What’s the Matter With Bruni?

I

“A man knowes no more of righteousness than he hath power to act.”

That’s Gerrard Winstanley, the prolific spokesman of the Diggers, a radical, socialist sect that came to life during the English Revolution of the mid-17^th century, when the crown’s censorship was abolished and just about everybody started speaking his mind (hers, too, there were outspoken women preachers among the Quakers and the Baptists and the Ranters).

By all accounts, the Diggers made the Levellers—the left-wing of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army—look like timid liberals in the face of the Protector’s successful bid for power, which eventually silenced all the sects, including the Levellers.  By all accounts, Winstanley himself was the first communist, the man who identified private property in land as the original sin, which the New Adam born of revolution would erase.

The quoted passage is from A New Yeere’s Gift to the Army, printed in 1650.  Winstanley was trying to persuade the Levellers and their soldier constituency to go for broke, to enfranchise (in the broadest sense) all Englishmen.  He was suggesting that private property in land was the principal source of power in contemporary society—James Harrington was meanwhile perfecting a similar argument—so that the power of any individual to act on anything, even his own belief in God, was as unequally distributed as such property.

Absent the kind of equality that would follow from the abolition of landed property, Winstanley argued, only those who owned the land could be in possession of themselves, and thus capable of the free choices that led to righteousness.  Imagine that: Henry George avant la lettre, by two centuries.

II

I’m reminded of this passage from Winstanley after reading Frank Bruni’s New York Times column today, about how stupid American voters are because roughly 40% of them “don’t even know that [Obamacare] is a law on the books”—and how precarious democracy must be in view of this fact, because a “clueless electorate is a corruptible one.”

Bruni’s column is a reprise of political science from the 1950s and 60s, which discovered an irrational electorate tethered to party rather than program, “mass belief systems” rather than ideologies.  By the same token, it’s a reprise of the Frankfurt School’s discovery of the “authoritarian personality,” which David Riesman translated into the less egregious character he called the “other-directed individual,” and which C. Wright Mills soon after correlated with a “post-modern” stage of western civilization.

Bruni’s lament is also, of course, a reprise of Thomas Frank’s discovery of false consciousness in Kansas, where, as in South Carolina and other states beyond the reach of Massachusetts, the people just keep on voting for capitalism even though it’s never on the ballot!  This amazing discovery catapulted Frank to the platform of guest columnist at the Times, then the Wall Street Journal, on toward his permanent gig as the replacement for Lewis Lapham at Harper’s, where whining about the benighted masses will never cease because the masses will never cease to be benighted, either because they simply are, by nature, benighted, or because the powers that be, whatever they may be, conspire with the culture industry to keep the masses benighted.

III

In other words, Bruni’s lament is by now a tiresome trope, a compulsive repetition, the kind of explanatory complaint you reach for when you don’t want to think—or rather, when you don’t have to think.  So let’s turn the trope around and ask, What’s the matter with Bruni?

You, Frank, believe you know how the world works because you’re smart, well-educated, articulate; your position at the Times verifies and amplifies these implicit claims to authority on behalf of Truth.  You and your readers are unlike the 40% of Americans, who don’t know that Obamacare is an incontrovertible legislative reality.

And yet you, Frank, acknowledge that although already on the books, this law hasn’t been “fully implemented”—it’s not quite on the books!—and that your friends among physicians are just as confused about it as the rest of us.  Suddenly the 40% don’t look so stupid compared to you.  What next?

Well, of course, you move on to the recent surveys showing that Americans, more generally speaking, are clueless.  First, minor fractions of them believe in Roswell, Bigfoot, and so on (ask them about their belief in God and you’ll be forever traumatized).  Second, “65% of us can’t name a single Supreme Court justice.”  Third, about a third can’t name the vice-president or “assign the proper century to the American Revolution.”  (I like the part about assigning a century, because it makes me feel like I just finished an impossible lesson plan for a substitute teacher, so everybody loses.)

Frank, tell me, why do these numbers matter to you?  OK, I got the classical part about a clueless electorate being corruptible.  But why are we supposed to know the esoteric things you do, like, say, that Obamacare is absolutely and already a law on the books?  What does it matter that the American Revolution happened in the 1700s, which we insist on calling the 18^th century because we’re stuck with an arbitrary calendar of human events that dates everything from the birth of Jesus?  (I’ve taught history for almost 40 years, and I’m always stumbling over this obvious discrepancy.  Quickly now, Frank, what century would you “assign” to the Black Plague, which first devastated Europe ca. 1349-1351?  Yeah, 1300s, but that’s the 14^th century.)

I believe, Frank, that you’re suffering from the “pearls before swine” syndrome that infects many teachers and writers—you know you’ve succumbed when you ask yourself, typically as you’re grading exams or reading rejection letters, this harrowing question: How can I keep speaking the Truth if my audience is made of morons?  You present symptomatically as follows: “We [journalists] purport to interpret an informed, rational universe, because we’d undercut our own insights if we purported anything else.”

Who sounds uneducated, ignorant, or clueless now?  What universe is it that you believe in?  Going to the family reunion in Roswell this year?

IV

“A man knowes no more of righteousness than he hath power to act.”

Broaden the scope of that unforgettable dictum.  A man or a woman knows no more of anything than he or she has the power to enact in this world, not the next.  For the condition of certainty in knowledge, according to the scientific method, is purposeful manipulation of—not contemplative abstention from—the world of objects you propose to understand.  The point is to change it, as Marx said, or rather, you can’t interpret it without changing it, and this world of objects includes yourself.  Without the power to determine yourself, you can’t even know yourself.

But now go farther, take Winstanley at his word.  There is no reason to know anything, or try to be anybody, unless it matters, unless we have the power to act on it.  We address the problems we’re already capable of solving.  We use the facts our models and our paradigms have produced.  Why would an individual want or need to know who sits on the Supreme Court, when everybody knows that this body is as far beyond the reach of political deliberation and personal persuasion as Olympus was from Athens?

Why would anybody want or need to know when the American Revolution or why the Civil War took place, unless it still matters—unless we still have the power to act on it, knowing that our choices made a difference?

When Frank Bruni accuses the electorate of ignorance, he’s convicting himself of the charge.  He’s reminding us that we, the American people, don’t lack either knowledge or education.  What we lack is power–the power to act on our beliefs, and to experience the righteousness that comes of this practical knowledge.

How to Feel Sorry for Niall Ferguson

I

Niall Ferguson’s latest gaffe is of course laughable.  It goes like this.

Keynes was gay, he didn’t have children, so he couldn’t care about the future; thus he urged us to squander our resources in the name of immediate gratification rather than long-term growth.  His economic theories promoted moral dissolution as well as economic dissipation.

That’s my paraphrase and amplification, to be sure, but my experience with the other side—the folks who believe fervently in more saving, increased private investment, and less government spending as the obvious cures for what ails us—convinces me that, Ferguson’s abject apology notwithstanding, there is a connection here between the economic and the moral planes of his statements which is worth tracing.

To put it more plainly, when Ferguson reduces Keynesian political economy to the personal life of John Maynard Keynes, he’s developing, not inventing, long-standing tropes that treat macroeconomic problems as moral calendars to be cleared by the decisions of individuals—as when politicians and theorists alike equate government spending and family budgets.

Just take a look at Paul Ryan’s proposals to dismantle the welfare state.  You can’t read them as the idiosyncratic ravings of a 19-year old high on Atlas Shrugged, because the Republican Party as such endorsed them, before, during, and after Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.  The prefaces are full of statements like this: “A government that buries the next generation under an avalanche of debt cannot claim the moral high ground in the world.”  And this: “From a moral perspective, these [entitlement] programs are failing the very people they are intended to help.”

I’m not trying to remind you that Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, or that economists can’t escape the moral implications of their spreadsheets.  I’m reminding us that in the last election season, Ferguson praised Ryan in the most effusive manner possible, in the infamous Newsweek cover story (“He blew me away”), and in doing so indicted America—his adopted country—as the “50/50 nation,” where, enabled by the welfare state, half the people had sunk to the level of the dole.  Notice: more than 47% of the population were mere hedonists, glad to be getting something for nothing, happily wasting resources that future generations will need.

II

But Ferguson’s apology makes it clear that his conscience was animated because his unconscious first got the better of him—in a truncated, grotesque, inarticulate form, he expressed the moral philosophy that is both premise and product of the economic theories he sponsors: Without saving or thrift, there can be no future, so Keynes obviously didn’t care about the future (meaning he didn’t care about the grandchildren) because he opposed the deferment of gratification we call saving or thrift.  Ferguson and countless others have said this many times before now.

There’s nothing new here, in other words, except the almost explicit correlation with homosexuality; but the connotation of decadence, a word that has no meaning without its sexual implications, has been there all along.  And why wouldn’t it be?  If you’re locked into the equation of macro and micro—the public good is the sum of private decisions—how do you explain the apparent decline of the work ethic except as a matter of moral decadence, assisted, as in suicide, by the state?  And how else to reverse the decline except by recourse to state power?

People with families and children are more likely to sacrifice present desires and needs in the name of the future because they have to, of course, but also because they want to, because they get pleasure from doing so, by observing and validating, in a word reliving, what they have relinquished—the insane and unruly needs of infancy.  That is why gay marriage is such a good bet on the future of capitalism; that is why the power of the liberal state will soon be on the side of homosexuality insofar as it can be disciplined by the rituals and vows of monogamy, which permit family as well as children (you can produce the latter without the former).

Still, what Ferguson said was egregious and embarrassing, even in view of what we might call, with apologies to Judith Butler, the new homo-normativity. But he has characterized his own extemporaneous remarks as “doubly stupid,” and pronounced himself “disappointed”—in himself.   Why, then, did he make them in the first place, if they were so obviously a violation of his own standards?

III

Finally, I get to play psychoanalyst.  Niall, you couldn’t help yourself.  The repressed will always return with a twist, with a vengeance, and usually, if Freud is right about jokes and their relation to the unconscious, they will return with a shocking, comic flourish.  Whatever you have repressed, no matter how trivial, will become a big secret, the kind that bursts forth under the most unlikely circumstances.  An ex-girlfriend put it this way: “Secrets always have coincidence at their disposal.”

The secret in your case, Niall, is the suppressed rage you feel against all those who are getting something for nothing—consuming without producing—by way of “entitlements”  or fake disability claims.  You believe these people are using up the resources that future generations will need.  You don’t think it, you believe it.  You believe that spending without regard to the compound interest that saving provides is like seeking pleasure without a higher purpose, like having sex without any reproductive resolve.  You believe that these are not just dangerously hedonistic pursuits, mere spastic moments in the elaboration of consumer culture—like Paul Ryan, you think they’re quite possibly immoral acts.

Now, Niall, you’re an historian, clearly you know that court society and its idiot offspring, our contemporary aristocracy of celebrity, are predicated on indiscretion, in both senses of the word—unlicensed sexuality and unbridled gossip, each an empty category without the other.  If kept private, discreet, and titillating, all hedonistic acts—seeking pleasure without a higher purpose—remain random events.  They’re just clandestine love affairs without effect on the larger (bourgeois) culture; indeed they validate the moral standards of that culture insofar as they remain “transgressive,” that is, exceptions to the rule.  When they become not just public but normal, lacking cultural or legal sanction, they become the rule.  That’s what you’re up against.  Are you getting this?

Look, the decline of civilization itself must follow, as you, Niall, have tried to prove in your last two books!  Meanwhile, though, blame—always remember, it’s the last resource of the dying animal—must be placed.  “What caused this?”  That’s the question consciousness makes us ask.  That’s the question you were answering when you made those stupid impromptu remarks.

But now you need to turn it around.  Ask yourself, “Do I really want to place all my bets on the integrity of the family, knowing what I know (as an historian) about its extreme variability over time and its present state?  Do I really want to reduce the macro to the micro, the public to the personal, and deduce universal moral principles from this conflation?”

Because if you do keep doubling down on this long shot, in the familiar manner of your conservative colleagues, you’ll keep saying things you will have to admit are stupid, after the fact.  You’re behind the times, Niall.  Civilization is not at risk because John Maynard Keynes makes more sense of the world—the future—than Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman.  Civilization is not at risk because sexuality finally begins to conform to the variety of human experience.  You know this at some level of your being, but you can’t admit it except when you’re apologizing, after the fact.  Beware, then: this awful knowledge will keep erupting from your unconscious in flagrant ways until you have become the Rush Limbaugh of academe, a bully without a pulpit, a minor disgrace.

So, my advice to you is very simple.  Shut the fuck up.

Lenny is Dead: A Short Story

When I saw the obituary in the local pages, I thought it was Lenny himself, but I looked closer, and it was his mother.  I knew he was long gone.  I shot a wedding twenty years ago where I saw his little brother Bobby, and he told me then that Lenny had died of an overdose or a broken heart.  I was too busy to ask what that meant.

I went to the funeral.  I drove forty miles to look at a dead woman I hadn’t seen for fifty-two years, since I left the old neighborhood.  I brought my camera.

The funeral parlor was on Findlay Road, the same side of the swamp where Lenny and I grew up.  Of course the swamp had been drained soon after I left.  The ten square miles of prairie that rose above it—where we had burned our black paths through the tall grass, always blazing some trail to the Highland Road—were now covered with concrete boulevards, brick houses, back yards.

We were just kids, but we owned guns, .22 caliber rifles (one of us toted a .410 shotgun), and we hunted pheasant and quail or rabbits and squirrels, pretty much anything that moved.  When that got boring, we’d spear leopard frogs where the swamp waters were already being stirred by construction up on the Highland Road.  We gutted them and nailed their skins to a thick tree; it took a couple of years to cover the trunk, but then we had to strip the skins away because one day the .410’s little sister got a look at our wallpaper—Lenny called it “exterior decoration”—and told their mother.  We never cooked any animals.  We killed them for fun.

Or profit.  One winter, Lenny immersed himself in outdoors magazines, the serious kind that featured hard-boiled fiction, so after four years of random slaughter, we started trapping muskrats and selling their skins by sending them to post office boxes listed at the back of Field & Stream and Sports Afield.  With more local knowledge, we learned to kill rabbits without shooting them, by chasing them through snow deep enough to exhaust them, knowing that they’d run in circles, slower and slower, until we could just lean down and pluck them from the powder; we sold them to a German restaurant in town that was looking for small game unblemished by shotgun pellet holes.

Lenny and I led the gang, six or seven guys, depending on whether the .410 showed up.  We didn’t play any team sports.  Whatever the season outside of summer, we’d gather in the swamp after school, decide on a plan.  We lit cigarettes with cinematic deliberation, making sure that the smoke veiled our faces as we discussed our options.  But nobody ever disagreed with Lenny, not even me, and everybody knew I was his equal, his partner, his best friend.  We kept the cigarettes burning no matter what he decided.

He was ugly.  Even I could see that he’d be a repulsive adult.  His long head was misshapen by the scalpels used to extract him from his mother’s womb, an emergency procedure done at Cook County Hospital.  His eyes always seemed squeezed shut by the weight of a massive brow; his jaw looked like a turnip stitched to his face by the stray whiskers he didn’t yet shave.  His teeth were tangled yellow edges never to be repaired by the braces then sprouting in the mouths of our classmates.  His skin was pale rubble, and his voice was already stripped of high notes by tobacco.

But he had conviction.  He always seemed to know exactly what to say, whether he was explaining to the cops that we had nothing to do with the poodle they found tortured to death, skinned alive and nailed to a tree on the Highland Road, or explaining to my mother that it was his fault we were late for supper.  He gave advice and spit out aphorisms like he was our own Ann Landers.  He’d say, “Forget the cops, never tell your father where you’ve been.”  Or, “Your mother is not your friend.”  Or, “Never ask someone what he’s thinking, he doesn’t know any better than you do.”  Or, “You commit yourself, and then you see.”  He knew a lot about Civil War battles and generals.  Also Napoleon.

I loved him more than his mother, I loved him like he was my father, and he knew that as well as I did, although I never said it.  From time to time, we used a potato peeler to scrape the skin off our right index fingers and let our blood mingle; but we never made any vows during these ceremonies, we never said a word.  We didn’t have to, I was with him every day, outside Christmas and maybe Thanksgiving, for seven years of my life.

One of those days, as we’re lighting our cigarettes, the .410 says “Let’s burn the house down.”  I say, “What house?” and Lenny says “The one on the Highland Road.”  I look confused, so he continues: “They’re building houses up there, that’s why all the traffic, the trucks and shit, my mom says they’re gonna drain the swamp and take over the whole thing.”  He waves his right hand at us and then lifts it, so I know he’s pointing outward, telling us that everything we see—everything we know—will be gone, and soon.  The animals, too.

I’m still confused, though, so I say “What do they want with this?” and I make the same gesture, so I mean the whole thing as well, I mean this swamp, the prairie rising above it, the ranch houses we come from, the animals we kill, the wrong lives we’re bound to live.  Lenny shrugs, he says, “No idea, but they’re gonna have it, sooner or later, nothin’ you can do about it.”

I look down the barrel of my .22 rifle and say, “They can have it.”

Lenny says, “When you movin’?”  My father had been promoted at work, so he’d bought a house in the center of the old town, near the railroad crossing and Sacred Heart School.  I hadn’t told anybody about it.  “Next week,” I say, but I don’t look at him, and when I raise my eyes from the gun I realize that everybody’s looking at me.  The .410 is staring, he says, “C’mon, man, let’s burn it down.”  Lenny waves away the smoke that hides his face and says, “All right.  First we clear a path, make it look like an accident.”

That’s what we did that day, we burned another crooked black corridor to the Highland Road, and when the construction crew was gone, we torched the half-finished house.  The .410 and I led the way, piling wood chips, spilling turpentine, lighting rags—we’d been starting fires since the first grade, so we knew what we were doing.  It was a three-alarm call by the time I got home, but I felt safe; we’d made a pact to deny everything, including the evidence of the fire itself, and I knew Lenny would enforce it.

He was arrested that night, charged with criminal damage to property instead of arson.  I heard later that the property he was convicted of damaging was the grass we burned—the real estate developer building the house on the Highland Road already owned the whole thing.  Lenny never said a word about the rest of us, so he went alone to juvenile detention, “reform school,” we called it in those days, for 18 months.

I saw him again two years later, on the first day of high school.  I had long since moved to Overton Street and made new friends, the kind of guys Lenny had called jocks and climbers and socialites.  We were walking toward each other, dodging locker doors and seniors bent on cruelty.  The .410 and a couple of other guys from Findlay Road were right behind him, everybody wearing baggy grey pants, pointed black shoes and wife beaters under open denim shirts.

He stopped when he saw me and my friends, everybody in jeans and loafers and golf shirts.  He smiled, looked down, shook his head, but then he was walking again, and nodding, stamping my new life with his seal of approval.

He said “Jeff, how’re you doin”? and I said “Good, Lenny, I’m good, how’re you doin’?”  After that, we just passed each other in the halls.  I never saw him again outside the high school.  I never wanted to.

I took some quick pictures of the funeral parlor from the parking lot because it looked like the houses behind me, across the vanished swamp—like a monument, something that would last forever.  I wanted it to.  Once inside, I spotted Bobby right away and walked over, thinking he wouldn’t recognize me.

I said, “Bobby, how you doin’, remember me from the house on Findlay Road?”  He said, “Hey, Jeff, sure, how you doin’, Mom talked about you all the time, Lenny did too.  You were at that wedding, what, twenty years ago now?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I don’t do weddings anymore, but I’m still a photographer.  I’m sorry for your loss, man, she was a nice lady, a good mother.”  As he got himself ready to say thank you, I said what I came to say: “You know, I’ve been wondering all these years, how did Lenny die?  You mentioned something at that wedding, but I never got it straight.”

Bobby looked over my left shoulder, then over his own, waiting for an interruption.  I remembered then that he was always waiting for something, mostly directions from Lenny.  Finally he shrugged and said, “I don’t think anybody ever got it straight.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we know how he died—he killed himself with a fucking shotgun—but nobody, except maybe my mother, nobody knows why.”

“Wait a minute, I thought he OD’d on something—“

“No, no, that was what Mom wanted people to think, but now that she’s gone, who cares?”  He stopped and sipped from his Coke, waiting again.

“I didn’t know.  Jesus.”

“Yeah, I guess it was pretty ugly . . . must have blown his whole head off.  I never saw it, never saw him, it was a closed casket.  My mother found him in the basement, cleaned up after him.  As usual.”

“Jesus.  Did he leave a note?”

“Mom said ‘No’ until last year . . . and then she showed it to me, just once.  Made no sense.”

“What did it say?”

“Something about the Highland Road.  And you were in it.  So was I.”

“Bobby, you remember the day we burned that house down?”

“Hell yes.  I was scared for years after that, I’m still scared of it, cops comin’ to the house in the middle of the night, bangin’ on doors and shit—”

“You remember what he said?  He said, ‘We get to the Highland Road, there’s no turning back,” like he was making a speech—like we were going to war or something.  You remember that part, was that in the note?”

“Yeah, getting to the Highland Road was in there.  In the note, I mean, I don’t remember him saying that shit the day we went to, when we burned—“

“’No turning back,’ he said, but he did, you see what I mean, he turned back!”

“I don’t know about that, he kept doing crazy shit all his life.  Back to what?”

“I don’t know, you think I know?”

“Well, you seem pretty worked up about it.”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”  I settled down by pretending I was going to shoot myself—in my mind I posed for my own camera, and then I said, “Come on outside, Bobby, I want to take a picture of you.”  He looked around to make sure there weren’t any relatives that needed his attention.  “OK,” he said.

I wanted to shoot him in the foreground of those houses, so I stood him up at the edge of the parking lot, where they rose behind him across the drainage canal, marching in tight formation up the incline toward the Highland Road.  I used him like the snap-up sight on an old rifle, aiming just over the top of his head.  In three minutes, I found the target I’d been looking for, the house the developer had built on the ruins of what we incinerated.

From there I could finally trace the path we’d burned that day.  It wasn’t a straight line, but it led to where Bobby and I were still standing.

“OK Bobby,” I said, “I got it.  Thanks.”

He relaxed—he knew he had been posing for something—and walked toward me.  I stuck out my hand and said, “Well, I should be going.  I’m glad we talked, man.  It’s good to know about Lenny.”

“You’re not gonna stay for the service?”  He shook my hand.  “You OK?  You know, you can come back to the house after.”

“Yeah, I’m good, and thanks, but I think I’d better get back.  It’s a work day for me.”

“Hell, it’s a work day for everybody in there except the old-timers.”

“Well yeah, but I want to develop these pictures.  I’ll send them to you.”

“All right.”  He turned back toward the Highland Road and without looking at me, he said,  “You know, that wedding you did twenty years ago, my mother loved those pictures you took.  She never said shit about me being the best man, she just wanted to talk about you, how you were Lenny’s best friend.”

“She did?”  I wasn’t surprised.  What was there to say about Bobby?

“Yeah, she did.”

“She really loved Lenny,” I said.

“Yeah, she did.”  He nodded as he said it, and then he turned again and was walking away, toward the funeral home.  I decided to drive home across the Highland Road.  I knew I’d never see Bobby again.  I never wanted to.

Fix the Deficit? Tax Corporations

Here’s the link to my op-ed in today’s New York Times, in case you missed it at Facebook.  Already the older arguments about corporations’ ability to pass taxes along to consumers as higher prices has resurfaced, as a critique of what I’m claiming here.  Of course I’m mystified by these older arguments in view of globalization and the theoretical controversies of the last, say, ten years, but the lack of political imagination which animates their return from the domain of the repressed might indicate that what I cite here as a reason to reconsider is a rationale for retreat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/a-fairer-corporate-tax.html?_r=0

 

More Work for Father: Rejoinder to Alex Gourevitch

I

Here I thought Alex Gourevitch and I were in a conversation about the ontology of work.  It turns out that he’s fighting a battle on the terms set a generation ago by “labor republicanism,” and I’m trying to change the rules of engagement.  We’re out of phase.  I wish I could trot out that trusty cliché and say we’re talking past each other.  But it’s worse than that.  He’s talking to himself.

Gourevitch thinks that he’s the sober realist in this room, and that I’m the wayward innocent—the utopian—who thinks that “radical social change is mere child’s play.”  Clearly he aspires to the role of “stern father,” the figure he mentions on his way to calling me a romantic.

So I’ll start with the family romance he invokes, where I’m the child and he’s the responsible adult, then work my way toward what he thinks is the substance of his critique.  “Desires have an odd, childlike immediacy for Livingston—direct impulses that we either repress or satisfy.”  I don’t know how Gourevitch can deduce this, either from my behavior (we’ve never met) or from what I have written, here or anywhere else.  My understanding of desire as such is determined by my appropriation of psychoanalysis; in the case at hand, my usage is derived from Hegel, whose notion of the “cunning of reason” bears an uncanny resemblance to Freud’s category of the unconscious.  In any event, I didn’t think I had to include a gloss on the master-slave dialectic or a back story for that primal scene when I belabored the obvious fact that work requires, or just is, the renunciation of desire.  Next time I’ll include footnotes, so that Alex doesn’t need to be so inventive.

“Somehow,” Gourevitch continues, lowering the intellectual stakes by eschewing explanation or understanding, “in Livingston’s world, we at once heroically bestride the world, consuming with unreflexive gusto all of the amazing technological outputs, yet [we] do so with the simplicity and innocence of a child, for whom any and all constraint is the ‘renunciation of desire,’ the oppressive residue of a bygone era holding us back like a stern father.”

Heroically?  Gusto?  Technological outputs?  Any and all constraint?  Are we filming a beer commercial or debating the labor metaphysic at the heart of Gourevitch’s worship of the work ethic?  Did he bother to read what I wrote?

I’m pretty sure I was enlisting Hegel, Marx, and Freud to talk about the renunciations most adults experience at work.  Not many of them get to read and write books for a living.  Not many of them want to take control of their workplaces, not even the ones who read and write for a living (not me, anyway).  Most adults don’t want or need to be fulfilled by work, as per Gourevitch’s achingly earnest agenda—they want to enjoy the rest of their lives.  They sure as hell don’t want to be defined by what they do for a living unless they’re lucky enough to get paid for making music or writing books.

But let’s take the metaphor seriously.  Without conscious intent, I hope, Gourevitch has happily made himself the scold, the stern father, that “oppressive residue of a bygone era.”  He’s cast himself as the modern Luther—the preacher who told his followers to “stay in your callings, there the Devil will lay cross enough upon you.”  He’s the new shill for an old order, because all he has to offer is more work, better work, real work, honest work; in these exhortative precincts, even play is supposed to be productive, the time you spend practicing.

At any rate Gourevitch clearly thinks everybody needs more discipline.  The word itself—discipline—appears nineteen times in a four-page, 2000-word essay.  This unlikely ratio strikes me as symptomatic of a Protestant urge to tame the unruly desires of people who don’t believe their identities reside in their occupations, or in work construed as the active production of real value.  Sorry, Alex, I’m with Kenneth Burke on this: I don’t want to be categorized as a worker.  Who would, who can?

Here is Burke at the American Writers Congress of 1935: “There are few people who really want to work, let us say, as a human cog in an automobile factory, or as gatherers of vegetables on a big truck farm.  Such rigorous ways of life enlist our sympathies, but not our ambitions.  Our ideal is as far as possible to eliminate such kinds of work, or to reduce its strenuousness to a minimum.”

Why is work so important, so ontologically significant?  Does it really discipline our desires, make us get all grown up, so that we might go about the serious business of “radical social change,” which obviously entails the very deep thinking only sober, suffering academics can do?  Why is work the first and last redoubt in this battle?  What do you believe it produces, Alex?  Character?  Knowledge?  Class solidarity?  Since when?  Because you said so, Dad?

II

Half a century ago, Herbert Marcuse, Daniel Bell, Norman O. Brown, David Riesman, and Richard Hofstadter, among many others on the Left and the Right, thought it was time to rethink the meanings of work because it could no longer produce either character or income commensurate with effort.  Marcuse went further than the others in writing Eros and Civilization (1955), but not because he was more steeped in Marx and Freud—they were all matriculating in the Frankfurt School.

Listen to Daniel Bell in 1956, writing the kind of crisp sentences he perfected at Forbes: “In western civilization, work, whether seen as curse or as blessing, has always stood at the center of moral consciousness. . . .What will happen, then, when not only the worker but work itself is displaced by the machine?”

Then listen to Richard Hofstadter in 1955, trying, unsuccessfully, to organize his ungainly thoughts on the matter:  “[William Graham] Sumner expressed an inherited conception of economic life, even today fairly widespread among conservatives in the U.S., under which economic activity was considered to be above all a field for the development and encouragement of personal character. . . . Today we have passed out of the economic framework in which that [work] ethic was formed.”

This momentous historical passage was rendered in a syntactical mode that would make Henry James himself wince: “And anyone who today imagines he is altogether out of sympathy with that ethic should ask himself whether he has never, in contemplating a nearly workless economic order, powered by atomic energy and managed by automation, had at least a moment of misgiving about the fate of man in society bereft of the moral discipline of work.”

Sound familiar?

Bell and Hofstadter were on the verge of the moral panic that animates Gourevitch’s response to my slogan, Fuck Work.  But, like Marcuse, and unlike Gourevitch, they were curious enough to ask what the end of work could mean rather than denounce the possibility—they were willing to treat it as an empirical proposition, as the measurable contraction of socially necessary labor, and they were willing to imagine a moral universe in which the discipline of work could no longer serve as the source of individual character or the regulative principle of social relations.  They took Marx seriously, in this sense, by locating the realm of true freedom where he did, beyond necessity.   (In my view, Bell and Hofstadter were two of Marx’s best readers in the mid- 20^th century; but don’t take my word for it, see The Coming of Post-Industrial Society [1973] and The Progressive Historians [1968])

Again, Marcuse went further, but he was traveling the same road Bell and Hofstadter were on.  In Eros and Civilization, he argued that the “ultimate form of freedom” would require release from compulsion in its most familiar human shape, necessary labor: “It is the sphere outside labor which defines freedom and fulfillment, and it is the [re]definition of human existence in terms of this sphere which constitutes the negation of the performance principle.”

He insisted, moreover, that this release from necessary labor was clearly legible, already impending, in the actual social conditions of his time.  “The utopian claims of imagination have become saturated with historical reality,” as he put it.  Consequently, the bourgeois “notion of productivity”—the idea that human beings must be “evaluated according to [their] ability to make, augment, and improve useful things”—could be interrogated, and perhaps even replaced, by a less anal-compulsive standard.

Here is how Marcuse emphasized the historical character of his argument: “Rationalization and mechanization of labor tend to reduce the quantum of instinctual energy channeled into toil, thus freeing energy for the attainment of objectives set by the free play of individual faculties.  Technology operates against the repressive utilization of energy insofar as it minimizes the time necessary for the production of the necessities of life, thus saving time for the development of needs beyond the realm of necessity and of necessary waste.”

Like Bell and Hofstadter, Marcuse suggested that “automation”—shorthand for the extrication of human labor from goods production—had laid the economic groundwork for a passage beyond necessary labor as the determinant of social relations and individual character.  Were they in the grip of a utopian fever, entranced and traduced, like today’s Panglossian technophiles—me included, according to Gourevitch—by the very machines that would enslave millions?  Or were they making a plausible empirical case?

I think they were onto something more measurable than metaphysical, and so I can’t understand why contemporary social and political theorists like Alex Gourevitch and Matthew Crawford want to reduce an argument about the waning significance of work to a philosophical defense of its disciplinary effects.  And yes, I intend the Foucauldian connotation.

Until the 20^th century, the world was “too poor for the satisfaction of human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, and delay,” as Marcuse observed—without constant toil.  Indeed the domain of social necessary labor had expanded since 1750 to the point where goods production, commodity exchange, and the “cash nexus” seemed to describe or exhaust the content of social relations as such.  But then around 1910, as per Virginia Woolf’s oracular sentence on the future, everything changed.

By the 1920s, the new economic realities had became observable.  For the first time in human history, growth happened in the absence of net additions to the goods-producing labor force or to the capital stock.  Until then, growth had required “additional labor,” either more living labor, more people at work in the present, or more past labor, work already completed and congealed in the form of tools, plant, and other capital equipment.  No longer.

The expansion of productivity and output now proceeded as a function of declining quantities of labor time, past or present.  The labor theory of value could begin to look quaint.  And so the centrality of work in the moral consciousness of western civilization could become a problem, a question—and the possibility of a world unmoored from the safe harbor of socially necessary labor could become a moral promise.

Why, then, can’t we accredit the ethical principle that resides in our historical circumstance—the principle that true freedom lies beyond the realm of necessity?  More to the point, why does Alex Gourevitch want to ignore the evidence and put us back to work?

And just out of curiosity, why does he have to be so fucking condescending and paternalistic about it?

Work Ethic/Slave Morality

 

‘Jim, quick question, in what way did you mean the following: “why do we seek out the deferral of desire that work requires, regardless of how collective and cooperative, or how lonely and artful, it must be? Why are we bound to this slave morality?” On its face it reads like you are saying that any deferral of desire for the sake of realizing some long-term purpose is a sign that we are latter-day Protestants (or slaves, I was a little confused on that point too). If you really mean that, I don’t get the argument. Should I just spend my days quarreling on FB rather than disciplining myself and trying to get my book written? Oh the loathing that would follow.’

________________

That’s Alex Gourevitch’s comment on my blog/FB post regarding his friendly exchange with Peter Frase and Seth Ackerman on the question of work.  I meant my own remarks as an interruption rather, or less, than an “intervention.”  For now I’m just trying to slow us all down, wherever we are on the road to a decision about the meaning and significance of work.

In the book I’m writing, I enlist Hegel as well as Marx to get at what Freud called the “compulsion to work.”  In doing so, I assume that Nicolai Hartmann and Alexandre Kojeve were right to think of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) as a “philosophy of work”—not an idealist retort to Kant, but a radically materialist alternative to The Critique of Pure Reason (1787).  But I also assume that Hegel treated work exactly as he treated private property, as a first approximation of self-consciousness and/or freedom, not the last word—as a stage in the development of consciousness that would, of course, be superseded by another (cf. par. 44 in The Philosophy of Right [1821]).  Not obliterated, mind you, but instead sublated, that is, both incorporated and transformed by the remembrance and the mourning of its demise.

I’ll sample both The Phenomenology and The Philosophy of Right to make the materialist point.  Herbert Marcuse notwithstanding, the logical, narrative, and normative structures of The Phenomenology still flourish in the later work.  For example, in the subsection on “Civil Society” (par. 182-256) in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel examines “The System of Needs.”  Here Rousseau is the object of serious ridicule:

“The idea has been advanced that in respect of his needs man lived in freedom in the so-called ‘state of nature’ when his needs were supposed to be confined to what are known as simple necessities of nature . . . This view takes no account of the moment of liberation intrinsic to work.” (par. 194)

Soon after Hegel sounds like Emerson in praising the “Doctrine of the Farm”—where manual labor is an education—or Gramsci in describing but also defending the effects of the assembly line (“Fordism”):

“Practical education, acquired through working, consists first in the automatically recurring need for something to do and the habit of simply being busy [sound familiar?]; next, in the strict adaptation of one’s activity according not only to the nature of the material worked on, but also, and especially, to the pleasure of other workers; and finally, in a habit, produced by this discipline, of objective activity and universally recognized aptitudes.  The universal and objective element in work, on the other hand, lies in the abstracting process, which effects the subdivision of needs and means thereby eo ipso subdivides production and brings about the division of labour.  By this division, the work of the individual becomes less complex, and consequently his skill at his section of the job increases, like his output.  At the same time, this abstraction of one man’s skill and means of production from another’s completes and makes necessary everywhere the dependence of men on one another and their reciprocal relation in the satisfaction of their other needs.  Further, the abstraction of one man’s production from another’s makes work more and more mechanical, until finally man is able to step aside and install machines in his place.”  (par. 197-98; cf. Marx’s Grundrisse, Penguin ed., pp. 83-111, 703-04)

In the earlier Phenomenology, Hegel’s language was more “intimate,” by which I mean his phrases had a closer proximity to the primal, and, yes, Protestant meanings of work: you can almost feel the fear, the trembling, and the sweat of the slave’s brow.  This is from the Lordship and Bondage section of Chapter 4:

“For this consciousness [of the slave] was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment in time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master.  It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it.  This complete perturbation of of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity

“. . . Further, this bondsman’s consciousness is not only this total dissolution in a general way; in serving and toiling the bondsman actually carries this out.  By serving he cancels in every particular aspect his dependence on and attachment to natural existence, and by his work he removes this existence away.  . . . Through work and labour, however, this consciousness of the bondsman comes to itself.  In the moment which corresponds to desire in the case of the master’s consciousness, the aspect of the non-essential relation to the thing seemed to fall to the lot of the servant, since the thing there retained its independence.  Desire [of the master] has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby [an] unalloyed feeling of self.  This satisfaction, however, just for that reason is itself only a state of evanescence, for it lacks objectivity or subsistence.  Labour, on the other hand, is desire restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed; in other words, labour shapes and fashions the thing.” (pp. 237-38, Baillie trans.)

Like the Stoic, the blueprint for the unhappy consciousness, the slave experiences his freedom as work, as the renunciation of the desires that create, or constitute, his self-consciousness (“self-consciousness is the state of Desire in general” [p.220]).  Like Augustine, he’s already divided up in time.

II

Still, Hegel’s break from the received tradition in political philosophy is clean.  It can be gauged from three different angles.  Manfred Riedel claims, rightly I think, that Hegel overturns classical practical philosophy: “On the classical model of poiesis [as in poetry or composition] there is no reflexive connection between the work and the worker, and certainly not the coupling and oscillating movement between worker and work, between subject and object, expressed by Hegel’s concept of development.  The reason for this lies in the hierarchy of activity itself, which identifies [political] action as superior to labour.”  According to Riedel, the “doubly negative movement” of work—the “self-objectification of consciousness’ as Hegel put it in the Jena lectures—“eliminates not only the simple dichotomy of form and matter, but also the priority of utility, a concept that plays a central role in the structure of the classical theory.  Briefly summarized, Hegel does not interpret the process of labour in terms of its outcome, as does Aristotle and the pre-industrial tradition of poietetics (artisanship or technology) which follows him; instead [Hegel] interprets it in terms of its origin.”  (Between Tradition and Revolution [1984], pp. 20-21)

Rebecca Comay says pretty much the same thing, but more poignantly: “The broken subject [the slave, the Stoic, the unhappy consciousness, the worker] can no longer position itself as the creative origin of either itself or [the] world.  Spirit thus suspends the labor that had defined human history as the artisanal history of production and self-reproduction.  The world ceases to present a mirror in which I can recognize the objectified imprint of my own activity.  In breaking with this imaginary scenario, I submit to a ‘complete externalization’ without return.”  (Mourning Sickness [2011], p. 146)

Finally, Hegel himself explained that his redefinition of work permitted a recalculation of the scope of political freedom.  In paragraphs 67 and 80 of the PR, we can read another kind of retort to Kant, who, in The Metaphysical Elements of Right (1797), had distinguished between “the active and the passive citizen” by claiming that civil personality was an attribute of property holders only—not proletarians and other dependents: “Apprentices to merchants or tradesmen, servants who are not employed by the state, minors (naturaliter vel civiliter), women in general, and all those who are obliged to depend for their living (i.e. for food and protection) on the offices of others (excluding the state)—all of these people have no civil personality, and their existence is, so to speak, purely inherent.”

Hegel begged to differ.  Here is how he announced his break from the classical tradition that Kant affirmed—the tradition, not incidentally, that Hannah Arendt revived with The Human Condition (1958)—in the Philosophy of Right: “Single products of my particular physical and mental skill and of my power to act I can alienate to someone else and I can give him the use of my abilities for a restricted period because, on the strength of this restriction, my abilities acquire an external relation to the totality and universality of my being.  By alienating the whole of my time, as crystallized in my work, and everything I produced, I would be making into another’s property the substance of my being, my universal activity and actuality, my personality.” (PR, par. 67; cf. par. 80)

By this specification, proletarians were neither slaves nor masters.  They were “moments” or members of civil society.  Not even the muted, mechanized violence of alienated labor in the mines and the factories—what the younger Hegel had called “the moving life of the dead”—disqualified them from participation, including citizenship, in the modern-industrial world.  Indeed the alienation of labor, the externalization or objectification or reification of self-consciousness was both the price and the promise of that new world.

And yet by the same specification, the proletarian must live by the slave’s morality, always converting the frustration or deferral of desire into the sovereignty of self-reliance—always internalizing the prohibited aggression (the realization of desire), so that longing for death and desire as such eventually become indistinguishable.  Nietzsche’s nihilism and Freud’s reconfiguration of the relation between ego and id after 1915 were both results of this Hegelian insight.

The proletarian does what he has to, he turns the other cheek, and in doing so he makes failure a virtue.  He chooses life—for the time being he stays in his calling and bears the scourge of the Devil, waiting for redemption, as Luther advised.

But what if the deferral of desire is no longer the condition of life because the socially necessary labor of the proletarian has receded?  What if the realization of desire (yes, the consumption rather than the production of values) has become the condition of life as such—of human development, as Hegel would say?  Then the morality of the slave, the Stoic, the worker—the repression of desire—becomes a constraint on human development, a fetter on the growth of the forces of production.  It becomes an end in itself, and thus a political dead end.

The young Marx spoke eloquently about how the working class, the universal class, would abolish itself in achieving its goal of liberation from alienated labor.  My aim is to abolish the intellectual and psychological predicates that make work, as both Hegel and Marx understood it, the indispensable characteristic of human nature—and then see what happens.

 

Fuck Work, continued

Here’s my belated interruption of the conversation on work being conducted at Jacobin and Facebook by Peter Frase, Seth Ackerman, and Alex Gourevitch.

____________

I’m an interested bystander, but I don’t yet understand the differences between Peter Frase, Seth Ackerman, and Alex Gourevitch on the primal and the political meanings of work.  Or, if I do, I wonder how these differences matter, pragmatically speaking.

All three agree that the decline of work is a problem, whether construed as a measurable sociological datum or an indispensable theoretical premise.  “The loss of work isn’t exactly something to celebrate,” as Frase puts it in criticizing Ross Douthat.  He goes on to propose full employment and a universal basic income.  Or, as Gourevitch puts it in criticizing Frase, Andre Gorz, and Kathi Weeks, work is more and less than necessary labor—conceived as a disciplined, collective human activity, it’s a site of struggle and a source of liberation: “work can be an expression of human freedom.”

Frase, Ackerman, and Gourevitch agree, in this sense, that (1) work is central to the human experience regardless of the scope of socially necessary labor, and that (2) the working class accordingly remains as the crucial agent of political innovation in the name of democracy.  In the same sense, then, they (3) validate the Hegelian specification of human nature—“He grasps labour as the essence of Man,” Marx explained in 1844—and (4) reaffirm the ontology of work that has since determined the Left’s approach to almost every political question raised by the advent of modern market societies.

Gourevitch goes farther down this four-lane highway than Frase or Ackerman, who are content to assume that their comrades understand the labor process as both the scene of oppression and the setting of self-realization—an everyday theater of absurd extremes.  For example, Gourevitch criticizes Gorz, and by implication Weeks, on the grounds that a Left committed to the end of work, not merely alienated labor, has no obvious constituency, no social basis, because it has no organic connection to the traditional concerns of left-wing politics: “One of the oddities of post-workism is that it has trouble identifying just who it is for, and thus whose needs, really, it is universalizing.”  In giving up on the conventional working class as the self-evident source of social and political progress, he claims, this new faction of the Left is building castles in the air.

Gourevitch makes that large claim not because he thinks Douthat is right about an impending world without work—he tacitly agrees with Frase on the unmeasured and unpaid expansion of necessary labor—but because, like Hegel and Marx (not to mention Luther and Freud), he defines work as the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, a condition to be grasped as a fortunate fall into the social space where productivity and creativity become synonymous.  It’s the “exercise of human powers” as such.  A world without work would, then, be a world drained of humanity.

Apart from its imperial reach—in these terms, work can mean almost anything—I have no major objections to this definition, although I would favor Freud over Hegel and Marx in explaining “the compulsion to work” as the sublime function of the neurosis that is human nature.  And to his credit, Gourevitch insists that the kind of work he has in mind “is a necessarily collective and cooperative activity of producing useful things.”  He clarifies as follows:  “It is not isolated craft production nor pure art.”  With these gestures, he has at least interrogated Hannah Arendt’s invidious distinction between work and labor in The Human Condition; by the same token, he has also challenged poeisis as the classical, unitary standard by which the alienation of labor is to be historically assessed—the standard Arendt and every left-wing intellectual with some glancing acquaintance with Marx uses to mourn the passing of “real,” meaningful work.  In doing so, he has borne us back, boats against the current, to the ambiguities and the consequences of paragraph 67 in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the great fork in the road of modern political philosophy.

Still, how does work acquire this ultimate credential, as the essence of human existence, except as the psychological residue of the Protestant work ethic and its social armature, all those disciplinary attendants from every place on the intellectual spectrum?  Sure, let’s discuss the ethics of work, but let’s first ask why work deserves this priority.  Does every metabolic exchange with Nature produce useful things, thus qualify as work?  Gourevitch nimbly evades Frase’s crucial observation on this very issue, so I’ll try another tack.

Why not accredit the destruction or, to be less polemical about it, the consumption of useful things, as the essence of human existence?  Why not give Georges Bataille his due?  Why not think of the bourgeois epoch as a deviation from the norm of human nature, as an ugly interregnum on the ruins of which we might build a less repressive civilization?

To be more polemical about it, why not say, Fuck Work?  Just as a first approximation of what is possible and necessary in view of the historical circumstances—not as a flamboyantly utopian posture and not as a pragmatic acknowledgment of an intractable unemployment crisis?  Why do we want full employment when more work for all means less income and less enjoyment for everybody?  In plain sight of the simple fact that we can increase output without increasing inputs of either capital or labor—when socially necessary labor is disappearing—why do we seek out the deferral of desire that work requires, regardless of how collective and cooperative, or how lonely and artful, it must be?

Why are we bound to this slave morality?  Because it provides us the grounds for a “left-egalitarian critique of idle rentiers and capitalists, living off the efforts of others,” as Gourevitch suggests?  Because we have to work and they won’t?  The ancient Christian and the modern socialist causes were informed by the criterion of need (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”)—once upon a time, the goal was the detachment of income (thus social standing) from work, not more work.  The end of socially necessary labor was a promise to be kept in the future, not a reason to mourn the past.

So, now that there is neither a transparent nor a legible relation between effort and reward because work on Main Street can’t provide a living wage—also because theft on Wall Street can create a fortune—why not acknowledge the intellectual and political possibilities that result?

Toy Story

I

The largest annual toy fair in the world closed in New York on Wednesday, February 13^th, after a four-day run.  It was convened as usual at the Javits Center over on 12^th Avenue, the vast convention hall between 34^th and 40^th Street (it’s the place Governor Cuomo wants to close in favor of a convention center in Queens).

You know what the book exhibit at the Modern Language Association or the American Historical Association looks like?  That windowless ballroom where you need proof of registration to enter and browse the publishers’ booths?  That significant space is typically about 30,000 square feet of boring books, diffident reps, and muted colors, which combine with the florescent light to create the ambience of a professional bowling event, where a normal tone of voice sounds vaguely alarming, a muted signal of emergency: nobody’s dying, but someone has thrown the equivalent of a gutter ball.

The International Toy Fair took up about 600,000 square feet in the Javits Center—Mattel had its own floor, where nobody except reporters and buyers with serious credentials were admitted.  Nothing was boring, nobody was diffident, and the colors were strident, shocking, as if everything here were plastic, or rather, because everything was plastic except the old-fashioned wooden sleds hanging in the booth next to the Sol Wheels.  These popular devices look like portable housing for a garden hose, but they’re unicycles without the height or the effort: you just stand there on a wheel and it moves you, like you’re Barney Rubble with a skinny tie and a back pack.  A set of Sol Wheels will cost you $1800.

The ambient effects were intriguing noise, theatrical voices, astonishing vistas, even strange smells, combining to make the scene feel like the parking lot outside a football stadium before the game: this is all earnest preparation for a spectacle that must be fun for somebody, somehow.  I place emphasis on that word because for all the insane frivolity of the event—toys are for children, but they get bought by adults who work for a living—this is a command economy.

Welcome to industrialized fun, where play is work.  And vice versa, of course!  The dialectic is never dead, only dormant, just ask Zizek.

The International Toy Fair takes the same “wholesale” approach as the publishers at the academic conventions.  At the MLA or the AHA, the exhibitors in the booths are there to sell to the middlemen and the distributors—professors like me, who will decide what products the retail consumer, the student, can buy in his or her segment of the curricular market.  At the Toy Fair, to be sure, the exhibitors are there to sell to much more important middlemen and distributors like Amazon or Costco.  Still, the analogy holds: large textbook adoptions are often determined by department committees.

Now reverse the field and imagine yourself hawking your monograph on the sexuality of the sans-culottes, or the politics of Reconstruction in DeKalb County, Georgia, in this kind of space, like you’ve got a trade book on your hands.  It’s not entirely fanciful.  The toy buyers browsing these thousands of aisles—deciding what to stock for next year—include small businessmen like John Middlekamp, who owns two upscale stores called Zoom in Kansas City, Missouri, one on Country Club Hill, an opulent “open mall.”

Think of him as a buyer at a book fair in Berlin.  Think of him as a publisher.  What would you be pitching?  Soon you’ll be wondering, because academic publishing won’t last any longer than tenure—I mean the academic system of seniority, not the certification of your job security.  Then what?

II

I was there to experience the scene because in noodling around on the Internet one day, I had stumbled on a promotional video for a new toy.  Watching it made me get all anthropological, willing to trek those four long desolate blocks from the 2 Train at Times Square to the Hudson River, fighting for pedestrian space with buses bound for Lincoln Tunnel.  This little video depicts, elicits, and magnifies every infantile desire Freud ever discovered, so I had to go there, to the place where wishes and dreams are accorded the dignity they deserve.  Not to the shrink’s office, no, to the Javits Center decked out as the Toy Fair.

My quasi-official guide escorted me from exhibit to exhibit on the acreage Mattel hadn’t monopolized—it had its own floor and its own security staff, no way we could get in.  She was gleeful, I was overwhelmed, and then I was giddy, like her.  At my request, she played “Jishaku” with a rep who claimed that the unscrupulous guys downstairs had ripped off his boss’s concept—place polished magnetized stones in a felt background, you win if your stones don’t attract others, imagine that.  His solemn conclusion was “It’s all about finesse.”  After watching them play, I agreed, but I still didn’t know who won, or why. Then, at my request, we entered the huge Manhattan Toy site because Parents Magazine was part of the logo, and we all got a little embarrassed when I quizzed the nice woman at the booth about the obviously grotesque affiliation.

My favorite moment came when I tried to topple the Dominoes at the eponymous site—this company is trying to diversify the brand, like Lego, which, I noticed, had commandeered a space the size of a ranch on the second floor.  After I wrestled with the nice little black and beige oblongs, assuming I’d level this playing field—it looked like a miniature cemetery, now that I think about it, serried rows of uniform markers, let’s kill the dead!—the guy in charge said, with practiced aplomb, “They’re glued down.”

I said, “What the fuck, what’s the point if you can’t make them do what they’re supposed to?”  As I said this, though, I saw the “moving life of the dead” Hegel had depicted as monotonous factory work—in his theological writings, in Jena, long before Toussaint or the master-slave dialectic—and I saw the “dance of death” Alex Cockburn had described as the board game of aristocrats we call chess.

OK, I couldn’t actually see these things, but I could begin to feel that every kind of work is preparation for play, and that play, even when disguised as work, is preparation for death.  I could see that maybe Georges Bataille was right about the nature of human desire, after all—it’s always about excess and expenditure, he claimed, always aimed at a pointless waste of resources.  I wanted to steal a domino.

The man in charge shrugged, then he laughed, he had the right attitude.  “It’s like chess,” he said, confirming all my suspicions.  I looked down at the board, where hundreds of little oblongs stood waiting for my first and last direction, and said, “C’mon, man, you can move the pieces when you play chess.”  He said, “Yeah, but you know how it turns out, it’s win or lose.”  I was stunned, I said, “It’s not a game if everybody loses.”

“Exactly,” he said. “This is not a game.”

He was right, it’s a game when the Cubans or the Dominicans play their fast and loose version of Dominoes, clacking and betting and screaming.  This board contained something else—it was a monument built, with painstaking effort, to be wasted gloriously, like a religious shrine.  Everybody loses, but the resulting deficit gives us faith in the future.

Our next stop, in Aisle 2100, was the Marshmallow Fun Company, which has patented and now produces every imaginable plastic device that lets you shoot edible white pellets.  I bought two mini cross-bows, ten bucks apiece, that will send a tiny marshmallow thirty feet with a gratifying sound, the inarticulate equivalent of the emphatic exhalations that come with sex, drugs, and sports events, also death, speaking of Bataille.  My hope was to engage my girlfriend in not-so-sublimated warfare—“Take that, bitch!”—but alas, as a daughter of Enlightenment, she has no interest in skirmishes conducted on this level of idiocy.

III

But as I say, I was there to explore the psychological and perhaps political dimensions of toys, specifically the toy I saw in the video, which mandates and enables personal rebirth by a verbal pact with an impending reality: by wishing that comes true, like a contract, or rather by wishing for the truth even if you don’t know what that is.  Perhaps, I thought, the wasted time we call play isn’t as bound up with those three fundamental realities—food, sex, death.  Perhaps Bataille was wrong in this sense, perhaps toys mine another seam of social reality, the Satanic-Adamic urge to give birth to yourself, or, as Freud put it, “to become father to yourself,” and not just in the limited, clinical sense that the child must be father to the man.

Here’s how that toy works.

You buy the product, a stuffed animal with an opening in its abdomen, and you place your wish there, in writing, in this gestational space.  Then you wait on the world.  If the wish comes true, you share it with the person who has fulfilled it—you name him or her as the cause, not merely the symptom or the effect, of your condition, which is your happiness.  If the wish doesn’t come true, that’s OK, there are no time limits on your search—when your patience is exhausted, you retrieve the message, and you rewrite.

You’re unhappy about your life, and you want desperately to change it.  How do you accomplish that?  You make a wish, and then you act as if it will come true, you commit yourself and then you see—as if your willingness, in every sense, is a real cause of what happens in the world.  Now this urge is not merely childish, “wishful thinking” as we used to say.  Your being-in-the-world just is the volition you bring to the situation at hand, equipped with purposes you can’t know and may never be able to acknowledge.  In that sense, you are always already “thrown” into the world, where you will discover a self—not by coming across yourself, perceiving yourself, but by being brought before yourself, made manifest by the material articulations of your inchoate intentions.  By projection, in short, not introspection.

I went to the Toy Fair because I wanted to see how this product, this idea, might appear to people without my preconceptions.  To begin with, what did the creator think about what she had created?  I was more interested in how the video answered that question than in the thing itself—I never did get hold of the stuffed animal, although I inspected it closely—so my account is still biased in favor of astonishment, wonder, and magical thinking, the properties of children, alchemists, and poets.

In other words, the following reconstruction of my conversation with the inventor is what I wished for.  She later denied she said any of it, and she may be right.

How do you make dreams work?

“I wanted it to be real, and honest, you know?  Not happy, because sometimes when your dream comes true, it’s not all good, it can be awful, just awful.  You get what you want, and then what?  You wanted this guy, a certain kind of guy, and he turns out to be not what you needed.  Look, I’m not talking about myself here.  Yeah, he’s good looking, and he works out, but he’s not . . . well, he’s just not what you need.  You mention the video, it’s mostly sad, everybody’s wishing for something they don’t have, they want to hope.”

You mean the wishing is a kind of denial?

“No, well, yeah, you can put everything aside, you have a purpose.  You don’t care that the sink is full of dishes, maybe you don’t look so good today.  Things could turn out because you know what you want.”

And what you really want is to give birth, like, to yourself?  The video makes me feel like the wish is a seed planted in a female abdomen, then it’s removed by Caesarean section when it’s ready, well-baked.  You become father to yourself, no?  Like the American Adam.

“No, you’re reading way too much into it.  It’s not about having babies.  It’s about facing reality.”

OK, reality.  But maybe, in that sense, it’s about having control of your life—your body?  Freud wrote some cool stuff about how you first experience autonomy by controlling your bowels, then you start equating feces and babies and, uh, penises: they all seem to come from the same place, you know?  You’re not thinking this when you’re a toddler, it’s always unconscious.  It sounds weird, I know.

“It sounds disgusting.”

Yeah, it is, but that’s the nature of the wish, no?  I mean, who really wants what they wish for?  Midas, “Bedazzled,” whatever, your desires don’t have much to do with reality, not once you get past food and clothing, and even there you’re—

“It’s not that complicated.  This toy lets people find happiness when they’re sad, they get to forget what makes them sad.  What’s wrong with that?”

Nothing, nothing is wrong with that, how could there be anything wrong with that?  Except maybe you don’t want to forget what makes you sad because if you do, you’ll regret it, you’ll forget what made you.  You said you didn’t want the video to be happy, you wanted it to be real.  There’s sadness in it.

“But only up to a point.  You can do something about it, you can change your life by hoping for something.”

Something that isn’t visible?  The conviction of things unseen?

“Yes, it’s not here.  Not yet.  Not yet.  But you can believe in it.”

 

 

 

Second Inaugurals

President Obama was clearly aware of Lincoln’s presence in composing and  delivering his second inaugural address.  But the anxiety of influence was absent.

The biblical references were everywhere, and if not in the recognizable references, they were in the cadences of scripture and the impromptu rhythms of the pulpit that carried the ideas past controversy.  Listen to the penultimate paragraph, and ask yourself if it would sound better if you removed any of the adjectives, or any seemingly incidental word: “Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.”

Like Lincoln, Obama sutured the Declaration and the Constitution by citing both (“We, the people” and “all men are created equal”) as if they belonged together.  And in keeping with that surgery, he practically quoted Lincoln’s second inaugural, insisting that liberty and equality aren’t just compatible, but rather that each is a necessary condition of the other: “through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free.”

But the accomplishment of this speech is a departure from Lincoln’s solemn use of scripture.   Quite apart from the continuity of Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall the president has now enshrined in the rhetorical memory of our unfinished founding—as Americans, each of us from elsewhere, that’s all we can share, this memory—Obama’s accomplishment resides in the way he was able to move us beyond the measure of liberty and equality God offers, whether in the words of the Bible or in the sermons of our contemporaries.

He said it twice:

“For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.”

And then, toward the ending:

“We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

Liberty and equality are what we make of them, not what God has given us.  They become truths we can live by only insofar as we know they’re our creations, in this life and on this earth.   That’s a new twist on the idea of a gift from God.  When Obama says we can hear a King proclaim that liberty is worthless in the absence of equality, you know he has a doubled son of man in mind.  You know the inscrutable God of Abraham has given way not to the forgiveness of Jesus but to we, the people.

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”

Amen.

Life Underground

I

If you live in New York, you spend a lot of your waking hours underground, unless you live in Queens.  In a normal week, I spend five or six hours down there beneath the city, where even the air you breathe has to be delivered.  This is not a complaint: the subway system is a magnificent architectural achievement as well as the best way to get around town.

Unless you get lost down there—it’s hard to do except in Penn Station—you tend not to notice the material intricacy or scale of the thing, because once you descend those steps, you’re in a hurry to get to the right platform, the next train, the destination itself.  You tend not to notice the tile work apart from the murals, for example, maybe because it’s everywhere you look, on the floors, walls, and sometimes the ceilings (can all that tile in the system outweigh the metal?). You don’t even notice how insanely long the trains are unless you ride the C, and then you worry that they’ll shut this line down before long because during off-hours, you can have a whole car to yourself (I once thought that if I were homeless, the C would look like the suburbs).

And you tend not to ask why they number the doors starting at the left front of each car, so that no matter where you sit, you have to read backward if you want to get from 1 to 16, and swivel your head, too, which is embarrassing, like moving your lips when you read.

II

So what are you doing down there?  Waiting and watching.  Mostly waiting, because even after you board your train, you’re just waiting for your stop.  But watching as well, at least to begin with, looking for a seat, looking for signs of something—danger, welcome, novelty, beauty, idiocy—in the clothes and the postures and the colors and the faces of your fellow passengers.

That’s what I do, anyway.  When they get on the train, most other people have something to read, or to listen to, or both.  Or they play games on their smart phones.  They share the sensibility of my girlfriend, who never goes near a subway without a New Yorker or a Times Book Review in tow.  But then she doesn’t make coffee or unload the dishwasher without listening to WNYC or a book on tape: either she’s the last Puritan or she doesn’t want to be alone with her  own thoughts (but then these may be the same psychological state).

Still, the subway does make everybody wait.  My trips aren’t that long, though, and, unlike most passengers, I’m never on my way to or from work.  So I don’t mind waiting, and I love watching.  I rarely read on the train, unless it’s something I’ve just written.  Instead, I look for things and people to look at.

Imagine my surprise, then, last Saturday morning, when I set out from the 14^th Street station at 8^th Avenue, looking for an E to get me to Lexington and 86^th Street, on my way to an out-of-cycle meeting with the shrink.  I’ve been waiting on this platform for almost four years, since I started coming to Chelsea to visit my girlfriend, and before Saturday I had of course noticed an ensemble of brass sculptures down there by Tom Otterness, called “Life Underground.”  But I had never actually looked at it.

III

Waiting a long time for that E train let me look closely.  I was leaning on some white tile beneath one of the 16^th Street stairwells and realized I was right next to a donkey who, according to cartoon convention, is wearing underwear (boxer shorts), work shoes, and a derby hat, but who also has female breasts.  That’s an interesting mix of signs, I thought, and then glanced at the donkey’s match, a figure facing the same way on the other side of a three-sided white tile foundation that looks like nothing so much as a wide shower stall.  It’s an elephant with a very long trunk, wearing the same underwear but women’s shoes and a top hat.

C’mon, the sculptor put three-dimensional caricatures of the two major parties on a bathroom pedestal, facing downtown rather than each other?  Well, duh, I could finally say to myself.  (Later I learn that this work was installed by the MTA in 2001; the artist’s commission was $200,000.)  Then I notice that between and below them, on the white tile floor, is what looks like two hairy feet facing the same way, except that it’s one huge foot with nine toes and two ankles.  Are these parties united by something after all?

These are clothed animals raised above a Big Foot that is clearly prehensile.  What are they doing here?  Keep it simple.  Where are they facing?  Downtown, to be sure, but which part of that dense puzzle?  The West Village is just below 14^th Street, then comes Soho, Tribeca, and the financial district.  What do these parties see—or rather, what do we see when we face the same way?

Underneath another stairway opposite these bizarre figures, on the floor, stage center, we see an alligator emerging from a manhole marked “NYC Sewer.”  This is not a Santa Claus from the sewer—like that jolly piece of shit Mr. Hankie—who brightens the holidays over at “South Park.”  The reptile is gleeful, yes, but he’s chewing on the legs of a little man whose head is a money bag, as in 19^th-century cartoons of monopolists and lesser capitalists.  The return of the repressed?

Meanwhile, on the railing, stage right, is a fat rodent feasting on the enormous coins that spill from a torn money bag, eating them as if they’re chocolate bars, that’s right, as if he’s munching on shit.  Let them eat money.

 

 

 

In the background, stage left, are two rodent policemen—they have caps, uniforms, and holsters—sweeping smaller coins into their receptacles.  Some representative of the neo-liberal state has to clean up this mess, might as well be the cops.

And in the dark, way beneath the stairs, almost unnoticeable at the back of this hilarious animal tableau, the smallest figure lays still, on her side, with two plain bags beside her: she carries no money, only her belongings.  She might be asleep, but she could be dead.  Either way, she’s homeless.

 

 

She’s hard to see in this light, isn’t she?

So when we face downtown with the Democrat and the Republican, these two brass animals, we see all the way to Wall Street, where the Law of the Jungle is at work.  Not exactly a dog-eat-dog world, but close enough to the reality of the 21^st century.