Kandinsky's triangle

In 1911 the greatest modern painter wrote:

"The spiritual life can be accurately represented by a diagram of a large acute triangle divided into unequal parts, with the most acute and smallest division at the top. The farther down one goes, the larger, broader, more extensive, and deeper become the divisions of the triangle. The whole triangle moves slowly, barely perceptibly, forward and upward, so that where the highest point is “today;” the next division is “tomorrow,” i.e., what is today comprehensible only to the topmost segment of the triangle and to the rest of the triangle is gibberish, becomes tomorrow the sensible and emotional content of the life of the second segment.

At the apex of the topmost division there stands sometimes only a single man. His joyful vision is like an inner, immeasurable sorrow. Those who are closest to him do not understand him and in their indignation, call him deranged: a phoney or a candidate for the madhouse."

Kandinsky's system is to apply the selectively naturalistic logic of Burke or Hayek to the masterpieces of art. The triangle is a metaphor for the sublation of the indefinite. Suppose a masterpiece of art is ordinarily defined along the lines of "an artwork considered to be especially excellent from a set of works of art". According to Kandinsky, masterpieces of art not only represent a kind of "conclusion" to the "syllogisms" of ordinary art. But also, ordinary art itself no longer needs to be submitted to critical judgement. It is formally subsumed by the masterpieces of art, and may remain undefined.

What Kandinsky has done is to apply the functionalist argument from Burke or Hayek to something which is meant to be, by the standards of art pour art, which he also wants to uphold, absolutely functionless. Some strange arguments follow from this...

"the Talisman"

"Comparison of others' attempts to setting off on a sea voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic north pole. Discover that North Pole. What for others are deviations, for me are data by which to set my course."

- Walter Benjamin

Impressionism had always had a mannerist side. It wasn't all about optics. But the idea that it was all about optics was allowed to stand as a total explanation. Sérusier's, or Sérusier's and Gauguin's the Talisman, is meant as a sort of painted manifesto to a style where the mannerist side of impressionism is to be stressed exclusively, and the alibi of optics dropped. In one respect this style stresses the richness of human experience, by showing what would correspond to a superlative form of human experience, and as such can be understood as arguing against the real immiseration of human beings. On the other hand, what is actually shown as a possibility of human experience is an invention, an impossibility. It is as if the work "supposed" a superhuman author given to superperception. Sérusier had been reading Hegel, in whose works such contradictions abound. Gauguin's career in the financial sector had been ended by the recession. He had abandoned his family in Denmark and was working in Pont-Aven, Brittany, which became a sort of hipster Lourdes.

I wanted to explain the theory of avantgardism. If the lead up to this has concentrated exclusively on "celebrity masterpieces" this is because the theory of avantgardism is a theory of "celebrity masterpieces".

British Art

When people refer to British Art they are not referring to something necessarily brilliant, though this possibility isn't definitively ruled out. The idea of British Art has an affinity with the idea of British Cooking. Some of it may be very poor, but this isn't an inevitability. Referring to British Cooking is not the same thing as referring to Italian Cooking, for example, which is generally considered to be unambiguously good; or Italian Art. The usage is different. For example if Balzac had written to Stendhal:

"what I do, is I do these frescoes; but you, my friend, have made British Art"

Our soldiers, returning from Afghanistan, are to be presented with the best of British Cooking, and the best of British Art.

But Britain did have a sophisticated visual culture at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, best exemplified by satirical cartoons. If these works don't convince enough people, or the right people, that they qualify as art proper, it's probably on account of the absence of obviously irreproducible skill, their opacity to modern viewers, and their puerility. The preponderance of figures engaging with the viewer also plays a part. If, in the style of Garfield minus Garfield, these figures were erased, at least some of these pictures would come across as great modernist renderings of the capitalist city, with the objectivity of Hiroshige prints.

"a great humanist gesture"

There's a kind of Marxist history where the principal classes in society fight over a common means of cultural production, like a rowing couple each trying to drag a disconsolate baby from the other ones grasp. Intellectual conflict is mapped onto social conflict. This wasn't the Marxism of Edward Thompson, who, in The Making of the English Working Class described the following:

"A witness before the parliamentary committee enquiring into the hand-loom weavers (1835) was asked to state the view of his fellows on the Reform Bill:

Q. Are the working classes better satisfied with the institutions of the country since the change has taken place?

A. I do not think they are. They viewed the Reform Bill as a measure calculated to join the middle and upper classes to Government, and leave them in the hands of Government as a sort of machine to work according to the pleasure of Government.

Such men met Utilitarianism in their daily lives, and they sought to throw it back, not blindly, but with intelligence and moral passion. They fought, not the machine, but the exploititive and oppressive relationships intrinsic to industrial capitalism. In these same years , the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism was running its parallel but altogether separate course. After William Blake, no mind was at home in both cultures, nor had the genius to interpret the two traditions to each other."

...which in one way suggests two and only two rival positions of two rival classes, but also something else. Because, on what grounds could the workers' criticism of Utilitarianism have been made, if not those underlying "the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism"? That political economy represented the final denial of man?

The establishment at the time believed and made use of several kinds of ideology. Thompson analyses the traditional or induced attachment to "Church and King" and religious revivalism as well as the much vilified Utilitarianism. I tried to demonstrate that the "modern conservatism" exemplified by Burke's arguments against the French Revolution, selectively and retroactively naturalistic, represented an important innovation, quite distinct from a genuine attachment to tradition or utilitarianism, even if the "spiritualising" tendency of this "modern conservatism" is employed alongside utilitarian arguments, as in most economics texts.

This is to slight the venerable historian somewhat, whose book is pretty good, but the multiplicity of conservative ideologies is a development that underlies and informs the modern political aesthetic, and as such is of some importance.

The great difference between Manet's and Gauguin's treatment of similar subjects is not just historical. The political situation is no longer that of the Second Empire. Gauguin's Anna the Javanese is a depiction of someone on the margins of society, perhaps even defiantly so. The old bourgois conception of sex work has been restored, somewhat. It would be an outrageous insult to call this woman a prostitute. The picture doesn't convince us about where and when it was painted, other than in its style and celebrity. It all looks a bit like a theatre set. It couldn't really be described as a criticism of modern life, unless blurishness is taken to be a political statement.



I used to work nights in a petrol station, and this kid came in about four in the morning to clean the forecourt and replenish the stock. The storeroom in which the stock was kept was a windowless concrete cell impregnated with motor oil. Imagine, it's full of old boxes and cobwebs. And this kid just went to sleep in there. The great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism. It's got to have been like an Eritrean prison cell, except with bottles of Pepsi Max and old boxes of Quavers. And this kid just used to sleep in there. I understand he smoked a lot of weed, but even so.

The pre-critical ambivalence underlying Manet's Olympia is ordinarily political: the vexed relation between bourgeois culture and the sex industry, so the picture can be understood as a partial criticism of society. For Gauguin, ordinary political considerations seem of less importance than the "truth" underlying the "great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism": the defiant assertion of man in the abstract. Even in Gauguin's pictures with "cut out" figures, the mystery of internal depth seems to have a decisive weight: the eyes of the doll rolling back in its head.

If Gauguin isn't quite, or not always asserting the idealism of Berkeley, the impression that comes across is something like Heidegger's overidealised politics: the mystery of Mankind's relation with the Cosmos. As if the frills of Javanese Pagodas, or Gothic Cathedrals, or the frills of this woman's costume, which she is momentarily without, prefigured the intermediate world of Heideggarian froth.

the anti-political communist tendency

One might have expected the anticapitalist disturbances of the 90s to have generated a voluminous critical literature with the sangfoid of the two undated, apparently online only issues of Letters Journal (whether pro or con):

"With this journal we wish to understand and analyze capitalism and crisis, attack the Left, critically engage with our own ideas and practices, and develop a more dynamic transgression from the political."

The "anti-political communist" tendency might involve a dozen people or so. It has also been articulated in articles under the pen name Monsieur Dupont, the best of which is probably the theory masterpiece Do you want to be or don't you want to be soft like me?

ten franc historical research: Manet's Olympia

The object of our study is not the nineteenth century, which we have hardly researched, but the contradictions of the present.

In 1864, the year after Manet painted Olympia, and the year before it was exhibited, the Goncourt brothers reflected on the history of prostitution in Paris:

"Our little cousin Labille came to see us this morning. He had a rendezvous with a cocotte who was going to take him out to Asnières in her carriage. There exists a peculiar type of high-class prostitute nowadays who finds her custom among boys still at school, emptying their pocket-books and building up a reserve of men who will keep her in later years.

When the boy had gone, we reflected on the course taken by love in our three generations. The elder of us, at our cousins age, had a girl who stitched shoes for a living. I had a tart who always had a few sous in her chest of drawers. And this youngster has a woman who keeps her own carriage and horses. The world progresses. Here we have the three periods: Louis-Philippe, 1848, and the Second Empire."

In the early years of the nineteenth century conditions were markedly worse. Jules Janin wrote in 1839, with reference to Parent-Duchatelet's earlier study:

"If all orders of society are represented in the convict prisons of Toulon and Brest, just as they are in the Golden Book of the Legion of Honor, does that mean that the novel and the play may concern themselves with those vile heroes, ever cowering beneath the public's contempt or the warder's truncheon? In his Histoire de la prostitution publique M. Parent-Duchatelet , the learned gentleman who, out of pure charity, lived amid filth, that rigid Port-Royal Christian who lived out his whole life in haunts of ill fame out of sheer virtue, tells us that in order to perfect his frightful knowledge of Parisian vice he was once taken to a house where five-score ladies of the night were sleeping promiscuously with thieves on a great pile of rags gathered from all the garbage heaps in the kingdom. M. Parent-Duchatelet saw it; he tells us so; we must credit him. And yet, merely because the thing exists, does that mean that the novel and the play may pore over this den of vice to dredge up choice morsels? No, no, there are some things from which we must avert our eyes..."

Janin's first sentence is reflected years later in Lautrec's obituary notice, whose writer peevishly observed that the list of the artist's thousand conquests could also be found on the desk of the chief of police.

I suppose it is a question at the back of Janin's mind whether Parisian prostitutes constitute a particular "estate" within the social order, and the answer is that they do not.

During the Second Empire prostitution was legalised and subject to police regulation. The Emperor had the character of a procurer, and the bases of the bourgeois conception of prostitution altered. Syphilis was pandemic. Beyond the celebrated courtesans, the Second Empire filles publiques were multiplied and massed together in barracks, like artisans in factories or the destitute in the poorhouse. Prostitution became an integral part of the social machine of the Second Empire.

Political ideas inevitably lagged behind these social changes. Conservatism, admittedly, had already ceased to be purely dogmatic and had become more often reactive and naturalistic. But the idea of a social estate of prostitutes engaged in great factories devoted to their trade must have been necessarily disquieting. Because of the special status these women had, the Second Empire prostitutes, whose profession was somewhat naturalised and somewhat denaturalising, dramatise the contradictions of industrial civilisation as a whole, itself naturalised and unnatural.



If we accept that, intellectually at least, someone like Manet could have contemplated the Parisian prostitute with a kind of excited ambivalence, we can reapply the analysis of Alfred Jarry's poster.

A moment of everyday paranoia is pictured which threatens to be indissociable from paranoia about the whole of society. I have tried to show that this paranoia is the opposite of extreme psychopathology. It is, rather, the excited indifference of the pre-critical mindset. The type of representation involved conveys this paranoia. In place of Jarry's exaggerated double take, Manet has three figures in distinct registers: Olympia, her maid, her cat. The whole effect is something like three seperate "cut outs", assembled in the same picture, or three offkey figures from a diorama, indicating simultaneously the perspectives in which they appear realistic and nonrealistic.

caveat mutant

Franco Moretti has an ideosyncratic take on "modern monsters": Frankenstein and Dracula. This is from Signs taken for Wonders:

"The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy summer. Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula. In the twentieth century they conquer the cinema: after the First World War, in German Expressionism; after the 1929 crisis, with the big rko productions in America; then in 1956–57, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, directed by Terence Fisher, again, triumphantly, incarnate this twin-faced nightmare. Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.’ That ‘must’, which for Marx is a scientific prediction of the future (and the guarantee of a future reordering of society), is a forewarning of the end for nineteenth-century bourgeois culture."

"They are indivisible, because complementary"? Strangely enough, when I was at school the class was split between two rival gangs. The leaders of the gangs were called Elephant and Dracula. I never learnt their real names!

The main point of my criticism of this piece is, it's all very clever but is Mary Shelley really anticipating Marx's theory of the decomposition of Nineteenth Century class society, which actually didn't pan out exactly as Marx anticipated? Isn't the operative political faultline in 1816 still Radical against Conservative rather than proletariat against bourgeoisie? Why is there only one monster who hardly interferes in society at all, but rather remotely terrorises it? Why doesn't this terrorism relate to the social relations made possible by capitalism, and that made possible the assassination of Spencer Percival, for example?

There might be something in the correspondence between the monster in Frankenstein and a certain way of looking at the destitute, but it surely requires the complete abstraction of the "disfigured wretch" from economic, social and familial relations.



The personal history of the author of Frankenstein ought to be asserted here.

Mary Shelley's mother was involved in a famous controversy of the period whose theme coincides with the theme of the book. More or less, Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense arguing for a rational society. The French Revolution took place, offstage. Edmund Burke came up with a very strange argument against the ideas of Paine and the actions of the revolutionaries. Certain institutions in society should be accepted as being unfathomably efficacious. Acting against these institutions, apparently rationally, would be either futile or disasterous. Reality is a mousetrap; Enlightenment a piece of cheese. Mary Wollstonecraft responded to Burke's pamphlet with Vindication of the Rights of Men. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein appropriates Burke's theme of the horrific aspect of the new: in modern language, the "mutant".

This is a fairly conventional analysis of Frankenstein. It might appear, from this, that Moretti has failed to understand the significance of the "Burkean" theme. In fact he goes over just this theme later on in his book, in a chapter on Sherlock Holmes.

Having established certain similarities between the treatment of the same theme by Burke and Mary Shelley, it's relevant to stress their differences. The same theme that served as the basis for a polemic by Burke serves as the basis for an imaginitive work by Mary Shelley. It has ceased to be a doctrine to be argued for or against and become somewhat naturalised itself. It has become possible for it to be contemplated with a kind of excited indifference.

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.