The City from Below

I'm a bit late in posting this, but this weekend here in Baltimore, beginning this evening, is the The City from Below conference. Numerous workshops and panel discussions are planned, with scheduled participants including, among many others, David Harvey, George Caffentzis, Sylvia Federici, and numerous local, regional, and national groups committed in various ways to fighting back and taking back the city. This is from the description on the site's main page:

We are committed in organizing this conference to a horizontal framework of participation, one which allows us to concretely engage with and support ongoing social justice struggles. What we envision is a conference which isn't just about academics and other researchers talking to each other and at a passive audience, but one where some of the most inspiring campaigns and projects on the frontlines of the fight for the right to the city (community anti-gentrification groups, transit rights activists, tenant unions, alternative development advocates, sex worker's rights advocates, prison reform groups) will not just be represented, but will concretely benefit from the alliances they build and the knowledge they gain by attending.

At the same time, we also want to productively engage those within the academic system, as well as artists, journalists, and other researchers. It is a mistake to think that people who spend their lives working on urban geography and sociology, in urban planning, or on the history of cities have nothing to offer to our struggles. At the same time, we recognize that too often the way in which academics engage activists, if they do so at all, is to talk at them. We are envisioning something much different, closer to the notion of "accompaniment". We want academics and activists to talk to each other, to listen to each other, and to offer what they
each are best able to. Concretely, we're hoping to facilitate this kind of dynamic by planning as much of the conference as possible as panels involving
both scholars and organizers.

THEMES TO BE CONSIDERED

Gentrification/uneven development

Policing and incarceration

Tenants rights/housing as a right

Public transit

Urban worker's rights

Foreclosures/financial crisis

Public education

Slots/casinos/regressive taxation

Cultural gentrification

Underground economies

Reclaiming public space

The right to the city

Squatting/Contesting Property Rights

Urban sustainability

It sounds like it will be a fun, informative, potentially exciting weekend. We hope to be able to take in what we can. If you're anywhere near Baltimore and can make it, please try to come out and take part.

On blogging and hype and The Kindly Ones

Recently, Andrew Seal considered why he reads new books. Since my time of despair on this particular question has passed, I now read very few new books. Which is to say, I may still despair of having time to read the history or philosophy or theory or political economy I want to read, I no longer worry much about new novels. Where once I not only jumped at the new Amis or Powers or whoever, but also felt compelled to track down the latest hype-gathering novels, now I barely even notice when something new is afoot (hence Aleksandr Hemon's excellent novel The Lazarus Project almost completely escaped my attention until very late last year). I don't trumpet this as a virtue, just noting that I've allowed myself to quite happily fall out of the loop. I will still read, sooner or later, the newest works from, for example, Coetzee or Roth or Marilynne Robinson, but new books from new writers or writers of heavily hyped books are rarely of immediate interest.

There are exceptions. For example, it has been hard to avoid the hype surrounding Roberto Bolaño in recent years, and though I've been spending time mining the classics, modernist or otherwise, I have ultimately succumbed. Though in a sense Bolaño is an exception, he is also a case in point. I did not run out and immediately buy his many books that have been blog-hyped, though I took note for future reference. I ended up reading The Savage Detectives last year because a friend had left it at our house and I was between books. In the wake of reading that book, which I was somewhat less than enthusiastic about, I was still unable to finally resist all the 2666 buzz; I asked for and received it for Christmas. And yet still it sits, patiently awaiting my attention.

A clearer exception is Jonathan Littell's controversial novel, The Kindly Ones. Though it's not really the buzz that has me wanting to read this book (after all, the buzz is not altogether positive, is it?). No. There has been an excess of words written about this book, much of which I have studiously avoided. Too much of what I have seen has been depressingly literal or reductive, reducing the book to either "Holocaust porn" or otherwise about something easily captured in a quick review. The book is this or that, and can be safely dismissed as such. But why do I feel as if I can sense that the book has not been fairly treated by such treatments, when I haven't yet read it myself? The answer is that the very voices that have elevated the novel to a must-read for me have done so by arguing for its virtues in a manner that seriously calls into question most other reviews (the tiresome remarks of reductive non-readers of the book notwithstanding). These voices are primarily Steve Mitchelmore's and, returning to the blogger who touched off this post, Andrew Seal's. It was, as is often the case, Steve who first put the book on my radar, and his own response to it, in typical fashion, bears little to no resemblance to any other. Meanwhile, Andrew's two fascinating posts (one, two) have deepened my sense that this is a book I need to read; I especially appreciate the attention Andrew pays in the first of his posts to some of the arguments used by other reviewers, positive or negative, in particular some of those employed by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books, and Samuel Moyn in The Nation (coincidentally, the only mainstream reviews of any interest to me).

I highlight Steve's and Andrew's posts not just to express my appreciation and to announce that I plan to read this particular novel, but to point out the continuing possibilities they represent. With a book like The Kindly Ones, the pressure on the reviewing establishment to respond quickly and reductively is immense. The historical and political baggage associated with the Holocaust just makes matters worse. Blogs, in theory, have the opportunity to take more time, allow more space, encourage critical exploration. Too often, it seems, bloggers get caught up in the reviewing pressure too. But there's no need to. Some books demand better attention than the newspapers are willing or able to give them--or, rather, some books bring into focus the demand made by all books of any value. As Andrew puts it, in a comment to an unrelated post of his, a comment in which he linked to the reviews of The Kindly Ones that appeared in the LA Times and the New York Times, "This is why I don't feel newspaper book review sections declining is a peril to the republic": I couldn't agree more. If it were up to newspapers to keep me informed on anything, let alone writing, I'd never have any idea what's going on.

The world is never over!

At zunguzungu, Aaron Bady offers a useful reminder for those of us, like myself, who have a tendency to give occasional vent to our apocalyptic jones:

The world is never over! The “deckchairs on the Titanic” metaphor is a nice way to belittle people who prefer to rearrange deckchairs rather than address the iceberg, but the world is not a ship, ontologically defined by whether it is sinking or floating; the world is a place in which history has a way of going forward, even if those living in it have difficulty imagining how.

[. . .] Life always goes on, somehow, and maybe badly, but the character and dynamism of its continuity is of profound importance for those of us who want to live in the future.

I should say that I intend my catastrophic comments here as a little different than what Aaron is talking about. He is posting in response to Brad DeLong's semi-apocalyptic outburst about the Geithner Plan. DeLong cannot imagine the world working differently (perhaps, because it simply shouldn't--he might say doesn't, can't--work otherwise) (I don't pay too much attention to DeLong, usually, since he first came to my attention some years ago for his stupid attack on Chomsky; his more recent attack on David Harvey didn't help matters (latter link via)--Harvey commented to that, and followed up here). For my part, I'm trying to imagine the world being otherwise than it is, both ideally (how I would like it to be or think it ought to be) and in the reality in which we might find ourselves in the coming years or decades (how I think we might be able to live in such an eventuality). In addition, my desire to try to figure out a way to live differently pre-dates the actuality of this particular crisis. Admittedly, my ability to imagine is severely hampered by the current system itself and my position within it. The problem is huge, the task before us enormous.

Aaron closes his post by observing that everything he's read tells him

that we do live in a world economic system that’s just lost all four engines. But the difference between a controlled crash-landing, where most of the passengers have a good chance of survival, and pretending that the engines still work (because the alternative is too dire to imagine) is extremely important, and needs to part of this discussion. To ignore it would be stupid, almost suicidal. Or rather, it’s a kind of thinking that those members of our society equipped with parachutes are more likely to indulge in, isn’t it? They can afford the fallacy. They’re not the ones flying coach.

This, for me, is the key thing. It appears that the capitalist system, which necessarily undergoes periodic crises, may have entered its terminal crisis. This could mean any number of things, of course. When we factor in environmental limitations (the barely yet registered effects of global warming) and whatever the truth may be about the remaining availability of oil, the system, in one way or another, could and likely will limp on, more and more destructively, for decades. The very rich are not likely to be as negatively affected by such an increasingly unstable system. But the rest of us are going to need to make potentially radical adjustments in how we live, and those adjustments can be very painful indeed, or a lot less painful, depending on how we respond collectively to the problems. In my view, efforts at re-localization are crucially important ways in which we can make that crash turn into a softer landing. Hence the focus on food.

Food Politics

For some time, since well before the current financial crisis, I've been painfully aware that I don't actually know how to do anything fundamental--such as, crucially, grow my own food or build things or repair things around the house (minor exceptions notwithstanding). Having skills of this kind, or being in close community with others who have them and are willing and able to share, seems to me to be of vital importance, either for attempting to lessen dependence on the capitalist system, or for long-run survival, in the likely event of that system's collapse, partial or otherwise (in which case, we would be forced to make do on our own).

Naturally, this sounds no doubt unduly alarmist to many. So be it. But I'll be returning to this theme again and again. Access to food is perhaps the major long-term problem facing us, along with the related problem of access to water. On that front, I want to direct you to this great piece by DeAnander at Feral Scholar. In it, she discusses the destructiveness and inefficiency and unviability of the monocrop industrial agricultural model, the importance and sustainability and diversity of local polyculture farming, and the concept of food as a basic human right. Here are some excerpts, but you should read the whole thing:

Not only does industrial monoculture produce less food per hectare, it produces its inefficient results at very high (and unaccounted-for) “external” costs. North American industrial farming has been estimated to consume 10 calories of fossil fuel for each calorie of food produced; estimates of topsoil loss vary from 2 to 6 bushels for every bushel of industrial corn harvested. Water usage for industrial farming is similarly alarming: in North America, the ancient Oglalla Aquifer is being drained dry by the enormous water demands of huge acreages of unnatural monoculture. Meanwhile, runoff from artificially-fertilised fields is creating large “dead zones” in coastal waters, destroying fisheries; and pesticides are implicated not only in human health risks, but in the destruction of beneficial insect populations including essential pollinators. Clearly, the inefficiencies of industrial agriculture go far beyond how many bushels of corn or soy can be extracted from each hectare of land in each season; if non-renewable resources are being consumed, or other sources of food (such as oceans and rivers) are being damaged, then our food-producing capacities are being impaired by the way in which we are producing food — in which case we are on a downward escalator of diminishing returns and negative feedback, and there is no future in the present paradigm.

[...]

In seeking local food security, then, we may be quite confident that the encouragement of diverse smallholdings — backyard gardens, SPIN farms, family farms — practising polyculture rather than monoculture, is a sound, practical, and realistic strategy. It is not sentimental dreaming, nor the charming but useless hobby of a handful of food snobs; the myths we were taught in school are just that — myths. It is industrial monoculture that is unsound, impractical, inefficient, and unrealistic. We can — and sooner than we think, perhaps, we must be prepared to — feed the world with small-to-medium-scale organic/sustainable farming.

It is not the productivity of land that prevents us from eliminating hunger. It is not the lack of new, improved, ever more phantasmagorical high-tech toys and techniques. What prevents us from eliminating hunger is our failure to return to, and adhere to, a moral code that recognises healthy food as a human right. As F M Lappé notes in a recent article, such a moral code is nearly universal among the people we call “primitive”; early humans, in striking contrast to many other animals, seem to have an innate tendency to share food — even with others not directly related to themselves. Allowing people in our tribe, village, or city to starve is a violation of our primeval human nature. When we muster the political will to continue our ancient food-sharing behaviour in modern dress, the results are astonishing: astonishingly simple, astonishingly easy, astonishingly efficient.

Recall, also, DeAnander's important essay from last year, co-authored with Stan Goff, "Politics is Food is Politics" (which I previously linked to last summer).

Analysing Sentences

In The Limits to Capital, in a footnote addressing a book claiming to subject Marx's analysis of technological change to "the standards and rigor which distinguish twentieth century analytic philosophy", David Harvey says the following:

"Analytical philosophy may be good at analysing sentences but is not so good, apparently, at capturing the total flow of an argument."

Ha!

Notice

After Mirah was born, we encountered a variety of surprising difficulties with breast-feeding. As part of that often painful process, we learned a lot about how nursing does and does not happen, about pumping, and about breast milk and formula. Ultimately, before Mirah finally did learn how to nurse, we entered into relationships with other women seeking to donate their excess milk.

All of which is a preamble to announce that my beautiful wife Aimée has written and published her inaugural free-lance article, for Babble.com, in which she discusses the phenomenom of donated milk, in part through the prism of our personal experience, with some history thrown in for good measure.

Please do, check it out. (Also note at the very bottom a nice picture of Aimée with Mirah. Yay!)

Spleen, Olive Moore

I'd intended to write about Olive Moore's Spleen last year, but time got away from me and I never got round to it. But even if the time for a proper review has passed, I do want to say something about it before allowing myself to move on completely, because Spleen is the quintessential forgotten book and it deserves to be read.

I bought Spleen several years ago, precisely why I cannot say. No doubt it was in the midst of my full-blown obsession with all things associated with the Dalkey Archive, though it would have been prior to the Big Dalkey Get. I say Spleen is the quintessential forgotten book: Moore is the forgotten writer par excellence. (In fact, I'd pulled the book down from the shelf, its slim volume lost between our several books each by Lorrie Moore and Toni Morrison, to see whether it should be discarded.) She wrote four books ("Olive Moore" is a pseudonym for Constance Vaughan; according to the biographical note in the back of the book, she lived in Bloomsbury, ran in those sorts of literary circles, and wrote an essay about D.H. Lawrence), in the early 1930s, before disappearing, presumably dying around 1970. Dalkey produced a hardcover, omnibus edition of her work in 1992 and the stand-alone paperback of Spleen in 1996. It seems these reissues got good notices, where they were noticed, but I'd wager she's been forgotten again. Even in Dalkey's roster of misplaced modernists and post-modernists, lost writers and otherwise missing books, she seems easy to overlook.

This is a shame, for Spleen, at least, is excellent. The back of the Dalkey edition suggests that Moore writes "in a style similar to Virginia Woolf's". I think this comparison is apt, though if anything, I preferred reading Moore's prose over Woolf's chewier writing. Woolf is a useful formal comparison, too, I think. Things are narrated primarily from the perspective of Ruth, the novel's main character; her consciousness is revealed above all. Where so far Woolf's fiction has struck me as self-consciously innovating--as evidently by a writer conscious of trying something new (no disrespect to Woolf intended at all; I like her), Spleen feels somehow, to this reader, more organic. (For no good reason, I'm sure, I am also reminded of Ann Quin's Three, but my memory of that novel is dim. The reminder could simply be because they're both more or less forgotten English writers, now published by Dalkey.)

The novel concerns Ruth and her self-imposed exile after the birth of her deformed son 20 years earlier, whose deformity she feels responsible for. She meditates on motherhood, nature, equality, class. In her exile, for example, she muses on the pregnancy of one of the local Italian girls:

One day she would return from the beach or from the town with the day's papers, and Lisetta would run out to her with a face of beatitude announcing that Graziella had been delivered of whatever she had had to deliver, and Graziella, completed, would be sitting up in bed, the sweat still on her smiling face, accepting the cup of zabaglione and the figs, and the next day she would be up and about, singing to her infant, feeding it, washing it, ravished with delight in it, and binding it in the mummy-bands of a della Robbia holy child until only its face, surprised and formless, was visible. And from the first to last no fear, no despair, no mental torture. Nothing that was known to colder northern women, over-civilised, over-sensitised, bearing their children in an agony of pain and bewilderment.

As she herself, much earlier, when she had found herself desultorily pregnant, had been bewildered:

For how can one love a thing one does not desire? Perhaps because it is usual to love one's child. Then I am not usual. (How easy to accept this in the darkness of the night when the unreal becomes the obvious!) Because she knew that not wanting the child now she would not want it later. She knew it was not possible to her to love a thing she did not know or had not seen. How can one? Yet I am expected to. All women do. I am a woman. Therefore I do. And if I do not? (And at a movement real or a imaginary within her.) When I breathe, it breathes. When I feed, it feeds also. Against my will. Yet when it had finished using her for its own purpose, she must welcome it and say that it was hers and that therefore she loved it (all women do) at once and without question. When it had had nothing to do with her from start to finish.

She had eventually come to an understanding about the unborn baby and decided to try to will something in the world with it, not passively accepting it, but as an active agent, as men presumably are in the world. It is as if she were responding to a message: "Something different, said the message. Something worth having. Something beyond and above it all, said the message. Something new." After which she is radiant, happy; but something went wrong, and she blamed herself--both because of her earlier ambivalence and her later desire to create "something new"--and left. The novel begins with the present of her in exile and shifts back and forth, various details coming to light along the way. We are treated to images from her childhood (free and Edenic, raised by a father with radical educational theories) and her perfunctory marriage (after the father's death, she going along with what comes; her mother-in-law never forgiving her for not being sufficiently grateful for being "rescued from genteel poverty", not understanding "that Ruth was without gratitude because without knowledge of what genteel poverty might be"); descriptions of the beautiful Italian landscapes; conversations with locals; intellectual battles with a certain visiting male artist ("He said things which in her world simply were not said, were not thought: but she had lived too long out of any world to care what was said or thought.") . . .

As I said, this is not a formal review, but I hope I've managed to give some idea of the book and why it might be worth reading. (Another point in its favor, if you're interested in giving it a shot: the novel is 128 pages long.) As should be obvious, I recommend the book, especially--but not only--to admirers of Virginia Woolf and to readers interested in the period of the historical Modernists, and fictional explorations of class and gender.

Attaching to Power

At Black Agenda Report, Glen Ford addresses some of the common complaints of the pro-Obama "Left" about the non-Obama Left, here in the context of a response to this article from Linda Burnham. A sample:

Below are the “two conflicting views” on Obama, on the Left:

"First, that Obama represents a substantial, principally positive political shift and that, while the left should criticize and resist policies that pull away from the interests of working people, its main orientation should be to actively engage with the political motion that’s underway."

"Second, that Obama is, in essence, just another steward of capitalism, more attractive than most, but not an agent of fundamental change. He should be regarded with caution and is bound to disappoint. The basic orientation is to criticize every move the administration makes and to remain disengaged from mainstream politics."

The first viewpoint is no doubt held by Burnham. It is essentially mooted by the reality that most Left Obamites only weakly “criticize” and virtually never “resist” Obama’s rightist policies and appointments in the crucial military and economic arenas – which was, first, the fear and, later, the main complaint of the non-Obamite Left. The Obama Effect is to neutralize Blacks and the Left (Blacks being the main electoral base of the American Left) by capturing their enthusiasm for Obama’s own corporate purposes. Obama and his Democratic Leadership Council allies (and their corporate masters) monopolize the “motion,” all the while shutting out even mildly Left voices (as in the recent White House Forum on Health, from which single payer health care advocates were initially barred). Blacks and the Left have not been in any kind of effective forward “motion” since Election Day. As we shall see, Burnham’s definition of “motion” does not involve confronting Power, but rather, attaching oneself to it.

Policy-wise, Obama no more “represents a substantial, principally positive political shift” than his political twin, Hillary – again, color aside. The second viewpoint is supposedly held by the opposition, and partially reflects the views of the BAR team. Yes, Obama is “just another steward of capitalism, more attractive than most, but not an agent of fundamental change.” This has been easily observed, since Blacks and the Left have allowed Obama to act upon his corporate and imperial instincts, unimpeded by even the mildest counter-pressures. His presidency takes shape to the Right of Democratic congressional leaders, who have made more noise over Obama’s Iraq trickle-out and his clear threats to Social Security and other “entitlements,” than have many Left Obamites. Obama is not simply “bound to disappoint” – he has already been cause for great disappointment, even among those of us who scoped his essential corporatist nature years ago. Who would have predicted that he would play the most eager Gunga Din for the bizarre Bush/Paulson bank bailout decree, last year? Who would have foreseen that Obama would retain the loathsome international criminal Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense? That he would continue Bush’s policies on Africa – Zimbabwe, Sudan, Somalia, AFRICOM – without missing a beat? That he would so quickly offer to put Social Security “on the table” for “reform” (in the Republican sense of the term)?

But Burnham would have you believe the Left opposition are nothing but nitpickers, inflating executive pinpricks into major assaults. Thus, she seeks to make the opposition look silly, as if we “criticize every move the administration makes.” In truth, her argument is designed to excuse her and her Left allies failure to “resist” or confront Obama in any meaningful way.

David Harvey on the Financial Crisis

Reading Capital has an excellent piece from David Harvey on neoliberalism and the financial crisis ("The Crisis and the Consolidation of Class Power"). Here's an excerpt:

One of the major barriers to continuous capital accumulation back in the 1960s and early 70s was the labour question. There were scarcities of labour both in Europe and the US and labour was well organised, with political clout. So one of the big barriers to capital accumulation during that period was; how can capital get access to cheaper and more docile labour supplies? There were a number of answers. One was to encourage more immigration. In the United States there was a major revision of the immigration laws in 1965 that in effect allowed the US access to the global surplus population (before that only Europeans and Caucasians were privileged). In the late 1960s the French government was subsidising the import of Maghrebian labour, the Germans were bringing in the Turks, the Swedes were bringing in the Yugoslavs, the British were drawing upon their empire. So a pro-immigration policy emerged which was one attempt to deal with the labour problem.

The second thing you go for is rapid technological change which throws people out of work and if that failed then there were people like Reagan, Thatcher and Pinochet to crush organized labour. And finally capital goes to where the surplus labour is by off-shoring, and this was facilitated by two things. Firstly technical reorganisation of the transport systems: one of the biggest revolutions that happened during this period is containerisation which allowed you to make auto parts in Brazil and ship them for very low cost to Detroit or wherever. Secondly the new communications systems allowed the tight organization of commodity chain production across the global space.

All of these solved the labour problem for capital, so by 1985 capital has no labour problem any more. It may have specific problems in particular areas but globally it has plenty of labour available to it; the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of much of China added something like 2 billion people to the global proletariat in 20 years. So labour availability is no problem now and the result of that is that labour has been disempowered for the last 30 years. But when labour is disempowered it gets low wages, and if you engage in wage repression this limits markets. So capital was beginning to face problems with its market, and there were two things which happened.

The first was the gap between what labour was earning and what it was spending was covered by the rise of the credit card industry and increasing indebtedness of households. So in the US in 1980 you would find that the average household would owe around $40,000 in debts now it’s about $130,000 for every household, including mortgages. So household debt sky-rockets and that brings you to financialisation, and that was about getting the financial institutions to support the household debts of working class people whose earnings are not increasing. And you start with the respectable working class, but by the time you get to the year 2000 you start to find these sub-prime mortgages circulating. You are looking to create a market. And so finance starts to support the debt-financing of people who have almost no income. But if you hadn’t done that what would have happened to the property developers who are building the houses? So you try and stabilize the market by funding that
indebtedness.

The second thing which happened was that from the 1980s onwards the rich are getting far richer because of that wage repression. The story we are told is that they will invest in new activity but they don’t; most of them start to invest in assets, i.e. they put money in the stock market, the stock market goes up so they think it is a good investment so they put more money in the stock market, so you get these stock market bubbles. It is a ponzi-like system without the Madoff’s organizing it. The rich bid up asset values, including stocks, property, and leisure property as well as the art market. These investments involve financialisation. But as you bid up asset values this carries over to the whole economy, so to live in Manhattan became all but impossible unless you went incredibly into debt, and everyone is caught in this inflation of asset values, including the working classes whose incomes are not rising. And now we’ve got a collapse of asset values; the housing market is down, the stock market is down.

More on Biblical narration and The Adventures of Augie March

Recently I suggested that Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March was in some respects like the Bible in its mode of narration. I had intended to say more about it but did not want to weigh down that earlier post. I won't go into great detail here, either, but I do want to mention something about how it was that I arrived at this idea. As part of this effort, I have since discussed "The Bible Open and Closed", an essay in which Gabriel Josipovici argues that the Bible's basic mode of narration is open (admittedly, that entry is more of a report than anything else). In fact, it was re-reading The Adventures of Augie March that once again brought Josipovici's argument to mind, prompting me to re-read the essay (which is of course much shorter than The Book of God, in which the same argument, among others, is dealt with in greater detail).

This, then, is the passage from Augie March that caught my attention in this regard (Augie, here, is working for his brother Simon at the latter's coal yard):

"Well," he said to Happy and me, "why don't you two take the car and go see some of the dealers? Try to drum up some trade. Here's five bucks for beer money. I'll stay here with Coxie and try to get that back fence in shape. They'll steal us blind [if] we don't do something about it." Cox was the handyman, an old wino in a slap-happy painter's cap that looked like an Italian officer's lid. He sent him scouting along the fence of the Westinghouse plant for old planks. Coxie worked for hamburgers and a bottle of California K. Arakelian's sherry or of yocky-dock. He was watchman too, and slept on rags back of the green lattice before the seldom used front door. Off he limped--he carried a bullet, he claimed, from San Juan Hill--by the mile-long big meshed fence of the corporation in which such needs as fences were met by sub-officers' inviting contractors' bids a tight steel net permitted all to look in at the vast remote shimmer, the brick steeples, the long power-buildings and the Vesuvian soft coal under the scarcely smeared summer sky and gaudiness.

It's that final detail about Coxie--"he carried a bullet, he claimed, from San Juan Hill"--that did it. Then I notice the other character details--he works for hamburgers or a bottle of sherry; sleeps on rags--do some of the same suggestive work. This character never appears again, but a life is briefly allowed to emerge here, before sinking back into the narrative, without any laborious back-story being filled in.

Again, I don't want to over-sell the comparison with the Hebrew Bible (not least because my experience with the Bible is highly limited!)--obviously, for just one example, Augie is the center of his own narrative. But I think such passages as the one quoted above, in the details I've highlighted, as well as Augie's general refusal to assign a meaning to his life and his uncertainty about it all, suggest an approach to literature that is more in the tradition of narrative, as argued by Josipovici, than in that of the novel, dominated as it is by story or even plot.

A clearing in the forest

Following on from yesterday's post, here is Gabriel Josipovici, in an interview in Forward, with Tamar Yellin, acknowledging his preference, as both reader and writer, for narrative over both plot and story (thanks Steve):

"Plot is not really my thing. Stories have a linear progression. My fiction is more like a clearing in the forest, a patch of clarity." If one can discern a philosophy behind this, it is a desire to serve truth through art rather than reshaping life artificially in order to lend it meaning. "I think the fiction — indeed the art — I like is that which reaches out toward meaning but accepts that in the end, it will always slip out of our grasp or turn out to be an illusion. . ."

Notes on Josipovici's "The Bible Open and Closed"

Regular readers of this blog will probably not be surprised to learn that the writings of Gabriel Josipovici have been of prime importance in the evolution of my thinking on matters related to religion and faith. In his case, it is of course through the loving attention he has paid to the Bible itself, along with his illuminating inquiries into suspicion and trust and tradition.

I've always wanted to read the Bible, largely because I felt I ought to, because of its standing as cultural artifact, its importance in history and in literature. I wanted to know what was in it, so that I could better read other things, understand allusions, and so on. And I wanted to know what it really meant, in the face of so many apparent believers in the Bible as repository of Truth and the literal Word of God, and so on. It thus stood tall as the ultimate obligation text. But Josipovici has made the Bible seem approachable for me, just as he has done with so many once-forbidding writers, writers who I'd previously held at arm's length, continually deferring my own reading, writers from Dante to Kierkegaard to Proust. And he has made the Bible come potentially alive for me, as a text. (Which is not to say that I've yet made much headway myself, for a variety of reasons I'll not go into here.)

His marvelous study, The Book of God, is vitally important in this area, obviously, but here I want to discuss a later essay I've recently re-read. In "The Bible Open and Closed", a beautiful essay collected in The Singer on the Shore, Josipovici discusses the decentred nature of the Bible's narrative mode, its openness. The Bible is, he writes, "a series of narratives" (italics his):

Narrative was clearly how these ancient Semitic peoples made sense of the world, as it was the way the Greeks of the time of Homer, and so-called primitive peoples all over the world did. Yet we in our culture have a problem with narrative. What does it mean? we ask. What is the guy trying to say? And if the book in question is a sacred text the problems grow even more acute. For then it is even more important to understand clearly what it is saying, since our very lives may depend upon it. We need to feel we are dealing with a text that is closed, in the sense that its meaning can be clearly understood and translated into other terms; yet the Bible, like all narratives, but, as I hope to show, even more than most, is open, that is, it resists translation into other terms and asks not so much to be understood as lived with, however puzzling and ambiguous it may seem.

He then proceeds to discuss examples of what he means. One involves a certain Phalti or Phaltiel, son of Laish. When David rebels against Saul, Saul gives David's wife Michal to Phalti. Later, after Saul's death, when Saul's son Abner and everyone else realize that David now has the power, Michael must be returned. Here Josipovici quotes the relevant passage from the Bible:

And Ishbosheth sent, and took her from her husband, even from Phaltiel the son of Laish. And her husband went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned. (2 Sam. 3:15-16)

These are the only times Phalti appears in the Bible. It would have been one thing, Josipovici observes, for this obscure character to appear once or twice, and no more. But the narrator "chooses instead to bring this man momentarily to life, to make his pain, whether wounded pride or anguished love, all the more palpable for remaining unspoken." So troubling are such examples, so counter to our expectations, particularly our expectations of how a sacred document should operate, but also counter to how we expect a story to be told, used to novels as we are, that we insist on assigning reasons for it. Indeed, the history of Biblical interpretation is full of just this sort of reason-finding. There must be something missing, or maybe this is meant, or perhaps that. But the Bible proceeds as an open narrative. What this means, he says, is that the text's meaning is not certain, not nailed down, not closed. Meaning is sought, but the Bible does not disclose meaning. There is no center to the narrative. All is rendered contingent--not just meaning, but the stories themselves, whether a given story is told, versus another. The characters, like Phalti, who simply walk on the stage, evidently have lives that could have been narrated too, but are not--and we are made to feel it, however briefly. Looked at from the outside, especially from this late date, we think we know that Phalti is of little consequence, so chances are good we will not even notice his appearance. And the Bible does not offer reasons why things happen or why certain people are affected or chosen--why Abraham? for example; indeed, why the Jews?--and of course this is how life is. Things happen. Things are. What matters is how we respond to things. In this way, he argues, the Bible is above all, realistic, which may seem odd to us, given how used to the conventions of the so-called realist novel we are, and how unlike such a novel the Bible is, regardless of our attempts to read it as if it were one.

Now, Josipovici is primarily talking about the Old Testament--for one thing, the New Testament clearly has a central figure in Jesus--but even the New Testament, he argues, can be seen to operate within this tradition. With the Gospels, he shows how Matthew's and Mark's version of certain events are different, in their mode of narration, than is Luke's. With the former, the narrative proceeds with elements similar to that of the Hebrew Bible: "the deadpan of narration, its refusal to comment on the action from some position outside and above it; and (what follows from this), its depiction of man as a being existing in time. . ." Whereas Luke tries to impose meaning. The former, the way of the Hebrew Bible, and of Matthew and Mark, for example, is "open" because, in the case of Jesus, "we are forced to experience Jesus's anguish [as when he asks 'My God, why has thou forsaken me?'], his sense that what he desires and what he has to be are not one and the same, and his sense that he does not know how things will turn out." His ultimate acceptance is more real, more forceful, when we are not assured, as Luke tries to assure us, that everything will be ok. Only with this openness, this kind of narrative movement, "can Jesus's remarkable acceptance be grasped for what it is: a gesture of trust."

All of this makes the Bible seem like something other than the boring, obligatory religious text I have at times tried to force myself to read. And it's method, it seems to me, does have implications for writing and for literature, as well as for important extra-literary matters--the notion that the Bible resists meaning rather than imparting it clearly seems to me to have radical implications in our politics and our religion. But these are topics to explore another time. For now, let me close with another passage from Josipovici's essay, this one from near the end:

It is remarkable that a religious document should place narrative above theology, reality above consolation in this way. But the Bible does. And it does so, it seems to me, because it recognizes that in the end the only thing that can truly heal and console us is not the voice of consolation but the voice of reality. That is the way the world is, it says, neither fair nor equitable. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to live so as to be contented and fulfilled? And it contains no answers, only shows us various forms of response to these questions. And from Adam to Jesus it is constant in its reliance not on teaching, not on exhortation, not on reason, but on the one human form that can convey the truth that we are more than we can ever understand, the only form that is open, the form of narrative.

Those Beckett Letters

As has been fairly widely noted, Cambridge University Press recently published The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940. Not too long ago, I would have looked on this event with something close to complete indifference, whether I'd begun reading Beckett or not. I had no interest in biographies in general and extended this lack of interest to diaries and letters--I saw interest in these latter two categories in particular as bizarre and puerile. In part my indifference had to do with my resistance to the reading of fiction through the lens of biography. This particular resistance has not lifted, but I can now see value in reading good biographies of literary figures, biographies that are interested in the writing, or that might perhaps help with reading the author in question, by attending to the his or her problems writing. That is, not merely a series of events, alongside breathless sales reports and the biographer's tedious speculation as to the psychological make up of the author.

I admit that letters and diaries still seem weird to me, but my view has been softening. I've always blanched at the thought of some of my own letters and journal entries being published, in the extremely unlikely event that I became famous enough that some poor soul should have to read them. (I've also wondered at the problem for scholarship posed by email chains, versus physical correspondance, at least when I operated under the assumption that society would continue without catastrophe. Ahem. But I digress.) Of course it's the personal nature of such documents that has bothered me, the writing being obviously not intended for public consumption.

So they seem weird, but as I say, my attitude has changed somewhat. I must confess to having developed an interest in certain diaries, certain letters, such as those of Kafka (of course, by now I've already read his Letter to His Father, which at least one reader thinks perhaps ought not have been published at all) and, obviously, Beckett. My attitude had softened somewhat already by this time, but when I read Josipovici's On Trust two years ago, I became fascinated by some of what Kafka had to say in his letters and diaries, and how those related to the problems of writing, the problems of suspicion and trust. I was similarly moved by Beckett's approach to writing, his problems, as revealed till then only in his biographies, which made use of some of his letters.

But anyway, here I am unexpectedly wanting to read Beckett's letters, like now, knowing it's foolish, that I'm being pointlessly impatient, since I have a quite a bit of Beckett's fiction still to read, as well as the two biographies, Dierdre Bair's Samuel Beckett and James Knowlson's Damned to Fame (both recently acquired, though in somewhat beaten used copies). Not to mention piles of other books (which I also want to read now). I was not expecting this. Nevertheless, I do plan to hold off, for a while. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the bits and pieces revealed by others. For example, Steve Mitchelmore really got the ball rolling, for me, with this post, which included two tantalizing excerpts. Here's part of one:

Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as for example the sound surface of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence?

Then at his fine blog, A Piece of Monologue, Rhys Tranter wrote about the book a few days ago, which he had not quite dived into yet. But he quoted from the introduction. I will finish up by excerpting one of his equally tantalizing excerpts. The letters, say the writers of the intro:

demonstrate his numerous commitments: to reading in a systematic way the classics as well as the literatures of several cultures; to training himself in music and the visual arts; to learning languages, becoming fluent in at least five and familiar with many more; to keeping up with a broad range of acquaintences, friends, and professional associates; to answering in polite and timely fashion practically every letter that was addressed to him, even when he became famous and the inquiries grew in number; to writing, of course - criticism, fiction, poetry, drama; and perhaps more surprisingly, a commitment to getting published and to seeing his dramatic work realized on stage. The letters also show the author's endeavor to lead the life that would make all these commitments realizable.

Notes on Stephen Crane and Modernism

I read some of Stephen Crane's fiction recently (I won't deny that an impetus for this reading was Gabriel Josipovici's enthusiastic mention of Crane in last year's Ready Steady Book year-end symposium, though I'd been meaning to at least re-read "The Open Boat" for some time). Looking at the biographical sketch in the front of the book, I was struck by the fact that Crane was born November 1, 1871. That is, four months after Marcel Proust (born July 10, 1871).

Younger than Proust! In my mind, where Proust feels present, his concerns relevant, Crane has always seemed locked in the dusty past--not only were some of his writings required reading in grade school, but the subject of his most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage, is the Civil War. His association with this war is so complete, I think, that it has only served to reinforce the sense I had of him belonging to a much earlier period than he does. In truth, of course, Crane's realism was innovative in its time, and I can see now that it stands as a precursor to the writing of some of the historical Modernists, Hemingway in particular. Actually, I'd always had Crane slotted in as an influence on Hemingway, who I've never been able to read. Neither of which did much to change my flawed view of Crane's own writing (yet I'd had fond memories of reading "The Open Boat"--it's a mystery). I knew that Crane had died very young, of tuberculosis, not yet 29. But whereas he wrote and published a lot in the 1890s--journalism, stories, novels--Proust struggled with his literary direction.

It occurs to me, now, thinking of Crane as an influence on Hemingway and perhaps other Modernists, to wonder if this might help us draw a distinction between conceptions of Modernism, a topic which has come up again here recently, and elsewhere. Crane's writing can be posited, from one point of view, as a set of advances for realism as a technique. I've already used the word "precursor" above, the kind of language I generally try to avoid in these matters: the notion of literary progress comes into play here, a notion I don't have much use for. The association of Modernism necessarily with a particular set of aesthetic advancements is of little interest to me. For me, the question is not about a particular aesthetic, but rather about whether the writer is attending to the problem at hand, solving the problems presented by writing--by writing in the particular instance, and by writing in general.

No general illumination, or: Some literary Links

I check in with Bloglines and I see that there is a new Spurious post, or two, or three. Will they be long ones? Will I have time to read them? If not, will I remember to get back to them? I don't want to click, afraid to lose them. I could check the actual blog, but no. Too easy; contrary to normal practise. I leave them for a while. Another day goes by, another new one. More. I see there are now eleven new Spurious posts. Overwhelmed, now I've got blog homework; I've got to catch up, the temptation to skim will be strong (it's worse with some other blogs: I see I've let Arthur Silber's new posts get away from me again: 26, Bloglines tells me--how long has it been?!?--and I know his are going to be long).

I click. And right away I'm laughing:

Reading Scholem makes me melancholy, I tell W. on the phone. He knows everything! He's an expert on all matters! That's because [he] studied for 40 years and then wrote, says W. How many years did you study? Are you studying now? But you're writing, aren't you? You're writing constantly.

Ha! I admit I used to glide right past these W. entries. I didn't get them. What's to get? What is my problem? Anyway, in recent months, they've become my favorite Spurious offerings. Which is not to disparage the others. For example, another recent post has Lars musing on Blanchot (and later on Jandek):

Some writers know to get out of the way of the work, to let it live. Know that the work belongs to darkness, that the ochre beasts should be discovered by the uncertain light of a reader's torch, and that there should no general illumination, no way of seeing the whole, and all at once.

Blanchot for me is, in a sense, still to come, if only because I've deferred continuing with The Space of Literature (continued to defer?), for now (though who knows I could pick it again up next week). I've deferred, yet this doesn't stop me from foolishly, impatiently coveting other Blanchot books. Lars above is referring metaphorically to the caves in Lascaux, fresh in my mind from reading the opening to Blanchot's Friendship, via Amazon's online reader:

It is certainly true that Lascaux fills us with a feeling of wonder: this subterranean beauty; the chance that preserved and revealed it; the breadth and scope of the paintings, which are there not in the form of vestiges or furtive adornment but as a commanding presence; a space almost intentionally devoted to the brilliance and marvel of painted things, whose first spectators must have experienced, as we do, and with as much naive astonishment, the wondrous revelation; the place from which art shines forth and whose radiance is that of a first ray--first and yet complete. The thought that at Lascaux we are present at the real birth of art and that at its birth art is revealed to be such that it can change infinitely and can ceaselessly renew itself, but cannot improve--this is what surprises us, what seduces us, and pleases us, for this is what we seem to expect from art: that, from birth, it should assert itself, and that it should be, each time it asserts itself, its perpetual birth.

This thought is an illusion, but it is also true; it directs and propels our admiring search. It reveals to us in a perceptible manner the extraordinary intrigue that art pursues with us and with time. . .

It continues, of course, and I want to read the rest of it right away. I want to have a small pile of Blanchot's works, which I could dip in at my leisure, following strands as they arise. But I must wait.

On a related note, I was quite taken with Jonathan Littell's lovely meditation on Blanchot, presented by Steve Mitchelmore at This Space. Here's a small, representative passage (translation by Charlotte Mandell; italics in original):

It's not that the text that results from this experience – poem, story, novel – is deprived of meaning, is not shot through with elements referring to the reality of life; rather it's that these elements function (to use a comparison that Blanchot would no doubt have discreetly avoided) like what Freud called the manifest content of dreams: the rags of reality they cloak themselves with so as both to manifest and veil their truth, their very reality. Thus, if writing is related to truth – and it certainly is, it has to be, or else not be at all, or in any case fall outside of the realm we designate by that mysterious word, literature – it is not by way of knowledge. Literary writing does not explain, does not teach: it simply offers the presence of its own mystery, its own experience, in its absence of explanation, thus inviting not some illusory "understanding" ("Reading either falls short of understanding or overshoots it," writes Blanchot), but precisely a reading. "Reading is freedom," Blanchot tells us, "a freedom that can only say yes." Yes to what? To experience; to the experience, usually born in anguish, of the one who writes, which is answered by the experience – by turns casual and transfixed by "the rapture of plenitude" – of the reader. Two experiences thus facing each other or rather tangential to each other, in any case radically irreducible to one another.

It's funny, though I've struggled with some of the language Blanchot uses, at least in The Space of Literature (no doubt because of my very limited engagement with philosophy), I persist because what I have gotten resembles what Littell suggests here, which in turn does a better job of evoking the relationship of the reading experience to truth, to reality, than most anything else I've encountered.

Elsewhere, at Blographia Literaria, in a post ostensibly about Gayl Jones' novel CoRregidora, but which deals mostly with Sven Birkerts' 1992 review of Jones' Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, Andrew Seal says the following (italics are his):

The idea that modernism is not overwhelmingly relevant to every literary object is perhaps one of the most radical positions one can take at the moment. Our feelings and affective associations (even more than our ideas) about modernism structure everything about the categorization, evaluation, and historicization of literary objects.

I hope to have more to say about Andrew's very interesting post, but just want to say here that it seems to me that this kind of conclusion relies on a certain common view of literary Modernism, one for sure held by critics like Birkerts (and Louis Menand, as displayed in his recent essay about Donald Barthelme in the New Yorker; subscription required): that Modernism was merely an extended moment in time when aesthetic experimentation in its own right was in ascendence, in an all out cultural war to "make it new". As indicated through my many previous posts on his writings, I find Gabriel Josipovici's take on Modernism to be much more interesting and fruitful. There may have been a moment, but rather than a pitched battle against the establishment, it is "a crucial moment in the history of art, when art arrives at an understanding of itself", and that, for art, in the world in which we live, this moment is ongoing, unending, still to come. (Contra Menand who, defining two prevailing views of post-modernism, writes: "It can mean, 'We’re all modernists now. Modernism has won.' Or it can mean 'No one can be a modernist now. Modernism is over.'" In either case, Modernism happened, and we can move on.) Incidentally, I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about how this conception of Modernism relates to those writers not fitting comfortably in the European tradition, such as those discussed by Jones in her study, another reason I found Andrew's post of value, even if he uses Birkerts conception of Modernism.

Finally, on that note, Steve tells us of Carcanet's forthcoming publication of two novels, in one volume, from Josipovici: very exciting!

Noted: Ivan Illich

From Deschooling Society (thanks to Stan Goff for the pointer):

The American university has become the final stage of the most all-encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilzation is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.

On Re-reading The Adventures of Augie March

Shortly after Dan Green announced his TRE Prime site, collecting his more substantial Reading Experience posts, I re-encountered this piece in which he articulated his dislike of Saul Bellow's fiction. The occasion for the original entry was an essay by J.M. Coetzee that appeared in The New York Review of Books, reviewing the Library of America volume collecting Bellow's first three novels. In his essay, Coetzee offers fairly tepid judgments of the novels under review (The Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March). It is in particular Coetzee's take on The Adventures of Augie March that interested Dan in his piece. Coetzee notes its "lack of dramatic structure and indeed of intellectual organization" and judges that "[t]he book becomes steadily less engaging as it proceeds. The scene-by-scene method of composition, each scene beginning with a tour de force of vivid word painting, begins to seem mechanical." Dan goes him one better and calls Augie March "basically unreadable"; it is, he says, "badly written" and "terribly paced".

It so happens that I was in the middle of re-reading The Adventures of Augie March when I re-read Dan's post, after reading The Victim the previous week. I have since finished reading it. I admit that I first read Dan's judgment (and Coetzee's) with some excitement. I'd liked some of the little Bellow I'd read at the time but did not understand the source of his reputation. And I'd had some troubles of my own with his work. So I was sympathetic to the criticism they leveled, but in truth my excitement had more to with weariness than with my own opinion of the quality of Bellow's fiction: I was tired of reading not only about how great he was supposed to be, but in particular about how he was The Great American Novelist; I was especially tried of hearing this from certain high-profile British writers and critics, namely Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and to a lesser extent, James Wood. It was their attention to his Americanness that irritated me most of all, I think. Amis' devotion, his claiming of Bellow as his literary father, especially made me gag (and this was before I'd gone sour on Amis). As for my own judgments, I'd loved Herzog (but even this judgment was reinforced here, as Coetzee rates it highly and for Dan it is the only Bellow novel deserving to be called "a superior work of fiction"), liked Humboldt's Gift and, to a lesser extent, the somewhat similar Ravelstein, and disliked Henderson the Rain King.

The Adventures of Augie March seemed to be of a different category. I remember finding it tough slogging, though overall I'd have told you that I enjoyed it. I could almost imagine co-signing Coetzee's assessment, if his critical words could somehow be admitted in the service of a more positive review. I was certainly not willing to go as far as Dan Green--even if I did indeed find certain sections literally unreadable: that is, I could not read them; I stumbled, unable to make the sentences move, tripping up on adjectives and nouns employed in weird ways, on grammatical oddities.

Re-reading Augie March, I found that I can see why I had trouble the first time, and I can see why one would find it virtually unreadable, if approached from the wrong angle. There were still passages that stopped me short, when I found it very difficult to continue without an effort of sheer will. However, I wonder if this isn't my problem rather than the book's, as if in these sections I'm still trying to force the book to be something it's not. Because when I was in the right frame of mind, I enjoyed the hell out of it. This is writing, often ramshackle, but writing, alive on the page. I have a hard time seeing how Dan could call it badly written. And it seems to me that Coetzee's problems are beside the point. Augie may live a charmed life of sorts, as Coetzee complains, but he is an amiable presence (and I'm not so sure his life is so charmed after all). There is no real plot, of course, but this is pure narrative. Adjectives pile up, images, insane lists, descriptions, quick, offhand characterizations: Augie sees. Sees a lot. It is this seeing that interests me, as well as what I'd like to call an occasional Biblical quality to the narrative. In both of these elements Augie March is like a much shorter, hard-scrabble In Search of Lost Time, if I may be so bold (following Josipovici, in his comparison of Proust's narrative mode with that of the Bible). Not that Augie's project is anything like Marcel's--he doesn't seem to be in search of his past or invested in literature in any way similar to Marcel. Augie is essentially writing his memoir, from a certain, though by no means completely, settled vantage point. His memory doesn't explode on him, recovered through his senses; he is simply remembering, and telling. Yet, though he could be said to be outside the timeframe covered in the novel, he manages to invest his writing with an element of in-the-moment discovery, creating writing out of it all. He's remembering, but not imposing meaning retroactively, even if along the way he tries to tell us--or himself--what he's about.

If this were a proper review, I'd be quoting passages demonstrating this seeing, this writing. But it's not; these are my impressions (and besides, I didn't do a good job of keeping track of passages I especially liked). It's true that there are times when the novel sags a bit--it's no coincidence, I think, that Coetzee identifies the Mexico sequence as signaling for him that something was amiss, for these chapters are considerably less compelling, on the whole, than the time spent in Chicago, where Augie himself is more at home; no doubt it could be argued that this is intentional, that of course Augie's memories of Chicago are more vivid than those of the strange time in a strange land. Nevertheless, my attention did wander. But on the whole, I developed a much greater appreciation for what Bellow is up to in general, as well as here, in this novel. It's a great book.

Noted: Saul Bellow

From The Adventures of Augie March:

It's really kind of tremendous how it all takes place. You'd never guess how much labor goes into it. Only some time ago it occurred to me how great an amount. She came back from the studio and went to take a bath, and from the bath she called out to me, "Darling, please bring me a towel." I took one of those towel robes that I had bought at the Bon Marché department store and came along with it. The little bathroom was in twilight. In the chauffe-eau machine, the brass box with teeth of gas burning, the green metal dropped crumbs inside from the thousand-candle blaze. Her body with its warm woman's smell was covered with water starting in a calm line over her breasts. The glass of the medicine chest shone like a deep blue place in the wall, as if a window to the evening sea and not the ashy fog of Paris. I sat down with the robe over my shoulder and felt very much at peace. For a change the apartment seemed clean and was warm; the abominations were gone into the background, the stoves drew well and they shone. Jacqueline was cooking dinner and it smelled of gravy. I felt settled and easy, my chest free and my fingers comfortable and open. And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreoever, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.

Basic Capitalist Principles

This interview with Noam Chomsky about the financial crisis is, as always, full of good points, interesting observations, and important reminders about recent history (link via Steve Mitchelmore). Much of it is familiar territory for him, adapted for the current situation, but like a favorite band's greatest hits, I love to hear the oldies again and again. For example, I've always been fond of how he emphasizes the role of the public sector in the economy, as he does here:

[T]he core of the economy relies very heavily on the state sector, and transparently so. So for example to take the last economic boom which was based on information technology — where did that come from? Computers and the Internet. Computers and the Internet were almost entirely within the state system for about 30 years — research, development, procurement, other devices — before they were finally handed over to private enterprise for profit-making. It wasn't an instantaneous switch, but that's roughly the picture. And that's the picture pretty much for the core of the economy.

The state sector is innovative and dynamic. It's true across the board from electronics to pharmaceuticals to the new biology-based industries. The idea is that the public is supposed to pay the costs and take the risks, and ultimately if there is any profit, you hand it over to private tyrannies, corporations. If you had to encapsulate the economy in one sentence, that would be the main theme.

There is, however, one aspect of this interview that troubles me. Talking about the IMF and how it operates as "the credit community's enforcer", Chomsky says the following:

If a loan or an investment from a rich country to a poor country goes bad, the IMF makes sure that the lenders will not suffer. If you had a capitalist system, which of course the wealthy and their protectors don't want, it wouldn't work like that.

For example, suppose I lend you money, and I know that you may not be able to pay it back. Therefore I impose very high interest rates, so that at least I'll get that in case you crash. Then suppose at some point you can't pay the debt. Well in a capitalist system it would be my problem. I made a risky loan, I made a lot of money from it by high interest rates and now you can't pay it back? Ok, tough for me. That's a capitalist system. But that's not the way our system works. If investors make risky loans to say Argentina and get high interest rates and then Argentina can't pay it back, well that's when the IMF steps in, the credit community's enforcer, and says that the people of Argentina, they have to pay it back. Now if you can't pay back a loan to me, I don't say that your neighbors have to pay it back. But that's what the IMF says. The IMF says the people of the country have to pay back the debt which they had nothing to do with, it was usually given to dictators, or rich elites, who sent it off to Switzerland or someplace, but you guys, the poor folks living in the country, you have to pay it back. And furthermore, if I lend money to you and you can't pay it back, in a capitalist system I can't ask my neighbors to pay me, but the IMF does, namely the US taxpayer. They help make sure that the lenders and investors are protected. So yes it's the credit community's enforcer. It's a radical attack on basic capitalist principles, just as the whole functioning of the economy based on the state sector is, but that doesn't change the rhetoric. It's kind of hidden in the woodwork.

My problem is the notion that this kind of activity is "a radical attack on basic capitalist principles". He notes that the rhetoric doesn't change, which no doubt refers to the rhetoric of the free market. Of course he's right about that. But I think it's incorrect to think that capitalism has anything to do with free markets. I know this seems counterintuitive, but that's only because we've had it hammered into our heads our entire lives that capitalism equals free markets equals freedom. So here, even Chomsky appears to have bought into that rhetoric to some extent. Capitalism is above all about forcing workers into the market. Where we should be able to have free access to food and shelter, as basic human rights, we are forced instead to contend with the housing and food markets; with both food and shelter subject to market forces, with once common land unavailable for use, enclosed, we are forced to sell our time, our lives, to others' in order to make the money necessary to afford food and shelter.

The state has always been necessary to protect the private ownership of productive property and to enforce the effective propertylessness of the rest of us. The dynamism of the public sector that he refers to above is simply another manifestation of this. He says you might instead call it "state capitalism" because of the massive state investment in the economy. This is fine, I suppose; some economists have called the old Soviet Union "state capitalist", too. It's all about control of productive capacity not being in the hands of those actually doing the work. It's about the removal of agency. In any event, to modify one of Chomsky's remarks, the last thing capitalists want is to truly compete in a free market. This is why, during the Progressive Era, leading figures like J.P. Morgan argued for and designed the regulatory apparatus. It was a disaster for them when they competed on the open market. Granted, there are numerous owners who do not understand this, and blather on and on about free markets, no doubt believing it, like lunatic Libertarians or something, but we needn't concern ourselves with them. (I hope it's obvious that none of this should imply that free markets are in any way desirable, anymore than capitalism is.)

I'm reminded, incidentally, of a passage from Marshall Berman's 1978 essay "All That is Solid Melts Into Air", collected in his Adventures in Marxism (I believe the essay was expanded into the later book by the same title). He is discussing Marx and bourgeois nihilism and Marx's apparent belief that the "bourgeois really believe . . . in an incessant, unrestricted flow of commodities in circulation, a continuous metamorphosis of market values." He continues:

If, as he believes, the members of the bourgeoisie really do want a free market, they will have to enforce the freedom of new products to enter the market. This in turn means that any full-fledged bourgeois society must be a genuinely open society, not only economically but politically and culturally as well, so that people will be free to shop around and seek the best deals, in ideas, associations, law and social policies, as well as in things.

This would hold true for communists and communist ideas, too. Marx further believes that thus people will choose revolutionary and communist ideas, because they are the best ideas, they will sell, and the revolution will be inevitable. My summary is simplistic, but still, it's evident that Marx, even as the great analyst of capitalism that he was, also bought into the free market rhetoric. Berman notes that:

In fact, in bourgeois history [the] principle [of unprincipled free trade] has generally been more honored in the breach than in the observance. The members of the bourgeoisie, especially the most powerful, have generally fought to restrict, manipulate and control their markets. Indeed, much of their creative energy over the centuries has gone into arrangements for doing this -- chartered monopolies, holding companies, trusts, cartels and conglomerates, protective tariffs, patents, price-fixing, open or hidden subsidies from the state -- all accompanied by paeans in praise of the free market. Moreover, even among the few who really do believe in free exchange, there are fewer still who would extend free competition to ideas as well as things.

A paragraph later, he says that "[a] more typical bourgeois pattern is to praise freedom when in opposition and to repress it when in power" and chides Marx for surprisingly "getting carried away by what bourgeois ideologues say, and losing touch with what the men with money and power actually do." Berman suggests that this is a dangerous problem, for if the bourgeoisie effectively closes off access to new ideas, then

it will be harder than ever for communism to take root. Marx would say that their need for progress and innovation will force them to open up their societies even to ideas they dread. Yet their ingenuity might avoid this through a truly insidious innovation: a consensus of mutually enforced mediocrity, designed to protect each individual bourgeois from the risks of competition, and bourgeois society as a whole from the risks of change.

In the climactic chapter of the first volume of Capital, "The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation," Marx says that when a system of social relations acts as a fetter on "the free development of productive forces," that social system has simply got to go: "It must be annihilated; it is annihilated." But what would happen if, somehow, it didn't get annihilated? Marx lets himself imagine this for barely an instant, only to dismiss the possibility. "To perpetuate" such a social system, he says, would be "to decree universal mediocrity". This is perhaps the one thing that Marx is utterly incapable of imagining.

I found myself, while dipping my toes last year in Marx, marveling at how prescient his analysis was. It seems even more relevant to current-day conditions than it did in his own day, and yet it seems he was unable to anticipate this key feature of our decrepit, collapsing system: its thoroughgoing mediocrity.

Notes on faith and atheism

Adam Kotsko, in a post nominally about his recent television viewing, encapsulates the kind of argument I've been trying to make in recent years (his ability to whip this kind of thing off better than I can may have something to do with him being a student of theology; just a theory). Here he's talking about "House" (a show I've seen a handful of times, with some combination of amusement and irritation) (italics Adam's):

House is a great example of how useless dogmatic rationalists are when they talk about religion. His constant accusations of “hypocrisy” on Cuddy’s part reflect a common gambit on the part of these people: if you don’t want to do “all” of a religion, you are a hypocrite for doing some. Who defines what “all” of a religion is, though? Obviously that doesn’t fall within the rationalist’s own job description, so he’ll usually defer to whoever purports to be the most “true” or “literal” or whatever representative of the given religion. Thus the options are fundamentalism or rationalism — anyone who tries to do otherwise is an equivocating coward. (This is the dynamic that leads to us only hearing from religious wackos as the representatives of the “religious” position in media debates.)

But the majority of religious people then become equivocating cowards in this view, because even in fundamentalist sects, there is usually only a small core of “true believers” who try to do everything. Back here in reality, the majority of “religious” practices are essentially “cultural” practices, or to put it better: the line between “religious” and “cultural” practices isn’t very clear. It’s really only Protestantism and religions influenced by it (like latter-day Catholicism) that really thematize something like “belief.” (Note that I’m not saying non-Protestant-ish people don’t “believe” in their religion — just that it doesn’t become a major issue. They take it for granted, rather than treating it as some big existential test.)

[...]

I realize that whenever I make arguments like this, some people get really pissed off and others want to spend a lot of time in comments trying to come up with some really firm definition of religion that reflects their intuition that my blurring of the boundaries between cultural and religious practices is missing something. I’ll save you a little time: that “something” is going to turn out to be belief. But if you go down that road, you’re just going to wind up defining religion as Protestantism or things like Protestantism, and not all religions are like that. In fact, not all religious practices that find their origin in the Protestant Reformation have turned out to be like that — I’m pretty sure you’ll find a lot of Episcopalians who just enjoy the liturgy and fellowship, for instance, and don’t really beat themselves up about whether they “believe” hard enough. Nor should they! It’s a free country, after all. Or you could define religion as a quest for meaning, but then how do you exclude secular philosophy? Etc., etc. Just give up, please. Criticizing fundamentalism is awesome. I do it all the time. Criticizing religious people for not being fundamentalists is stupid.

Let me take this opportunity to thank Adam for his apparently tireless efforts in this regard. As I've discussed elsewhere on this blog, I once would have described myself as a hardcore rationalist and would have made many of the arguments so often made by dogmatic atheists, including the one noted above, defining religion as essentially and necessarily the religion of fundamentalists. In recent years, I have moved away from these positions but have struggled to effectively explain my problems with them, beyond some degree of unease. In this regard, I've found the efforts of Adam and his compatriots to articulate and defend this kind of argument enormously helpful, whether at The Weblog or An und für sich, or elsewhere (I'm recalling several highly contentious Valve threads over the years).

I recently attempted to articulate a version of this argument in a comment to this post at Wisdom of the West, in which Jim H. argues in part that Darwin's theory, by smashing the basis for the myth of divinity, destroyed the traditional appeal to authority as divine right. This is why "they hate us", he says. I had trouble with who "they" was supposed to be, among other things, taking issue in particular with the antagonistic stance so often taken by atheists. Jim replied, in part emphasizing that he is not an atheist, but agnostic. To be atheist, he argues, requires faith, but he is agnostic since one cannot truly know. He says: "Faith, as Kierkegaard, says is a gift. It takes a leap beyond the limits of knowledge and rationality I am not willing to make." I was interested to see Jim invoke Kierkegaard, for I had just read Fear and Trembling for the first time (and am therefore naturally an expert). Atheists hate being told that atheism is as much a faith as religion. I used to hate it myself; more recently, I've thought it wrong-headed, but not hateful. Now, I'm not so sure it's wrong. This is part of my follow-up comment replying to Jim (cleaned up somewhat for clarity and grammar):

I do consider myself an atheist, not because I know there's no God, but because I see it as meaning that I believe there is no God, so to speak. You're right that we can't know, of course (hence you opt for "agnostic"). But your reference to "faith" as a gift, per Kierkegaard, forces me to say more. I usually object when someone says that atheism is a faith just as much as theism. But in the sense that it's true that I lack the "gift" of faith, in the Kierkegaardian sense, I find it interesting to think that I have the gift of non-faith in God. That is, my non-belief is matter of faith, but in the sense that it simply is. It's not based on rational assessment of the religious question. I simply don't have faith, or I have the faith of non-faith.

One reason I found myself pulling back from my more strident expressions of atheism of the past had to do with being confronted with close friends and relatives who are deeply religious. I used to tell myself that if they were honest with themselves, they would eventually be forced to conclude the error of their beliefs. I soon found that arguing premises, content, got me nowhere. That, in fact, nothing got me anywhere. It was easy, and self-congratulatory, for me to say that this was a weakness on their part. Ultimately I concluded that this thing called faith was finally literally incomprehensible to those of us who lacked it. Now I'm interested in this idea that rather than think of the lack of faith as a lack, as an absence distinguishing the rational atheist from the irrational believer, that instead it is indeed fruitful to think of it as a kind of faith of its own, but if we think of it as a capacity, and in that regard as a gift similar to the gift of faith.