Masterpieces of Conservative Intuition: Duchamp's Urinal

Alain Badiou talks somewhere, quite grandly, about art; a theory to art to which he does not subscribe, in which art appears as something like "the condescension of the infinite into the material abjection of the body."

There are many good reasons to talk about art. It's pleasant to discuss pleasant things. It can be a way of obliquely discussing political questions, since the distinctions between ethics and aesthetics are somewhat indefinite. Also there is a great deal of money sloshing around unrestrained by dreary market imperatives.

It is perhaps not Professor Badiou's intention here to be working through an explicit critique of political conservatism.

The infinite is certainly a category of the postmodern political aesthetic. In employing such figures such as "the statistical mysteries of GNP" one suggests the real abstraction of things; infinite displacement. But this way of looking at the world is prefigured by more ancient ideas, those of modern and precapitalist conservatism.

Conservatism has an afiliation with theology. It is nonetheless fundamentally pragmatic and emotional. Its basis is something like the idea that human institutions are justified by a series of validating operations tending to infinity. This perpective is, or ought to be, underwritten by the relatively static nature of the society in which it subsists. Several strands of distinctively modern ideology depend to an extent on the same feeling, notably evolutionary biology and political economy.



Having carefully studied Duchamp's urinal, not to mention the theoretical articles supporting it in The Blind Man, it is hard not to be convinced that the opinion of many art-school professionals, who assert that this work expresses Duchamp's personal lyricism, and that whatever such a remarkable individual designates as art is so, is not only wrong, but expresses prejudices comparable to those Duchamp attacks. The affective basis of Duchamp's work is, clearly, the conflation of the conservative paradigm, where an institution is validated retroactively irrespective of its practical usefulness (as a thing detached from its circumstances, such detachment being unacceptable), and an object of no practical usefulness as art (though with undeniable practical usefulness in itself, as Hegel was fond of saying). This is a deconstruction of conservatism, and it's odd to find it discussed in a way that conforms to the tenets of this same conservatism.

The conservative instinct is, however, very strong, meshing as it does with material interests, and can be expected to cling tenaciously to the bottle-rack and the bicycle-wheel.

Introduction to Liberalism

At a meeting in 1975, Margaret Thatcher reached into her briefcase and pulled out a book. According to John Ranelagh in Thatcher's People, she held the book up for all of us to see - This, she said sternly, is what we believe, and she banged the book down on the table. The book was The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek.

How much credence to give this attachment to Hayek's letters. These are the parts of an ideology. They aren't purely a banal set of instructions, an instruction manual. And yet this couldn't be just anything.

We have interests and seek to defend them. It helps for there to be a coherent narrative threading together the various moments through which power is manifested. And yet it's likely that these ideas have a degree of autonomy beyond that of cynical post hoc justification. This ought to be demonstrable empirically.

Iain Boal and Michael Watts write in a review of David Harvey's book about neoliberalism that:

"neoliberalism" should be approached – could this possibly come as a surprise to a Marxist? – as an ideology. Any adequate account of its rise to hegemony should not assume a pure body of neoliberal theory "lurking in the wings" of history, as Harvey has it. Rather it has to begin from the premiss of a contested discursive field among whose keywords are "freedom", "market", "private property".

This point is confirmed, quite starkly in the Joseph Stiglitz exposé in last week's Guardian:

I ask what discoveries Stiglitz found the most disturbing. He laughs, somewhat mirthlessly. "There were actually so many things - some of it we suspected, but there were a few things I couldn't believe." The fact that a contractor working as a security guard gets about $400,000 a year, for example, as opposed to a soldier, who might get about $40,000. That there is a discrepancy we might have guessed - but not its sheer scale, or the fact that, because it is so hard to get insurance for working in Iraq, the government pays the premiums; or the fact that, if these contractors are injured or killed, the government pays both death and injury benefits on top. Understandably, this has forced a rise in sign-up bonuses (as has the fact that the army is so desperate for recruits that it is signing up convicted felons). "So we create a competition for ourselves. Nobody in their right mind would have done that. The Bush administration did that ... that I couldn't believe. And that's not included in the cost the government talks about."

Then there was the discovery that sign-up bonuses come with conditions: a soldier injured in the first month, for example, has to pay it back. Or the fact that "the troops, for understandable reasons, are made responsible for their equipment. You lose your helmet, you have to pay. If you get blown up and you lose your helmet, they still bill you." One soldier was sued for $12,000 even though he had suffered massive brain damage. Some families have had to buy their children body armour, saving the government costs in the short term; those too poor to afford it sustain injuries that the government then has to pay for. Then there's the fact that it was not until 2006, when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defence, that the DOD agreed to replace Humvees with mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armoured vehicles, which are much more able to repel roadside bombs; until that time, IEDs killed 1,500 Americans. "This kind of penny-wise, pound-poor behaviour was just unbelievable."

Yet on another level, Stiglitz is unsurprised, because such decisions are of a piece with the thoroughgoing intellectual inconsistency of the Bush administration. The general approach, he says, has been a "pastiche of corporate bail-outs, corporate welfare, and free-market economics that is not based on any consistent set of ideas. And this particular kind of pastiche actually contributed to the failures in Iraq." There are the well-rehearsed reasons: ignoring international democratic processes while advocating democracy; pushing forward liberalisation before Iraq was ready. Stiglitz's twist on this was the emails he was receiving from the United States Agency for International Development, complaining about the Treasury being obstructive. "They were saying, 'Can you help us? Because we're trying to get businesses to work, but the US Treasury is trying to tighten credit, so there's no money in this country.' "

It's probably fair to judge the liberals in these circles, the “free market people”, as the progressive element, or at least as the less anti-progressive. But I don't think the course of human freedom is going to be set back by looking at these things.

Britney Spears: Curious

(Sibel Edmonds comparison here)

Kosovo's alleged "population bomb"

Population 000s	Albania	Kosovo	Morocco	Philippines
1971	2189	1244	15711	37602
1991	3299	1956	25039	62538
Increase%	51	57	59	66

Statistics off the internet. Countries from faostat. Kosovo statistics from Yugoslav official statistics.

no future

Colonel Chabert certainly had some strong opinions about Mark K-Punk and his writing. Could part of it just be the Punk thing?

I remember growing up the kind of disdain working people had for the eight years out of date punk scene. Truly it was more loathing than disquietude. It was especially adressed to this one punk who wandered round the shopping centre with a child's swing chained to his jeans. Many drank. At this time cheap supermarket lager made it feasible to drink outdoors in the afternoon. There was also a glue panic. I was more into BMX. A playground marked up with sex pistols graffiti yet generated a sense of menace, both seductive and repellant, of the sort ruined by actually listening, years later, to the tedious sex pistols records.

Anyway, I think the line of argument borrowed from Dr Žižek in Mark's theory masterpiece Marxist Supernanny gets the "ideology of late capitalism" wrong. Mark writes:

"In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek famously argues that a certain Spinozism is the ideology of late capitalism. Žižek believes that Spinoza’s rejection of deontology for an ethics based around the concept of health is allegedly flat with capitalism’s amoral affective engineering."*

There are really two things to consider that are intimitely related: liberalism as an ideology and the actual economic base, constructed on the principle of seperation, of which liberalism** represents an idealised version. Ideologically liberalism is basically private property conceived as not being underpinned by coercion. This is something like a philosophy where substances persist in themselves indefinitely without any kind of totalisation. And as such this diverges from Spinoza's metaphysical plan at the point where Spinoza introduces the idea of God as substance subsuming the various substances, and so effecting just this kind of totalisation. And we can maybe accept the Deleuzist argument, if only provisionally that politics and theology operate on the same "level" without making politics a determinant of theology or vice versa.

*my hacheks

** i.e. economic liberalism of which anglo-saxonic conservatism is a degenerate form

more inequality

Income distribution for various countries: percentage of national income or consumption for successive quintiles of population assigned by income, i.e. quintile A means bottom 20%, quintile B next 20% etc. The bureaucrats at Penn State Uni explain the whole thing, and with better html.

Source here, statistics from World Bank here

Country	A	B	C	D	E	Gini
China	4.3	8.5	13.7	21.7	51.9	0.47
India	8.1	11.3	14.9	20.4	45.3	0.37
Indonesia	8.4	11.9	15.4	21	43.3	0.34
Brazil	2.8	6.4	11	18.7	61.1	0.57
Pakistan	9.3	13	16.3	21.1	40.3	0.31
Bangladesh	8.6	12.1	15.6	21	42.7	0.33
Nigeria	5	9.6	14.5	21.7	49.2	0.44
Mexico	4.3	8.3	12.6	19.7	55.1	0.46
Philippines	5.4	9.1	13.6	21.3	50.6	0.45
Vietnam	9	11.4	14.7	20.5	44.3	0.34
U.S.	5.4	10.7	15.7	22.4	45.8	0.41
Japan	10.6	14.2	17.6	22	35.7	0.25
Germany	8.5	13.7	17.8	23.1	36.9	0.28

medecine

Forty years ago Simon Kuznets' pioneering studies of national income disclosed a significant relationship between income and inequality, such that:

a rise in income in low income countries tended to be consistant with greater inequality; a rise in income in high income countries tended to be consistant with less inequality.

From this empirical fact the "Kuznets curve" was theorised, illustrating a supposedly universal pattern of development whereby as an economy develops inequality first rises then falls.

This procedure involves an extra presupposition. Economies are considered as effective parallels of each other. Their interrelation and the way they function as part of a unified world economy is abstracted from.

This was never the cutting edge of neoliberal development theory, but the assumptions made here have to be considered in the context of practical measures in this sphere: the decades of IMF austerity measures etc. It goes some way toward furnishing these policies with a theoretical basis, or at least a post hoc explanation.

The consequent story about development also, deliberately or accidentally, has certain features in common with victorian moralising. And it wouldn't be too surprising to see a trickle down version of this theory in the pages of The Economist militating for the underdeveloped world to "take its medecine".

Are we obliged to consider this universalisation of the European and American experience, which provides a rationale for the programmes of their proxy, as an example of the sort of phenomenon Edward Saïd discusses in Orientalism? One important differance is that the presuppositions of something like the Kuznets curve typify mere disinterest rather than an aggressive objectification. The pathology differs.

fetish

Spectrology comes out of social conditions, not ambiguities in old books. But I wonder if this passage in Ricardo inspired some of the gothic mise-en-scène in the first part of Capital:

“The real price of every thing,” says Adam Smith, “what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.”

...what Smith and Ricardo mean is that transacting commodity for commodity, or labour for commodity is effectively reducible to a transaction of labour for labour, where commodities are valued according to the labour that goes into their production...

... on the other hand Ricardo's cut and paste can't help but suggest, though accidentally, that the commodity itself somehow attains hex properties, mysteriously "imposing toil on other people".

"labour was the first price"

Ricardo on labour as the source of value:

"In speaking then of commodities, of their exchangeable value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint.

In the early stages of society, the exchangeable value of these commodities, or the rule which determines how much of one shall be given in exchange for another, depends almost exclusively on the comparative quantity of labour expended on each.

“The real price of every thing,” says Adam Smith, “what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.” “Labour was the first price—the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.” Again, “in that early and rude state of society, which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land, the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another. If among a nation of hunters, for example, it usually cost twice the labour to kill a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver should naturally exchange for, or be worth two deer. It is natural that what is usually the produce of two days’, or two hours’ labour, should be worth double of what is usually the produce of one day’s, or one hour’s labour.”

That this is really the foundation of the exchangeable value of all things, excepting those which cannot be increased by human industry, is a doctrine of the utmost importance in political economy; for from no source do so many errors, and so much difference of opinion in that science proceed, as from the vague ideas which are attached to the word value.

If the quantity of labour realized in commodities, regulate their exchangeable value, every increase of the quantity of labour must augment the value of that commodity on which it is exercised, as every diminution must lower it.

Adam Smith, who so accurately defined the original source of exchangeable value, and who was bound in consistency to maintain, that all things became more or less valuable in proportion as more or less labour was bestowed on their production, has himself erected another standard measure of value, and speaks of things being more or less valuable, in proportion as they will exchange for more or less of this standard measure. Sometimes he speaks of corn, at other times of labour, as a standard measure; not the quantity of labour bestowed on the production of any object, but the quantity which it can command in the market: as if these were two equivalent expressions, and as if because a man’s labour had become doubly efficient, and he could therefore produce twice the quantity of a commodity, he would necessarily receive twice the former quantity in exchange for it.

If this indeed were true, if the reward of the labourer were always in proportion to what he produced, the quantity of labour bestowed on a commodity, and the quantity of labour which that commodity would purchase, would be equal, and either might accurately measure the variations of other things: but they are not equal; the first is under many circumstances an invariable standard, indicating correctly the variations of other things; the latter is subject to as many fluctuations as the commodities compared with it. Adam Smith, after most ably showing the insufficiency of a variable medium, such as gold and silver, for the purpose of determining the varying value of other things, has himself, by fixing on corn or labour, chosen a medium no less variable.

Gold and silver are no doubt subject to fluctuations, from the discovery of new and more abundant mines; but such discoveries are rare, and their effects, though powerful, are limited to periods of comparatively short duration. They are subject also to fluctuation, from improvements in the skill and machinery with which the mines may be worked; as in consequence of such improvements, a greater quantity may be obtained with the same labour. They are further subject to fluctuation from the decreasing produce of the mines, after they have yielded a supply to the world, for a succession of ages. But from which of these sources of fluctuation is corn exempted? Does not that also vary, on one hand, from improvements in agriculture, from improved machinery and implements used in husbandry, as well as from the discovery of new tracts of fertile land, which in other countries may be taken into cultivation, and which will affect the value of corn in every market where importation is free? Is it not on the other hand subject to be enhanced in value from prohibitions of importation, from increasing population and wealth, and the greater difficulty of obtaining the increased supplies, on account of the additional quantity of labour which the cultivation of inferior lands requires? Is not the value of labour equally variable; being not only affected, as all other things are, by the proportion between the supply and demand, which uniformly varies with every change in the condition of the community, but also by the varying price of food and other necessaries, on which the wages of labour are expended?

In the same country double the quantity of labour may be required to produce a given quantity of food and necessaries at one time, that may be necessary at another, and a distant time; yet the labourer’s reward may possibly be very little diminished. If the labourer’s wages at the former period, were a certain quantity of food and necessaries, he probably could not have subsisted if that quantity had been reduced. Food and necessaries in this case will have risen 100 per cent. if estimated by the quantity of labour necessary to their production, while they will scarcely have increased in value, if measured by the quantity of labour for which they will exchange.

The same remark may be made respecting two or more countries. In America and Poland, on the land last taken into cultivation, a year’s labour of any given number of men, will produce much more corn than on land similarly circumstanced in England. Now, supposing all other necessaries to be equally cheap in those three countries, would it not be a great mistake to conclude, that the quantity of corn awarded to the labourer, would in each country be in proportion to the facility of production?

If the shoes and clothing of the labourer, could, by improvements in machinery, be produced by one fourth of the labour now necessary to their production, they would probably fall 75 per cent.; but so far is it from being true, that the labourer would thereby be enabled permanently to consume four coats, or four pair of shoes, instead of one, that it is probable his wages would in no long time be adjusted by the effects of competition, and the stimulus to population, to the new value of the necessaries on which they were expended. If these improvements extended to all the objects of the labourer’s consumption, we should find him probably at the end of a very few years, in possession of only a small, if any, addition to his enjoyments, although the exchangeable value of those commodities, compared with any other commodity, in the manufacture of which no such improvement were made, had sustained a very considerable reduction; and though they were the produce of a very considerably diminished quantity of labour.

It cannot then be correct, to say with Adam Smith, “that as labour may sometimes purchase a greater, and sometimes a smaller quantity of goods, it is their value which varies, not that of the labour which purchases them;” and therefore, “that labour alone never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared;” —but it is correct to say, as Adam Smith had previously said, “that the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another;” or in other words, that it is the comparative quantity of commodities which labour will produce, that determines their present or past relative value, and not the comparative quantities of commodities, which are given to the labourer in exchange for his labour."

from Principles of Political Economy

Government Buildings

What I noticed today at the Learning Disability Centre. These government buildings have a sort of ostentation, not at all in their decor, but in the extension of their space. It's plausable that rather than the cramped sensation that typifies the ordinary relay* being consistant with society's ultimate possibilities, they could instead be consistant with this "depth".

Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons are intelligible this way; that they are constructed in recognition of the principle that this indefinite extension of the social sphere is truly feasible. But secondarily this impression is made distasteful, conventionally blackened. Psychoanalysis seems to have half recognised that ideology quite often appears this way, with the superimposition of contradictory impulses. It's here again in this sort of invective.

*the relay of capital through consumption etc

... at least I am not a marxist

& I read this on Leninushka's blog, as an explanation of Karl Marx's notion of surplus value:

"Let us recall the gist of Marx's notion of exploitation: exploitation is not simply opposed to justice - Marx's point is not that workers are exploited because they are not paid the full value of their work. The central thesis of Marx's notion of 'surplus-value' is that a worker is exploited even when he is 'fully paid'; exploitation is thus not opposed to the 'just' equivalent exchange; it functions, rather, as its point of inherent exception - there is one commodity (the workforce) which is exploited precisely when it is 'paid its full value'. (The further point not to be missed is that the production of this excess is strictly equivalent to the universalization of the exchange-function: the moment the exchange-function is universalized - that is, the moment it becomes the structuring principle of the whole of economic life - the exception emerges, since at this point the workforce itself becomes a commodity exchanged on the market. Marx in effect announces here the Lacanian notion of the Universal which involves a constitutive exception.) The basic premise of symptomal reading is thus that every ideological universality necessarily gives rise to a particular 'extimate' element, to an element which - precisely as an inherent, necessary product of the process designated by the universality - simultaneously undermines it: the symptom is an example which subverts the Universal whose example it is."

(from Dr Žižek's Ticklish Subject)

According to Marx's theory, as laid out in Capital, the remuneration of the predominant form of labour, disqualified or undifferentiated labour, sold on the open market and so remunerated its "true" market value will tend to a conventional minimum, just enough to reproduce the worker as worker. The product of labour will likewise be remunerated its value as realised on the open market, which according to Marx, following the example of Ricardo, will be equivalent to the value of the labour of which it is comprised. Surplus value, which accrues to the capitalist, represents the difference of these amounts.

According to Baran and Sweezy's definition, surplus value is "the difference between total social output and the socially necessary costs of producing it", theoretically this could apply to situations other than that described by Marx.

This theory is eminently criticiseable, (though professional economists tend to prefer to ignore it altogether). Nitzan and Bichler describe the labour theory of value, where labour produces its value but is paid the value of its own production as "a dangerously circular notion". Certainly one wonders why the value of each commodity isn't bid down by "competitive markets" to the value of reproducing productive labour, so value added by labour equals the remuneration of labour and the neoclassical model holds*.

Karl Korsch supposed that the laws of motion of the capitalist system disclosed by Marx's model were evidently correct but that the presupposition underlying it should realistically be conditions of monopoly rather than pure competition (Sweezy concurred with this view). The tendency of capitalists to not compete on price would be a consequence of (a high degree of) monopoly, all other conditions would hold.

The crucial advance of Marx's theory over that of the economists of his time, and which their successors have conspicuously failed to make good, is to describe a dynamic economy in which both the remuneration of labour and capital are "real" outputs.

Žižek's reading of Marx, which to be fair to its context, is surely meant to be an "against the grain" piece of belle-lettrism, sets up an integral ambiguity on the phrase:

"the full value of their work"

which could mean either:

"the full value of the remuneration of their work"

or "the full value of the product of their work"

and "justice" could mean

"the most equitable"

or "according to the law"

...hence there's a number of meanings suggested here that seem more exciting than the only one that can be reconciled with what Marx writes in Capital: that workers are paid the going rate and that this is in accordance with the law of the land. This contrivance of ambiguity where none is necessary compliments and reinforces what one supposes to be the background impression of Marx and his work as evoked through the wider cultural and educational apparatus, as fundamentally ambivalent, both validated and discredited. This ambivalence seems to be often indicated, where our ideology "crystallises" into the form of the individual. And it is surely in this respect that Marx announces Lacan.

*The objection to neoclassical economics here seems to run something like this: while one business or one business sector could reduce its prices to merely cover inputs, this behaviour can't be aggregated to the level of the whole economy since price cuts are only relative price cuts (some players gain, some lose) and don't have the effect of lowering total output, while neoclassical economics considers the lowering of prices to be consistant with output being added to.

societies of control

This admittedly fatuous news story made me think Deleuze and Guattari could have been right after all:

Cat's daily routine baffles owner

"A cat is baffling his owner by wandering off at night before expecting to be collected by car every morning at exactly the same time and place.

Sgt Podge, a Norwegian Forest Cat, disappears from his owner's home in Talbot Woods, Bournemouth, every night.

The next morning, the 12-year-old cat can always be found in exactly the same place, on a pavement about one and a half miles (2.4km) away.

His owner, Liz Bullard, takes her son to school before collecting Sgt Podge.
She said the routine began earlier this year, when Sgt Podge disappeared one day.

Ms Bullard rang the RSPCA and began telephoning her neighbours to see if anyone had seen him.

An elderly woman who lived about one and a half miles away called back to say she had found a cat matching Sgt Podge's description.

Ms Bullard collected him but within days he vanished again. She rang the elderly woman to find Sgt Podge was back outside her home.

She said a routine has now become established, where each morning she takes her son to school before driving to collect Sgt Podge from the pavement between 0800 and 0815 GMT.

It is thought Sgt Podge walks across Meyrick Park Golf Course every night to reach his destination.

Ms Bullard said: "If it's raining he may be in the bush but he comes running if I clap my hands."

All she has to do is open the car passenger door from the inside for Sgt Podge to jump in.

Wandering the streets

Ms Bullard also makes the trip at weekends and during school holidays - when her son is having a lie in.

She does not know why, after 12 years, Sgt Podge has begun the routine but explained that another woman who lived nearby used to feed him sardines, and that he may be on the look-out for more treats.

"As long as you know where they are you don't mind as a cat owner," Ms Bullard said.
"I know where to collect him - as long as he's not wandering the streets."

Back at home, Sgt Podge has breakfast before going to sleep by a warm radiator. "

acted version

(This is a review of the BBC's Bill Turnbull Programme. It's like an acted version of The Daily Mail.)

It's noticeable that the interrelation of the military industrial complex and the media apparatus in these societies is such that while one does not find oneself hypnotised to the extent of uncritically accepting their worst excesses, to some extent real disquiet is deadened, routinised. If the media hasn't been so succesful in legitimising the warfare state its illegitimacy has been allowed to persist.

(and they invite me, if indirectly, to write about this stuff, as undifferentiated sausage filler)

We are not permitted to know how serious the administration is with respect to potentially bombing Iran, or what would be at stake, or even if publicity of all this is or is not a deliberate tactic. Apparently it has something to do with Our Reluctant Pipelines.

The dissemination of fake news or news styled entertainment should therefore be considered as part of a wider politics.

In common with many other commodities one feels impelled to criticise the BBC's Bill Turnbull Programme on aesthetic grounds (in which respect it's evidently deficient), though it really deserves to be criticised politically.

It's stretching things to say that this programme is neo-liberal propaganda: its obvious complacentcy being precisely what is forced by "harsh realities";

but in another way a kind of mill logic is at work. One is shown the commodity as flux and invited to imagine its total situation. Here one is shown a series of great banalities, and invited to connect:

- the flatness of this "news" - the relative inelasticity of its supply schedule - the total labour crystallised in total news production - the veracity of this news, and by extension that news which is not shown.

(as one of those queries about things that switch with the changes in the mode of production, it would be interesting to know if in the past this sort of "flat news" would have been considered straightforwardly incompetent, and if this changed, when.)

Britney Spears video

...anyway this is a better example than all that about renaissance drama:

They hired a bare arse double for this video*; it's meant to be something like:

this unexpected social convention, a red hot bared arse projected out of the usual neolib austerity, this estrangement invites one to "spiritualise" the social world as it appears**; to find society tiered, and so, in a way, artistic.

This seems to be what Pierre Bourdieu missed: that bourgeois art isn't made in the image of bourgeois man, but is rather constituted as a compliment of the major bourgeois idea: bourgeois individualism; and as such this art is quite often presented as a series of imaginary exoteric networks, such as can be observed.

*surely an original stage in the progress of division of labour

**what Lacan imprudently generalises in his "big other" theory

eco solipsism

Tom and Barbara: kept pig in kitchen

I was going to write this whole thing about ecology - I'm reminded of this with Warszawa's essay. This was an interesting essay. I disagree about Iraq though. The revealed powerlessness of the general population in this country is surely a very bad sign. These banal points relate more to other things:

1. Consumption is related to work - all other things equal the more people work the more is consumed and vice versa. A reduction in consumption is equivalent to an increase in leisure. That this leisure is expressed as unemployment rather than a shortened working week is really political not economic. How much people would work if the only factor to think about was consumption, so not including this constructed insecurity, is hard to gauge. Probably people would want to work less.

2. In the most industrialised countries only a small proportion of the population work in agriculture now (in the UK 1%, in the US 2%, Denmark 3%*). Even in a crisis this figure is not going to be greatly multiplied. the most realistic response to a food shortage would be more intensive agriculture not a return to peasant agriculture, especially for office workers etc. Reprocessed neoliberal "knowledge workers" are not going to be better at farming than experienced farmers. They might be better at writing CROP FAILURE on one of those jumbo pads in marker pen with arrows pointing out the reasons: FARM MANAGEMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE, SKILL BASE, WEEVILS etc, or setting up a projector slide of a cartoon character saying WHAT NEXT? in front of a withered field.

*proportion of those in work, Economist World in Figures 2007

martian logic

"there are two faculties of intellection of which you possess one"

...a compliment and an insult together, perhaps.

1. diagrammatic method

Draw a hoop. Label its ends Plus/Minus, also: "there are two faculties of intellection"/"of which you possess one"

2. literary method

I suppose that while the meaning of the two parts of the formula are reconcileable, the intentionality you would ascribe to these parts is contradictory; but these parts are also mutually associated (rule of association).

You have a sense of yourself thinking, or an idea of your sensitivity; in any case you have a faculty and its intentionality.

Supposing the impression of correct reasoning follows from the contradiction in intention of actors; this is proscribed by Jung's formula which subsists as if intending two things at once (i.e. there's a necessary consonance of interests of actors given rule of association and its preconditions).

And the intentionality you ascribe your faculty, by itself or so prompted, is pitched against one side then the other, finding always something this faculty cannot digest.

This sense which I suppose Jung developed from something like the Book of Disquietude, of the mysterious nature of vocation (the potency of a personal faculty with respect to the potency of all faculties), illegitimately by my reckoning; this works itself out into something like the apprehension of a divine plan. This isn't a vague conservatism, but an important ideological form of conservatism, supplementing conscious self interest. Jung's affinity with the thought of the middle ages is well known.

Another example of split intentionality comes up with Percy Shelley's "unacknowledged legislator". All this is no doubt hard to understand; it's really like martian logic. But it's just outside the view of J M Keynes say, invoking "unacknowledged legislator" against ideologism, at the end of General Theory.

again, Jung

With the discusion about Jung and his types, I attempted to analyse the working of these types in a new way. And not entirely successfully. If I've just derived a model of sorts from intuition I could still list the various assumptions and preconditions that underwrite its validity, after Hotelling's look at the Coke/Pepsi problem.

supposing Jung's formula can be legitimately reduced to something like:

"there are two faculties of intellection of which you possess one"

(I'm violating an important legalistic convention here: that you shouldn't represent that which you criticise: the same person shouldn't be defence counsel and magistrate. This is for the sake of simplicity, but the argument also comes back to this convention)

I'm assuming firstly that the statement's abstracted out of definite context, and as a corollary of this, that the way the formula functions: it's development of meaning and affectivity, vary depending on the way you intend or desire these things: here "thinking" and "feeling"; and as a further consequence of this that the parts of the formula are associated; you want to reconcile the parts of the formula into a coherent whole; this has to do with the convention that you structure the implicit error of statements univocally etc. According to Empson "we think not in words but in directed phrases".

These rules or conventions that follow from an originary state of abstraction probably ought to be called:

1. Rule of intention

2. Rule of association

If I wanted to illustrate the rule of intention, there's this thing by Pessoa: He passed me, came after me, (which otherwise might be worth considering in its confluence with Fascism, but) as an example here it demonstrates this point quite elegantly: it finishes "I'm lucid./Bloody hell! I'm lucid". This exclamation "Bloody Hell!" does nothing except reverse the expected intentionality or directedness of this "I'm lucid". So Pessoa's juxtaposing the senses of "I'm lucid", intended contrarily; as if he's registering the momentary incandescence of "I'm lucid" and its degradation; it's, as it were, registered as credit and deficit. The punchlines to jokes degrade this way. Pessoa, I suppose, finds his sense of everything: society; language - all this appears to warp in sympathy with desire.

This apparent paradox develops in Book of Disquietude into "I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped", which diverges from Pascal in having an established dichotomy to invert: Pessoa is "reasoning" apparently, and not "feeling" the substructure of his belief. The literal meaning is implicitly an inversion, and so the opposite is, in a sense, also stressed. You're maybe reminded of the two faces of Gauguin's cow. Again, I think Pessoa's fascinated here, and not analytically, with the possibility of shifting the directedness or intention of the assertion "I reasoned", from credit to deficit, and so volatalising his otherwise rather conservative (or reactionary) consequence "he should be worshipped". Pessoa's formula is close to Jung's formula. Already there are "types" of intellection: reasoning and feeling ("since the human spirit tends towards judgements based on fealing instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God"); and a structurally generated "incompleteness" built around this quirk in conceptualisation.

In my next piece, if I write such a thing, I'll come back to how this develops with Jung.

I'm not sure how to value my new method. The brevity of the argument here seemed the least inappropriate thing to do. It all came out of the critique of political economy, but Nitzan and Bichler, for instance, seem to have done rather better with this with ordinary empiricism.

After the Revolution

Diego Abad de Santillan "After the Revolution" here

"The opaqueness surrounding the nature of what may have been hit in Operation Orchard"

here:

"Operation Orchard can be seen as a dry run, a raid using the same heavily modified long-range aircraft, procured specifically from the US with Iran's nuclear sites in mind. It reminds both Iran and Syria of the supremacy of its aircraft and appears to be designed to deter Syria from getting involved in the event of a raid on Iran - a reminder, if it were required, that if Israel's ground forces were humiliated in the second Lebanese war its airforce remains potent, powerful and unchallenged."

ritual in the dark

My landlord was a large genial man with a neatly shaved head. He wore a surprised expression as if surprised having ate Tweetie. His collection of pornographic supplements from the tabloid press* was second to none; they took the place of encyclopaedias in his lounge; or, one could suppose, from a previous period of the development of the middle class: holiday brochures. This lounge had a stilted sort of perfection like the "installations" in the Littlewoods cataloge. And maybe this exaggerated a sense of provisionality that followed from its function as something like a concierge's office. You were reminded of that programme where Paris Hilton pretends to be an air hostess.

My landlord liked to imagine this pornography wasn't merely staged, apparently ex nihilo but in some way documented another social world, and simply recorded living friezes of taut flesh.

Supposing commercialised sex now stands in for something like a Deleuzian line of escape, I mean ideologically not really -

- because all this is reproduced through the commodity system the detritus of former ideological regimes isn't erased -

- it stands in for this as drug abuse did, as petty crime did, as working class life did.

Pornography is probably another version of pastoral, as Michaux' books used to be (however involuntarily). If the metaphysics of pornography are, as Baudrillard said, what's interesting about it, this is because they are peculiar to this era, and can be understood as such.

[*the Sport for instance offers a quite eclectic apprenticeship not limited to sex lines, videos, rubber, dildos, spanish fly, inflatable men and women, articles for use per rectum; and contact details for depressed prison wives, perhaps, or those of truckers, or other men.]

first principles

I was telling these two transvestites about Hotelling's spatial duopoly model. About how the problem isn't so much the discontinuities in the reciprocal reaction functions, as their failure to be quasi-concave.

Hotelling's innovations certainly contributed toward the development of useful models for understanding capitalist competition (e.g. Paul Sweezy's theory of monopoly); but his ideas are also interesting as a very pure form of the logic of economism. So, in Stability in Competition Hotelling criticises the mathematician Bertrand's presupposition (from his monograph on Cournot's book) that:

"one merchant can take away his rival's entire business by undercutting his price ever so slightly. Thus discontinuities appear, though a discontinuity, like a vacuum, is abhored by nature. More typical of real situations is the case in which the quantity sold by each merchant is a continuous function of two variables, his own price and his competitor's. Quite commonly a tiny increase in price by one seller will send only a few customers to the other."

In so far as Hotelling's system proved not to be internally consistant it invites consideration as ideology, i.e. as a product of the imagination under the circumstances in which it was formulated. Of course it's the logic of neoliberalism, something like:

"given the abstraction of the situation, and given the antithetical interests of participants involved, we must deduce or further presuppose the contiguity of their positions, hence equilibrium, a practically useful conjecture that cancels abstraction practically without cancelling it really."

Without going into the ruinous absurdities derived from, or related to this system of thought just yet, it's not irrelevant that this does recall previously existing figures of ideology, as discussed by Bachelard:

"The Grand Bénitier's strength is on a par with the height and bulk of its walls. Indeed, according to one observer, it would take two horses hitched to each valve to force the Grand Bénitier "to yawn, in spite of itself."

I should love to see an engraving that represented this exploit. I can imagine it, however, by recalling an old picture, which I have looked at long and often, of horses hitched to the two hemispheres, between which nothing existed but space. Here this image depicting the "Magdeburg experiment," which is legendary in elementary scientific culture, would have a biological illustration. Four horses to overcome fourteen pounds of limp flesh!"

a subject for popular anxiety

"Interest in "atmospheres" is a critical attitude designed for, and particularly suited to, the poets of the nineteenth century; this may tell us something about them, and in part explain why they are so little ambiguous in the sense with which I am concerned. For a variety of reasons, they found themselves living in an intellectual framework with which it was difficult to write poetry, in which poetry was rather improper, or was irrelevant to business, especially the business of becoming Fit to Survive, or was an indulgence of one's lower nature in beliefs the scientists knew were untrue. On the other hand, they had a large public which was as anxious to escape from this intellectual framework, on holiday, as they were themselves. Almost all of them, therefore, exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood, where they were able to conceive things poetically, and whatever they might be writing about they would suck up from this limited and perverted world an unvarying sap which was their poetical inspiration."

***

"In that age, too, began the doubt as to whether this man or that was "grown up," which has ever since occupied so deeply the minds of those interested in their friends. Macauley complains somewhere that in his day a man was sure to be accused of a child-mind if no doubt could be cast "either on the ability of his intellect or the innocence of his character"; now nobody seems to have said this in the eighteenth century. Before the Romantic Revival the possibilities of not growing up had never been exploited so far as to become a subject for popular anxiety."

- William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity

the gorgon's head

I saw this in Southampton City Art Gallery last week. It's really the distance these things have from us now that justifies considering them as fragments of a dead culture. It would surely be an exaggeration to declare capitalist culture in general fragmentary, but there's no doubt some validity in Benjamin's method in Arcades, say.

Anyway, we can be sure Burne-Jones's picture is very symbolical of something or other. It suggests perhaps that the reflected image is the real one and the "natural" image somehow counterfeit (or something else).

a modern prince

The Times interviewed General Musharraf. The propaganda element of this article, from the decision to commission an interview with this unelected leader and not others, is no doubt to show the General somewhat domesticated; if not justified at least putting his side of the story. The idea of dialogue can be connected with the General. An intimacy of sorts is established.

There's also the ludicrous sub-editing:

"Hard man in a rocky place"

"He’s the West’s night watchman — an Islamic leader holding the flanks in the front line of the war against terror. His country harbours Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But is Pakistan’s President Musharraf doing enough — or is he fomenting civil war?"

(as if the perfect nightwatchman was a fantasist:)

"The exchange illustrated one of the problems Musharraf’s critics have consistently complained of: that when the truth is inconvenient, he simply tends to ignore it, crossing the frontier from fact into fiction as nonchalantly as he once ordered his troops to cross the border from Pakistan into India at Kargil. This is very evident in his memoir. As a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal noted, “believe little of what you read… Though there’s much the book doesn’t tell us, it does offer invaluable (and frequently hilarious) insights into the levels of delusion a man may reach when he is accountable to no one, elected by no one and trusted by no one”.

If Musharraf’s book was accused of having an inventive approach to the facts, it was also widely said to be, as The Economist put it, both “boringly boastful” and “bafflingly rude” about the leaders of other countries. The first time that the general showed either of these tendencies during our conversation was when I asked him what he felt when the world’s press published photographs of Dick Cheney lecturing him during a recent visit to Pakistan. At this, the general showed a brief flash of his famous amour-propre. “Dick Cheney never wagged his finger at me,” he said, in direct contradiction of pictures beamed across the world. “People may say that, but in fact… Dick is rather a quiet man. A great listener. I talked 90% of the time.” There was an irritable pause. Then the general added: “Everyone thinks we had a dressing-down. It’s not true.” Another pause, then: “At official levels there is total understanding between the US and Pakistan. We’re together in the same coalition. There can be differences, but…” He left the sentence unfinished."

Futurism

Suppose Futurism performs two contradictory operations, that we could call humanisation and dehumanisation, and suppose the combined effect of these operations was a kind of empty religious art.

Walter Benjamin's reduction of Marinetti's manifesto on the Ethiopian war demonstrates Futurism's effect quite purely:

"For twenty- seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic.... Accordingly we state: ... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others.... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art . . . may be illumined by them!"

Its processes:

1. Humanisation

Marinetti's surrealist in this way: that he effectively takes for his unconscious things that really belong to the wider social world. This happens first of all with his Jarry pastiche Roi Bombance, written as if Jarry had the legal status of an imaginary friend. We can applaud this disregard for the copyright laws. It's here again in this piece on the Ethiopian war, Marinetti effectively usurps the position of creator, as sanctioned in bourgeois art, but here with respect to a vast apparatus of death.

2. Dehumanisation

What Badiou calls formalism:

"On one side is the absolute desire for new forms, always new forms, something like an infinite desire. Modernity is the infinite desire of new forms."

...a recognisable tendency, is I think really a tendency to dehumanisation in art. There's no intrinsic inventory of forms with an implied succession, rather "newness" is here more an effect of form: "new architecture, like that of the big tanks" etc. This would relate formalism to the baroque, which Benjamin tells us "knows no eschatology". The market evidently dictates that art ought to be inhuman.

In the first case the artist stands in front of this alienation effect, in the second he tries to disappear behind it. In the situation where both operations are effected simultaneously the result is something like the genderless reproduction of the inhuman. This is how I'd want to introduce the subject of modern architecture.

Inequality

To what end is class, a category basic to capitalist society, treated under the heading "inequality" e.g. in the research of the left liberal Joseph Rowntree Foundation? This abstract "inequality" in a way suggests its opposite: quantitative inequality through qualitative equality; as if this society was an unfortunately inequitable version of socialism, and as if the only sociology thinkable was that of "economic man", (uncoerced and uncoercing, unaccumulating). Society is here found unfair not structurally, but in an inessential way; as if only "decoratively" unfair, on account of its practical efficiency (this is almost suggested). Thousands of homeless people affirm this society is not socialist.

class composition in Britain: 2001 census information

"The National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) is the replacement proposed for the Registrar General’s ‘social class’ classification. It places people into a socio-economic category based on their occupation and certain characteristics of the work that they do (whether they are an employer, self-employed or an employee; whether or not they are responsible for supervising others; and the number of employees at the place of work). Of the classifications for people in work, the highest group is NS-SEC 1,‘Higher managerial and professional occupations’, and the lowest is NS-SEC 7, ‘Routine occupations’.The NS-SEC classes are listed with the population in 2001."

1. Higher managerial and professional occupations (3,182,614) 8.46%
"Doctors, directors of large organisations, clergy "

2. Lower managerial and professional occupations (6,990,083) 18.59%
"Journalists, nurses, school teachers"

3. Intermediate occupations (3,532,894) 9.39%
"Travel agents, police officers (sergeant and below)"

4. Small employers and own account workers (2,626,067) 6.98%
"Farmers, taxi drivers, hotel managers"

5. Lower supervisory and technical occupations (2,687,927) 7.15%
"Train drivers, electricians, bakers"

6. Semi-routine occupations (4,393,965) 11.68%
"Scaffolders, traffic wardens, dental nurses"

7. Routine occupations (3,410,122) 9.07%
"Building labourers, waiters, cleaners"

8. Never worked and long-term unemployed (1,404,188)3.73%
Never worked (1,021,800)
Long-term unemployed (382,388)

Not classified (9,379,577) 24.94%
Full-time students (2,648,991) 7.04%
Not classified for other reasons (6,730,586) 17.90%

Total (aged 16-74) 37,607,437

Saatchism

The dominant cultural paradigm in Britain now, and perhaps too in 1979, reflecting the coincident practices of the culture industry and the ideological bases of neoclassical economics, is the individualism of the atomised society. The credibility of this individualism as a realistic explanation of society depends on the absence of those features that were understood to characterise earlier versions of class society:

1. Coercion
2. Accumulation

Saatchi and Saatchi's indefinite dolequeue presents a horrific accumulation of the indigent, reminiscent of the legendary breadqueues of the eastern bloc. But it doesn't so much ask the spectator to choose the most realistic response to the phenomenon of unemployment, as to choose the metaphysical system that retroactively presents this unemployment in the most acceptable way. Thatcher's metaphysics won the day.

a Miracle Play Herod

(Max Stirner at least seems to have noticed that Hegel's historical scenes are largely populated with papier-mâché figures)

Athlone Contemporary Thinkers etc: an industry exists producing these books about politics that convince not through their appraisal of real political structures but rather through the adoption of a style and tone that suggest a real political theology, as if such a thing were possible. In this arrangement the properties afforded to a single figure, here the writer, work to suggest a whole metaphysics, which in turn extends and frames the work itself. Versions of pastoral can do something similar: using single figures or figures in small groups to suggest coherent classes. Of course these works aren't immune to the effects of bureaucratic processes (alternatively "the effects of the market") - and so the slogan "imminence in philosophy" - a refutation of these arrangements, is effectively promoted in exactly this way. This doesn't make it a bad slogan though.

Here's a sort of explanation from renaissance drama:

1. Falstaff suggests a Plantagenet underclass, in the same way as Žižek suggests a class of theologians. In the case of Dr Žižek a few real or imagined novelties, or perhaps novelties with respect to the everyday language of the media, imaginatively suggests the efficacy of an imputed science that does not need to be shown. Likewise the incongruity of Shakespeare's Falstaff as an underclass figure is used to suggest the properties of this underclass. This unusual, disturbing quality is I think what Empson's getting at* in objecting to the "tender attitude" shown toward the latter Falstaff or the popular Falstaff. His argument recalls the notion of "compulsion anxiety" - pleasure (in this case) achieved through the repetition of an experience that's initially distasteful. (Advertising often takes advantage of this sort of process).

2. An incongruous figure suggests a coherent other class better than a figure typical of that class. Common paranoia can be left to construct around the few strokes drawn a coherence that can only be really shown in a truly pedestrian way.

*"It is as well to look at Falstaff in general for a moment, to show what this tender attitude to him has to fit in with. The plot treats him as a simple Punch, whom you laugh at with good humour, though he is wicked, because he is always knocked down and always bobs up again. People sometimes take advantage of this to view him as a loveable old dear; a notion which one can best refute by considering him as an officer.

I haue led my rag of Muffins where they are pepper'd: there's not three of my 150 left alive, and they for the Townes end, to beg during life

We saw him levy a tax in bribes on the men he left: he now kills all the weaklings he conscripted, in order to keap their pay. A fair proportion of the groundlings consisted of disbanded soldiers who had suffered under such a system; the laughter was a roar of hatred here; he is "comic" like a Miracle Play Herod."

- Empson Some Versions of Pastoral

classes

There might be some mileage in analysing the work of writers like Nick Cohen in a "Hegelian" way. Cohen's What's Left isn't really of or for the working class, its closer to being a book calculated to irritate anyone who belongs to the working class and reads books about politics, i.e. its ostensible target audience; even as disinformation it is useless. Nor can one imagine the plutocrats for whom Cohen works finding anything useful or even cheering in his miserable hack work. It truly appears as bourgeois ideology reproduced through an imagined version of its implied ideal recipient.

Obviously the rabbit eater is partly a joke, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be accurate. For this reason I'm trying to locate some proper statistics for class composition in Great Britain. These are some statistics for the US, from Dennis Gilbert The American Class Structure: In An Age of Growing Inequality (2002):

Capitalist class 1%
"Top-level executives, high-rung politicans, heirs with incomes in the top 1%"

Upper middle class 15%
"Highly educated, most commonly salaried, professionals and middle management with large work autonomy"

Lower middle class 30%
"Semi-professionals and craftsmen with a roughly average standard of living. Most have some college education and are white collar"

Working class 30%
"Clerical and most blue collar workers whose work is highly routinized. Standard of living varies depending on number of income earners, but is commonly just adequate"

Working poor 13%
"Service, low-rung clerical and some blue collar workers. High economic insecurity and risk of poverty"

Underclass 12%
"Those with limited or no participation in the labor force. Reliant on government transfers"

some versions of pastoral

his appearances on each take on a different character

William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral manages to be a book about organised mendacity that avoids reproducing the overwrought tone that distinguishes, almost without exception, the successors of Friedrich Nietzsche. It worked this way, at least acording to Empson:

"The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language (so that you wrote about the best subject in the best way). From seeing the two sorts of people combined lime this you thought better of both; the best parts of both were used. The effect was in some degree to combine in the reader or author the merits of the two sorts; he was made to mirror in himself more completely the effective elements of the society he lived in. This was not a process that you could explain in the course of writing pastoral; it was already shown by the clash between style and theme, and to make the clash work in the right way (not become funny) the writer must keep up a firm pretence that he was unconscious of it."

Pastoral was always for the rich. So another way of describing its effect is that it refuses to present a particular figure, that of the poor man deformed by the politics of the rich; and it's to this end that the poor are imagined how the rich ought to be. Empson is, effectively, reproducing the logic of psychoanalysis without its presuppositions, to the effect that pastoral can be said to be built around the repression of this idea of the poor being cramped or injured by these politics.

(applied psychoanalysis was then in vogue: "Ernest Jones' essay on Hamlet, which may perhaps have caused Mr Eliot to jettison the play in his later essay, brought out a very far-reaching use of double-plot methods and introduced at least one valuable technical term; in "decomposition" "one person of complex character is dissolved and replaced by several, each of whom possesses a different aspect of the character which in the simpler form of the myth is combined in one being".)

Consequently, where the statement of class distinctions is inevitable, it's normal to show the poor as an idealised version of the rich, so that for either group the personality appears to be formed according to a logic that's indifferent to politics. It could be done another way; if class distinctions weren't stressed, a similar feeling could be produced by showing an extravagant degree of difference.

Empson describes a genre that gives pleasure, or more properly happiness, since pastoral is aligned with stoicism, or represents a more decorative version of it. It's also close to the effect of modern media in that (what we could call) its "first movement" is to invite condescension.

In any case, this is Empson's discussion of the emergance of the "independant individual" of bourgeois society, in relation to the sonnet "I am a little world..." of John Donne that:

"though without indifference to a universal right and wrong, takes the soul as isolated and independent; it is viewed as the world in the new astronomy, a small sphere, complete in itself, safe from interference, in the middle distance. The idea that you can get right away to Americs, that human affairs are not organized round one certainly right authority (e.g. the Pope) is directly compared to the new idea that there are other worlds like this one, so that the inhabitants of each can live in their own way. These notions carried a considerable weight of implication, because they lead at once to a doubt either of the justice or uniqueness of Christ. It was bad enough when all the Chinese were certain of hell because they had not been told of the appearance of the Messiah, but to damn all inhabitants of other planets on this count was intolerable. On the other hand, if Christ went to all the planets his appearances on each take on a different character; it is a more symbolical matter, and you can apply the ideas about Christ to anyone who seems worthy of it. This was in fact done, though with an air of metaphor. Beyond that heaven which was most high adds that heaven, if it is there at all, is now safely far off; it is difficult to reach across from either side."

Daleks

Mark K-Punk on the psychology of the ruling class:

"Class power maims at precisely the same moment that it confers its privileges, which is why, in my experience, so many members of the ruling class resemble Daleks: their smooth, hard exterior contains a slimy invertebrate, seething with inchoate, infantile emotions. Dominic is quite right to insist on the distinction between inner phenomenological states and social confidence. The ruling elite will often be in states of profound inner turmoil (which states they often believe are terribly interesting, even if they are tediously generic); yet this doesn't affect their social confidence a jot. The behaviourist philosophy of Gilbert Ryle may prove surprisingly useful if we want to understand how this is so. Ryle's dismissal of the 'ghost in the machine', his claim that there was no inner entity corresponding to the Cartesian notion of mind, might well have been polemical overstatement, but his emphasis on the external and behavioural quality of mental states is essential to understanding how class power operates."

...which I think is an excellent piece of writing. It illustrates a problem vividly and concisely: economic forces; the Cartesian notion of mind; an image from popular culture concretely relating these ideas. We're then left to decide how applicable this model is. Objections to this argument could be made on various grounds:

1. Ethically: The pronounced gap between esoteric and exoteric presentations of self in Mark's model conforms quite closely to fashionable Lacanian ideas about psychology. Mark, however, isn't applying it universally, but only to one social group. This simple conceptual modification presents a psychology quite different, affectively, to that of Lacan. Instead of the obligatory chorus pronouncing that we are all suffering, one hears, if distantly, the catcalls of the mob. It seems unfair.

2. Aesthetically: Undoubtedly the figure of the Dalek does serve to poetically represent Descartes' theory of mind. But one has reservations as to whether a character from a television series is a philosophically appropriate object of contemplation. Can we really place the Dalek on a pedestal beside Lacan's heuristic figures?

3. Logically: Statistical research in psychology is of course dominated by institutions with their own political interests, which in this case are likely to coincide with the interests of the ruling class*. One could, nevertheless, extract concrete positions from Mark's observations and evaluate them with reference to the available literature.

*we need a consistant definition of this term "ruling class", which can be stretched to mean: those who give orders, so including the overseers of the working class; the upper middle class, including those who don't give orders; capitalists and state administration; or just the capitalists; or the ruling class in the last instance, the Generals and Chiefs of Police.

heuristics 2

Yesterday's Guardian reports an official death toll for the Islamabad Red Mosque siege of fifty eight: eight soldiers, fifty militants. Acting mosque leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi, in touch with local television via mobile phone, had earlier reported deaths in the hundreds even before the Government's final assault. Today's China Daily puts the figure at 102. Mr Ghazi was killed in Tuesday's attack having already predicted "my martyrdom is certain now". The violent end of this confrontation was probably inevitable from the first shots being fired at security forces from inside the mosque.

The Government raid that degenerated into the siege occured in response to escalating para-police activity by "hardliners" associated with the mosque. The BBC describes these militants as being involved in:

"a morality campaign which in recent weeks included the abduction of police officers and people accused of running brothels, as well as raids on music and DVD shops."

...to which the Government initially responded in a conciliatory way. The adoption of a more confrontational approach (to what are blatantly crimes) followed complaints from the Chinese Government concerning mistreatment of its citizens.

Clearly this was a complex situation. But one is immediately struck by the senselessness of the militants' acts. Did they really believe they they could win? Wasn't their position unrealistic?

It's worth considering how these events are replayed through the media. There's always potental for ordinary bias and misinformation, but there's also the matter of journalists and editors making a complex event intelligible in a short article.

This is the first paragraph of an article from the BBC News website written at the start of the siege:

"Barely two weeks ago, Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, was battling for his political survival. The war drums being beaten by the opposition at home were reaching a crescendo. His battle with the country's chief justice had taken a serious toll on his image as a military man who loathes the pettiness of everyday politics. More importantly, perhaps, his Western allies seemed to be getting increasingly impatient with his seeming inability to deal decisively with Islamist extremists. All this seems to have changed dramatically over the last three days, after Gen Musharraf gave his administration the green light for dismantling a radical seminary located in the heart of capital, Islamabad"

...which is to present the confrontation between Musharraf and the Islamists in terms of an index that mediates between them. No information about the parties needs to be supplied, only the relative movements of the index, given the presupposition that the interests of the contending parties are strictly antithetical.

(As if there were two balloons in a box, and as one is inflated, so the other is compressed.)

This is a coherent heuristic system, useful in some ways for passing on information, because it dramatises. But in this case a supposition is introduced concerning the antithetical orientation of these two parties, and it's intoduced (I believe) methodologically, in order to help the story along; as it were "unconsciously". This supposition may be fallacious.

Mainstream opinion suggests a relationship between Pakistani secret services and these Islamists, at least tacit approval. Imran Khan, writing in The Guardian asks:

"A number of questions arise. Why was action not taken immediately? How were militants and arms able to ge in under the gaze of the police and intelligence services? And why were other measures, including shutting off electricity at the mosque, not exhausted earlier?"

al Jazeera asks a similar question:

"In Pakistan – governed by generals for more than half of its sixty-year history - just what is the relationship between mosque and the military? "

Hotelling's spatial duopoly model

Why are New Labour and the Tory Party so much alike? And are they really reflecting public opinion? Or, why are Coke and Pepsi alike?

This is a two part problem: a qualitative problem of product differentiation and a quantifiable problem of competitiveness. Harold Hotelling's spatial duopoly model, of 1929, attempts to solve this problem by substituting this qualitative differentiation with a type of quantifiable differentiation: hypothetically the spatial distance between rival firm's plants. Consequently we can consider a purely mathematical system relating product differentiation to competitiveness. So if we know something about one of these factors, we can make inferences about the other.

Suppose for instance two stalls selling flowers are set up alongside a highway, and alternately decide their prices and location along this highway. Potential customers are evenly distributed along the highway but the distance they are prepared to walk to buy flowers depends on two factors: price and distance*. Each flower seller is therefore in a position of seeking to set their price and location along the line to maximise their profits. But their strategy is ultimately dependant on what the other seller does

(*I've tried to make this picturesque: Hotelling talks about unit cost and transport cost)

Hotelling's mathematical solution of this problem gave the conclusion that both firms would acheive higher profits than under perfect competition and would tend to minimise the degree of product differentiation. In Hotelling's famous phrase they would compete "back-to-back" in the centre of the market.

Now, unfortunately subsequent studies, following d'Aspremont's revisions, have demolished the mathematical basis of Hotelling's reasoning. There isn't a pure strategy solution to the game Hoteling actually specifies; and variations to the Hotelling game are seen to result in deliberate product differentiation, and again profits above those determined by perfect competition.

It's possible Hotelling was thinking the transport cost accrued to the firms (but didn't state his presuppositions this way), in which case I believe his conclusions about product differentiation are justified, though it's hard to imagine real world circumstances to which this model could apply.

structuralist pornography

homo lacanianus

For the committed postmodernist, what's interesting in Slavoj Žižek's articles in the Washington Post isn't so much their content, but the politics of their style. This is the introduction to an article Žižek contributed to the Washington Post of the 24th March this year:

"Since the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent of his crimes has been mixed with doubts. Can his claims be trusted? What if he confessed to more than he really did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop the water boarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques?"

...which is really antiphilosophical: presenting a tangle of discursive elements unattributed to any speaker. For whom is moral outrage mixed with doubts? Who is vacillating over whether claims apparently extorted from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed under torture can be trusted? Who wonders if Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's vanity precedes his humanity, or vice-versa?

The affectivity of this paragraph is the affectivity of structuraism. By structuralism I mean philosophy not as a practice, but as a transcendental structure.

Structuralism is first conjured in this opening paragraph, with the gaping discrepancy between Žižek's philosophical credentials and his antiphilosophical practice. His statement is a variation of Baudrillard's practice of presenting an inverted truth and alongside it a fantastic justification. The complete inversion of truth suggests the infinite extension of philosophy: a structuralism.

Žižek continues:

"It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, but also the fight against them, now has to proceed in a gray zone of legality. We thus have de facto "legal" and "illegal" criminals: those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers and the like), and those who are outside legality, subject to military tribunals or seemingly endless incarceration.

Mr. Mohammed has become what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls "homo sacer": a creature legally dead while biologically still alive. And he's not the only one living in an in-between world. The American authorities who deal with detainees have become a sort of counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law and yet not regulated by the rule of law."

...working the schema a different way. Perhaps Žižek intended only to advertise the work of his colleague, arch antimaterialist Giorgio Agamben. Here, a tangible problem concerning institutional inconsistancies is given a fantastic solution. To the reader perhaps inclined to query this line of reasoning, references are duly produced (Agamben: homo sacer). This referencing is important because Žižek here can only hint at the properly opaque style of his books.

(the apparent legal problem stated above is in fact soluble: in US law evidence extracted by the state under torture is inadmissible)

Again what's suggested is a version of structuralism; and this is what's important for the newspaper. Because it allows the reader to suppose there's (so to speak) another level of discourse above that of the newspaper, authorising and correcting what the newspaper has already said.

The affectivity of structuralism is built around the logic of (pre whig era) conservatism. Structuralism isn't selling conservatism but it does dramatically ask: what if conservatism is after all reasonable? It restates the idea of a mysterious quasi-divine social order, not as the basis of political commitment but as a horrifying possibility undermining political commitment. It's surely of a piece with the vague politics of the middle class; predicated on a worried sort of liberalism. But again it's not too far from conservatism proper, which was always an orthodoxy of absent arguments; the arguments of conservatives being nearly always bad (there's also a relation to masochism).

The tendancy of the newspaper reader to countenance every kind of insult, albeit to only a small degree, probably derives his everyday use of two incompatible forms of argument:

1. ordinary arguments from experience

2. "reverse induction" arguments such as are required to understand newspapers*

but it truly is only the middle classes whose permanent tutelary role allows them to dream so profoundly the bureaucratisation of all social practice.

* i.e. what I later call arguments based on "naturalistic-inductive" logic

suggestion

Reproducible pornography is a discourse thats affectivity derives from the apprehension of a disturbing social reality outside its diegetic plane.

This pornography can only suggest, because it cannot realise:

1. the existance elsewhere of a general social pathology (along the lines of Foucault's scientia sexualis)

2. the existance of a real world of libertinism likewise outside pornography

(there is no libertinism, only a discourse about libertinism)

The affectivity of pornography is built around a double bind: pornography both incites and censures a libertinism it doesn't really relate to. Libertinism is here determined twice: as substance of indictment and as protocol of experiment.

For this reason the current form of reproducible pornography is probably vulnerable to gratuitous parody, as all commodities are vulnerable to gratuities.

symptômas

a new survey asserts! a new survey asserts!

Walter Benjamin writes somewhere that the philosopher lives under the sign of the intellect, as the prostitute lives under the sign of sex. The popularity of books such as those by Slavoj Žižek suggests that the bourgeois consumer often feels he lives under the sign of his mysterious pathology.

The consumer base in this country consists predominantly of a single class of petty functionaries, who, though they do not own the means of production, are permitted to call themselves bourgeois, or, if they are not permitted to speak, may feel ashamed in the name of the bourgeoisie. Their leaders have followed their gods in ceasing to speak to them directly. Their society is dominated topographically by capitalism and culturally by hearsay.

The vogue for a repackaged psychoanalysis, a psychanalysis cut into bits and redistributed through magazines, surely derives from the bourgeois consumer's horror and fascination with his own image as it appears distorted in the commodity spectacle. Ceaseless pronouncements on the abstract necessity of every aspect of his life, along with the miserable condition of this life, undoubtedly suggests to him that it is his own psyche, the centre of his universe, that is in really riddled with neuroses.

Capitalist mass culture, though hegemonic, is nearly always presented as something subsidiary, or marginal, as if some alternative existed. This ersatz marginality derives from its reproduction through the commodity system. Life is seen to circulate around an absent dominant. The counterpart of this discourse in topography is airport architecture: transit without destination. The reproduction of social roles tends also to the reproduction of marginality. There is no reason for these roles to be consistant with a conscious totality of life. Society takes on the character of the workplace. The psychoneurotic imagination serves to compliment and otherwise explain life as an endless series of preludes to living.

(intertitles for a silent film)