how would you like to be kidnapped at Bagram airbase?

When the British Home Secretary tries to claim as expenses pornographic films that her husband has watched, this is something people censure less because of the tawdriness of this particular episode, than the way in which it encapsulates the rotten complacency of the governing class.

Suppose they did a cartoon satirising this episode, showing the Home Secretary's husband watching a porn film shot in Abu Ghraib. On the one hand this would serve to underline the complacency of our governors, since complacency is complacency whether it concerns big or small things. And it would underline the personal responsibility of those who complacently or otherwise consented to such abuses. On the other hand the cartoon might tend to reduce the status of the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib to that of a stock situation, brought up for laughs.

I wanted to talk about some things from our culture. If I discuss this civilisation's "permanent collection" of images this does not necessarily mean granting them an exaggerated importance, or that the discussion concerns these images only.

I suggested that some of the impetus for Jarry's famous poster comes from the political sociology of modern life. The figures he has carefully drawn represent stylised bureaucrats. People recognise that there's something unreal about government bureaucrats. I've worked in these places and it's sometimes inevitable. People sit behind the counter. They have the job of humanising the blows struck by the great engine of bureaucracy at the public, and sometimes vice versa. Call centres have a similar function. I've worked in these too.



So, a situation presents in itself in real life in which people relate to each other immediately and mediately at the same time, or successively. One relation displaces the other, in an unsettling way, at least until the experience becomes commonplace. This is how people relate to the police or the people phoning from the call centre. This is pictured in Jarry's poster by a kind of double take. An excessive image stands in the place in which a more prosaic image is suggested.

I related this invention rather vaguely to the universal historicist cause: capitalism. This might be correct, even for a year as late as 1896, because the idea of capitalism as a decentred system, to be observed more or less indifferently, has to supplant the older popular idea of capitalism as legalised social warfare against the popular classes.

This might also go some way to explaining the strange situation of Manet, who, in the wintry sunshine of 1863, paints pictures in a similar vein and whose followers seem to have borrowed from him hardly anything at all.

another appalling story

"In 2008, the Iraqi government went on a military spending spree, signaling its intent to buy large quantities of advanced weapons from the United States — including F-16 fighters and M1 tanks. In 2009, it’s preparing to go further, with Defense News reporting the potential purchase and refurbishment in the United States of 2,000 T-72 tanks. These potential arms deals are worth over $16.6 billion, and if fully realized will mark the re-emergence of Iraq as a major regional military power."

from January this year

what is Badiou about?

If we consent to compare, say, Marcus Garvey with the English parliamentary reformer Henry Hunt this does not mean we're necessarily committed to a view of the world in which Europe inevitably proposes models that are subsequently imitated in other contexts. The political problems faced by humanity often reoccur, so similar solutions are often proposed. The political conjuncture out of which Latin American populism has developed might well correspond to the European future.

I mention this because if we want to understand Alain Badiou it might be useful to refer back to previous periods in which the prevalent intellectual culture was disconnected from everyday life. If it seems incomprehensible now that working men earnestly attended lectures by people like John Ruskin or William Morris it is sufficient to recall the lectures by Badiou and Zizek attended by fee paying students and future call centre workers. If we permit ourselves to assert that the prevalent intellectual culture is disconnected from the culture of everday life this does not mean we are obliged to find fault with the latter. Intellectuals are not so much expected to say the unsayable (that is, to rationally undermine the hypocrisy and cant of the establishment) as to dramatise the sublimation of language: its "becoming unintelligible". This is a social problem, and does not follow from the excesses or eccentricities of a few writers. Badiou has inherited this situation. This is not to say it doesn't affect his work.

Doesn't this follow from Badiou's quite correct assertion that the organised left, that is, the political structures of the working class, have for some time been in abeyance?

Badiou's article in the New Left Review introducing the ideas he develops in his book on Sarkozy is illustrative of the disjuncture I have mentioned between ordinary culture and a supposed elite culture that certainly shouldn't be mistaken for bourgeois culture tout court. Badiou is celebrated as an inventor of abstruse theory. This is connected, by various personal, social and historical circumstances to his political engagement on behalf of "a minority of the poor". I think both these activities are quite justifiable, but their interplay here results in a decidedly leftfield political theory.

It shouldn't be too surprising that Badiou is able to accurately criticise some of the contradictions of modern politics. The outcome of the election won by Sarkozy:

"affirmed the manifest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive manner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes any embodiments of dissenting political will. "

"The underlying rationale is, of course, that of the single party: since all accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy and so forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties?"

The interest in the essay, and one assumes the book, is the way this social critique connects with Badiou's philosophical system. It's something like a brittle crust overlaying molten Badiouism.

The argument seems to develop like this:

Badiou sees the French public and the capitalist state as mutually determining. The election results demonstrate the public's consent toward their government and political system. The political system is integrated with the capitalist system. The capitalist system molds public opinion:

"We should not underestimate the role of what Althusser called the ‘ideological state apparatus’—increasingly through the media, with the press now playing a more sophisticated part than tv and radio—in formulating and mobilizing such collective sentiments. Within the electoral process there has, it seems, been a weakening of the real."

The mutual determination of public and state might be thought of as a "virtuous circle". It is at least consistant with formal democracy. Nevertheless the foreign policy advocted by the french government is entirely cynical:

"a total consensus reigned on Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan (where French forces are fighting), Lebanon (ditto), Africa (swarming with French military ‘administrators’). Public discussion of alternatives on these issues was on neither party’s agenda."

and blame for domestic problems is fallaciously attributed to:

"ill-intentioned elements of the population—currently, foreign workers and young people from the banlieue."

In effect Badiou has described a political impasse - an "essential conservatism" - and the negative externalities that follow from it. The central problem, for Badiou, appears to involve the authenticity of the electorate and their failure to acheive a universal view of events. It appears that the system of mutual determination constantly recirculates "sad passions", hence the emphasis on fear. At the same time this means the system is abstracted from reality as a whole.

In the theory of avant garde art an abstracted status quo is negated and subsumed by an original form of art. In demonstrating the abstraction of the political status quo Badiou is able to apply the rules of this theory of art to politics. The regime itself understands in what direction its negation lies:

"What is haunting the regime, under the name of May 68? We can only assume that it is the ‘spectre of communism’, in one of its last real manifestations."

from which follows the conflation of disparate popular struggles with "communism" as a "transcendental invariant" and the real avant garde. This is to give history a strange reeducation camp flavour, easily refuted by enquiry into the events involved, for instance the first stages of the Chinese revolution, the Spanish civil war and so on.

The deficiencies in the argument as a whole follow from the failure to recognise the electorate's real economic interests. This allows a wholesale denigration of parliamentary politics, and by implication the customary right of political franchise. What is perhaps a temporary conjuncture is taken for a transhistorical "invariant". The right to vote has been useful in the past and probably will be again. The theory of avantgardism is a strange modern phenomenon that ought to be analysed properly before serving as the basis of some kind of neo-maoism.

Hobsbawm's alternatives

We ought to be able to show some generosity toward distinguished historian Dr Eric Hobsbawm, who has lived through so many decades of turbulent history and has consistantly supported the working class (even if they're now renamed "a minority of the poor"), as well as intermittantly supporting the bureaucratic elite who used to rule the Soviet Union.

Dr Hobsbawm argues in last week's Guardian that "the basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century” is that there are “two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism or socialism.” and:

"We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy."

Is the current social, political and economic structure of Britain really the result of a "practical attempt to realise" a "totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy"? Dr Hobsbawn is referring, presumably, to government policy from Thatcher onwards. Clearly the policies undertaken in this period are consistant with each other but was the goal really the triumph of the free market? We ought to ask for whom these policies were carried out, irrespective of their democratic mandate. Britain's political structure is intertwined with its economic structure, in which power is fairly concentrated. The post Thatcher governments inherited a good deal of corporatist legislation apparently related to welfare state provision and a semi socialised economy through some kind of social contract. The "socialist" parts of the British economy have been relentlessly attacked, corporatist legislation restricting free trade has not, where it is in the interests of big capital.

The monopolistic structure of big capital and its relationship to the government apparatus largely explains the current crisis and why the governments response has been anything but "a practical attempt to realise" a "totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy".

Dr Hobsbawm asks "Have we really got away from the assumption" that "the growing chasm between the super-rich and the rest doesn't matter that much, so long as everybody else (except the minority of the poor) is getting a bit better off?" He doesn't think we have. If I was super-rich I don't think I'd think it mattered, even if I wouldn't demand "we" thought it too. The important point surely is how it came to be that "everybody else (except the minority of the poor)" got a bit better off and if this is likely to be a continuing trend. The principal driver of this ameliorative trend has been house price inflation. The prices have inflated because the market is not at all free and was not intended to be so. The continuance of house price inflation will eventually work to make "everybody else" worse off as housing stock becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Dr Hobsbawm is right that what's needed is "a progressive policy". Better policies could be formulated than those which are on the table, and better policies could be formulated that most people would approve. We ought to ask whether there's any force in play capable of instigating such a progressive policy. There isn't. The likely trajectory of current policy follows from this abdication.

the WKD craze

As I think I said Rabbiter is only good for pointing out problems. The analysis unfortunately has to be cast into the habitual form of critique. Hence this thing borrows from an institutionalsed culture of critique whose trajectory does not necessarily coincide with the goals and methods of critique per se; but then neither does the culture of everyday life.

Isn't it sufficient to juxtapose the marketing material for the alcopop WKD with the lying apologias for government PFI projects to establish a connection?

There's no mystery as to why people like icepop flavour vodka drinks. The marketing of WKD stands out not because it's original but because it represents an especially egregious example of a trend that's been fairly widespread over the past few years.



It's meant to be a "wicked" drink. People like how its commodified. It isn't marked up with the sticky fingerprints of human activity. Capitalism has subsumed the efficient market and now throws up these products as efficient for their purpose as a cruise missile is to its. WKD is meant to be superior to the previously available and all too human pub drinks, like factory produced lager, because it appears more commodified. You get to participate in a made up imperative that's meant to supercede the always imperfect human capacity to exercise discretion. Participation in a baseless imperative is reimagined as participation in revocable evil: "wickedness", hence the devilry aspect. It is a cynical product that invites you to participate in its cynicism.

An emptied Experience circulates round an Innocence that's meant to have ritualistically subsumed a now generalised pig ignorance.

It is as if Adam and Eve, lead away to a life of perpetual toil, had at least the satisfaction that they could no longer be held up to ridicule by God; or that they were afforded the pleasure of being allowed to refrain from condescending the subsequent inmates in Eden; and Eve with hen night devil horns.

underworld with ghosts

"If we imprudenty imagine all secular authority to cohere as a unified bloc, it appears that even as they put down demonstrations by force they dream up demonstrations."



Look at the eyes of the people dancing, and those who have not been hired to dance. The T-mobile dancers fairly radiate the grace of their election. The bystanders seem self-conscious. They aren't in on the thing.

The ideas of neoliberalism were constructed on the traditional common sense of the middle classes, which became the common sense of the salaried working class. Society was nothing but an endless grid of hard working families. The political issues of capitalism and the state became moral issues. A moral sensibility developed which validated actions that validated this picture and anathematised actions discrediting this picture.

They were decent people, mainly, who didn't think about consciously constructing their own culture.

The point I am trying to make is that getting paid took on a significance beyond the significance of getting paid. It came to signify the excellence of whatever was paid for in the absence of reasoned inquiry into the goals and methods involved (c.f. our soldiers in Iraq).

The same sense of grace became attached to certain blatantly commodified commodities, like McDonalds and WKD, which conversely did not pay but had to be paid for.

I meant to describe the culture on which late Thatcherism was superimposed. Some of this is a cruel exaggeration.

...a whole society of T-mobile dancers, responding to orders relayed through loudspeakers, by the bleeding Mysterons.

crisis memo (3)

This is another bailout memo. In light of some of the pitiful clucking directed against yesterday's protestors in the media, I thought it might be worth summarising the issues:

1. The dynamic process underlying the growth phase has been the transfer of notional wealth from labour to capital.

This process has subsisted alongside a more or less consistant division of output. This distribution is hard to change because of political and technical structures that are hard to change.

2. The first process eventually impacted on the structure of the real economy - the costs of socially necessary debt became unserviceable - hence the first process ground to a halt.

This has a deflationary impact on notional capital wealth since capitalists ought to seek to diversify away from insecure unprofitable investments.

This is mitigated by a tendency for capitalists to hold on in anticipation of a further social/political change allowing the first process to continue - i.e. the breakdown of the "homeowner democracy" - or for want of suitable alternative investments.

3. Political power, however, is unduly influenced by banking interests and financialised capital (e.g. the car industry). The banks, through incompetence and systematic fraud are bust if notional wealth is allowed to deflate.

Hence governments are compelled to redistribute money to the finance sector to attempt to counteract the effects of the free market

This is the precise opposite of a fiscal stimulus per the Keynesian/Kaleckian model in which money is redistributed in favour of labour. Here money is redistributed in favour of capital. It has the likely effect of further reducing demand and increasing inflation.

4. The whole point is to carry through a wave of proletarianisation at the expense of damaging the real economy. Big capital may be able to survive, and even profit from this situation by cannibalising small capital.

The general public - the working class, the salaried middle class and the petit bourgeoisie such as it exists - would be better served with piecemeal solutions to the various problems brought up - bank fraud, savings recovery, winding up of the banks, measures against precaritisation. It is surprising that nothing much has been organised.

Hegel's logic, sort of

"the enveloping wings of the Hegelian dialectic..." Derrida talks about, rather grandly, somewhere. If it's unclear what Hegel means by his "spiritual" we can't assume he isn't referencing the "spiritual" of popular culture, more or less consciously. This is sort of an illustration for my unreadable treatise on logic.

Latouriana

a critical take on Bruno Latour's thing, here

treatise on two sorts of logic

"From these conceptions gradually grew a body of social theory that showed how, in the relations among men, complex and orderly and, in a very definite sense, purposive institutions might grow up which owed little to design, which were not invented but arose from the separate action of many men who did not know what they were doing. This demonstration that something greater than man’s individual mind may grow from men’s fumbling efforts represented in some ways an even greater challenge to all design theories than even the later theory of biological evolution. For the first time it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of designing human intelligence need not therefore be ascribed to the design of a higher supernatural intelligence, but that there was a third possibility—the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution."

Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty is not only a precurser of, and copybook for, todays "economic" styled apologias, but goes some way to providing a straightforward rendering of the rationalisations and presuppositions underlying the logic of economism.

Hayek intends to prove the folly of tampering the institutions of bourgeois society. He stresses the "evolutionary" basis of these institutions, and asserts that since the reasoning embodied in them will tend to exceed in quality the reasoning ability of any individual, or contrived group, then these institutions are to be preferred to any contrived alternative.

The form of reasoning on which Hayek, and Hayek's chosen predecessors, found this justification of modern society is contrasted with the form of reasoning utilised by those who theorised the deliberate reengineering of society, explicitly or implicitly. Hayek calls the respective philosophies that developed from these forms of reasoning "the empirical tradition" (also called "the evolutionary tradition") from which Hayek considers his own work to descend and opposed to this "the rationalist tradition", which no doubt points the way toward "the road to serfdom". This is something of a restatement of Burke's polemic against "Jacobinism", though Hayek prefers Adam Smith as a predecessor.

I think we should have proper names for these two forms of reasoning but Hayek's terms won't quite do. The "empirical" or "evolutionary" tradition as represented by, for example, Adam Smith probably provided a more accurate theory of the social world of the late eighteenth century than the "rationalist" tradition as represented by, say, J J Rousseau. The pragmatic quality of Smith's work can justly be contrasted to the idealism of Rousseau. The form of reasoning that Hayek correctly sees as central to Smith's work, the recourse to "markets", can hardly be guaranteed to be valid everywhere and for all time on account of this contrast. A theory ought to stand or fall on account of its relation to contemporary reality, not on account of its superiority to eccentric rival theories, in the distant past. The recourse to markets is not part of Smith's "empiricism". Rather Smith's theories come out of the interplay between the logic of markets and empiricist methodology.

Since the "recourse to markets" is in no way empirical and differs in important ways from the reasoning underlying Darwinian evolutionary theory, I suggest the kind of reasoning of which it represents one example ought to be called "naturalistic inductive logic". Hayek's method is slightly different from a general "recourse to markets" and represents another example of this logic. The methodology of the unhappy Rousseau and those other imaginative engineers of the social world could reasonably be called "rationalistic-inductive logic". Albeit, rationalistic-inductive logic is basically ordinary reasoning, in contrast to operations like the recourse to markets.

An approximate definition: rationalistic-inductive logic resembles deductive logic in every respect but admits approximate, provisional or conditional terms and produces approximate, provisional or conditional conclusions. It introduces expedients.

Naturalistic-inductive logic introduces expedients of a different sort from mere approximations, so deserves to be classed as a different kind of operation entirely. Before offering a definition of this way of thinking, it will be necessary to look at how it works.

The first disinterested genteel visitors to factories must have found them dirty, noisy and rather prosaic. To found a theory of modern society on its basic unit of commodity production: the factory, it's necessary to make the factory socio-economically meaningful. Hence the recourse to competitive markets, not merely as an explanation of the factory, but as the basis for a socio-economically viable definition of the factory. Markets, according to the theory, compel businesses to continue efficient operations and discontinue or modify inefficient operations. Consequently, given the reality of an untramelled free market the factory ought to be maximally efficient given the limitation of current technology.

In effect the institution, here "the factory" is abstracted from its context; it is considered to constitute a total object with a purpose of reproducing itself as itself. It stands on its own feet against the scouring of winds of free competition. This is to state its attributes in the order they might occur to someone versed in economism. The demonstration of these principles works best the other way. The bleak world of generalised countervailing force resembles the gloomy sphere of human existance. The purposiveness of institutions that really do exist, and exist in defiance of these forces, plausibly follows. For a thing to be purposive it must be a thing in itself: singular, iterated.

This isn't a logical demonstration because the operation itself isn't logical. Naturalistic-inductive logic ought to be aimed at practical usefulness rather than truth. It is, put crudely, illogical.

A further rule applies. The functional explanation of an institution as embodying a purposive force against a generalised countervailing force can only be a total explanation of that institution. This explanation therefore both cancels the real history of that institution and, in another sense, constitutes that history. Such an institution sublates its own history.

Naturalistic-inductive logic can therefore be defined approximately as the introduction of the notion that an institution has purposely reproduced itself as itself against a field of countervailing force. The institution thus idealised will thus be:

1. abstract

2. iterated

3. purposive

4. sublative

Economic theory as a whole is founded such idealisations of institutions (or aggregates, to which the same argument applies), that render the interactions between them amenable to scientific analysis. This process of idealisation has a particular logic which I've arbitrarily called "naturalistic-inductive". The name won't stick but the process will always be more or less the same.

Hayek, in effect, understands the institutions he valorises as sublative of a prehistory that includes the arguments of his opponents.

The sorts of reasoning I have delineated represent contrasting approaches to the problem of forming an adequate theory given limited information. They do not constitute an exclusive pair. There must be other ways by which a useable theory could be put together in these circumstances, so they aren't really "opposites". When these methods are applied to politics, however, they might appear to be "opposites" (as "forwards" is the opposite of "backwards"). Political institutions in the modern world tend to be distanced from everyday life. This would be a corollory of the abstractedness of political institutions, on which naturalistic-inductive logic is predicated, and which impels its development. Given this condition, it seems appropriate that rationalistic-inductive logic will work from a reasonable knowledge of everyday life, to a more sketchy idealised model of the institutions of the state. As Hayek correctly understood an idealised model of the institutions of the state entails exposing these institutions to criticism.

If rationalistic-inductive logic tends to err in its idealisation of institutions, naturalistic-inductive logic is prone to the opposite error, mangling the individual. The theory derived from naturalistic-inductive logic still has to be reconciled with ordinary knowledge. Its faulty assumptions can feed back into the sphere of everyday life. Economism feeds back its methodological principle of homo economicus, the economic man, as an anthropological principle. Hayek is obliged to disregard the possible "evolutionary" development of the organised working class, and of the intellectuals he censures, and assume humanity to be sociologically indeterminate, and consequently a suitable object of moral judgement. They are to be judged in the matter of their service to these institutions: banks, industrial conglomerates, the military and police.

So, these two sorts of logic can appear to be opposites when applied to politics, because they tend to have contrary orientations in the way they theorise the population and their institutions. But the orientation of either could work the other way. Someone with real experience of these institutions could analyse these institutions according to ordinary principles of logic, what I've called "rationalistic-inductive logic". Similarly, "naturalistic-inductive logic" could be the basis for an extreme functionalist sociology that insisted on the correctness of ordinary human behaviour, perhaps including even union membership.

These issues are illustrative of the way Hayek's "evolutionary tradition" diverges from the accepted theory of evolution in biology. In biology, every organism that exists contemporaneously is equally the outcome of evolution. There are certainly degrees of complexity among organisms but no gradations of rank; and certainly no gradations of moral standing.

Hayek's applied "evolutionism", like applied market theory, has a marked resemblance to certain aspects of Hegel's logic. For all his invectives against anti-empiricism, Hayek basically employs a system like that of Hegel, but with its rococo excesses deliberately concealed; and what is excised is precisely the system's development toward a valid account of its own methodology. To develop a properly Hegelian grandeur out of positions already based on so called "naturalistic-inductive" logic only requires the use of ordinary logic (deductive logic proper, or partial deductive logic, what I've called "rationalistic-inductive" logic). Hayek believes his ideas are perfectly sensible, and somehow akin to science proper. He wants it to be understood that there's an implicit line separating his work from that of someone like Georg Hegel. In fact, Hayek retains the irrational part of Hegel's system and excises the implications that reasonably follow from it. This affinity between Hegel and the economists, who mainly think the way Hayek does, might go some way toward explaining why Marx apparently borrows from the former in order to criticise the latter.

Hayek selects objects, institutions, or events that he believes ought to be allowed to continue to exist. These are rationalised according to a sytem of thought I have called "naturalistic-inductive" logic. By this process, they are reconfigured as the surface effects of "purposive institutions". These institutions subsume human intelligence generally, and in particular arguments against these institutions. This is Hayek's logic. The mock up of an intricate system of deductive logic in the style of Spinoza, which takes up most of The Constitution of Liberty is completely besides the point. It is threadbare and unconvincing. It is superfluous to Hayek's real argument, which depends on "naturalistic-inductive" logic, and is not coherent in itself.

The historical aspect of this enquiry may or may not interest a professional historian. It's certainly noteable that Adam Smith, Burke and Hegel are near enough contemporaries. I have elsewhere tried to show that the conditions underlying the logic they employ are complexity in the sphere of ideology reproduction, and the crumbling of central authority, the corrolate of which is the multiplication of, and increased importance of commercial printing. Evidence can be found corroborating a qualified relationship between "naturalistic-inductive" logic and the modernity of the late eighteenth century, as evidence can be found falsifying an extreme insistance on this relationship.

Since I don't want to be chained to my neologism, it's noteable that the characteristics pertaining to the elevated objects considered under the lens of "naturalistic-inductive" logic can be summarised by Hegel's term "spiritual", understood as the compound of the characteristics outlined above: abstraction, purposiveness, iteration, sublativity. The process that converts rotten corporatist legislation into the output of purposive institutions with superhuman intelligence has been called "naturalistic-inductive" logic. Alternatively, we could say this process is equivalent to the "spiritualisation" of the legislation.

Chariots of Fire

I wasn't very old when the film Chariots of Fire came out; and you would get, in the playground at school, some kids always running along in slow motion, like the scene in the film. Kids would just be milling around, and a couple of kids would be running along, in exaggerated slow motion.

"they simply don’t know what an argument is"

One of the things I find about my students is that they simply don’t know what an argument is. Beginning with Spinoza would therefore give me the opportunity to discuss the nature of argument, the distinction between inductive and deductive arguments, the relationship between premises and conclusions, what it means to make inferences, and so on.

I nearly spat out my tea when I read this last week. Apparently I'd been using these terms inductive/deductive in an anachronistic way. Hopefully people can tell what I'm saying anyway - I should be able to correct it soon enough. I am eternally grateful to Dr Sinthome's deductive fidelity.

introduction for a book by Susan Sontag

Isabella of Castile is meant to have remarked that she knew of only four fine sights in the world: "a soldier in the field, a priest at the altar, a beautiful women in bed, a thief on the gibbet". The allegedly meritocratic society of our own time does not accept these values, and instead regards the priest as a pious child it would be cruel to disabuse, and the thief, once suppressed, as a child sealed into childhood trauma. The soldier has become an object of pity: an unfortunate lost child. Like children they cannot pay for themselves. And to this end the poor woman has to be prised out of her bed, where she could turn so little profit, and onto the redundant gallows.

the two sorts of policework

There are two sorts of policework. In one you investigate crimes and try to establish who is responsible for them, in the other you identify suspicious characters and try to establish whether they have committed any crimes. So these two methods might appear to be represent the logic of induction used in contrary directions. Psychoanalysis is a heuristics of suspicion. It resembles the second kind of policework.

Sometimes an hour or so passes between me writing one sentence and writing the next sentence, such is the nature of working life. I find the fragmentary style this engenders quite appealing. It seems appropriate to the world of today. Don't be surprised if the police metaphor is suddenly dropped.

The argument in notes on Fourier is precisely psychoanalytical. The rhetotic of psychoanalysis has for a long time been unmoored from the domain of psychotherapy, which it no longer needs for support. Slavoj Zizek can sell his books psychoanalysing the products of complex social relations - films or historical events - precisely because the minimum requirement for the deployment of psychoanalytical rhetoric is a minimally paranoid spectator. Psychanalysis can proceed perfectly well without having to analyse the psyche.

Karl Marx thought Fourier deserved respect as a precursor of future proletarian literature and as a heterodox critic of bourgeois civilisation. Consequently aren't the notes on Fourier somewhat unfair?

Psychoanalysis has two aspects:

1. the multiplication of perspectives

2. the evaluation of these perspectives according to their degree of suspiciousness

the classic style of psychoanalytical explanation maintains a certain tension between disbelief and suspicion; that is, it plays on the discontinuity between the results of reasoning by two sorts of induction.

So, it can be assumed that we started off with a perfectly reasonable explanation for Fourier's utopian fantasies:

1. that Fourier really wanted to solve society's problems

we invented an alternative explanation:

2. that the problem Fourier is really trying to solve is the literary problem of the petit bourgeoisie

The first explanation is correct but falls short of a complete explanation. The heuristics of suspicion favour the second explanation - it makes Fourier's motives more suspicious. Psychoanalysis.

notes on Fourier

1. According to Walter Benjamin "Fourier appears, at many points, to prefigure a new type of human being, one conspicuous for its harmlessness". I agree he represents a new type of human being insofar as he represents a new kind of writer. It isn't too much of an imposition to state that Fourier represents a kind of writer whose career is made possible by the rise of the bourgeois economy in France. Fourier is a petit bourgeois writer; as such he gains access to the means of pursuing a literary career but without access to the traditional channels of patronage such as existed for bourgeois writers until much later. Fourier writes for the anonymous audience established by the commodification of literary culture even though he does not write works intended as commodities. Hence what distinguishes Fourier is not so much his harmlessness as his unusual earnestness.

2. The writers of the petit bourgeoisie in France in the early nineteenth century are already contributors to the spectacular society. The writers of the bourgeoisie, all the great writers, are not. The writers of the petit bourgoisie for the most part lack talent and have compelling commercial reasons to not analyse their condition in its metaphysical aspects. They are a class who cannot claim authority. Central authority has crumbled, for this class but not all the others.

3. In Fourier's ideal society class distinctions are not abolished but further exaggerated. The classes that existed in early nineteenth century France are to be further fragmented. Class mobility will be a matter of volition, rather like mobility between mystical states in Swedenborg.

4. Fourier's refuse collectors carry flags like the actors in Jiang Qing's revolutionary model operas. The flags represent the coincidence of theory and practice. They sound musical instruments to signify that their work is carried out under their own volition. So:

“The charge of the Little Hordes is sounded by a din of alarm bells, carillons, drums, trumpets, barking dogs, and mooing cows. Then the Hordes, led by their Khans and their Druids, rush forth with great cries, passing before the patriarchs, who sprinkle them with Holy Water. They gallop frenetically to labour, which is executed as a work of piety, an act of charity toward the Phalanx, the service of God and of unity.”

They think about and approve their actions. Harmony, therefore, has two aspects: it can be understood as the harmonisation of labouring classes or as the harmonisation of thinking classes. Since each class has both attributes: it is simultaneously a labouring class and a thinking class, both problems are simultaneously solved in Fourier's overall solution.

5. Fourier's problem as a writer is the crumbling of central authority, as much as it's the problem of later bourgois writers such as Beckett or Sartre. He is in a position somewhat analagous to that of a child delivering a lecture for adults, a lecture that nevertheless must urgently be given. His utopia is conceived as a solution to precisely this problem: how the institutional forms of endemic ignorance can be reconciled with each other and with society as a whole. Graduate students love to hear about the little hordes in which they recognise their veritable image.

6. The real solution to the problem consists in bypassing the commodity spectacle, obviously.

historicism (2)

Another example of historicism: C.P. Fitzgerald writes in The Birth of Communist China:

"Confucianism was not, however, a dynamic creed. It looked back in a half-antiquarian spirit to a supposed golden age in the distant past. It did not attempt to arouse enthusiasm, to inspire the mass. It was quite content to let the "stupid people" worship any manner of god as and how they wished. The Communists being by definition the party of the people must make a religion which will satisfy the people, but which must be no more "superstitious" than the ethical system which used to be the privilege of the scholars. The people have no reason to think that they were happy in the remote past, any more than today, so the new heaven must be cast into the future, to which all may strive, even if few will see it come to pass.

The gods must be overthrown, since they promised nothing in this life and the Communists are only concerned with this world, to them the only reality. The people must also be aroused, given purpose and hope, simple ideas and clear manifestations of the improvements which the Communists seek to bring about. This is achieved by making the people into a God. The people are themselves God. They can do nothing wrong, because by their doing it it becomes necessarily right. They cannot be identified with any one or two fallible human beings; even the party, the chosen instrument, may make a mistake, may fail to do the will of the people. The fact that it has made a mistake is itself evidence that it has not done the will of the people, just as its triumph is evidence of the "correctness" of its line"

and

"Nothing against the will of the people can ultimately triumph"

Fallibility was formerly thought to especially afflict the common people: the labouring classes. Now it is understood to afflict the higher cadres; the labouring classes are no longer to be thought of as fallible, if not individually then certainly as a class.

This change in the way people think certainly does track a change in the way society is. But is this the same kind of historicism as the example from the textbook of European philosophy? Perhaps what C.P. Fitzgerald has noticed shouldn't be counted as historicism at all. But why not? The only reason to exempt it is that it's overly correct: the periodisation of history (empire - interregnum - communism) is obvious, and part of the mechanism by which ideas are reproduced obviously exists (CP indoctrination, for one thing). The underlying process is exactly the same in Fitzgerald's book and the Chinese textbook. The real difference is in the style employed. And the distinction between between what Fitzgerald writes and what we normally think of as historicism - fairly free speculations about human existance - is also stylistic. Fitzgerald is not in the business of writing after dinner paradoxes - that's it, mainly.

It is a matter of judgement, a weighing up of efficacy against accuracy, as to how far it is prudent to advance with speculative historicism. Onto thinner ice: it's noticeable that the new paradigm in Chinese political thought shows a marked similarity to European liberalism, with the minor variation of the market standing in for the people in liberal thought. The change in both cases tracks that slippery category, the advent of modernity (China had a modern bureaucracy for two thousand years but not a political structure subserviant to commodity production). It could be argued that with the advent of the commodity system (principally in the domain of the intellectual class), one no longer reasons by ordinary induction from human nature to social institutions but by a special kind of induction from social institutions to human nature. This, inevitably, is speculation.

introduction to historicism

People find our marxism inconsistant and our avant gardism passé. But just as an A rated investment can be made out of several B rated investments, a single valid genre can be made up out of these two discredited genres: historicism.

Historicism seeks to pin changes in consciousness to changes in the structure of society.

From marxism is borrowed the idea that social structures determine patterns of thought and the periodisation of history. From the theory of avant gardism (e.g. Hegel) comes the idea that history can be profitably considered as a series of avant garde movements that progressively succeed each other. Because they have a necessary relation to social structures, the particular mechanisms by which they develop out of these structures (which are obscure in any case) do not need to be given.

For instance, Simon Leys writes about a Chinese history of European philosophy, printed subsequent to the Cultural Revolution:

"the introduction of the class struggle into European philosophy turns that history into a shooting gallery where no one is spared"

Leys then translates part of the section on Nietzsche, which is meant to represent a particularly crass example of historicism:

"Nietzsche pursued and developed the esoteric voluntarism of Schopenhauer. He announces fascism. He publicly defended enterprises of cruel oppression and aggression launched by the reactionary-bourgeois class, having developed to the point where it could shed its democratic trappings, openly adopted a policy of violent dictatorship: it developed in the last part of the nineteenth century when capitalism was changing into imperialism"

In some ways this might be useful information if the reader were permitted to actually read Nietzsche. The major fault, by my reckoning, is treating a casual relationship between Nietzsche's writings and Imperial policy as a necessary one (in the pantheon of Nietzsche's muses Bismarck looms inordinately over Syphilis). But that's not really the point. The premises of historicism are necessarily faulty: material structures determine thought in ways too complex for us to understand; the periodisation of history is an exercise of taste; Hegel's avant gardism is second cousin to horse racing systems. The point is that history can be simplified to the point at which it becomes useful, acording to the necessarily unscientific application of the faculty of taste.

"the inexplicable is enthroned in bourgeois society"

Art criticism ought to be written in the knowledge that it is basically beside the point. Any valid explanation ought to be verifiable from the picture (or sculpture or whatever) itself, making the written explanation redundant. The same applies to the criticism of social institutions: shopping precincts or the social services for instance. The following paragraphs attempt to explain Alfred Jarry's poster for Ubu Roi via a historical analysis of changes in the way authority is articulated. But history is written within history. I wrote the whole thing at work with no research whatsoever.



Authority is reconfigured in bourgeois society. The system by which authority is relayed becomes entangled in the system of commodity reproduction. Social control over the greater part of the day is taken over by capitalist firms. Direct orders take on a puritan simplicity.These firms altogether constitute a diffuse network of control with no fixed centre. The weakened state apparatus floats above this. Later, the the state expands serving to underwrite the system of capitalism. The state apparatus becomes swollen with thousands of bureaucrats. Social control over the remaining part of the day hardly exists since it hardly needs to exist. The stark world of direct commands that scaffolds a society in which commodity production predominates is supplemented by a mass culture made out of commodities. Since this culture is based on the commodity form it is determined by the consonant or conflicting interests and ideas of its proprietors and audience and by the exigencies of commodity reproduction: the imperative that costs be more than covered by revenues. Authority, then, appears in a second form, contextualising its first appearance as direct command.

The task of propagating a higher culture eventually falls to a specialised clerissy. The collaborative product of this class is a vast system of structuralism: a heaven of structuralist thought floating above the secular realm of the giant bureaucracy. It hardly advances beyond an officialisation or a rendering orthodox of notions from capitalist mass culture. Its solidity is also a reflection of the clerical disavowal of initiative. Practice is reified as BestPractice. Structuralism can be recognised from the works of Renan or Taine to a modern psychotherapy that does not recall its originators.

Authority in the developed form of clerissese tends toward pure abstraction. It comes to resemble medieval thought, itself concerned with "structures", with the important distinction that the substance of medieval authority was not held to be perfectly interchangeable. The worldview of the clerissy is like a cardboard theatre with interchangeable characters and interchangeable sets.

It would be all too easy to demonstrate the ways in which the above paragraphs fail to conform to professional historiography. At best they could be a sort of parody of the compressed style of Hegel. No matter.

To return to the poster, Jarry is able to point to, criticise and lampoon this interchangeability of the substance of modern clerical authority. The improper object of veneration, Père Ubu, appears as an unexpected profanation of veneration unexpectedly rendered contentless.

monument to change we can believe in: Easter Island

les derniers mohicans du neoliberalism

After first being described as a bail-out, the bill was now being called a rescue package, and all those lobbying to push it through were emphasising that this was meant to help the average American on Main Street, not the bankers of Wall street.

Wasn't this a dog of a bill? According to a strict application of the rules of analogy the partisans of pure neoliberalism disappointed by this bill could be compared to the supporters of the socialism of the third international, disappointed by the Nazi-Soviet pact. In both cases the directorate of a political tendency abruptly changed course and adopted a line wholly contrary to that which it had hitherto taken and the line advocated by its erstwhile supporters. Consequently in each case the directorate was revealed as less the providential expression of the will of its supporters than an appendage of other interest groups (respectively: Wall Street; the Kremlin). Nevertheless it would be unjust to make this comparison. While it is legitimate to consider the Republican Party and the PCF to be equivalent in the matter of disappointing their supporters, the existance of many generic similarities that are not consequential to the main point of comparison serves to blur a limited comparison into a general comparison. Hence one can suggest a general analogy between the Republican Party and the PCF without having to substantiate an explicit claim to this effect by establishing an accurate limited analogy.

The operatic struggle in the House of Representatives told us some things about the nature of the links between the economic and legislative powers in the US. Principally House Republicans fought to derail the bill or at least to gallantly appear among the defeated when it inevitably passed. The Democrats mainly caved in. The "rebels" could have framed their objections in the cold style of the professional economist but did not. They could have put together a credible manifesto and tried to defend it. The science of economics, as is well known, is hardly effective without the warranty of finance capital: of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs etc. It appears that the Representatives took seriously their role as conduits between the people and the executive and framed their objections in folksy populism, to judge from the comments of those whose minds were changed:

Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri who voted "no" on Monday, said: "America feels differently today than it did on Monday about this Bill."

Sue Myrick, a Republican, returned from her North Carolina district having changed her mind after an array of local banks told her that they were at risk of collapsing.

John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, held back tears: "I think most Americans realise we are facing a serious crisis. It's time to act on behalf of the American people. It's about their savings, about their jobs."

They have some autonomy but the gravitational pull of economic power makes real independence onerous, unpalatable, eccentric.