instructions pour gens d'affaires 1

The double change brought about under capitalism – the creation of wage labor under the regime of industrialization and the introduction of a revamped and quantitatively huge sphere of circulation under the regime of consumerism – is one that particularly effects the place of the clerk. The fictional commodities of land and labor, and the international trade in everyday household and psychoactive commodities – sugar, chocolate, alcohol, coffee - that underlay the great transformation required a new system of description and calculation that opened up a new vocational form – and into that form came the clerk. When Marx speaks of the way the bourgeois economists invert the processes that constitute the nature of the commodity so that it seems like the commodity comes first and constitutes the unsurpassable horizon of the world, what he is really talking about is the codification of the economy from the point of view of its managers in the sphere of circulation – for them, gazing at the world through their maps, spread sheets, instructions, and sales, the exterior world really does seem to be a price-driven market system, a great dualism between demand and supply.

In 1770, a Bordeaux lawyer named Joseph Rousselle published a how to book on management: “Instructions pour les seigneurs et leurs gens d'affaires”. The book divides into what the seigneur should look for in a manager – a gen d’affair – and what the manager should do. Among the latter, listed in the table of contents, is: “state of the domestics, properties and officials on the lands; archives of the seigneur and the state of his property; debts and charges; general knowledge of the lands; archives of the lands; active and passive transfers concerning the fiefs”; etc.
Rousselle begins the book by sounding a note of urgency: “Prudence demands that they [the seigneurs] found their principle existence on their patrimonial properties; yet the greater part of these properties are so badly guided, so badly administered, there reigns such abuses, that the Seigneurs lose considerably, be it by infidelity, be it by the incapacity of their agents.” (3)
What Rousselle is complaining about here has a long reach: we see this among the reformers in England and the novelists in Russia in the 19th century. Eventually, this story is about the end of the ancien regime – but as Thomas Mann puts it in Doctor Faustus, that regime didn’t wholly end until 1917 – until World War I.

In Rousselle’s time, certain among the corps of gens d’affaires were philosophes – including perhaps the most influential, Rousseau.

...
One can too easily make it seem that production and circulation are spheres that do not intersect because they are spheres that must be separated analytically and have different structures. In reality, these spheres interpenetrate: from the factory to the fashion show, production and circulation are interlocking parts of one whole. It is that interpenetration which gives to class its everyday value as something performed in routines – while everyday class differences are then registered in income differentials, and social positioning. In effect, one of the narratives Marx unfolds, in the Grundrisse and then in Capital, concerns the production of different forms of rationality that correspond to class strategies that dominate in the sphere of circulation and in the sphere of production.

There’s a striking passage in Plutarch’s essay on the Fortune of the Romans in which he considers the meaning of the fact that the Romans built a temple to Fortune centuries before they built a temple to any of the virtues. In a sense, this is a metaphor for the whole pre-capitalist economy in Europe from the time of the Romans to the early modern age. All the virtues – the province of the philosopher, the scientist, the clerk – were subordinate to the warrior class, who saw in Fortune the rationality of the system of war. However, the warriors couldn’t actually live on war – they lived on treasure, they lived on the slavery of those planted on the lands they conquered or were rewarded. Fortune, which provided that final margin which balanced the battle, sealed the alliance of the warrior caste and the Gods. The slave – the man who ‘owed’ his life to his conqueror, redeeming that debt, as David Graeber shows in his Debt: the first 5,000 years, by dedicating his life to enriching the man who spared it. Not, of course, that the slave volunteered for this fate, but along with physically direct coercion there came a morale of defeat.

It would be a huge mistake to equate the slave economy of the Ancients and the economy of the Middle Ages. The Christians, for good reason, fought against Fortune, and it wasn’t simply because Fortune was diabolic – it was because Fortune pitted itself, at the deepest level, against the virtues.

our debt problem

In important ways, the D.C. drone drone drone about deficits and debt is right. Unfortunately, they have targeted the wrong debt. It isn't the government's debt that is the problem: it is the people's debt.

Unfortunately, the government could have chosen to do something radical about debt in 2009 and it didn't. No, I don't mean that we could have balanced the budget in D.C. - we could have helped balance the budget in the U.S.

Instead of loaning, at 1 percent, 16 trillion dollars to the American people, which would have effectively re-liquidated every American household, this is what the Federal Reserve - which is the government - did: it chose to loan that 16 trillion to the banks in the 2008-2010 period. What was the beneficial effect of this policy? It saved the banks. What does that mean? The government loans money to banks at 1 percent or below, so the banks can loan money to businesses, people and the government at from 2 percent to 14 percent (for you lucky credit card holders).
What does this mean? It means that the investment class was given a free ride, while the vast majority of people - for whom the economy exists - were given an elbow in the mouth.
Here is what debt politics should be about: our debts. A combination of policies to radically crush private debt while creating a large enough deficit to counter-act the private sector's collapse of demand for labor - for instance, by simply hiring every unemployed person - would have taken us out of the Great Recession by now.

As I have pointed out, will point out, and will probably mumble on my deathbed, the policies and politics of our epoch are determined by the curious fact that we have left the wealth of the wealthy out of the equation. We pretend that we can't afford to do things that we could do in the fifties or sixties, when we were much poorer. We actually can. However, to do so we would cut deeply into the wealth of the wealthiest, who are the investor class who massively benefited by the Government's welfare for banks scheme, and who would not benefit from liquidated the debt bondage in which the mass of Americans are held - quite the contrary.

Let's not end on an exasperated note. Let's end as one ends a love letter. This love letter is to the Occupy Wall Street people. You are right. Think big. Operating in the interests of the majority, you will either win now or win later, but you will win. The elites, the pluto-parties that monopolize our politics at the moment, are not so different from the horrific and racist parties that dominated the political scene in America in 1900. Don't worry that we are too senile as a nation, have filled our veins too full of shit and our heads too full of trivia, to live. That old nation will die, in fact is in its death throes, but a new one will arise.

the boytoy "left"

I have read with amazement the news about the speeches at the Labour conference that is going on this week. Labour has discovered its niche in the political sphere, apparently: support for ‘deficit reduction”, i.e. mass employment and wage deflation, combined with a strong on crime stance. Thus, the silent majority may huddle in their homes waiting for the layoff slip or the round of unaffordable bills, but at least they can have the satisfaction of seeing the noisy unemployed person in the house next door put out in the street.

This is what the supposed “Left” has come to.

Clearly, the Blairist poobahs that have reformed Labour have no time for the economic sillyness of their forefathers. Someone like Bevin, surveying the current scene, would have summed up the deficit debate very simply: we will cure deficits by curing unemployment and stimulating higher wages. In the interim, we will consider nationalizing the bond markets if they can’t do a better job of pricing the risk in bonds. And in the future, we will consider whether the idea of a private bond market for state finance isn’t altogether archaic.

It bears repeating, as nobody repeats it: bond traders work for financial institutions, banks, mutual funds, hedge funds, etc. Financial institutions were, worldwide, floated by 16 trillion dollars in emergency funds by the Federal Reserve. Instead of loaning sixteen trillion dollars to the working class – to those making below 100 thousand dollars – in the U.S., through easily created modalities (the Post Office, anyone), the Fed chose to continue a system that can’t clear. Let’s say this again: cant clear. It can’t clear because clearing would cause mutual collapse on all sides. The EU and various European governments, on a lesser scale, also propped up the financial system, which then turns around and loans to the European governments through buying bonds, which are then, through the auctioning system, repriced – in effect, the interest rates the bonds pay are increased. What we have here is obviously a vicious circle of borrowing, A “loaning” at .05 percent to B, which then loans at 2 percent to A - which exists only partly to do what the state and private financial enterprise are supposed to do – guard the well being of the population and supply capital for private enterprises and credit for consumers – and majorly to insure the fortunes of the richest. Another way of saying this is: we are paying the rich to sit on our faces.

Labour’s boytoys want us to be outraged because – as the rich sit on our faces, somebody with dreadlocks or a dyed Mohawk has moved into the apartment down the street!

Trivia, timewasting, and a plutocratic ideology in which the leaders of a party formerly representing the workers has drowned themselves has now become the U.K’s opposition party. Really.

Stamp out the parties.

“The sweetest sleep and fairest-boding dreams
That ever ent'red in a drowsy head
Have I since your departure had, my lords.
Methought their souls whose bodies Richard murder'd
Came to my tent and cried on victory.
I promise you my soul is very jocund
In the remembrance of so fair a dream.”

the battle and the market: geneology of unintended consequences, two

The battle and the market

“Might one, then … bring on the Romans once more as witnesses in behalf of Fortune, on the ground that they assigned more to Fortune than to Virtue? At least, it was only recently and after many years that Scipio Numantinus built a shrine of Virtue in Rome; elater Marcellus23 built what is called the Temple of Virtue and Honour;24 and Aemilius Scaurus,25 who lived in the time of the Cimbrian Wars, built the shrine of Mens so﷓called, which might be considered a Temple of Reason. For at this time rhetoric, sophistry, and argumentation had already found their way into the City; and people were beginning to magnify such pursuits. But even to this day they have no shrine of Wisdom or Prudence or Magnanimity or Constancy or Moderation. But of Fortune there are splendid and ancient shrines, all but coeval with the first foundations of the City.” – Plutarch, On the Fortune of the Romans

In an essay exploring the concept of Fortuna in the Latin world, Nicole Hequet-Noti demonstrates the parallel between the growth of the cult of the goddess and the growth of the military aspect of Rome. In other words, as Rome became a great generator of battles, it also became a great worshipper of that mysterious quality associated with being lucky. As Hecquet-Noti puts it, paraphrasing Cicero’s praise of Sylla: ‘That gift, originally exterior to man, is incorporated in order to become an immanent force in this man, a good properly belonging to him, conferring a particular force superior to that of others…” 18

This double development should be remembered when considering the place of Fortune in Plutarch’s Moralia and biographical writings – an unconsidered source for what became articulated, in the Enlightenment, as the programmatic concept of unintended consequences, except that somewhere in this line of transmission – which might be thought of as the modern moment, co-ordinate with the de-legitimation of glory as the reason of the State - the market is substituted for the battle.

Plutarch’s moralia and his history seem have been divided among different sorts of scholars, who commonly don’t take the time to connect the two text types systematically. What Plutarch meant by his parallel lives, though, was more than just the telling of a history through the lives of great men. Rather, biography here serves as a sort of laboratory in which, through different situations, we see the sentiments or virtues – which are, abstractly, atomic and unified – express themselves differently. This is the doxic force of tyche, of chance.

Now of course in the synthesis of luck and reason that ‘builds’ the market system (as well as the war system), virtue – Plutarchian practical reason – is not wholly powerless before luck. But luck has on its side sheer incident; and sheer incident is hard to treat neutrally. Sheer incident is the screen upon which we project the uncanny, in the Freudian sense. Plutarch tells a story to illustrate how the force of fortune can impose upon virtue – a lesson that is surely underneath the discovery of ‘unintended consequences’ in the Enlightenment:

” Caesar's son, who was the first to be styled Augustus, and who ruled for fifty-four years, ewhen he was sending forth his grandson to war, did he not pray to the goddess to bestow upon the young man the courage of Scipio, the popularity of Pompey, and his own Fortune,38 thus recording Fortune as the creator of himself, quite as though he were inscribing the artist's name on a great monument?a For it was Fortune that imposed him upon Cicero, Lepidus, Pansa, Hirtius, and Mark Antony, and by their displays of valour, their deeds, victories, fleets, wars, armies, raised him on high to be the first of Roman citizens; and she cast down these men, through whom he had mounted, and left him to rule alone. p343It was, in fact, for him that Cicero governed the State, that Lepidus commanded armies, that Pansa conquered, that Hirtius fell, that Antony played the wanton. fFor I reckon even Cleopatra as a part of Caesar's Fortune, on whom, as on a reef, even so great a commander as Antony was wrecked and crushed that Caesar might rule alone. The tale39 is told of Caesar and Antony that, when there was much familiarity and intimacy between them, they often devoted their leisure to a game of ball or dice or even to fights of pet birds, such as quails or cocks; and Antony always retired from the field defeated. It is further related40 that one of his friends, who prided himself on his knowledge of divination, was often wont to speak freely to him and admonish him, 320"Sir, what business have you with this youth? Avoid him! Your repute is greater, you are older, you govern more men, you have fought in wars, you excel in experience; but your Guardian Spirit fears this man's Spirit. Your Fortune is mighty by herself, but abases herself before his. Unless you keep far away from him, your Fortune will depart and go over to him!”
The uncanny has a collective effect that we should not underestimate. Marx’s idea that the political economists had endowed things with a power that they did not have – that, in other words, by avoiding examining human power, political economists were the blind promoters of ideology – plucks out this uncanny moment that binds Roman Fortune and the Invisible Hand of the Scots. Plutarch’s trope concerning Augustus is at least distantly echoed in Smith’s famous passage about the Invisible Hand:
“As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”
In the Plutarch passage, the work of virtue in those who went before Augustus resulted – in spite of themselves – in adding to Augustus’ glory. The movement, here, is from the virtuous to the fortunate. In Smith, it is an opposite movement – the fortunate make their fortune, in spite of their concentration on selfish gainseeking ends, only by making the larger fortune of others, i.e. the nation itself.

A little history of the Income Tax

Naturally, LI finds the class warfare cry that has gone up with Obama’s proposal to tax the wealthy at a less onerous rate than they were taxed in the 90s rather comic, as class warfare is precisely what is at the heart of progressive taxation. Progressive taxation can best be seen as one of those complex treaties, like that which officially divided up Yugoslavia, that takes a situation of ongoing hostility and freezes it in place. It allows the wealthy to continue to exploit and flourish, but at a cost.

However, there is one aspect of the right’s class warfare meme that seems to have taken root with a considerable number of middle class citizens, which is that there is something unfair about the wealthy paying 50 percent of the total of the income tax collected by the government. The usual response to this by liberals is to point out that federal taxes also consist of taxes for social security and medicare, so that the figure for income tax alone is distorting. This is true.
However, it also concedes the point, and this is bogus. A little historical research will tell us why.
In W. Elliot Brownlee’s dry as a cracker history of the Income Tax (Federal Taxation in America: a history) there is an account of the roots of the Income Tax and the intentions of its designers that makes it clear that the designers meant the income tax to be paid completely, lock stock and barrel, by the rich.
Back in 1916, as Wilson plotted to get America into WWI, the financing of that war was high on the agenda. Southern Democrats, who back then combined racism and populism, saw this as a good opportunity to create a truly progressive tax system.

In Brownlee’s words:

“The Democratic tax program, which was implemented in the
wartime Revenue Acts, transformed the experimental, rather tentative
income tax into the foremost instrument of federal taxation.
The Revenue Act of 1916 imposed the first significant tax on personal
incomes, doubled (to 2 percent) the tax on corporate incomes,
and introduced an excess profits tax of 12.5 percent on munitions
makers. It rejected a broadly based personal income tax—
one falling most heavily on wages and salaries—and focused on
the taxation of the wealthiest families. Among the provisions of the
1916 legislation was the elimination of the personal exemption for
dividends. Thus, the act deliberately introduced the double taxation
of corporate earnings distributed as dividends. In effect, the
1916 legislation embraced the concept of using the corporate and
personal income taxes as two different means of taxing the rich.
The architects of the Revenue Act of 1916 intended to implement
on one hand, through the personal income tax, an “ability-to-pay”
philosophy and on the other hand, through corporate taxation, a
“benefit” theory of taxation.”

What was the result of this?

“In 1918, only about 15 percent of American families had to
pay personal income taxes, and the tax payments of the wealthiest
1 percent of American families accounted for about 80 percent
of the revenues from the personal income tax. Even without taking
into account the incidence of the corporate income tax on the rich,
this wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers paid marginal tax rates ranging
from 15 to 77 percent and effective rates averaging 15 percent,
having increased from 3 percent in 1916.”

Say it loud and say it proud: Only the rich should pay income tax! That was the intent, that was the early history, and that was how even the Republican administrations of the 1920s saw things. But the Republican administrations were, after all, business friendly, and one of the things they did was to erase as much as they could indirect taxes – tariffs and corporate taxes – and thereby accidentally increased the importance of the income tax as a funding vehicle for government:

“Mellon’s tax program consolidated the flow of income-tax revenues
into the Treasury. The portion of general revenues provided
to the federal government by indirect taxes (largely the tariff) fell
from almost 75 percent in 1902 to about 25 percent in the 1920s;
meanwhile, income-tax revenues increased, accounting for nearly
50 percent of the federal government’s general revenues. As had
been the case in World War I, income-tax revenues proved to be
more abundant than the Treasury experts had forecast, and the
Republican administrations enjoyed substantial, growing budget
surpluses until the onset of the Great Depression.”

Those income tax revenues, mind, came from the wealthiest income group. In a country where the median income was some 2 thousand dollars per year, the first 3,000 dollars of income was not taxed. As Mellon, the conservative Treasury Secretary put it:

“Mellon went so faras to advocate providing a greater reduction in taxes on “earned”
than on “unearned” income, and the Revenue Act of 1924 included
such a provision. “The fairness of taxing more lightly incomes from
wages, salaries, or from investments is beyond question,” Mellon
asserted. “In the first case, the income is uncertain and limited in
duration; sickness or death destroys it and old age diminishes it;
in the other, the source of income continues; the income may be
disposed of during a man’s life and it descends to his heirs.”

While this was a plea for greater death taxes, it was also a concession to the Edgeworthian logic of the tax, in which the determining factor is the marginal utility of income. As the marginal utility of a dollar to a man making 50,000 dollars is much greater than it is for a man making 1 million dollars, the logical thing is to tax the man making 1 million dollars. It does less harm.

So far, so good. But the worm in this apple lies in the notion of ‘investments”. Income, after all, must provide for current expenses and savings in a household. Up until the seventies, the savings of a middle class household were presumed to be in some private pension in combination with social security. Then, of course, the neo-liberal ideology began putting its sharp little teeth in the hide of the developed economies. Why not use tax deductions to get the mass of that savings flowing into the markets? Oh, what a win win proposition. In fact, the winners were naturally in the financial sector – they were the very malefactors of great wealth Roosevelt talked about 70 years before. And so the assets of middle income households were gradually tied to the private financial services sector - stocks and bonds – as their taxes went up to provide for government services and their incomes stagnated. The latter fact was not separate from their investments in the market – in effect, middle class households began betting on their own lack of income growth. This was all very well as long as there were bubbles to make those stock investments grow. Bubbles aren’t bad or good things – they are just the way that technology, population growth and capital converge. However, they let you down in a pinch. Thus, the empire of pensions built up by white collar workers since the Depression, and union workers too, was dissipated in the fine frenzy of the financial markets, and after the first wave, the 401(k) ripoff replaced the traditional pension.

It is this which has introduced an interesting variant into our class war. Their assets of households have made them the allies of the wealthy (this was the intended political dimension of neo-liberal policies) even though the wealthy are really not their allies at all, as any business cycle will show you.

If there were a progressive community in America, this story would be on their radar and they would be fighting against it. One way is to divorce Main Street and Wall Street. This is why LI is a big fan of the government providing a means of investing money with a guaranteed safe rate of return outside of the stock market. Theresa Ghilarducci made a suggestion in 2008 that we stop giving a tax credit to 401(k)s and introduce Guaranteed Retirement Accounts, in which the average person can simply open a government account and park money in it, earning non-taxed interest, with the aim of creating a retirement fund worth 70 percent of a person’s pre-retirement income.

This would be the single biggest blow against the neo-lib agenda since the seventies. A truly liberal president would have Ghilarducci as his advisor. One day we will have such a president, although I imagine Ghilarducci will be retired at that point. At present, we have a president named Obama who is a bit to the right of Andrew Mellon on economic issues. A pity, that.

The geneology of unintended consequences

In the note he devoted to the Regency in his Precis of the Reign of Louis XV, Voltaire marveled at the consequences of the rise and fall of Law’s system in France: “Finally, that famous system of Law or Lass, which seemed it must ruin the regency and the state, in fact sustained one and the other by some consequences that nobody could have foreseen.”

The idea of unforeseen consequences will have a long history in economic thought. Voltaire introduces it hear in a marveling tone – and yet, what he shows is not a marvel, but the development of a trend that developed because of the ‘side effects’ of Law’s system. This is one of Voltaire’s signal contributions to that product of the Enlightenment, the conjectural history, of which the most famous example is Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Even as Montesquieu adheres to the classic rise and fall model of the economy, one in which Nemesis is still visible, the watermark beneath the elegant system, Voltaire dispenses with Nemesis and introduces the complexities of a feedback system that defies, to an extent, any easy moral analysis.

“The cupidity that it awakened in all conditions, from the lowest people up to the magistrates, to the bishops and the princes, diverted the attention of all minds from the public good and all political and ambitious views in filling them with the fear of losing and the avidity of gain. It was a new and prodigious game, when all citizens bet one against the other. Avid gamblers do not quit their cards in order to trouble the government. It happened, by a prestige of which the mechanism was not visible except to the strongest and finest eyes, that a completely chimeric system gave birth to real commerce, and the rebirth of the India Company, established in the past by the famous Colbert and ruined in the wars. At last, if many private fortunes were destroyed, the nation soon became more commercial and rich. This system lit up intellects in the same way the civil wars sharpened courage.”

Voltaire’s is a brief account of the rise and fall of the System, putting into a few paragraphs a broad description of the ‘complexity and rapidity of the machine”. Voltaire does not moralize upon the upsurge of greed, for he saw pretty clearly that greed was not the vice that France was suffering from, but famine and disease. The sudden fortunes acquired by upstarts was, in comparison, a comedy, and one with the strange effect of securing the state. Surely in being able to see these things calmly, Voltaire was influenced by Mandeville, as well as an proto-economist named Melon. And yet Voltaire was enough of a moraliste to understand the symbolism of what he testifies that he saw: Law, an ‘unknown’ and an adventurer, ‘arrive at the halls of the Palais Royale followed by Dukes and Pairs, Marshals of France and Bishops.” The world was only briefly turned upside down, but in that moment a glimpse was given of another possible world.

That possible world is masked by the image of the Age of Reason, which, although an excellent pamphleteering title was not, pace Tom Paine, a very informative description of what the Enlightenment wrought. From Voltaire to Adam Smith, the unintended consequences of action – particularly political action – was the theme constantly sounded against the schemes of sovereign reason, until finally, in the Critique of Pure Reason, reason itself becomes a sort of impotent god, like one of those deified people selected in certain tribes described in the Golden Bough, whose divine life was spent incommunicado, walled up, and generally tabooed. Although it is also true that reason plays a more multitudinous role in the writings of all these writers – if the unintended consequences of political reason, or of the passion for gain, operates as a positive force in the cultivation of progressive society, its negative dimension can be countered by the citizen’s virtue, or practical reason. Paine could just as easily have spoken of the Age of Virtue, for it was virtue that was evoked in the Assembly as the basis of the revolution.

Behind Voltaire and Mandeville’s tonally different but thematically similar analysis of the unexpected social virtues of private vices there lies, in fact, a Plutarchian theme: that of the dispute between virtue and fortune. The contest is staged in two of Plutarch’s speeches – on the fortune of the Romans and on the Fortune of Alexander, as well as in his biographies.

In the speech on the Romans, the contest between Fortune – which is amoral – and virtue – which is moral – is identified with another contest, between fortune and forethought.

“Wherefore our present discourse
does, in a measure, bestow a fair and enviable dignity
upon Rome, if we raise the question over her, even
as we do over earth and sea, heaven and stars, whether
she has come to her present state by Fortune or by
Forethought."
Fortune, it should be said, is not merely chance. In another essay on Fate, Plutarch distinguishes between the contingencies that can befall anything, living or non-living, and the fortune that impinges upon the course of human life:
‘that which is fortuitous allows also chance, and belongs to things practical; but what is by chance cannot be also by fortune, for it belongs to things without action: Fortune, moreover, pertains to rational beings, but chance to rational and irrational beings alike, and even to inanimate things.” Although Plutarch attributes this doctrine to Aristotle, he fundamentally agrees with it, and uses it to give an illustration of unintended effects, or the effects of fortune: ‘Now the cause by accident, when it is found in a thing which not only is done for some end but has in it free will and election, is then called Fortune; as is the finding a treasure while one is digging a hole to plant a tree…” (Volume 3, Essays and Miscellenies)

The example is, as any good Derridean would expect, mysteriously influential on the concept exemplified. Fortune (for Plutarch, tyche) and treasure are bound together through a deal of etymological weather, which is why the beginning of political economic discourse begins by replaying the Plutarchian dramatis personae…

DSK and his fantasies

Freud wrote that the system of the unconscious doesn’t contain a ‘no’. It uses, instead, contradiction to mark a negation – which is why, in dreams, seemingly inconsistent narratives will merrily unfold themselves, making it hard for the dreamer to tell the dream in waking language.

I thought about this watching DSK trying to explain the events of the morning of May 14, 2011 on TF1, where he was interviewed last night by his wife’s friend, newscaster Claire Chazel. The entire interview revolved around a negation: when asked to give his side of what transpired in the thirty some minutes he spent with Nafissa Diallo, DSK came up with no account whatsoever. Instead, he declared that what happened was a ‘moral error’ and that – bizarrely – he was not ‘proud’ of it.

That he was not ‘proud’ of what happened – a phrase he used at least twice – seems to be Strauss Kahn’s attempt to say that he was ashamed of it. But not being proud and being ashamed are, of course, two different things. The idea that something happened for which he had to disclaim ‘pride’ tells us much more about Strauss Kahn’s view of himself as a sexual ‘seducer’ than, perhaps, he might suppose.

Having chosen the famous politician’s strategy of the non-apology apology, Strauss-Kahn went on to heighten the contradictions by claiming that he used no violence and he used no money. In essence, then, what Strauss Kahn is not ‘proud’ of is the story that seems like a very common erotic fantasy. A maid comes to the hotel room, she glimpses Strauss Kahn in his mighty nudity, she swoons with sexual desire, and she offers to suck him off, which he graciously allows until he comes in her mouth, when she spits his semen out.


How plausible is this story? It is about as plausible as a dream. Strauss Kahn himself recognizes this – after telling us that no payment was made, he also tells us that Diallo made the accusations and created the entire storm on account of the fact that she wanted money. Now, of course, in this part of the narrative, we are to believe that as the memory of Strauss Kahn’s irresistible member faded, she decided to charge him with rape to make some money.

What is plausible and what is implausible was one of the great problems around which Aristotle’s Rhetoric turns. The plausible is from the beginning a class instrument – in Aristotle’s terms, it is what seems well to an educated male citizen. That is, to one of the ruling class in the city. And these stories of willing maids and hung males certainly circulate among this class. But outside of that context, the whole story, it seems to me, could be made so wildly implausible by a halfway decent prosecutor that DSK would choke on it in court. I was talking to a friend this morning who thought, after the first five minutes, that DSK did rape Diallo – something he hadn’t thought before – simply because he was the sort of man who got away with jumping women. Perhaps this is true. TF1, however, has done little to cast any light on the subject, and – with a format of questions that never followed up on DSK’s evasions – seems to conspire with his ‘rehabilitation’.
I think that project is fucked from the beginning. I hope so.

on the emotional frontier

Robert I. Levy, in an essay entitled Emotions, Knowing and Culture [1984], proposed two axes for analyzing emotions on the sense making level – that is, not as private experiences, but as experiences that enter into the public domain. On the one hand, he speaks of hyercognition – “Hypercognition involves a kind of shaping, simplifying, selecting, and standardizing, a familiar function of cultural symbols and forms. It involves a kind of making “ordinary” of private understandings.” In contrast to that stands hypocognition – “Hypocognition forces the (first order) understanding into some private mode.” Citing his own work on “sadness” among Tahitians (Levy claims that, while there are words for severe grief and lamentation, there are “no unambiguous terms that represent the concepts of sadness, longing, or loneliness… People would name their condition, where I supposed that [the body signs and] the context called for “sadness” or “depression”, as “feeling troubled” pe’ape’a, the generic term for disturbances, either internal or external;…”) Levy writes that these are some “underschematized emotional domains”, and that these are hypocognized. “One of the consequences of hypocognition is that the felt disturbance, the “troubled feelings,” can be interpreted both by the one who experiences them and by others around him as something other than ‘emotion’. Thus, the troubled feelings that persist too long after the death of a loved one or those that occur after some loss that Tahitian ideology holds to be trivial and easily replaceable are in the village often interpreted as illness or as the harmful effects of a spirit.”

Levy’s idea has not, unfortunately, been taken up by intellectual historians. Perhaps this is because one thinks, still, of emotion as being a very intimate and incommunicable state of feeling, which, though perhaps aroused by an external incident, is wholly enveloped within the individual self, much as a tooth ache is felt by the possessor of the tooth and not by the dentist who pulls it. But the affections are not spontaneously invented within us, even if they are, of course, neurologically guided. In fact, one would expect that the kind of epistemic and social ruptures that are thought to constitute the great transformation within the Occident – defined as capitalism, or the industrial or scientific revolution, or the emergence of new encompassing institutions – should present situations that evoke feelings that are ‘underschematized’.

It is an oddity of the work of Foucault, and of his followers, that though Foucault was very clear about the kind of epistemic rupture that he dates, approximately, to the late 18th and early 19th century, the rupture is not witnessed. On his account, it happens in a sense without any contemporary realizing it. I call this odd in that Foucault thought that he, on the contrary, could very well recognize the ‘end of man’ and the shifts that signaled another epistemic rupture. If we suppose that such things could be witnessed, perhaps the witnesses would struggle with hypo-cognition – perhaps they would not be able to interpret their feelings about what they witnessed, about the new thoughts they thought. Suppose, suppose. We are not, I think, looking for total witnesses, but instead searching for partial testimonies. Testimonies of those who were something like affective pioneers. Among whom I would put Rousseau.

Perhaps the enormous influence of Rousseau in the French revolution and in the late Enlightenment owes something to the obscure sense that Rousseau was not only a 'thinker', but he was a sort of witness to what had grown up within the old order as it began to fail affectually - he articulated a certain collective problematic of articulation, in which a connected system of new ways of living sought a schema in which to feel. The feeling about things is not a given: nor are the people of Europe or the "West" magically equipped with an all embracing set of affective categories that they can wrap around the world. The total social fact of collective feeling is not an unchanging universal, although the form in which it works is to make it feel like a universal. 

Adventure revisted

A post constructed from two former posts. If you look up the sociological work done on adventure, you will soon find that there is little or none. Astonishingly, it seems to hold no interest, in itself, for the sociologist. With one exception – a classic essay by Simmel. When, otherwise, the subject comes up, the sociologist views adventure in the same spirit as the tourist agency: as a category in the leisure field, requiring a guide, hotel accomodations, showers at the end of it, cameras, and flights to and fro. This is all the more astonishing in that adventurers certainly have existed. Adventurers brought down the Inca empire. Adventurers founded the Jamestown colony. Legitimists called Napoleon an adventurer for good reason – the same thing could be said for Garibaldi. So why the lack of interest? Perhaps it is because adventure, from the serious social science point of view, seems to have the irritating ability to turn the monumental into the ludicrous: it is continually shaking hands with the Commandantore. And, for the social scientist, there is a line: the truth must, in the end, be serious. It simply can’t be ludicrous. That would be an insult to all the founding positivist family. The adventurer, the politician, the artist, the scholar/virtuoso – they are all types that appear in the Renaissance. They are related insofar as they all have complex and conflicting relationships with the system of patronage. Of them all, the adventurer is the hardest, perhaps, to grasp, since it is difficult to say just what his object is. The politician aims at power, the artist at art, the virtuoso at knowledge, and the adventurer at experience – yet that seems much too vast and vague an object (although why it is vaster and vaguer than knowledge or power is a good question). Michael Nerlich, a literary critic, observes in The Ideology of Adventure that adventure is first used as an economic term: "Godfrey's selection of examples of aventure in his Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue francaise is, to be sure, one-sided, but it is of particular interest to us because his examples are almost exclusively of legal or economic meanings, with the first examples going all the way back to the late thirteenth century. Alongside the meaning of “output, earnings, income” ... the word aventure also occurs with the meaning of ‘catch, booty or harvest...” And later ... “Despite all the theories about ‘eventus, etc., I believe that this is the original meaning, sicne it is difficult to see why an ad-ventura would have had to be invented when eventus already covered the meaning.” Nechlin gives us this meaning with the note that it is controversial, and seems to infuriate some medievalists, who do not like the idea that the adventure of the knight on his quest is a thing of booty. In the same way, Kierkegaard strenuously objects to Moliere’s Dom Juan being endebted – dealing with money is, to Kierkegaard, a fall from the infinite adventure of seduction. Simmel’s essay on adventure begins by considering the “double-sidedness” of events in a life. On the one hand, events fall into a pattern in relationship to one another, so that one can talk of a life as a whole and mean a unified thing – on the other hand, events have their own center of gravity, and can be defined in terms of their own potential for pleasure or pain. To use an example not mentioned by Simmel, but getting at what he means: Famously, Kant had a regular habit of taking a certain stroll each day in Königsberg. It was famous as a regular habit – it was an example of some craving for order in Kant’s life, which some have read into his work. Now, one walk was, intentionally, much like the other – and yet, they all formed a distinct sub-system in Kant’s life of Kant’s walks. In ordinary life, we often talk about what we are “like”. If I lose, say, my wallet, I may say, I always leave it on the table. In so saying, I’m observing myself anthropologically – this is what the tribe of me is like. It has these rituals, these obsessions, these returning points. At the same time, there are rituals and obsessions I am not so aware of. Let us say I am a woman who continually falls in love with a certain type of man. He is surly, he has issues with his father, he is emotionally needy. How does her radar pick out these men? Of course, the exterior appearance – I like such and such a feature - is easy to account for, but not the similarity of temperament over lovers. Why does the same process happen over and over? In Hoffmann’s story, The Sandman – the story that Freud used as the template of the unheimlich, the uncanny – this automatism goes so far that the hero actually falls in love with an automaton, as if some interior routine evoked a counterpart in the world itself. Freud speaks of “fate” in the love life. Of course, fates preside over other things beside the destinies of our dicks and pussies. La Bruyere, for instance, outlines the characteristic of a man who is always losing things, bumping into people, misreading signs, mistaking his own house for somebody else's and somebody else's for his own. We might think that this state of confusion, in the extreme, is evidence of some pathological disturbance of the brain. However, there are a number of habits one "falls" into in one's life, resolves not to continue with, and still - falls into again. Simmel speaks of events and their meanings in themselves and in relationship to the whole of life. Which can also move in the other direction: “Events which, regarded in themselves, representing simply their own meaning, may be similar to each other, may be, according to their relationship to the whole of life, extremely divergent.” Simmel’s definition of adventure is on the basis of this relationship of the parts of life to the whole course of life: “When, of two experiences, each of which offer contents that are not so different from one another, one is felt as an adventure, and the other isn’t – so it is that thise difference of relationship to the whole of our live is that by which the one accrues this meaning that is denied to the other. And this is really the form of adventure on the most general level: that it falls out of the connections of life.” That falling out of the Zusammenhange – the “hanging together” of our life isn’t to be confused, according to Simmel, with all unusual events. One shouldn’t confuse the odd moment with the adventure. Rather, adventure stands against the whole grain of our life. There is a thread that spans our lives – Simmel uses a vocabulary that returns us to the “spinning” of the fates – and unifies it. Adventure follows a different course: While it falls out of the connections of our life, it falls – as will be gradually explained – at the same time, with this movement, back inot it, a foreign body [ein Fremdkörper]in our existence, which yet is somehow bound up with the center. The exterior part [Ausserhalb] is, if even on a great and unusual detour, a form of the inner part. [Innerhalb] As always in Simmel, there is a lot of sexy suggestion here, which clouds one’s questions – especially about the latent conflict between a thread spanning a life and a center. One recognizes the logic of the supplement here – an excess in affirming a proposition has the effect of making it less clear, rather than more clear. Simmel’s ‘proof’ of this theory about adventure is that, when we remember these mutations in our life, they seem dreamlike. Why would the memory set up an equivalence, as it were, between a dream and an adventure? Because it is responding to the logic of the exterior/interior binary. Dreams, which are so exterior to our waking life that we cannot see them as playing any causal role in that life, are so interior that we share them with nobody else. Introjected – Melanie Klein’s word – wasn’t available in 1912 for Simmel, but something similar is going on. “The more “adventurous” an adventure is, the more purely it satisfies its concept, the “dreamier” it becomes in our memory. And so far does it often distance itself from the central point of the I and the course of the whole of life consolidated around it, that it is easy to think of an adventure as if somebody else had experienced it.” These traits – which are expressed, Simmel says, in the sharpness of beginning and ending which defines the adventures in our life, as opposed to other episodes – make adventures an “island” in our life. These traits too call up another in the chain of signifiers that are suggested by the dream – that is, the artwork. Adventurers are like artists in that the adventure, like the artwork, lies both outside of and deep within the whole of a life. It lies outside of and deep within from the perspective of memory – while the perspective that unfolds during the course of the adventure is one of presentness – this is why the adventurer is deeply “unhistoric”. That present is neither caused by the past nor oriented towards the future. To illustrate this, Simmel uses the example of Casanova. What he says should be put in relationship to Moliere’s Dom Juan, who, as I have pointed out, was always proposing marriage – to propose marriage was his compulsion, as he explains it to Sganarelle, just as Alexander the Great’s was conquest. A reading of the play, like Kierkegaard’s, that regards the marriage mania as a mask for the real seduction underneath takes the conjunction of marriage and seduction too easily. This is Simmel on Casanova: “An extremely characteristic testimony to this [the lack of a sense of the future] is what Casanova, as can be seen in his memoirs, so oftin in the course of his erotic adventurous life seriously aimed at – to marry the woman of the momen he loved. By his disposition and way of life, there was nothing more contradictory, nothing more innerly and outerly unthinkable for Casanova. Casanova was not only a notable knower of men, but was maifestly a rare knower of himself; and though he was obliged to say that he couldn’t have held out in a marriage more than fourteen days, and that the most miserable consequences would inevitably attend this step – the intoxication of the moment so caught him up (by which I mean to lay more emphasis on the moment than the intoxication) that it swallowed up the future perspective, so to speak, hide and hair.”

Totalization and me

There are a number of theories that account for and explain modernization. All tend to isolate modernization in opposition to the pre-modern, traditional or ‘natural’ social arrangements, and one can see why: to understand an object or process, one must isolate it, however artificially, in order to focus upon it and analyze it. However, the work of isolation and focus has often been reified and projected upon modernization itself, as though the old order – however one describes it – is simply swept away, as though the epistemologically clarifying gesture reflects the totalizing character of modernity. This is not to say that modernity doesn’t strive towards being the total social fact that characterizes all societies locked in the universal history of capitalism. The institutional circles of the law, money, and education, which Simmel – to an extent – saw in the Philosophy of money, or – to name three other less institutionally bound signifies - industrialization, politicization and science, which form another total complex, touch everyone – even the lost tribe, the isolato. Above all our heads is the Van Allen belt. Within our bloodstreams there is plentiful testimony to the artificial paradise we have produced. But within our dreams and our gossip there are other murkier currents, there are pre-modern reflexes. Superstition rules the stock market, and favors, turn taking, and oddly earmarked symbols are traded between workers in the most rational of office spaces, where the halogen lighting creates its uniform zones of visibility and computer screens are monitored and monitor all actors. The great and little traditions – to use James C.Scott’s categories – do battle, or uneasily lay down one next to the other, not only in peasant tilled fields, but in the traffic jam and the service economy. .

token time in the moronic inferno

There’s a passage in Control, John A. Mills history of behavioralism in America, that strikes me as a key to American capitalism as it goes through the autoimmune disorder that is so rapidly destroying the middle class.



Because behavioralism did not have a place for the mind, it was very dependent on experiments on animals, where one could supposedly see everything – such as the rats in the maze work that was so popular in American universities from the 30s until the 70s. It is from work with chimpanzees, according to Mills, that token economics developed into the ultimate control:



“Lindsley also conducted a study with Azrin on the effects of reinforcement on cooperation between children.47 They reported that cooperative behavior could be conditioned and extinguished without any verbal instruction regarding the tasks from the experimenters. Thus their study suggested that cooperation could be learned for the sake of reward, without recourse to

more complex explanations of the behavior.



Operant principles found their most ample application in token

economies. Token economies are staff-operated operant systems in

which the delivery of tokens controls the target population’s actions;

these economies are designed for use in institutional settings such as

mental hospitals, institutions for the mentally retarded, and schools.48

Versions of token economies were also used in jails. These systems

broke new ground in that the principles of behavioral science were applied

directly to nonlaboratory situations. As Kazdin commented, “it

is especially important to single out token reinforcement because it

has permitted a larger extension of programs than ordinarily is the

case with type [sic] of reinforcing events.”49 In institutions tokens are

awarded for the performance of basic social tasks, such as getting

dressed or helping to keep the ward tidy. In schools the usual “target behaviors” are the maintenance of an acceptable level of academic

performance or maintaining acceptable social behavior. Tokens can be

used to buy desirable items (e.g., cigarettes in mental hospitals) or to

gain access to social privileges (e.g., going to the cinema or gaining a

day pass in a mental hospital). Token economies provide us with a

paradigm for studying the role of operant reinforcement in the institution

and maintenance of acceptable patterns of social behavior.”



It is instructive to see the parallel between token economics and the Reagonomics/Neo-Keynesian paradigm under which the developed world has learned to accept the most absurd wealth inequalities and a lifestyle of decreasing reward for labor and increasing reward for shopping. In the world in which credit cards replace pay increases and zero down enters the bloodstream like the wickedest bit of cholesterol (was that your mortgage blowing up or a heart attack?), we are their chimps - in this moronic inferno, we have learned to keep the wards sparkly so long as we get a discount on the cell phone, plus some future flyer miles. The prob only really comes to a head when the scientists disband the lab, or the financial welfare queens disband some economy. Then all the tokens are worthless, because all the chimps have been guilty guilty guilty – in the eyes of the bond trader. Who, as is well known, is the only prophet we have left.

Two cheers for industrial policy!

Jon Gertner’s NYT mag piece on Manufacturing and (oh so scary!) industrial policy gets it. And, incidentally, it summarizes the guru of Obamanomics, ‘neo-liberal’ Larry Summers, rather beautifully:

“As the former White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers put it, America’s role is to feed a global economy that’s increasingly based on knowledge and services rather than on making stuff.”

Jargon over objects, this is the echt neo-liberal style. Gertner doesn’t reference the source, but I imagine it was the Lizza piece on Summers in the New Yorker that contained all the information you needed to know that Obama’s administration was set on fail, two years ago. The funniest remark of the Obama four year term so far came in this article from Summers:

“Summers was equally doubtful of the idea that fairness required the government to bail out every struggling industry. He said, “The point that some of you made is one that, frankly, a number of the President’s more political advisers make with great frequency: how could you lend money to the big banks in New York and not lend money to regular folk who are employing a hundred people and are losing a hundred jobs?” But, he said, “just like occasionally in war there are unintended benefits, occasionally in bailouts there are unintended beneficiaries.” The bank bailouts, which, he noted several times, began under President Bush, “were directed at preventing a collapse that would have led millions of people to be out of work, not as support for those institutions.”



But to get to crowning Gertner’s article with a few laurel wreaths.

I liked how this article seems to get it. The manufacturing economy isn't "modular", but full of network affects. It is a root system, not a haphazard pile of building blocks. When you ship the manufacturing of an industry to another country, contra Larry Summers, you are shipping knowledge, you are shipping the increasing return on investment that comes with every next step in the industry. Not understanding this one bit, the economists as advisors and the political elite have truly helped bring the U.S. to this point of exhaustion. And they will continue, blindly, to work against the interests of the majority, because it is in the interest of the one sector that does hire economists - the financial sector. Notice that 60 percent of scientists and engineers are employed in the manufacturing sector, and notice that these aren't fake engineers - financial 'engineers". So far, the financial industry has been so successful that the trillions 'loaned' to it hasn't even emerged as an issue in the public space - because newspapers won't report on it (the GAO report on the Fed didn't even break into the back pages of the NYT) and the economists who reporters call up for the 'expert' quote are quite proud of themselves for managing to keep us from a 'depression'.


I liked the fact that the NYT mag piece didn't spend much time quoting any economists. In Lizza’s piece on Obama’s economic team in 2009, you could almost hear the disdain in Summers’ voice for the phrase “industrial policy.” How Un-Hayekian! How cruel to put impediments in the way of creative destruction!
Economists have the same view of the people who make ‘stuff’ as bug spray manufacturers have of bugs. They know enough about the way the bug’s nervous system works to get rid of em. But if you want to know how bugs really evolve, live, and reproduce, go to an entomologist. Obama hired Raid, when he shoulda been hiring Edward O. Wilson.

A Better novel than Anna Karenina

From LI, 2004




We would never have read La Regenta or heard of it if we didn’t have a habit of trolling the aisles of libraries, our shoulders hunched up like that of an old crow, dreamily pulling tomes off the shelf and looking at first paragraphs, blurbs, pictures of authors, etc. etc. Years ago, when we came upon La Regenta, we were in the mood for a long 19th century novel. At that time, believe it or not, we were living in utter poverty (gasp!), renting a room for a pittance from our friend H. That La Regenta was a long novel was all the reason we needed to check it out and take it home. We have a lovely memory of reading the book in great big gulps: a reel of reading, a continuum, a glide down a slide. We immediately grouped the heroine, Ana Ozores, with Nana in terms of overpowering sexiness. But Clarin, unlike Zola, was not in the habit of drooling over his heroine. In fact, Anna is quite intelligent; Nana merely has the intelligence God would have given to any more than usually shrewd member of the 19th century demi-monde. Purge the odor of sex around Nana, and you have an operator, a nineteenth century capitalist of her own extraordinary pussy, whose vital instincts have merged with the utilitarian calculus preferred by the laissez faire economists of the time in much the way any captain of industry’s did. Her industry was orgasm, Carnegie’s was steel. Same diff.



We recently decided to treat ourselves to the novel once again.



The edition we are reading was put out by University of Georgia Press. Warning: it carries a completely bogus introduction by the translator, John Rutherford. The innocent reader, stumbling into the intro, might flee from the book entirely to escape the babbitry in which Rutherford so abounds. After congratulating Leopoldo Alas, aka Clarin, for having anticipated Freud (it was the fashion, back in the sixties and seventies, to take anything anyone said about sex before Freud to be valuable insofar as it anticipated Freud, or quaint insofar as it disagreed with him – Freud being to sex what Edison was to illumination), Rutherford reaches the very zenith of platitudes with the following sentence: ‘But thanks to its universal themes, psychological insight and technical boldness, it [the novel] has proved itself to be worthy of the attention of modern men and women.’



Oh, what bliss, to be worthy of the attention of modern men and women! The heart sings like a robin… A poisoned robin.



Too much of that kind of thing makes one wonder if the translation is going to be any good. Ignorant of Spanish, we can’t vouch for its accuracy – but it achieves a consistent tone well above the introduction’s heady sampling of Rutherfordism. And there aren’t big mistakes in the English – a state of affairs that is rare, nowadays. It is amazing, the carelessness of publishers who publish translations. This is a subject we have had plenty of reviewing experience of. Ça suffit…



We are happy to note that we still hold to our original judgment, when we finished the novel way back in the dreamtime: La Regenta kicks Anna Karenina’s ass.



The only way to justify this would be to go through the novel at much greater length than we have time for. Instead, let’s excerpt a paragraph.



Here’s the context. Ana Ozores is the daughter of an Italian dressmaker and a petty liberal aristocrat. The seamstress dies, the petty liberal aristocrat gives himself over to the struggle to remake Spain, and then retires in disgust in a small bungalow, having shot his inherited wad. On his death, Ana, who is a scrawny teen in the throes of her first menses, is taken in by her two spinster aunts in Vetusta, a backwards cathedral town. Her aunts intentionally “plump” Anna up – and she cooperates, realizing that her aunts want to make her “eligible.” Since she doesn’t have money, her ‘eligibility’ will have to consist of her blue blood – mention of the dressmaker is under strict rature – and her beauty, which in due time blossoms. Anna is one of those 19th century beauties – poitrine a la Nana, haunches like J-Lo. That Ana has a knack for writing is discovered by the aunts, and firmly suppressed as a vice. And so the aunts put her on the market, so to speak. They catch a millionaire, an ‘American’ who has returned to Vetusta and wants to buy the biggest house and the town beauty. Ana refuses. She is being courted, at this time, by an older man, Don Victor Quintanas. This is the description of her aunt Anuncia’s receiving Ana’s refusal of the millionaire. The scene is set in the dining room. There’s a fire in the fire place – otherwise, the room, one presumes, is not illuminated. The aunts have their little ways to save money:



“But Dona Anuncia needed no more to let loose the basilisk of fury which she carried in her bowels. Her shadow, amidst all the other shadows on the wall, at times resembled that of a gigantic witch; at other times, multiplied by the flickering flames and the old woman’s jerks and contortions, it represented all hell let loose. There were moments when Dona Anuncia’s shadow had three heads on the wall and three or four others on the ceiling, and it seemed that screams and shrieks were coming from all of them, so strident were her vociferations.”



Obviously, Alas is fusing, here, a memory of Goya’s Caprichios and a motif out of European folklore to create this scene – but how brilliantly it succeeds! LI has found that arguments are extremely hard to depict in fiction. As any rookie knows, modifications of “said’ are always rather iffy – yelled, vociferated, sarcastically observed, shrieked, cried – the lexicon is there, but the effects fall short of the intensity one wishes to convey, as though one were playing the keys of a piano in which the wires had been cut. The shadow play, here, supplies a context that does everything: merges the economics of marriage to a primal scene of cannibalism; caps the whole extended metaphor of plumping Ana up – a metaphor that creates, on one end, sympathy for a woman who is, after all, simply eating, and on the other end, transforms the cooks into monsters; and finally, it gives us a sense of just how close Anna is to that soap bubble film separating perception from hallucination. This quality is at the heart of her poetic talent. It is also at the heart of her downfall.



We could go on…



Just one other thing. We’ve mentioned this before – in fact, one of our first posts, back in 01, was about this. The relation between time and suspense in novels has never really been spelled out to our satisfaction. A novel in which a man is depicted borrowing money has installed a timer in its code – the timer is the debt. Time will be measured by the debt coming due. Time spatializes itself in the actions of the indebted man – the axe he finds to get rid of the pawnbroker from whom he has borrowed sums, the marriage he intends with the rich merchant’s daughter, etc., etc. There are all sorts of timers in the novel’s code. Here we see metaphor acting as a timer – the plumping out process has to end, for one thing – Anna can’t become too fat. She has to achieve a healthy avoidupois. For another, since this is a plumping up, the timer is running on the aunts. Eventually, they have to make good on their side of the metaphor – they have to become the monsters that plump up humans, that feed on human flesh. It is an agricultural metaphor, indicating an agricultural original sin – the slaughtering of the fed beast. Since feeding is, after all, a gift, one of the great founding gifts of society, to feed and then to slaughter is a contradiction that sets in motion a whole exculpatory ethic.



We could go on…

harvey golub, welfare queen

On 10 November, 2008, American Express suddenly filed the papers to become a bank holding company. Why? Well, American Express was feeling – as corporations sometimes feel - a bit down. A bit like it was going to collapse. A bit like enjoying extraordinary loans from the American government.

The Fed obliged. The Fed’s rules about loans were a bit different from American Express’s. American Express’s Daily Periodic Rate can be up to 15.9 percent. The Fed’s for its Commercial Paper Funding Facility and its Term Asset Backed Funding Facility was 1 percent or below. The FDIC did its part and extended something called the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. American Express generously decided to save itself; whereas its customers, in the situation that American Express found itself in, would have their cards yanked or its interest rates adjusted upwards, these are evidently the rules in the microsphere for micropeople. The rules in the stratosphere for stratopeople are different. It is thus that AXP became a big welfare entity overnment that it had helped stock, over the years, with bribed and venal officeholders – like the rest of corporate America. AXP weathered the storm triumphantly, with the help of little over 10 to 15 billion dollars from Uncle Sam.

Are we happy about this or what?

Which is the background against which to read the plutocrat’s lament by former American Express CEO Harvey Golub, whose protest against the idea of raising tax rates on the successful – and who can argue with success when it diverts such large sums of money from the Government for the purposes of peculation and hypertrophied CEO compensation packages? – has received much play among the peculators and exploiters

Golub is rather an expert in the field of hypertrophied compensation packages – appointed CEO of AIG after it had become another welfare queen, he left in a huff because the Government in a cosmetic move to assure the micropeople that it was democratic and populist to save a fancypants bucket shop from extinction put a limit on said compensations. This contrasts with how he left American Express in 2000. Having presided over the company during the fat nineties, when every CEO was king (while, surprisingly, every king CEO was raking in bucks from companies that were simply averaging what other companies in their sector earned – almost as if their own personal god-king decisions were not the deciding factor in the prosperity of the enterprises they were picking the fat bits from), Golub left in 2000 with this:

“The American Express Company gave Harvey Golub, its chairman and chief executive, options on 750,000 shares of stock last March, according to a proxy statement filed last week that valued the ''special award'' at $30.9 million. The options raised Mr. Golub's total pay to about $52 million. He got an additional $38 million from exercising other options the company had granted.
A company spokesman said the options rewarded Mr. Golub for a job well done and gave him ''an incentive to stay during the transition.'' Mr. Golub, 60, will give up his job as chief executive to Kenneth I. Chenault, the president, in April 2001, and his chairman's post a year later. Mr. Chenault, 48, received options worth $16.5 million plus stock worth $4.9 million, raising his 1999 pay to about $32 million.

Then, inevitably, this happened in 2001:

“American Express surprised investors yesterday by saying that it would eliminate as many as 5,000 jobs and take more than $1 billion in charges against its earnings by the end of this quarter.

The job cuts would be the biggest that American Express has taken in about a decade and would come on top of the 1,600 jobs American Express has already eliminated this year. They are part of a reorganization of the company's various financial services businesses and will help offset the heavy losses the company sustained from its aggressive investing in junk bonds.

In announcing the changes several days before the company is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings, the chief executive, Kenneth I. Chenault, admitted that the company had misjudged the risks in its $3.5 billion portfolio of junk bonds. He repeatedly told analysts and investors yesterday that the company would take a more conservative approach to investing the money it takes in from selling insurance and investment products.

Mr. Chenault, who succeeded Harvey Golub as chief executive in January, said the costs of the changes it is making would reduce pretax earnings for the quarter that ended in June by $826 million. In addition, the cost of cutting about 5 percent of its jobs will reduce this quarter's pretax profit $310 million to $370 million, he said.

The losses are far larger than analysts had expected. They follow two earlier write-downs of the company's investment portfolio in the last year and some investors sounded angry about the latest disappointment. All told, the company has marked down the value of its junk bonds and some other bonds that it cannot resell by more than $1.1 billion, or about one-fourth of their original value.” NYT 7/19/2001

Evidently, Mr. Golub has that sixth sense that tells him when to head for the door with the family silver. On Wall Street, this makes you a sage. So of course, his screed on the taxes he pays was full of the kind of thing that passes for Conventional Wisdom among the plutocrats and the political elite. Read the tidbits!

“Governments have an obligation to spend our tax money on programs that work. They fail at this fundamental task. Do we really need dozens of retraining programs with no measure of performance or results? Do we really need to spend money on solar panels, windmills and battery-operated cars when we have ample energy supplies in this country? Do we really need all the regulations that put an estimated $2 trillion burden on our economy by raising the price of things we buy? Do we really need subsidies for domestic sugar farmers and ethanol producers?
Why do we require that public projects pay above-market labor costs? Why do we spend billions on trains that no one will ride? Why do we keep post offices open in places no one lives? Why do we subsidize small airports in communities close to larger ones? Why do we pay government workers above-market rates and outlandish benefits? Do we really need an energy department or an education department at all?”

Good questions! I especially like the one about the overcompensated laborers on public projects. From the junk bond king, this was the kind of gall that is almost sweet - it shows not so much hubris as a deepfried stupidity, a selfishness that builds a monument in the soul like a giant pearl, except made out of the material you find in your lower gut.

But I notice that he did not ask: do we really need a Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, a Commercial Paper Funding Facility, or a Term Asset Backed Funding Facility at all? Because after all, a man doesn’t question the things that saved his ass. They simply recede into the background of the gated community, to be used next time the predators lose massive amounts of money.

Mockingbird politics

A. and I went camping this weekend, and I had an (admittedly drunken) talk with one of my bros., who is getting more conservative as he grows older. Sadly, he was the one who was most enthusiastic about Obama when he came in – and he is exactly the type Obama lost with his ‘compromises’ and inability to recognize the cratering of middle class American lifestyles we’ve been witnessing. He’s looking for that fabled beast, the reasonable republican.

Anyway, to my insistence on the fact that political talk shouldn’t be hemmed in by the “we can’t afford it” mantra when in fact the ‘we’ is the bottom 80 percent who owns 25 percent of the wealth, while the “we’ in the top 20 percent, who owns 75 percent of the wealth, is rich as fuck and can definitely afford it, he made a very wise and so far unbeatable reply: “I’ve heard this over and over, but the cost for the social programs don’t come out of the rich. The rich always win. So in the end, they come out of me.”

This is true. And I think it explains much of the vile politics of the Bush-Obama era. You cannot run a New Deal social insurance system while at the same time encouraging a pre-New Deal division of wealth. It just doesn’t work. The reason the mantra of the rich against tax increases works is because, in reality, everybody out there knows that the tax increase, while it might hit the wage class, will spare the wealthy. Meanwhile, the government does all it can to ‘de-regulate” and “privatize”, adding further costs to the wage class and causing streams of money to rise like manna towards the bloodsuckers. Obama’s disastrous administration is simply the logical result of a welfare state that has evolved into a welfare for the rich state. It is getting worse in this “crisis”, not better. It is the first economic crisis, perhaps, since 1848 in which there is no “left” flank – not a single powerful organization or party. Just right flanks, socialist parties adopting Austrian economics, and the like.

According to the polls, the group that Obama has pissed off the least, in the last year, is liberal Democrats. Which does make me wonder why these people consider themselves liberal. I imagine that tattered word now covers a sort of fan base – it isn’t really a political viewpoint at all, but more of a warm feeling towards certain celebrity figures.

At least for people like me, with no stake in the system and no hope for change, this is the moronic inferno of our mockingbird dreams. We mock, because we can’t act.

Looting in the plutocene!

Comparison: an old and reliable enlightenment tool. The philosophes loved the whole idea of comparison, for it seemed to magically produce progress in ideas. Unfortunately, comparison, as the elementary student of dialectics knows, simply fossilizes the embryo idea – leaving it forever in a pre-natal state unless it is vigorously moved forward via the forceps of antithesis and inversion.

However, under the shadow of that dialectic move, comparison still holds a great deal of anarchic power – satirical power. The enlightenment prehended the limits and fate of comparison in the preference given to satire.

To which I want to revert. Let us compare stories of looting.

Here’s one. It comes from the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Bank received 541 billion dollars worth of 1 percent and below loans from the Fed over the past 3 years. Why? Well, the Bank was preserved for all of us, we are told. Or rather, not told – our governors don’t have to tell us these things, they act for our own good. But the fluffers in the news, the bloggers and pundits, and sometimes the economists tell us that this was all for our good.

Oh, that good! So general we can barely feel it. But so specific that we can name whose good was served by the Fed’s kindly action. 9 people in the upper management of RSB, according to this story from 8 March 2011:

“… the nine key staff – including chief executive Stephen Hester – had been handed bonuses for 2010 of £10m in shares with a further £18m in long-term incentive plans that run until 2014 when their exact value will be known.

... The RBS disclosures came just 24 hours after Barclays lifted the lid on the pay deals it makes to its highest earners – handing five of them £110m.

Hester – whose £2m bonus for 2010 was announced last month and will be paid in shares – is receiving an extra £4.5m in stock through the long-term incentive plan on top of his annual bonus and £1.2m salary. This puts him on track for a pay deal of around £7.7m. For 2009 he did not take a bonus but received just over £4m through the long-term share plan.

Finance director Bruce van Saun is receiving £1.3m in shares for his 2010 bonus and a further £2.8m through the long-term incentive plan.

The largest bonus awarded in shares is the £2.5m handed to John Hourican, head of the investment bank. Next week it is likely to emerge that Hourican has received more than that because he is also being paid in the bank's debt – although he is not expected to top the £7.7m that Hester could be handed if he meets all his performance criteria.

American-based Ellen Alemany also emerges as a top earner with a £1.1m bonus in shares and £2.5m of stock awarded through the long-term plan. Nathan Bostock, who runs the parts of the bank being shut down or sold off, gets £637,000 in shares for his 2010 bonus and £2m through the long-term plan. Brian Hartzer, who runs the retail bank, had £600,000 awarded in shares for 2010 and £1.9m in the long-term plan.

The 2010 awards are coming from the £950m payout pool agreed with UK Financial Investments, which controls the taxpayer's 83% stake in the bank, at the time of the Project Merlin deal.

The Merlin deal requires the pay of the five highest earners reporting to the chief executive to be announced and RBS is expected to make those disclosures next week. The nine included in Tuesday's announcement are expected to be among them.”

And then there is the story of the looting that occurred on the streets of London and Liverpool and other cities in the UK. Disgraceful! It must have been considerable, as there are 1,000 people going to jail for it. So what are the figures we are talking about?

“In Bristol police released dramatic footage of a jewellery shop being looted in the city centre, and still images of 17 alleged rioters taken on Monday night, and urged the public to name them. The videos from CCTV systems in the Cabot Circus shopping centre capture a group of at least 10 men, women and youths, some on bikes, breaking through the window of the Thomas Sabo jewellery shop where thousands of pounds of goods was stolen.”

“It has been estimated that the UK riots thus far have cost high street retailers around £80m in lost sales. High value shops like HMV, GAME and Comet were all the targets of looting.”

"...Carter, of James Street, Salford, was caught in King Street, Manchester, with a bag of clothes and shoes worth £500. He was sentenced to 16 months in jail for theft by finding.

The maximum sentence of six months in jail that lower courts can hand out was deemed not to be enough by magistrates.

A fourth person to be sentenced on Tuesday was Linda Boyd, 31, who received a 10-month suspended jail sentence. She was also handed an 18-month supervision order.

The court heard Boyd, of Acomb Street, Moss Side, was found by a police officer with a bag full of cigarettes and alcohol, so heavy she could not carry it.

In all, the looting carried out over three nights in the UK amounts to not even a single day of borrowing from TALF by Royal Scotland – amounts, in fact, to about an hour of borrowing. I find the numbers interesting. I find the proportion
interesting. I find it interesting to compare the danger to society of Ms Boyd, of Acomb street, with her bag of looted cigs, and the danger to society posed by Ms. Ellen Alemany, with her bag of £1.1m bonus in shares and £2.5m of stock. However, the stock and shares were never so vulgar as to be materialized as something you put in a bag – Ms. Boyd’s big mistake.

Now, Ms. Ellen Alemany sounds like a nice enough person, unlike the vile cig smoking Ms. Boyd. Daughter of a liquor store owner. Making her way to the top by hard work, no doubt. After carrying off her swag from RSB, she was given an honorary degree from a Rhode Island college in May of this year: PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Ellen Alemany, Head of RBS Americas and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Citizens Financial Group, Inc. has been named an Honorary Doctor of Business Administration at Bryant University. This honorary degree was presented at the school’s undergraduate commencement on May 21, 2011.

“I am honored by this degree from Bryant University, one of Rhode Island’s great institutions” In its citation, the University commended Ms. Alemany as someone “who in both her personal and professional life exemplifies what being excellent in the world of commerce means. At a time when many financial institutions and their leaders have failed to merit public scrutiny and approval, you make it a point to be worthy of the trust of your customers, employees, and your leadership team.
“Those who are familiar with you say that even before the financial crisis you were thought of as an authentic banker—a person with an unending commitment to excellence and accountability. To this end, you re-launched the corporate campaign, GOOD BANKING IS GOOD CITIZENSHIP, reminding us all why banks exist and the critical role they play in fostering growth and prosperity, that in a most essential way they are meant to serve the communities where they exist. Indeed, good citizenship for you is embedded not just in the name of your company, you see to it that it is rooted in your daily corporate culture.”

“I am honored by this degree from Bryant University, one of Rhode Island’s great institutions,” Ellen Alemany said. “This is a special time for the Class of 2011 and I was proud to be a part of Commencement as this year’s graduates prepared to leave Smithfield for the careers and the life journey for which Bryant has prepared them so well.”

Strangely enough, the honorary award said not word one about the fact that Ms. Alemany was part of the group who presided over one of the UK’s great Bank collapses, albeit as head of an American subsidiary. But bygones are bygones – save when you are caught after a riot with a bagful of cigs. Then it is six months for you, and eviction from public housing.

Perhaps our Bryant University friends are merciful Christians of the type that can overlook women without bags of cigs and alcohol, but stuff up the bungus with stock and shares. Let's roll the tape back to distant 2008, when this happened:


“No comment at the weekend from ROYAL Bank of Scotland officials on reports that its American subsidiary Citizens Financial Group was under investigation by the US regulator for deleting e-mail records vital to an investigation into the mis-selling of financial products to the elderly.

Two New England newspapers reported last week that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was involved in an investigation by the Massachusetts state regulator for the alleged "unethical and dishonest conduct" in selling variable annuities.

These are tax-deferred investments that provide periodic payments to investors. They are considered inappropriate for elderly investors as their value rises or falls with the underlying investments, usually stock or bond mutual funds. Gaining access to the fund carries a hefty surcharge.

Citizens chairman Larry Fish, who earned £2.3 million last year and whose multi-million dollar "secret" bonus scheme was attacked at the RBS annual meeting in Edinburgh in April, has defended Citizens Financial as "an ethical entity", but has refused to comment on the details of the state investigation, or whether the SEC was involved.

Massachusetts secretary of state William Galvin accused the bank of not co-operating with the inquiry.

The Massachusetts Securities Division, which regulates banks in neighbouring Rhode Island, where Citizens Financial is based, lodged a complaint against its brokerage arm, accusing it of failing to preserve e-mail crucial to the variable annuities inquiry.

The complaint said Citizens "failed to preserve e-mail communications related to its business as a broker-dealer, despite having an affirmative obligation to do so". The lost e-mail has "substantially and severely impeded" the investigation into the sales of variable annuity investments to elderly customers, Galvin's office said.

It had filed an earlier complaint in February, accusing Citizens of violating securities laws in connection with variable annuity sales.”

I think it all comes down to weight, doanit? For our governors, the weight of deleted emails (zero!) must be balanced against a bag of looted stimulants (which our lootress can barely carry!). Thus, off to the clink with the one, and off to the honorary degree ceremony with the other. And thus the wheels of justice grind, and the grinders simply hope never to be caught under them. Build those gated communities high! Anyone who, in fact, advocates that the grinders feel a bit of justice gets kicked straight off Facebook and five years in a cell for em!

The plutocratic riot has been televised. Nobody cared. It will, of course, destroy your lifestyle and your children's, but don’t get mad at our gentle kleptocrats! For Look! A vicious looter in a hoodie!

Table 8- our Hoover Dam!

The news is full of pundits worrying and stories tutting about our swollen entitlements culture. Our middle class leaches. Our wage class deadbeats. The news is full of stories about how the government is going bust providing a safety net to the poorest, who incidentally, don’t appreciate it at all and smoke dope.

The news is not full of the greatest safety net ever devised. It is as if we are hiding our light under a basket! What the Hoover Dam was to the culture of the thirties, Table 8 of the GAO report on the Fed is to the culture of the 00s. We should be proud of our men in blue (suits), whose hands no doubt were stricken with carpal tunnel aches and pains as they shoveled money into the pockets of the wealthiest.

Here’s table 8.

Table 8: Institutions with Largest Total Transaction Amounts (Not Term-Adjusted) across Broad-Based Emergency Programs
(Borrowing Aggregated by Parent Company and Includes Sponsored ABCP Conduits), December 1, 2007 through July 21,
2010
Dollar in billions
Borrowing Parent Company TAF PDCF TSLF CPFF Subtotal AMLF TALF Total loans
Citigroup Inc. $110 $2,020 $348 $33 $2,511 $1 - $ 2,513
Morgan Stanley - 1,913 115 4 2,032 - 9 2,041
Merrill Lynch & Co. 0 1,775 166 8 1,949 - - 1,949
Bank of America Corp 280 947 101 15 1,342 2 - 1,344
Barclays PLC (Uk) 232 410 187 39 868 - - 868
Bear Stearns Co. - 851 2 - 853 - - 853
Goldman Sachs - 589 225 0 814 - - 814
Royal BankScotland 212 - 291 39 541 - - 541
Deutsche Bank AG (Germany) 77 1 277 - 354 - - 354
UBS AG (Switzerland) 56 35 122 75 287 - - 287
JP Morgan Chase & Co. 99 112 68 - 279 111 - 391
Credit Suisse Group AG (Switzerland) 0 2 261 - 262 0 - 262
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. - 83 99 - 183 - - 183
Bank of Scotland PLC (United Kingdom) 181 - - - 181 - - 181
BNP Paribas SA (France) 64 66 41 3 175 - - 175
Wells Fargo & Co. 159 - - - 159 - - 159
Dexia SA (Belgium) 105 - - 53 159 - - 159
Wachovia Corporation 142 - - - 142 - - 142
Dresdner Bank AG (Germany) 123 0 1 10 135 - - 135
Societe Generale SA (France) 124 - - - 124 - - 124
All other borrowers 1,854 146 14 460 2,475 103 62 2,639
Total $3,818 $8,951 $2,319 $738 $15,826 $217 $71 $16,115

irresponsible socialism: now more than ever!

I left the following rather mild comment on an economics site about “WHAT SHOULD BE DONE”, thee Chernyshevsky caps included : “Hike the capital gains tax to 39 percent, Start separate tax categories for the individuals making more than 400 thou and more than a million thou per year and bring their marginal rates back to pre-Reagan levels. Remember, spending is great. It is what the gov. should do. And it should do it without the keynesian mumbo jumbo, which is a political stupidity. Instead of a stimulus, a patchwork of government spending justified, each piece, by the product or service it will bring. This is where economists, who live in a world of aggregates, have no psychological feel for the way the voter thinks at all. To call it a stimulus was from the beginning an idiocy. But spending on infrastructure, spending on research, taking over some banks and backing massive, trillion dollar loans to the middle class - that is an idea whose time is still here.”



In reply, I was told, as I often am told, that I am a socialist. I have no business experience. I am one of those people who have the attitude of all take and no give. I am one of those people who say about our massive deficit that it should be paid by “anyone but me.”



This rather charmed me. Anyone but me is an excellent guide to our current crisis. Firstly, of course, one should refute the nonsense that businesses live on the Responsible Me principle. In fact, capitalist enterprise in our epoch is founded wholly on anyone but me. This is standard practice - one always tries to offload costs. Ask the oil companies who cleans up after they cut canals through bayou country and the swamps start to salinize. Anyone but me. Ask the power companies who should pay for the enormous costs of nuclear accidents. Anyone but me. Ask the banks who should pay for trillion dollar mistakes in trick investing involving useless financial instruments. Anyone but me. Anyone but me is the principle of the top 1 percent income bracket.


Luckily, that bracket makes enough that whacking them with taxes will not diminish their life styles in any noticeable way. Their healthcare will be excellent, their vacations will be primo, their children will go to the best schools, etc. Money, at a certain point, is all about power. And power is there to ensure that the anyone but me ideology works every time there is an oopsy moment. It is, in other words, insurance against the supposed 'Darwinism' of capitalism.

After the GAO report on the 16 trillion - trillion - dollars in 'emergency loans', at emergency interest rates of less than one percent, hat floated the entire investor class over the last three years, I would think that there'd be a certain shame about pretending that us 'socialists' know nothing about business. We do - we just don't know how to do socialism. The wealthy, however, have perfected that art. It is time to learn from them.