possible—because until recently, it hadn’t been. But Lippman, along with traders at other Wall Street investment banks, had created a way to short the subprime bond market with precision.
Here’s where financial technology became suddenly, urgently relevant. The typical mortgage bond was still structured in much the same way it had been when I worked at Salomon Brothers. The loans went into a trust that was designed to pay off its investors not all at once but according to their rankings. The investors in the top tranche, rated AAA, received the first payment from the trust and, because their investment was the least risky, received the lowest interest rate on their money. The investors who held the trusts’ BBB tranche got the last payments—and bore the brunt of the first defaults. Because they were taking the most risk, they received the highest return. Eisman wanted to bet that some subprime borrowers would default, causing the trust to suffer losses. The way to express this view was to short the BBB tranche. The trouble was that the BBB tranche was only a tiny slice of the deal.
But the scarcity of truly crappy subprime-mortgage bonds no longer mattered. The big Wall Street firms had just made it possible to short even the tiniest and most obscure subprime-mortgage-backed bond by creating, in effect, a market of side bets. Instead of shorting the actual BBB bond, you could now enter into an agreement for a credit-default swap with Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs. It cost money to make this side bet, but nothing like what it cost to short the stocks, and the upside was far greater.
The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the N.F.L. Eisman was perplexed in particular about why Wall Street firms would be coming to him and asking him to sell short. “What Lippman did, to his credit, was he came around several times to me and said, ‘Short this market,’ ” Eisman says. “In my entire life, I never saw a sell-side guy come in and say, ‘Short my market.’”
And short Eisman did—then he tried to get his mind around what he’d just done so he could do it better. He’d call over to a big firm and ask for a list of mortgage bonds from all over the country. The juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default—had several characteristics. They’d be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking homeowners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.”

WE SEE HENRY AND TWO HOODS from cabstand checking the cases
of liquor being delivered into the lounge. The entire room
is filled floor to ceiling with cases of whiskey, wine,
crates of lobster, and shrimp, and stacks of table linen
and sides of beef. The place looks like a warehouse.

HENRY (V.O.)
But now the guy has got to come up
with Paulie 's money every week,
no matter what. Business bad? Fuck
you, pay me. You had a fire? Fuck
you, pay ma. The place got hit by
lighting? Fuck you, pay me. Also,
Paulie could do anything. Especially
run up bills on the joint's credit.
Why not? Nobody's gonna pay for it
anyway.

EXT. BAMBOO LOUNGE - REAR ALLEYWAY - DAY

WE SEE cases of liquor, wine, etc., being carried out of
the rear door of the lounge by HOODS from the cabstand and
loaded onto U-Haul trucks.

HENRY (V.O.)
As soon as the deliveries are made
in the front door, you move the
stuff out the back and sell it at
a discount. You take a two hundred
dollar case of booze and sell it
for a hundred. It doesn't matter.
It's all profit.

INT. BAMBOO LOUNGE OFFICE

HENRY, JIMMY and TOMMY are standing around the small
workman's table. There is no desk. The office looks denuded
of furniture. A LAWYER is going over papers.

A terrified, unshaven SONNY BAMBOO is seated behind the
desk. The LAWYER is showing him where to sign.

HENRY (V.O.)
And, finally, when there's nothing
1 left, when you can't borrow
another buck from the bank or buy
another case of booze, you bust
the joint out.

The book is rejected, and LI is bummed

Well, the agent to whom I sent my proposal letter had one his factotums respond that it wasn’t the type of project for the agent’s “list”. No explanation, but I imagine that the factotum was the one assigned to the task of delicately warding off the cranks. And, admittedly, I am a crank.

Well, fuck it. I was bummed for a bit. But I still think that this small book works – it would be an excellent intro to my larger, more flou happiness book. If – I told myself, awake in the hollows of 3 a.m. as the snow began to really accumulate on the streets of Paris – if I just made a first chapter, some 10,000 word consideration of how, a, we moderns have come to at least accept the myth of homo economicus, and b., how economics, in its policy designs, has tried to impress the character of homo economicus upon capitalist societies.

Unfortunately, the story I want to tell has more than just one linear narrative – because in telling this story of the moderns, I am concerned to show that the moderns do not, contra the intellectual historians and the economists, make up one homogenous mass – that in fact in the everyday life of contemporary societies a number of exchange matrixes are in play – and in fact must be in play for capitalism to be liveable.

From the question and the thesis springs my drama – how HE has been fostered in society, and variously resisted by imagination armed.

So these are the elements I need to put into my first chapter.

Ireland and Pareto

Ireland and Pareto

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

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

But if our heaven is not in eternity, but in the sublunar flux of time – if all things in this heaven are mutable – then we see that, indeed, what looks like no skin off the nose of the drudge – what does he care if the boss makes his 400 million, as long as the drudge himself makes enough to buy the entertainment center, the car and the house on easy credit terms of 9 percent per annum (with the creditor holding the right to readjust interest at any time)? – might actually not be such a good deal. Heaven has a flaw. The devil’s disciples, from Machiavelli to Marx, have noticed it. The flaw is called power. In fact, a part of the 400 million dollars might well be used to block the poor drudge’s socially upward mobility, by making the cost of entry into a higher class too expensive – say, by making college tuition too expensive, or dentistry, etc. The boss may use part of the 400 million dollars to make tax loopholes for himself, to be paid for by either closing off social welfare programs that benefited the drudge (who will be scolded for his ‘special interests’ and his unwillingness to “share the sacrifice”). Or – and such are the wrecks of mutability – there may come a time, a horrible time, called a slump. Yes, in heaven on earth, it may be that the business cycle is not abolished, even if the economist angels have announced that God, that is, the free and competitive market, has abolished it.

We are testing the effect of creeping from one Pareto superior position to another in Ireland. Here, indeed, the gains in utility seemed to be exogenous. A low corporate tax brought in companies from outside the country. And then, look at how easy credit terms were offered through banks that were flooded with cash from foreign investors! Why, drudge and millionaire could dance to the pleasing pipes of some Celtic Tiger rock band and lay down, afterwards, in one another’s arms, like the proverbial lion and the lamb.

But it turns out that, while the lamb was asleep, he was being trussed up, and now he wakes up to discover, to his horror, the boiling pot and the butcher’s blade. For it is the drudge, the lamb, the one who was gaining utility in spirit whenever his boss’s board of directors gave the boss another raise, who is going to be sacrificed in the feast. Pareto superior states, it turns out, are heavens for the peculator, and they end in fricassee for the drudge. Who doesn’t understand, and turns to the economist who proclaimed the end of the business cycle. Only to hear that now the business cycle must end by the drudge, a., paying for all his boss’s parties, and b., lowering his wages and paying the debts (the not so easy credit term debts) that the economist, just last week, was telling him was the great reason he was the most fortunate drudge in all of Emerald heaven!

And the poor drudge turns to the right (where the words are the same) and the left (where sympathetic leaders should that the drudge has been mishandled, but (sotto voce) that really, there’s nothing one can do, and we do depend on the boss for all good things in life, don’t we?) and discovers that not only is his credit worthless, but so is his vote!

One of Pareto’s admirers wrote an article – oh, I should find the buckos name – to defend the great man from the accusation he was a fascist. The accusation comes from the fact that, at the end of his life, Pareto embraced Mussolini. The admirer wrote that Pareto was a great lover of liberty – of entrepreneurial freedom! – and thus, the fascist business was all a misunderstanding. But, he also wrote, Pareto also hated democracy.

The love of liberty, the hatred of democracy, stir a little and you get Pinochet. Or Klein’s shock doctrine. Or the current state of Ireland, as the drudges are auctioned off to the bankers.

Harpagon 1

The miser is a figure, a character, who exists, in the ancient world and the early modern world, in terms of comedy and vice. He is usually old. He is usually miserable. In terms of Simmel’s schema of money, he is perverted in a key way: he has forgotten the function of money as a means, and in this way, he has forgotten the ends of life.

“When one wants to grasp human fate in the schema of the relationships between the wish and its object, one must say that money, in relation to the stopping point in the series of ends, is really the most inadequate, as well as the most adequate object of our desire.”

Moliere’s miser, Harpagon, can certainly be seen from this side of things. If we look at the sexual objects of desire in play, here, from the beginning we have two secret love matches - of Harpagon’s daughter and son – that contrast with Harpagon’s own overt desire for his son’s choice, Mariane, a space that has been opened by a fact mentioned in the very first scenes – the mother in this household has died. Elise replies to her brother Cleante’s recital of griefs received from their father, Harpagon:

“It is really true that, every day, he gives us more and more reason to regret the death of our mother, and…”

At which point she is interrupted by Cleante who hears the voice of their father.

The death of the mother/wife is both the occasion of the removal of a certain limit to the existential perversion that now characterizes Harpagon – his avarice – and allows the father, an old man, to reverse the natural order by seeking to marry a young woman, Mariane. I want to make a little more business of this competition between the love match and the old man’s money – but I’ll do that later. At the moment, let’s note that the mythic background, here, of an underground god raping a young woman – Pluto/Persephone – fits with certain features of Harpagon’s character that seem borrowed from Aristonphanes Ploutus – the ragged clothes, for instance. And, in particular, the buried treasure.

Harpagon’s two-fold perversion has one source – forgetting the ends of life. Sexually, the end of life, in the seventeenth century, is reproduction. Ever more life. Similarly, the end of money, as Boisguilbert will show in 1690, is commodities – use values.

Simmel interprets this curious synthesis of sterility and desire as the logical result of making a sort of category mistake – mistaking the absolute means for the absolute end:

“If therefore the mediated character of money has the effect that it emerges as the abstract form of pleasures that one does not yet enjoy, then the valuing of its possession in as much as it is not expended preserves a coloring of objectivity, it costumes itself with that fine charm of resignation, that accompanies al objective end goals, and combines the positivity and negativity of enjoyment in a peculiar unity that words can hardly express.
Both moments achieve in avarice their most extreme tension with each other, because the money has an aspect like an absolute means to unbounded possibilities of enjoyment and at the same time as the absolute means can still be completely untouched in its function as the unexploited possession of pleasure.”

Simmel is touching, here, on the ascetic life style of thrift that Weber will later emphasize – and yet the miser does not seem to be a normal bourgeois, even if his character does enter into all descriptions of the bourgeois up to the twentieth century. And even, among outlier fortunes – for instance, those having to do with suddenly gained primary product wealth, like the Texas oil billionaires of the 19302-1960s - the miser figure pops up again, in all its archaic glory, as does its companion, the spendthrift.

Simmel on money and the devil

In early modern Europe, money was the determining factor in creating the literary and moral character types of the spendthrift and the miser. Characters are not vocations, but vocations can accord with or be in discord with characters – and evidently the miser was the character type drawn to middleman professions, ones in which the circulation of commodities, or money itself, is privileged at the expense of production. Misers are also associated with age – whereas the spendthrift was associated with, on the one hand, disdain for a profession – a sort of aristocratic pretence – and youth. Simmel’s essay on the avaricious, the spendthrift and the poor takes its bearings from the social meaning of money as a medium of exchange – as a means – which is why he also includes the poor, a group “in its purest and most specific appearance” defined by “the measurements of the money economy.”

Simmel comes at the problem from the perspective of philosophical anthropology: man is a purposive – a purpose setting – animal. But in as much as purposes give birth to intermediate stages – in as much as the mechanism that leads to a purpose can, in fact, create a middle ground of steps that have to be taken until the purpose is achieved – man is also an ‘indirect being’, the one who is always struggling with the means to ends, as Laocoon and his sons struggled with the snakes. The snakes, in the story, won – they strangled the prophet. Means, in Simmel’s story, also tend to win, as our social lives become so entangled in them, accommodate the distancing of ends and purposes so much, that ends and purposes become faint, distant, and irrelevant.

I think of Simmel’s essay (Über Geiz, Verschwendung und Armut, which is here), evidently hived off the great mass of Philosophy of Money, as being one kind of interpretation of a phenomenon – the role of the cash nexus as the great modernizing element in the world - that, from another side, was interpreted by Weber as inner worldly asceticism. Of course, in Marx, the penetration of all spheres of private life by exchange value receives another interpretation, for Marx sees the role of the cash nexus as a thing, in modernity, that can’t be understood without bringing it into relation to class differentiation, the division of labor, and the freeing of labor from feudal constraints.

Simmel recognizes that unlike the barter economy (or what he romantically calls the ‘natural’ economy), the money economy is not characterized by simply making money another kind of commodity. Rather, it is a commodity that loses all the sensual and, as it were, hedonistic features of a commodity in order to embody, as it were, substitution itself. He makes an interesting remark about that feature of money in relation to ascetic religions – a remark that foreshadows (and conflicts with) Weber’s thesis. Simmel is explaining the irreplaceability of money for living in a society that is fully monetized even though the gaining of money is only the gaining of a means to the things that make for living:

“It is because of this fact, where in principle only indifference reigns against all external things, that it is easy to slip into hatred against money.
Thus, secondly, the tempting character of money works all the more decisively. Because it is ready in every second to be applied, it is the most terrible trap of the weak hours, and since it seems to serve to create everything, it represents to the soul the most seductive of things; and all of this is such an uncanny danger as money, so long as it simply remains as money in our hands, is the most innocent and indifferent thing in the world.

Thus, for the ascetic sensibility, it becomes the appropriate symbol of the devil, who seduces us in her mask of harmlessness and impartiality; so that against the devil, like money, the only security lies in absolute distance, in the renunciation of any kind of relation, so harmless as it may seem.”
To be continued.

as astronomers to the stars, are economists to the economy.

We can easily imagine DNA replicating itself without molecular biologists, and the planets revolving around the sun without astronomers. But can we imagine capitalism without economists?

On the one hand, we are always identifying proto-forms of capitalism without contemporaries making a formal theory of it. On the other hand, would the kind of capitalism we know, that which appears in the 17th and 18th century in Europe and America, have developed as it did without the appearance, at the same time, of the political economists? And as political economists developed their discourse – as economics began to regard itself as a science – was capitalism merely a parallel development, one that they studied, or was it a development in which they played a role?

Marx, in the Grundrisse, working in the shadow of the disputes in Germany about theory and ‘materialism’, wrote:

daß die einfachre Kategorie herrschende Verhältnisse eines unentwickeltern Ganzen oder untergeordnete Verhältnisse eines entwickeltem Ganzen ausdrücken kann, die historisch schon Existenz hatten, eh das Ganze sich nach der Seite entwickelte, die in einer konkretem Kategorie ausgedrückt ist. Insofern entspräche der Gang des abstrakten Denkens, das vom Einfachsten zum Kombinierten aufsteigt, dem wirk||16|lichen historischen Prozeß…

“…the simpler categories can express the dominant relationships of an undeveloped whole or the subordinate relationships of a developed whole, which historically already exists, before the whole has developed towards the side that is expressed in a concrete category. Just in so far may the course of abstract thought, which ascends from the simplest to the combined, be correspondent to the real historical process.” – Marx, Grundrisse

I take it that the intellectual space, here, is opened up by the uncertain position of the ‘categories’ by which social life is understood vis-à-vis the dominant relationships of the social whole. Marx doesn’t seem to believe that there is a natural tendency within the social whole to move in a given direction – in this way, he does not have a classically liberal view of progress – but instead, given the presence of subordinate and dominate relationships, posits conflicts in which some agent figures.

Boldly, I take the concrete categories to be expressed in character-making. Or as all the boys and girls like to say now, in the construction of the subject. However, for obscure reasons, I prefer the vocabulary of the character to the subject. Maybe I will be able to explain this later.

the miser to the egotist

This morning I am finishing up my query letter on the book. I’m going to blog a lot of my work in progress, naturally. I’ve been thinking, over the last couple weeks, about misers. To this end, I’ve been reading Moliere’s L’avare and watching Louis de Funès version of it – which is quite funny. I was interested in seeing how Funès would make it funny, as, if you go by the play’s critical interpretation, it is a play in which the unfortunate spectator is put in the grip of an unrelievedly horrible monster, the miser Harpagon. Marcel Gutwirth begins his 1961 essay on the play – perhaps the best essay in English – like this:

“L'AVARE is probably Moliere's harshest play. Scheming love suits, openly rebellious chil-dren, an unloving father, a sordid theme hardly leave our sympathies any acceptable resting-place. Harpagon, moreover, is a monster who, unlike Tartuffe, is firmly anchored to the center of the stage. No jail, not even an omniscient King can rid the unhappy family of the man who is its head. His power may wither, as it must for the comedy to end on a note of relief, but his presence cannot be so decisively expunged from the lives of those around him. When Tartuffe is dragged to jail in Orgon's stead, justice is restored in the state, as is solidarity to the once bitterly divided family. Har-pagon leaving the stage to go see his chere cassette is merely shedding his family without another thought, allowing it to find unhoped for reunion under the wing of a new father, Don Thomas d'Alburcy, as generous and loving as the real father had been mean and hateful. “

It is easy to see, from the text, Harpagon’s meanness and lack of family feeling. In the very first scene, Harpagon’s daughter, Élise, mentions to her brother that the family has changed since their mother died – and certainly one feels that the death of the mother sets the mood for the entire play, which, in some ways, plays out an Oedipal struggle between father and son that the mother no doubt suppressed. Yet as Funès’ version shows, what may be monstrous, judged from the viewpoint of bourgeois drama, can be transformed into comedy when we remember how closely comedy is connected to puppetry. Wyndham Lewis remarks, somewhere, that he constructed the characters in his novels as puppets, in order to display both their monstrosity and their inherent ludicrousness. Lewis’s novels have never been popular for that very reason – but on the stage, especially a stage that has just emerged from the people’s plays of the foire, this works very well. Even as a text, it works – a couple of nights ago, reading the scene that plays out between Valere and Harpogon after Harpagon’s treasure has been stolen, I couldn’t stop laughing. Moliere knew how funny misunderstanding is – and – this is the uncanny thing about him as a writer - how it erodes our confidence in understanding.

So my next post will be about the miser. I think I will, firstly, bring into the discussion Simmel’s essay on Geiz – avarice, and then advance to Moliere.

Three stories of invisibility – or Gyges wound and unwound

1. In the first chapter of Marc Shell’s Economics of Literature, The Ring of Gyges, he relates two stories about the King of Lydia, Gyges. Shell is interested in Lydia because, in Greek historiography and legend, Lydia was the birthplace of coinage, and Shell is looking for something like the primal scene of monetization.
What does this have to do with invisibility?
The logic of Shell’s chapter slowly brings together, through Greek texts, the power of the invisible and the power of money, or, more precisely, how money operates to introduce invisibility into society.

This is the context for his analysis of Gyges.

“It is not easy for us, who have used coinage for some twenty-five hundred years, to imagine the impression it made on the minds of those who first used it in their city-states. The introduction of money to Greece has few useful analogies.1° Tales of Gyges associate him with founding a tyranny in Lydia and with a power of being able to transform visibles into invisibles and invisibles into visibles. This power, as we shall see, is associated with new economic and political forms that shattered the previous world and its culture.”

Gyges was the subject of two different histories, Shell points out, in Herodotus and Plato. In Herodotus, the tale goes like this. “Candaules [the King of Lydia] fell in love with his own wife, so much that he supposed her to be by far the fairest woman in the world; and being thus persuaded of this, he raved of her beauty (eidos) to Gyges". In this version of the story, Gyges is a noble at King Candaules’s court. Candaules is so proud of her beauty that he becomes convinced that someone other than himself must witness it – Gyges. He accuses Gyges of not believing him, and thus orders Gyges to spy on the queen, his wife, when she is dressing. Gyges doesn’t want to, for to spy on the naked queen would mean, in his opinion, taking property from the King – for the queen’s eidos – her figure, is the King’s property in the same way that the King’s figure on a coin marks the coin as the King’s property. Of course, in the latter case, the property is alienated and circulates – but at no point in the circulation does the coin change its stamp.

Gyges, in the event, is hidden by the King in the Queen’s chamber, and spies upon her nakedness. However, as Gyges does this and contrives to slip out of the chamber, unbeknownst to him, the Queen spots him. The next day she calls Gyges into her presence and gives him a choice. Either she will have him killed for spying on her, or he will kill the King and rule with her over Lydia. In one way or another, she will have her honor – her aidos – avenged.

The invisibility in this story is all a matter of human invention. It is the invisibility of the person who is hidden. The story is neatly sewn together as the invisible and the visible positions change places. That the Queen’s beauty is invisible to any male gaze except the King’s (we discount, in this story, the Queen’s serving women) is the motive that sets the intrigue in motion, for her beauty is, in a sense, both undervisible and overvisible – it exists as a second visibility. The King’s love is constrained by the fact that this second visibility cannot circulate. Gyges, as the voyeur, is indeed put into a position where he, invisibly, takes possession of that second visibility – but immediately, his position is reversed by the fact that, unbeknownst to him, he is seen by the Queen when he leaves his spot. The voyeur is, in turn, spied upon. A trope we find, incidentally, in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. And finally, of course, the two come together in a plot to overthrow the King. Here, they become conspirators in a secret – a relative of the invisible and the hidden.

Plato’s tale is better known. It is told by Glaucon in The Republic. The personages and terms, here, are rearranged a bit. Gyges is not a noble in this story, but a shepherd. Then one day…

“After a great deluge of rain and an earthquake, the ground opened and a chasm appeared in the place where he was pasturing; and they say that he went down and wandered into the chasm; and the story goes that he beheld other marvels there and a hollow bronze horse with little doors, and that he peeped in and saw a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature, and that there has nothing else (allo men ouden) but a gold ring on its hand, which he took off and went forth.”

This ring, it turns out, has the power to make its possessor invisible and then visible again. "Learning that the ring made him invisible, he immediately contrived to be one of the messengers of the king. When he arrived, he committed adultery with the king's wife and, along with her, set upon the king and killed him. And so he took over the rule".

The fable of Gyges is a limit case meant to throw light on the question of justice. If we have the power to escape the power of justice – the armed power of the state - by becoming invisible, would we continue to be just? Socrates argument is that the cause of behaving justly does not tell us the nature of justice – rather, justice is good in itself. “We have met all the.. . demands of the argument and we have not invoked the rewards and reputes of justice as you said [the poets] do, but we have proved that justice in itself is the best thing for the soul in
itself, and that the soul ought to do justice whether it possess the ring of Gyges or not, or the Helmet of Hades to boot".

Shell’s argument is that we must go back to the terms of the story – the antithesis of the visible and the invisible – to understand how it works textually in the Republic, in which the power of money is at work as an irritant. First, he cites early commentators on Herodotus’ story, which introduce the features that coalesce, later, in Gyges’s ring.

“That the queen could see Gyges in the bedroom indicates that she possessed not only a power to make things invisible but also a corresponding power (as invisible spy) to make visible to herself things that were invisible to other people. Ptolemaeus Chennus writes that the eyes of "the wife of [Clandaules. . . had double pupils, and she was extremely sharp sighted, being the possessor of the dragon-stone. This is how she came to see Gyges as he passed through the door.” The dragonstone has an opposite effect from the magic ring. In one case the talisman makes people invisible; in the other case, it makes people visible: taken together, their power makes things visible or invisible. This is the power of Platonic Gyges. It is also the power of the archetypal tyrant.”

Shell, going back to the notion that the King possesses a property in the appearance of the wife, alludes to the Greek distinction between two forms of transaction.

“ousia phanera is property whose transfer was seen by others, and ousia aphanB is property whose transfer was not seen. (In a visible transfer, the buyer and seller might exchange a symbolic deposit not as part of the purchase price but as a visible sign of their agreement.) The second meaning of the opposition involves money: ousia phanera is a nonmonetary commodity (such as land or "real" estate) andousia aphanēs is money (such as a coin).”

Which brings us to our second history.

2. An Athenian farmer, Chremylus, goes to Apollo’s temple at Delphi to ask advice from the God. Chremylus has been one of Socrates’ kind – he has done good all his life. But all around him, he has seen wealth go to the worst, the cunning, those who are incompetent in everything except plundering; more, he has seen honesty positively punished. Socrates, of course, extolled justice even if it put the just man in danger of losing his life. But this is to put the question on the level of the individual: how about a society in which the just man always loses? Is it just for a man to condemn his children to pain and poverty by teaching them to be just, thus reproducing the social conditions that make for injustice? Chremylus is too good not to be worried about how his son will make out if he follows his father’s path. Thus, he wants to know whether he should raise his son to be unjust, a criminal, and thus spare the boy the pain that the father has known.

The oracle gives him a typically oblique judgment – the first person he meets, returning to Athens, he is to talk to and take into his home.

The man he meets is blind. His clothes are ragged and dirty. Chremylus decides he wants to know the wretch’s story, and even threatens the blind man with his slave, Cario, if he won’t tell it.

“CARIO. If you don't speak, you wretch, I will surely do you an ill turn.
PLUTUS. Friends, take yourselves off and leave me.
CHREMYLUS. That we very certainly shan't.
CARIO. This, master, is the best thing to do. I'll undertake to secure him the most frightful death; I will lead him to the verge of a precipice and then leave him there, so that he'll break his neck when he pitches over.
CHREMYLUS. Well then, I leave him to you, and do the thing quickly.
PLUTUS. Oh, no! Have mercy!
CHREMYLUS. Will you speak then?
PLUTUS. But if you learn who I am, I know well that you will ill-use me and will not let me go again.
CHREMYLUS. I call the gods to witness that you have naught to fear if you will only speak.
PLUTUS. Well then, first unhand me.
CHREMYLUS. There! we set you free.
PLUTUS. Listen then, since I must reveal what I had intended to keep a secret. I am Plutus.”
Chremylus is, of course, skeptical of this story. Plutus is the god of wealth – the man before him looks like the product of the worst poverty. The images seem irreconcilable.
“CHREMYLUS. But tell me, whence come you to be so squalid?
PLUTUS. I have just left Patrocles' house, who has not had a bath since his birth.[740]
CHREMYLUS. But your infirmity; how did that happen? Tell me.
PLUTUS. Zeus inflicted it on me, because of his jealousy of mankind. When I was young, I threatened him that I would only go to the just, the wise, the men of ordered life; to prevent my distinguishing these, he struck me with blindness! so much does he envy the good!
CHREMYLUS. And yet, 'tis only the upright and just who honour him.
PLUTUS. Quite true.
CHREMYLUS. Therefore, if ever you recovered your sight, you would shun the wicked?
PLUTUS. Undoubtedly.
CHREMYLUS. You would visit the good?
PLUTUS. Assuredly. It is a very long time since I saw them.”
As A.M. Bowie has observed, Plutus’ story is paralleled by the story of Prometheus. Just as Prometheus, out of love for mankind, steals fire from the gods – and is punished for it by Zeus – so, too, the god of wealth, when he can see, intends to distribute money only to those who are upright – to, in effect, give money to the just.
Blindness is invisibility reversed – instead of the invisible being present to the seeing eye, the visible is made invisible by being present to the unseeing eye. But eye it still is. Aristophanes story – for this is the storyline of Aristophanes’ last play, Plutus – is a sort of variation on the Gyges story, substituting an immortal for a mortal and blindness – a sightless presence – for invisibility – a presence that can’t be seen. In the course of the play, Plutus’s sight is restored – and initiates a golden age of just deserts. What interests me is that, although Zeus’s treatment binds together the two mythical figures, it is Prometheus who survives, in the collective imagination, as the hero. The romantics, including Marx, were attracted to the Prometheus myth in that it countered Christian meekness and pulled away the veil from the violence of the established order. But the blessings of a seeing Plutus did not inspire the poets. Yet, the attempt to make Plutus see, the dream of the seeing god of wealth, has been the ardent pursuit, the mythic ideal, of liberal society – one that finally, in a dialectical movement, returns the utopian society of the end of Aristophanes play back to the blind god, now in John Rawls’ original position, distributing the goods in society properly, restrained not by Zeus, but by Pareto optimality.
3. And then – another transformation of Gyges story – there is the story of the killing of the Chinese Mandarin.
The story is told in Pére Goriot. Rastignac is tempted by Vautrin to plot for the destruction of the rich brother of Victorine. Victorine would inherit the family wealth if her brother died – an event that Vautrin seeks to arrange through a duel. As Victorine is in love with Rastignac, it would only remain for the latter to marry the former and enjoy her wealth. The day after Vautrin reveals this plan, Rastignac consults a friend, Bianchon:
"'I'm being tortured by evil thoughts,"' Rastignac says, adding: "Have you read Rousseau?" "Yes." "Do you remember that passage in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chi-nese mandarin, without leaving Paris, just by an act of will?" "Yes." "Well then?" "Oh, I'm on my thirty-third mandarin." "Don't joke about it. Come, if it were proved to you that the thing was possible and that all you'd need to do would be nod your head, would you do it?" "Is your mandarin very old? Oh, well, young or old, healthy or paralytic, good Lord ... Oh, the devil! Well, no."
I’m quoting the passage as it appears in Carlo Ginzburg’s essay, “Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance”. This scene in Balzac is, of course, the seed for much that has followed in the novel - for instance, Raskolnikov’s problem in Crime and Punishment falls out along these lines, as Grossman has pointed out in his study of Doestoevsky. As I recall, Czeslaw Milosz devoted an essay to Rastignac’s problem – although I can’t find it now. But Ginzburg’s essay is exceptional in following the trace of the motifs that finally find their place in this mistaken reference to Rousseau. It is rather Diderot, as Ginzburg points out, who is Rastignac’s predecessor here. Diderot presents the problem of distance and conscience first in the Dialogue Between a Father and a Son, and later in Supplement to the Voyage of Bouganville. In the former, the story is told of a hatter who steals the inheritance of his dead wife from her family. The family had the legal right to it; the hatter, however, had taken care of his invalid wife for eighteen years. Finally, the hatter decides to flee with the money to Geneva. At this point, Diderot writes:
"We agreed," Diderot writes, "that perhaps distance in space or time weakened all feelings and all sorts of guilty conscience, even of crime. The assassin, removed to the shores of China, can no longer see the corpse which he left bleeding on the banks of the Seine. Remorse springs perhaps less from horror of oneself than from fear of others; less from shame at what one has done than from the blame and punishment it would bring if it were found out."
And so China, distance and murder come together. But the terms are reversed, of course, in Rastignac’s tale – which may well figure the reverse of the terms of adventure as eighteenth century colonialism, with its slavery and sugar, gives way to nineteenth century imperialism, with its markets and opium.

note to homo oeconomicus 1

Mill, in his influential System of Logic, devoted Book six to the logic of the sciences of human nature, which he called ethology – the science of character. His first purpose in writing this chapter is to defend the notion that social sciences are exact sciences – that is, that they express laws, in the same way that the phenomena studied by astronomers or meteorologists express laws. His second point is that ethology is a deductive science – not an experimental one: “Are the laws of the formation of character susceptible of a satisfactory investigation by the methods of experimentation? Evidently not: because even if we suppose unlimited power of varying the experiment, (which is abstractedly possible, though no one but an oriental despot either has that power, or if he had, would be disposed to exercise it,) a still more essential condition is wanting; the power of performing any of the experiments with scientific accuracy.” (517)

This breathes the air of liberal doctrine. From Mill to Hayek, the idea that some central despotic power could or would ‘experiment’ with humans evokes the moral outrage that is the correlate of the liberal philosophy of markets. Markets, on the other hand, exert no despotism; markets, being free, free men from despotism.

In fact, Mill’s observation seems, from the point of view of the exact sciences, correct. And yet, from the point of view of the governance of men, it seems to miss the point. Almost any rule – whether derived from the management of a business enterprise or from a government agency – is in the manner of an experiment. It organizes human activity in a certain way. Looked at pragmatically, humans go from experiment to experiment – that is, from norm to norm.

And this brings us back to the question of the myth of homo oeconomicus. When I asked, parodying the title of Veyne’s work, if the moderns believe their myth, I am asking about how the myth affects the moderns. My hasty answer is that slowly, inexorably, a myth that was devised to explain society has become the myth to which society is being sacrificed. This is its ‘demonic’ power. In creating an economics that features, centrally, homo oeconomicus, the economists – in spite of their protest that homo oeconomicus is an ideal type, a fiction binding together the models of a science – embarked upon an experiment. But one must be careful here: for the power to design this experiment is surely not in the hands of the economists. Rather, the myth congeals into a recognizable figure central elements of the capitalist order, and in so doing reinforces them. It is as if an experiment were proposed by an occidental despot, in which the question explored is: can we devise a society in which homo oeconomicus is the norm?

In protesting that the rational economic agent is not meant to represent the typical human, with his ‘perturbatory’ human features, Walras was doubtless being sincere. But he was ignoring the unconscious, utopian side of his invention. When physicists devise their model of the atom, it is without a thought that the atom should take counsel from the physicists. But the same can’t be said for the economists.

To leap ahead: I don’t propose to become the biographer of homo oeconomicus because I delight in his hijinks. I propose to do so because I think the experiment is turning out badly.

Looking at global capitalism at the end of the Great Moderation, I am reminded of the end of the Soviet Union. In the eighties, with actually realized socialism in place, it was time for the New Soviet Man to emerge. As he did so, in the confident words of the regime’s ideologists, a satiric portrait of him – Homo Sovieticus – was promoted in dissident circles. But even Homo Sovieticus could not quite capture the forces that were steadily undermining the Soviet imperium. As the economy became more and more unreal, an empire of soft budget constraints – factories whose products were obsolete by the time they reached the end of the assembly line, workers who diverted the chemicals needed for their machines into beverages to be fermented and drunk on the line, etc – the New Soviet Man became more and more real.

A similar, unacknowledged process is taking place in the capitalist world, which is busy ignoring the signs of imminent environmental and moral collapse. As the experiment to make homo oeconomicus real effects the life histories of billions of people, the mixed exchange matrix that actually makes capitalism livable is being eroded. In the end, when the life of the fiction negates the life of the flesh, the fiction will die – but, if history is any guide, the death throes will make the life of the flesh miserable in some vast and catastrophic way.

homo oeconomicus 1

A mystery surrounds the birth of homo oeconomicus. His ‘hour of birth” is disputed. His parents are many – and they are all males. He has been traced back to Plato’s philosopher king – and more plausibly, to the all knowing fiction devised by Laplace to explain the explicability of the mechanistic universe: “An intelligence which in a given instant would know all the forces of which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that compose it, if it were besides of a vast enough scale to submit these givens to analysis, would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for her, and the future, as the past, would be present to her eyes.”

Homo oeconomicus, of course, has not yet been elevated to a principle as universal as all that. But he is still a hero, and as such, a piece of the marvelous that no plebian copulation can explain. The hero’s birth, which is always a matter of cultic interest, divides us into initates and the uninitiated – and never more so than in the mysteries celebrated in the name of the rational maximizer. We understand the mysteries or we don’t. And the priests work to ensure that the mysteries become ever more mysterious and ensnaring as we enter the sacred places.

The phrase appears, all at once, in the 1890s in the works of several political economists. In an essay from 1891, Lasciate Fare, Lasciate Passare, Vilfredo Pareto writes: “now the science of economics tends to separate itself into two branches. In the first case, one departs from some postulates, in fact only one postulate, that of hedonism, and having assumed a homo oeconomicus whose actions are hedonistic in every, one establishes a workable basis of a deductive science that represents what would happen in a society composed of such men. In the other, one brings together like facts and tries to deduce laws from them, which cannot be non-empirical…” [cited by Michael McLure 2001, 41] Leon Walras in 1898 writes: “In fact, the man who has needs, who divides labor and who, in view of the maxima satisfaction of his needs sells his services and buys products in quantities such that his scarcities should be reciprocal to the virtually exchangeable quantities of goods and services, homo oeconomicus, is also he who is endowed with sympathy and an aesthetic sense, with understanding and reason, with a free and conscious ill, homo ethicus; and both are man living in society, cultivating art, making science, having manners and morals and practicing industry, in brief, homo coenonicus.” 1898 Irving Fisher, reviewing a book by the Italian economist, Matteo Pantaleone in 1898, asks: “Is it necessary, for instance, to predicate of “homo oeconomicus” perfect foresight and papal infallibility (pp. 87, 240)…”

In fact, even as homo oeconomicus steps into history, who and what he is, his properties, what he is for, the destiny that lies before him, the charge he must keep, all are subject to doubt and dispute. That he is a fiction is granted all the way around: but isn’t it true of all sciences that they operate by creating useable fictions? That is, generalizations or ideals, models or laws, that are not used to explain every physical occurrence, since occurrences happen in the friction of altering circumstance.

Walras, in 1875, corresponded with the French philosopher, Renouvier, about the justification for his conception of the economic actor - this, one should note, is before the homo oeconomicus was named, but not before the sages were dimly conceiving of him. Of his prehistory we will speak later.

Renouvier wrote that “psychological, social and other conditions are of a nature to introduce a separation between the previsions of mathematical economics and the determination of economic facts.” Walras responded, defending his Elements of Pure Political Economics: “It is exclusively a work of theory, in which I believed I was able to make an abstraction of ‘psychological, social and other conditions” of which you speak as accessory perturbations. [Cited by Donald Walker in Etudes Walrrassiennes, 2004]

This ability to put aside the perturbations of society and psychology, and to abstract the unit of pleasure – or utility – to a mathematical quantity that is, at one and the same thing, the object of some agent’s direst predilection and a mere variable for any pleasure whatsoever, is what characterizes the most heroic act of the homo oeconomicus. It is not so much that he is a calculator – it is that he is a substituter.

Doing intellectual history: the Great and Little Tradition

Is intellectual history about intellectuals? Or is it about the intellectual spirit of a given epoch and culture, the mix of ideas and assumptions? Is it, in other words, about what James Scott has called the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition?

Recall what Scott says about the two traditions in his seminal essays about peasant revolts from the seventies: the Great Tradition, which is usually developed in the urban setting by ‘high culture’ intellectuals, then spreads out into the rural setting, where it encounters the set of beliefs and symbols held by peasants, or the Little Tradition. The process of dissemination, however, is full of slippages:

“My contention … will be that there is something systematic about this slippage between religious and political ideas as understood and practiced in the city and their little tradition variants in the countryside. This slippage, I argue, is scarcely random or accidental - quite simply because the social characteristics of an idea's great tradition adherents differ in clear and identifiable ways from the social characteristics of its little tradition ad-herents. The former, taken broadly, live in large differentiated cities where much of their life is governed by impersonal legal norms, are generally middle or upper class, and are masters of a written tradition. The latter, also taken broadly, live in small, relatively homogeneous villages where much of their life is governed by local custom, are generally lower-class subsistence-oriented producers, and are part of an oral tradition. To the extent that this gross characterization has any validity, it alerts us to the fact that religious and political ideas may each be transformed in comparable ways as they reach the peasantry. If folk Catholicism is to the New Testament and St. Peter as folk communism is to Das Kapital and Lenin, we may then be able to say something meaningful about folk variants of great tradition ideas and practices in general.”

Scott’s contention originally conceives of the Great Tradition in terms of the systematic possibilities afforded by the text – with its rules of relevance, truth, consistency, etc. – and the Little Tradition in terms of the possibilities of the oral – with the veridical weight it puts on the relationship between speaker and speech, its subordination of coherence to a host of exceptions, etc. This looks much like an old division between those with and those without the book, or writing. However, if the framework here is creaky, I think it is useful to have these two traditions in mind when trying to understand the past from an anthropologically informed perspective. I would, however, add to the dialectic between them that the Great Tradition continually distances itself from a past that it casts as ‘superstitious’ or outmoded – that it describes in Little Tradition terms – and that this perception is not completely false. The little tradition is not completely un-textualizable. On the contrary, it thrives on what Bakhtin called the “word” – on the maxim, proverb, verse, fable, figure, divination – which in turn operates as a sort of doxic disturbance within the Great Tradition.

In order to represent the intellectual landscape of, say, French culture in the seventeenth century, it is best to keep in mind the existence of both of these traditions. An intellectual history that takes up, say, Descartes, Gassendi, Pascal, etc., may miss important things about French intellectual culture. For instance, we know that in the 17th century, both the Nahua in Mexico and the French in the countryside, and in churches and parlements, believed human beings could change themselves into other animals. The French belief in this fact was confirmed over and over in many witch trials. The difference between the Nahua and the French was, in fact, not so much a difference in belief as in governance, which allowed certain figures in the Great Tradition the discursive possibility of examining the human body and, in the end, doubting that it could change into the body of other animals. This condition was the result of certain unique features of social control in France that were not generated by the Nahua – the policing of belief, for example.

Of course, members of the “high culture” could very well use witchcraft beliefs – even if they didn’t share them – tactically.

Take the sad tale of Baron and Baronne Beausoleil. This tale is less known than it should be – feminist historians, take note! Baronne Beausoleil, born Martine de Bertereau, came from a noble French family in Touraine or Berry. Her husband, Jean du Châtelet, Baron de Beausoleil and D’Auffembach, was a 17th century virtuoso. His nephew was a well known surgeon and Cartesian. Beausoleil was a geologist and alchemist, who became well enough known for his work on mineralogy to attract the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph, and his successor, who made him commissioner general of the mines of Hungary. He was enticed back to France by officials of the court of Henry IV. The French state was alarmed by the disarray in which they found the French mining industry. Thus, Beausoleil – who worked with his wife, Martine – was given broad powers to restart the mining sector in the provinces.

In doing so, they established a base at Morlaix. It was there that their first misadventure befell them: a priest, a Prevot Provincial she names, charmingly, Touche-Grippé, ransacked their chateau while they were away on some survey of mines in the area. He justified his search by alluding to his suspicion that they were dabbling in magic. After all, how could they succeed in their task if they were not using magic? One has to remember, too, that in the early 1600s, magic could be a synonym for science – it is used with this signification in Porta and Bacon.

Rather remarkably, Martine seems to have been entrusted with the task of public relations for the pair – which is how we know of this first, and as it turns out, premonitory dustup with the priest. For a while, the couple left France, but they were enticed back under Louis XIII. It was then they made the mistake of using their own fortune to explore for and open mines – thinking, evidently, that they would be reimbursed by the state.

Such were the circumstances when she published her pamphlet, La Restitution de Pluton. In it, she tackles the subject of her sex:

But how about what is said by others about a women who undertakes to dig holes in and pierce mountains: this is too bold, and surpasses the forces and industry of this sex, and perhaps, there is more empty words and vanity in such promises (vices for which flighty persons are often remarked) than the appearance of truth. I would refer this disbeliever, and all those who arm themselves with such and other like arguments, to profane histories, where they will find that, in the past, there have been women who were not only bellicose and skilled in arms, but even more, expert in arts and speculative sciences, professed so much by the Greeks as by the Romans.”

And here, after alluding to some classical instances, she gives her bonafides in the “occult art”: having descended myself in the shafts and caverns of mines (although they are frighteningly deep), as those of gold and silver in Potosi, in the Kingdom of Peru…In those of Neusoln, Cremitz, and Schemnitz, in the Kingdom of Hungary…”

Which has given rise to the report that she actually went across the ocean on some expedition to visit Peru. One wonders if this claim is exaggerated – it would certainly be interesting. And it is politically possible that the Beausoleils, who worked for the Habsburgs, could have gotten such passage. Of course, right after this claim comes another – about what is met with in the mines of Hungary and Germany: .. where one often meets small dwarves, of about three or four palms in height, old, and clothed like those who work in the mines, to wit with an old short jacket, and a leather vest, which hangs down over most their body, with a white cape with a hood, a lamp, and a stick in their hand, horrible specters to those who have not long had experience in the descent into the mine.”

The Restitution of Pluto is a rather strange title for a mining manual – for Pluto to receive restitution, one would think, something was called for on the order of returning ore – a sort of antimining. But the restitution that Baronne Beausoleil has in mind is the restitution of the fortune she and her husband spent on exploring mines for the French government. In addition, she complains of having had the household maps and documents concerning mining pilfered by Touche-Grippé. In the course of her pamphlet, she also undertakes to show how astrology and the ‘wand’ used by miners were employed in renewing old and worn out mines.

Perhaps this was the excuse that provided the base for her downfall. The case of baron and baronne Beausoleil is curious, in that we have no record of their trial, no documentation to tell us why they were separated and imprisoned, Martine de Bertereau in Vincennes, her husband, Jean du Châtelet, Baron de Beausoleil and D’Auffembach, in the Bastille. Martine was imprisoned with her daughter. The last indication we have of Martine, the woman who may have plunged into the fearsome mines of Potosi, and certainly did go down into many Hungarian and German mines, is contained in the letters of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, who was imprisoned in Vincennes as a Jansenist priest. According to Saint-Cyran, Martine was ‘assez mal en ordre’ - she wore threadbare clothes. He was able to procure some better clothes for both of them. He also wrote to a friend as a favor for Martine, requesting him to inquire about the couple’s daughter, Anne du Châtelet, who had been left in the care of one of their friends. Anne had been taught Latin in order to “render her capable of the science of mining, which is hereditary in the family”. In another letter, Saint-Cyran defends Châtelet from the accusation of necromancy. His interest in astrology, Saint-Cyran assures his correspondent, was entirely scientific – the kind of divination that Saint Thomas approved of.

The Great Tradition is built on many bones, and some of the bones it grinds are of unfortunates who are caught in out of joint moments, and purged from our collective memory.

logic and strategy

The other day, a friend told me about a class she is teaching. The students had to make presentations, and two of them presented about South Africa. Oddly, she said, these student seemed barely aware that once upon a time, South Africa had a racist, apartheid regime. I said (falling into my old codger routine) that I remembered the day I protested the University of Texas' investment in South Africa, along with hundreds of other students. And then I said, I now think that was a mistake.

And then I thought about it and said, no, it wasn’t a mistake. It was right to protest. It was wrong for U.T. to have that investment. But it was, at the same time, good that U.T. had an investment we couldd protest.

My reactions led me to reflect on the difference between strategy and logic.

To illustrate that difference, take the 'human rights' game. Say that there is a country - call it, a U.S.-like country, that is, one that doesn't torture and invade countries illegally, but that is nevertheless wealthy and has an interest in promoting human rights. And take a human rights violator, like, say, Iran. It would be better, in my opinion, for the U.S.-like country to recognize Iran and make investments in that country. At the same time, it would also be better for people to protest those investments and demand that the U.S.-like country boycott Iran.

Logically, these positions are incompatible. One comes to a decision fork – A or Not-A. Logically, one can’t embrace both.

Strategically, however, both may be preferable. It is preferable that Iran have an internal interest that is vulnerable to protest. And it is preferable that protest exists to make the threat of loss credible.

This is the kind of thing that Deleuze and Guattari are talking about when they speak of affirming both sides of a disjunction. One leaps, here, from logic to strategy.

Of course, there is a problem. In order for the protests to be credible, the protestors must sincerely believe in disinvesting in Iran. And in order for the investments to be credible, the investors must act credibly like investors, defending with all their might and main investment in Iran.

So – where is the strategist, given this field of beliefs? The strategist is in the position of a sort of Maxwell’s demon – or a Chinese sage. She has anchored herself to the ‘uncanny’ position within the social field. She does have a strategic goal – the strategy is meant to move Iran to another regime point. But she can’t really reveal her goal for the strategy to succeed. And she must be on both sides of the decision branch.

It is a tough life for Fortuna, the game theorist. But she must be pitiless – even with herself.



the exchange matrix

The other day, my friend M. sent me a copy of a letter that was written by an editor of a press to another person, in which the editor solicited a small essay for a line of books that would contain small, one hundred page essays on a variety of topics. M. suggested that this was definitely up my alley – and I have to agree.
So I have been thinking of carving out a small bit from my human limit project for a book to be tentatively entitled, Homo Oeconomicus: the biography of a myth. Much of what I’ve been writing lately (about the origin of the equilibrium idea in economics) would flow very easily into a book about the rise of the idea of the homo oeconomicus – the rational actor whose ectoplasmic calculations are at the center of mainstream economics. To paraphrase Paul Veyne’s book, “Did the Greeks believe their myths”, I think an essay about whether the economists believe theirs – and more importantly, how their belief has helped form the political and economic order of modernity – is worth a nice one hundred pages.

This essay would have to begin in Rouen. I’d like to start with Pascal, Boisguilbert and Fontenelle and go forward until, in the 20th and 21st century, I bump into Robert Lucas, the Ownership society and the Browne report. The essay would really be the development of a phrase of Fontenelle, who, in his Eloge de Montmort, wrote that the scientific spirit will in the end bring about the belief “that the political world as well as physics is ruled by weight, number and measurement.” The great transformation of the economic and political arrangements under capitalism, outlined by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto and Karl Polanyi in the Great Transformation, took place not only in the vast recombination and recreation of everyday routines, but also in the thoughts entertained by the clerks, the policymaking intellectuals, the poets, the dissenters, the political arithmeticians, the pamphleteers and scientists, and in general the entire crowd of Burke’s “theorists”. Such is the ‘spirit’ of capitalism.

Historians have long been convinced that Adam Smith’s conjectural history is basically right Smith puts “commercial society”, or a society based on the cash nexus, at the endpoint of history. Myself, I want to dispute one of the premises of this idea, which is that we have gone from a society in which the dominant form in which the matrix of exchange occurs is barter to one in which the dominant form is money. I think this claim is made, to an extent, by engaging in a definitional tour de passe-passe, in which a system of exchanges is mysteriously expelled from economics, and is then, as mysteriously, crunched into a system of rational choice, a method by which mountains regularly give birth to mice, and all is dissolved in the triviality of a decisional form without, of course, explaining decisions at all. I take the term “exchange matrix” from Robert Cowen, who was very concerned with the fact that, in the Walrasian and neo-Walrasian schemas which are at the heart of neo-classical economics, the stripping away of the “veil of money”, which is meant to help us understand the self-regulating nature of money, is the equivalent of the claim that, in essence, money simply is a refined form of barter. D. Dillard, in The Barter Illusion, helps us to see what Cowen tries to show formally in matrix form – namely, that the idea that money is barter undergirds a completely fictitious view of firms, which premise that they exist solely for the sake of consumption. As Dillard – echoing Marx – points out, a firm’s output is ‘reconstituted as money capital” for the very good reason that firms do not exist – except on the most abstract level – to increase consumption. “What is real from the point of view of the objective of the firm is money.” As Dillard points out, “A corollary of the barter illusion is that money is neutral with regard to output and unemployment.”

All of which is one part of the illusion of the pure exchange system – that is, that barter and money are essentially the same. So the first part of understanding the myth of homo oeconomicus is to remove the illusion of the equivalence of money and barter, and the corollary illusion that, on the one hand, there is a pure barter system, and, on the other hand, that there is an equilibrium towards which markets tend.

Homo Oeconomicus, that eternal calculator of profit, operates within these larger mythical frameworks. My proposal is, firstly, to go from the mixed matrixes of the late medieval European economies up through the genesis of political arithmetic in the early modern period by looking at some plays – I’m thinking of Everyman, King Lear, the Alchemist, L’avare; secondly, to look at some analogies of the wheel – the wheel of Fortune or Nemesis, the circulation of the blood, and the circulation of money; thirdly, to examine Pascal’s meditations on the difference between reasoning and authority, against the background of Pascal’s development of a theory of probabilities based on the example of the game; fourthly, to examine the Enlightenment development of man the machine as man the calculating machine; fifthly, to go from Smith’s pin-factory to Marx’s theory of alienation, with its deep reach into how he conceives the economic sphere; sixthly, to discuss Polanyi’s double movement – that fold in the development of Capitalist culture in which the state intervenes as a guarantor (of social welfare, of banks, of farming culture, etc.); and finally, to discuss the social coordinates of individualism.

This may be too ambitious. Hey, commentors, tell me what you think!

Pascal's modernity

Ernst Coumel, in an essay on Pascal’s contribution to the theory of probability (La théorie du hasard est-elle née par hasard ? 1970), cites a Jesuit opponent of Pascal’s, one Abbe de Villars, who, in responding to Pascal’s devastating attack on casuists in Lettres écrites à un provincial, asked a very good question about Pascal’s interest in and contribution to the theory of gaming: But I had heard that you were a very great enemy of permissive Casuists: from whence, then, does it come that you not only do not condemn gambling, but that you make religion and divinity depend on a game of heads or tails?”

Coumel, in his essay, is at pains to point out that Pascal’s interest in the theory of games must have deeper reasons than that, by chance, he was the friend of Chevalier de Méré. Coumel is combating the opinion of Cournet, who wrote that it was simply by historical chance that the problems of chance in games – for instance, the problem of dividing the stakes of a game that had been interrupted – had not fallen under the purview of some ancient Alexandrian geometer. On the contrary, Coumel writes, the growth of game theory up to Von Neumann and Morgenstern characterizes a very modern development.

Modern – the word must be underlined. Surely, on the one side, there is the fact that historical circumstances were pressing in. In the seventeenth century, the de-monetized, medieval economy, with its system of in-kind exchanges – barter – was giving way to a monetized economy. As Sasan Fayazmenesh has shown in Money and Exchange, this fact can’t be interpreted as simply the substitution of a more efficient form of barter for a diffuse form – the Walrasian interpretation of money as the representative of a barter exchange fails to comprehend the multiple affordances of money. Fayazmenesh refers to Robert Clower’s analysis of money and barter as modeled by a ‘exchange matrix’, in which their functional differences come out. Clower assumes the universal exchangeability of goods for goods in the barter economy – which is a convenient assumption when mathematizing barter, but has the disadvantage of not being the case. In the whig view of the economists, of course, the monetary system is superior because it is a universal solvent in which any and all exchanges can take place. This, too, conveniently overlooks the vast number of barter exchanges and their multiple restrictions that undergird our daily lives. If I do a favor for my mother, for instance, I can’t, under normal conditions, monetize and sell my perception that I expect her eventually to do a favor for me, even if I can predict that she will, in fact, do a favor for me in the future. Our real life – with friends, co-workers, family members, lovers – is tangled in nets of in-kind and monetary exchanges, which are simply grandly overlooked by the economist.

However, it is also the case that Pascal’s France was monetizing a great number of exchanges. Colbert’s system, with its vast number of taxes, speeded up the process. And it is at this point that speculative questions arise that had no space in an in-kind economy.

Such, then, is one approach to the modernity of Pascal’s situation. But there is another sense of the modern, which Pascal himself diagnosed in the fragmentary preface to the treatise on the Vacuum.

Which I will get to in my next post.

sun, king, and heart: circulation of the blood 2

Part two

William Harvey was acquainted with Francis Bacon – of course. Harvey was, after all, a physician at James I’s court. He remarked to John Aubrey that Bacon “wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor.” This remark has been taken to mean that Bacon was, in Harvey’s eyes, no philosopher. And yet, it is not simply a disparagement – a meaningless quip. For what does it mean to write philosophy like a Lord Chancellor? Could it mean that Bacon’s administrative rationality – or his sense of stratagems – prevented him from understanding nature (which is presumably what Harvey is getting at – as Harvey was not interested in larger metaphysical issues)? And yet, were not Harvey and Bacon part of the same ‘team’, the team that turned upon a culture of reading – in which the sacred book emblematized the value of books – in favor of seeing, using instruments, measuring?

Harvey, as Walter Pagel has pointed out, did not derive his conclusions about blood circulating in a the closed system from experiment – that is, he did not ‘discover’ the circulation of the blood, in the sense that ‘discovery’ is an event that is not predetermined but thrust upon the observer by the facts as they are. “On such a view,” Pagel writes, “discovery should normally be the result of a sum total of observations and suitably designed experiments, and such a process should be discernible in Harvey’s own account of his discovery as the immediate conclusion from observations and experiments – as Willis’ ‘standard’ translation has it: ‘When I surveyed my mass of evidence.’” However – Pagels points out – Willis’ nineteenth century translation slips into Havey’s text a sentence – that sentence – which does not exist in the text. So much did Willis desire to believe in a certain image of Harvey, the experimentalist, that he overwrites what Harvey wrote, which was that “I often and seriously considered with myself what great abundance there was (sc. of blood)”. (3)

Pagel emphasizes that Willis’ Harvey, who operates like a Newtonian scientist, is not the Harvey who presents himself as a Cartesian scientist – whose idea that the blood circulates was due to a meditation, which depended, in turn, on a confidence that nature never acted without purpose. From that meditation, Harvey moved to create evidence – “to become science it required the chain of brilliantly conceived and executed experiments and observations…”

In this nuanced shuffle between scientific models, where is the Baconian?

It is here that Christopher Hill’s essay on Harvey intervenes. In 1966, Hill, who was writing his book on the English Revolution, pointed out that Harvey’s first book on the circulation of the blood was prefaced with an address to the King. This address combined two analogies: one to the absolute place of the monarch in the body politics, and one to Copernicus’ discovery of the heliocentric system.

"The heart of creatures is the foundation of life, the prime of all, the sun of their microcosm, on which all vegetation does depend, from whence all vigour and strength does flow. Likewise the King is the foundation of his kingdoms, and the sun of his microcosm, the heart of his commonwealth, from whence all power and mercy proceeds"

And, just so that we don’t think that this is a matter of dedications alone, see how Harvey defends the claim that his dissection of animals has import on the constitution of the human body:

“Since the intimate connexion of the heart with the lungs, which is apparent in the human subject, has been the probable cause of the errors that have been committed on this point, they plainly do amiss who, pretending to speak of the parts of animals generally, as anatomists for the most part do, confine their researches to the human body alone, and that when it is dead. They obviously do not act otherwise than he who, having studied the forms of a single commonwealth, should set about the composition of a general system of polity; or who, having taken cognizance of the nature of a single field, should imagine that he had mastered the science of agriculture; or who, upon the ground of one particular proposition, should proceed to draw general conclusions.”

One notices, in passing, that the connection of the animal to the human is purely physical, not a fact indicating a common interiority – to push Descola’s thesis. But the absolute distinction between nature and culture was in the making – and what one notices, as well, is the tendency of the natural philosophers to push a new sense of universality. What Harvey writes here about the homology between the animal and the human body participates in the same logic that makes Newton put the domain of physics on a unified footing, dissolving the line between the sublunar and the celestial.

This is done, by Harvey, with reference, as well, to political terms – to the Lord Chancellor’s rhetoric. And, as Hill notices, this reference to the commonwealth is also entangled with the analogy to the sun. In the crucial chapter in which Harvey announces that blood flows in a circle in the body, he writes:

“The heart, consequently, is the beginning of life; the sun of the microcosm, even as the sun in his turn might well be designated the heart of the world; for it is the heart by whose virtue and pulse the blood is moved, perfected, and made nutrient, and is preserved from corruption and coagulation; it is the household divinity which, discharging its function, nourishes, cherishes, quickens the whole body, and is indeed the foundation of life, the source of all action. But of these things we shall speak more opportunely when we come to speculate upon the final cause of this motion of the heart.”

These analogies may, of course, simply be the lateral poetry that opens the scientific imagination. And yet, Hill is right to point out the background noise, here – the ceaseless cataract of history. For Harvey’s claim that the heart is central, like a sun, or a monarch, changes when he comes to write his treatise on the circulation of the blood of 1649, and on the generation of animals of 1651 – changes in accord with the beheading of King Charles. Whether or not these changes are evidence of Harvey’s republicanism – Hill’s claim – they are changes in the analogy holding between the human body, the monarch, and the solar system. Even as the human is bound to the animal kingdom, kingdoms and cosmological centers seem to fall out of the realm of essences. Or out of the realm of those analogies that give us a clue about the circulation of the blood and the function of the heart.

“In I649, moreover, Harvey went out of his way to repudiate the astronomical analogy which he had used in I628. "The knowledge we have of the heavenly bodies" is "uncertain and conjectural"; its example "is not here to be followed".'1 An astronomical allusion in the De Generationec onfirms this point, since Harvey no longer draws a parallel between the heart and the sun but between the blood and "the superior orbs, (but especially the sun and moon)", which "do by their continual motions quicken and preserve the inferior world".12 (That inveterate obscurantist, Alexander Ross, was quick to spot the dangers of Harvey's new position. In a book published in I65I, which also attacked Bacon and Comenius, he particularly insisted on the sovereignty, the prerogative, of the heart, and on the hierarchical order in the human body: the testicles are "ignobler than the heart and brain".)”

Dethroning the heart: 1

“He did delight to be in the darke, and told me he could then best contemplate.” (John Aubrey, Life of William Harvey)

Barthes, in his Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes wrote that of the tropes, the one that most aroused his suspicion was analogy: “Saussure’s bete noire was the arbitrary (of the sign). His is analogy. The analogical arts (cinema, photography), analogical methods (academic critique, for example) are discredited. Why? Because analogy implies an effort of Nature: it constitutes the natural as the source of truth; and what adds to the cursed state of analogy is that it is irrepressible: as soon as we see a form, it is necessary that it resembles something. Humanity seems condemned to the analogy.

…
Outside of these transgressions, the beneficial opposite to the perfidy of Analogy is simple structural correspondance: homology, which reduces the appeal to the first object to a proportional allusion (etymologically, that is to say, in the happier times of language, analogy meant proportion).
(The bull sees red when its lure strikes it on the muzzle: the two reds coincide, that of anger and that of the cape: the bull is in full analogy, this is to say is fully in the imaginary. When I resist analogy, it is in fact to the imaginary that I put up my resistance: to wit, the coalescence of the sign, the similitude of the signifier to the signified, the homeomorphism of images, the mirror, the captivating lures. All scientific explanations that have recourse to analogy – and they are legion – participate in the lure, they form the imaginary of science). “

If we take Barthes at his word, it is not only humanity that is condemned to analogy, but especially the human sciences. The escape through homology – the escape through mathematics – is affected, in the human sciences, under the sign of analogy – analogy to the positive sciences.

But the positive sciences are not, themselves, as free of lures as all that. So it is with the history of the discovery of the circulation of the blood. When I talk about my Human Limit project with A., I often say that I do not want to write a talking heads history – and the way to break through that sort of history (and inhabit, a la Nietzsche, all the names of history) is to understand the interactions of images and analogies that circulate, themselves, in the socius. And one must even understand the dominance of homologies, that ultimate iconoclasm – that is, the construction of a mind set that sees the world in terms of placeholders, in which substitution is always the rule and the goal.

“He was wont to say that man was but a great mischievous baboon.”

One of the symbols of breaking out of the prison of analogy is a reference to the analogy between the reading of a book and the reading of the ‘fabric of nature’. Reading the book of nature relies on our sense of reading – an activity that, after the development of the printing press, multiplied both in the number of its practitioners and the number of the things they could read. The scientists of the early modern era – the natural philosophers, the virtuosos – were both products of this reading culture and in revolt against it. The revolt took the form of a mutation in the way in which one argued for a ‘fact’. Harvey is famous for having rejected reading – the works of Galen and even Aristotle, among others – for dissection. There is an anecdote that he dissected an animal in a class led by one of his opponents, Caspar Hoffman, to demonstrate the circulation of the blood. He literally showed how the heart works, to the satisfaction of all present – but Hoffman was unconvinced. Harvey laid down his dissecting knife in disgust. Galileo experienced a similar resistance – the resistance of the reading eye to the seeing eye – when astronomers refused to look through his telescope. In a letter to Kepler, he wrote: “what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? Shall we laugh or shall we cry?” The eye that reads, the eye that sees, the eye that cries. It seems like a paradox that the culture of reading leads to a rejection of reading as a method for understanding nature. Reading, it seems, liberates the eye to look up – and to see, or weep.

…

Which brings us to Christopher Hill’s political reading of William Harvey.

Descola on Nature and culture

When Nicolas Coeffeteau, in the Tableau of the Human Passions (1631), wants to demonstrate that all creatures are endowed naturally with what we would call the fight or flight response, he uses an example that sets him immediately outside of our modernity:

“For we see, with other corruptible creatures, that they have not only an inclination and a power to search out things that are agreeable to them, and to flee those which can do them harm; but in addition to this they have another for resisting and combating that which gets in the way of their actions, or destroys their being. As, for example, first is not only endowed with lightness for lifting itself higher, but it has similarly received from the nature heat, by means of which it resists and combats all that is contrary to its action.”

This comparison seems to violate a deep categorical borderline between the living and the non-living – as well as other borderlines that divide the living according to properties that we ascribe to humans and refuse to ascribe to non-humans.

In Beyond Nature and Culture (2005), Philippe Descola shows how the divide between nature and culture – the indispensable categories of modernity – does not, in fact, universally govern all cultures. In a rather beautiful passage, he contrasts the monistic, or animistic, view of the world and the modern occidental view, which he calls naturalism:

“In characterizing naturalism in previous work as the simple belief in the evidence of nature, I only followed a positive definition that goes back to the Greeks, according to which certain things owe their existence and development to a principle that is foreign to chance as much as it is to the will of human beings, a principle that our philosophical tradition has successively qualified by the terms phusis and natura, then by their different derivations in the European languages. This concept reduced to the attestation of a fact remained thus prisoner of a conceptual geneology internal to the occidental cosmology, losing by this fact the benefit of the usage of contrastive traits less fixed to the historical situation that a comparison with animism can furnish. Thus, in commenting on my up to that point incomplete comparison of naturalism and animism, Viveiros de Castro was right to underline that the fundamental opposition between these two modes of identification reposed essentially on a symmetric inversion: animism is multinaturalist, according to him, since it is founded on the corporal heterogeneity of classes of existents that are nevertheless endowed with a identical spirit and culture, while naturalism is multi-cultural in that it backs up the postulate of the unicity of nature with the recognition of the diversity of manifestations of individual and collective subjectivity. One might discuss the term multinaturalism in such a context, the multiple natures of animism not possessing the same attributes as the unified nature of naturalism: the former evokes, rather, the ancient Aristotelian sense of a principle of individualization of beings, while the second, in its singular aspect, makes direct reference to the mute and impersonal ontological domain of which the contours were traced definitively with the mechanistic revolution. …”

To put Descola’s point simply: the naturalist ontology can admit a diversity of subjective types, on the human side, which coexists with a physical continuum of forms of life. Since Darwin, biology has even postulated that we humans are fully part of this physical continuum, and the smallest molecular actions can, in a sense, ‘move’ us. Still, scientists are reluctant to make the leap to saying that science consists of molecules talking and writing about molecules – they tend to get realistic about math, for instance. They retain subjectivity even when reducing it. What naturalism doesn’t admit is a subjective continuum that would treat fire as having an interiority that is different in degree, but not kind, from the human. On the other hand, for the animist ontology, the discontinuity of physical forms – the fire, rock, plant, animal, human – is inhabited by a continuum of interiorities – ‘souls.’ It might even be inhabited by a soul that moves out of one physical form into another – shapeshifters.

This story is, of course, as Descola acknowledges, a little too neat. The material in Descola’s book itself points to the neatness. On the one side, animism is represented by entire cultures – what, for instance, the Achubar, the Amazonian tribe with whom he did his fieldwork, believes – and on the Occidental side, we run into names – Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Darwin, etc. It is as if intellectual history has predetermined the names it will run through, the rosary, in spite of the massive evidence presented not only by the numerous books left to us by lesser figures, but by things like the historical work using such things as the archives of the Inquisition, or of the Paris police, etc., which often give us glimpses of folk beliefs that are systematized and very different from what we would expect from the history of the talking heads. We speak of Montaigne or Spinoza – and we don’t speak of, for instance, Menocchio, the Italian miller whose trial for heresy was dug up by Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms. Or of the peasant healer Gasparutto in Friuli, who testified, in 1575, that there existed a group, the benandanti, who,during the night, use fennel stalks to battle evil doers, who use sorghum stalks, and that the benandanti got together by, for instance, traveling in spirit astride hares, cats, and so on – a group Ginzburg studied in The Night Battles. Menocchio and Gasparutto left only testimonies, transcribed by inquisitors – but they both were of the type that Gramsci called the organic intellectual. That is, they had a bent towards understanding the world in terms of some system or another. And we must constantly remember that ‘high culture’ is entirely permeable, as a practice, to ‘low culture’ – its assumptions and images are often imported into from low culture. The equilibrium of which the economists are so proud is one of these imports – it governs as a myth, but a modern myth – one that emits an array of models.