don't forget the camel scrotem!

There are bankruptcy stories that are full of the blood and bones of children and workers, all ground up neatly, fairy tale wise, to be eaten by bondholders - and then there are fabulous bankruptcy stories in which the violence really is symbolic, and reaches into the very vacuum of our ersatz culture. The NYT story of the end of the Yellowstone club and the bankruptcy of its owners, Edra and Tim Blixseth (divorced) includes, in the inimitable po faced style of the Times, the following graf:

“Among examples of profligate spending Mr. Blixseth cites in the filing is a $90,000 party that Ms. Blixseth had at Porcupine Creek for more than 100 guests. Guests were invited to whack piñatas shaped like Mr. Blixseth and which contained chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil. Voodoo dolls resembling Mr. Blixseth — complete with stickpins — were also on display. (Ms. Blixseth acknowledges that the party did indeed occur.)”

There is also this:
“Members say, mostly with fondness, that Ms. Blixseth’s aesthetics were more madam than monarch. Indeed, décor in some parts of the clubhouse almost smacked of Montana bordello. There, just as at Porcupine Creek, quality met kitsch, with Persian carpets and antiques rubbing up against huge marble statues and a couch covered in real zebra skin.
“I mix centuries together,” Ms. Blixseth acknowledges. She opens an ornate trinket cabinet to retrieve a brown, gourdlike object. “Do you know what this is? A camel scrotum! It holds water.”

Of course, this bankruptcy was made possible by your friends at Credit Suisse, who though Mr. (Toxic) Blixseth's ideas were worth about 400 million dollars. Luckily, in the great poker game between banks and the world central bankers, that money was no doubt taken care of by using state money. Because, after all, what is more important than a bank? It spreads money around so optimally. Ask any University of Chicago economist.

engineering and poetry

Everybody knows Adorno’s famous phrase that there could be no more poetry after Auschwitz. But why did nobody ever say that there could be no more engineering after Auschwitz? After all, the camp produced methane gas, not alexandrines.

Of course, the reason is simple. We can’t do without the methane. Verses, in the popular mind, are for teenagers and losers. But underneath all the systems – socialist, fascist, communist – we need something to make the methane. We need something to make the engines. We need more roads. We need plastic, and we need low fat foods. We need hardware, and we need software. We need the cities, and we need the planes and bombs to bomb the cities. At this cold level, at the bottom of the artificial paradise, nobody is going to take giving up engineering seriously. It might lead to mass death, but who can imagine living without it? It is possible that the largest negative externality the planet has ever seen – the CO2 that, year by year, is bringing us close to the end of the Holocene – comes from engineering. But whether it is Auschwitz or global warming, we cannot question the engineering.

I’ve been reading Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire. It is a history that confronts one with Hitler’s most successful idea: a war state in which the population is shielded from war. This, at least, was the plan. Hitler saw the blockade of 1914-1918 as the key to the Allied victory, and the downfall of the Kaiser, and he did not want that repeated. Hitler’s great drive was to immunize the Germans. This drive even worked under the extermination camps – for dead people don’t eat. One of the great Nazi diktat in the 1940-1942 period was to keep the nutritional level of the population up, by all means necessary. This meant a vast program of expropriation in the East, and, to a lesser extent, in the West.

However, the Hitlerian system was hexed by its own striving for totality. Seeking both a racially pure German and a war state that would master Europe, Hitler’s machine inevitably began to seek out labor for the factories, and soon flooded Germany with more foreigners than it had ever held before. Having seized Poland and planned on making it a vast extension of the Reich, Hitler’s men soon found that Germans did not want to colonize the eastern front – which meant, of course, that the “subhuman” slav population of Greater Germany spiked up. In this political sense, Popper’s Open society is certainly right – the price of the triumph of a total social system is its rapid decay and defeat. The limits are crossed in a delirium, the limits aren’t even seen. But they are there, nonetheless. The engineering underneath just brings you closer and closer to them.

of freaks and men

In a remarkable passage in Fallen Leaves, Rozanov describes the God’s relationship to the world in these terms:

Expansible matter embraces an unexpansible object, no mater how much larger it seems. It – is always “larger”. A boa constrictor as thick as an arm, at most as big as a leg at the knee, devours a small goat. This is the cause of many strange phenomena and of the appetite of the boa and the goat. Yes, it hurts a little, is tight, but – it worked… It is remarkable to put on a kid glove, how it lies there so narrow and ‘innocent’ in the store box. But when it’s put on, it forms a firm grip. The world gravitates metaphysically towards a “firm grip”. In a “firm grip”, God holds the world.”

As Olga Matich, who quotes this passage in Erotic Utopia, says, “the passage first depicts the expansion of a vagina, erection of a penis (even though it is called an ‘expandable object’).” Matich is being delicate – I can think of cruder terms for this metaphor.

Rozanov was a Russian decadent – and a fierce critic of the Russian decadents. He proclaimed himelf a philo-Semite, but this just meant that the took the anti-semitic stereotypes about Jews – including, especially and notoriously, the notion of blood offerings extracted from little Christian babies – and used them to effect an inversion of values. Matich quotes Bely’s portrait of Rozano: ‘his devious little eyes seemed to be brown morsels…[Rozanov cooked his ideas] which he would bake somewhere (in a sacred place), where he would produce the shameless bodily function of his shameless thought.” Bely did not like Rozanov, but as Matich points out, his portrait is accurate, down to the equivalency between excretion and thought – Rozanov himself emphasized that his writing was full of his sperm.

It is hard to know what attitude to take to a writer who strips himself with such gusto. Who is shameless.

Which brings me to the contemporary film director, Alexie Balabanov. My friend Masha thinks Balabanov is an extremely clever and extremely nasty film-maker. I had only seen Brother 1, which didn’t strike me as anything clever, although the nastiness – particularly the anti-semitism – was there. So I went and rented Of Freaks and Men. And I saw what Masha was talking about.

Of freaks and men is filmed in a golden sepia – as though the shots had been drenched in Catherine the Great’s amber room. But it is typical of Balabanov that this beauty is twisted – the collector’s fetish for sepia is mocked in this sepia, which never was nor will be. Collecting is what the film is about – briefly, a man in a turn of the century city (St. Petersburg, although the name is never mentioned in the film) runs a pornography operation that involves photographing the bare bottoms of women getting whipped or spanked. He has a sinister assistant, who delivers the postcards to two customers – one, the maid of a doctor who has married a blind woman and adopted a pair of Siamese twins, and the other to Liza, the daughter of a prosperous engineer. As it happens, the maid in the engineer’s house is both the lover of the engineer and the sister of the pornographer. The assistant is attracted by the freaks and the blind woman in the doctor’s house – he uses the latter as a model bottom, and kidnaps the children and photographs them nude in his basement studio. One of the twins he debauches with alcohol. Meanwhile, the maid shows the engineer, who has a heart problem, the photographs his supposedly innocent daughter has bought. This brings on a heart attack and death. The pornographer then moves into the engineer’s apartment and makes Leeza one of his models. For good measure, he throws in the freaks.

From one end to the other, this is a repulsive world, shot in beautiful sepia. If, indeed, some deity is putting its penis into the tight grip of this world’s cunt, you can be sure it is not the god of love. It is a gangster god, a thief god, a god who can conceive of love only in terms of terror and compulsion. And, indeed, the movie ends with Leeza making a brief fugue from her apartment, only to end up being spanked, once again, in a brothel.

We all know that shock is at the center of the modernist aesthetic. But repulsion is a modernist reaction, too. Not just in horror films. It’s ideological meaning is harder to penetrate. Masha, with good reason, sees Balabanov’s films as an extension of his ultra-right politics. It is the politics of Limonov, the writer turned nationalist. According to this reading, it is enough to show the decadence of the pre-revolutionary intellectuals to condemn them. But repulsion is an overdetermined reaction. Just as the assistant (a repulsively pale, completely bald man with spaces between his teeth, a sort of cleaned up Nosferatu, played by Viktor Sukhorukov) is fascinated by the freaks beyond any economic need or even apparent erotic function, so, too, Balabanov is much too fascinated with this world he has conjured up to condemn it crudely. Like Rozanov, he plays with his own disgust – and makes the viewer complicit. In fact, infects the viewer, which is of course the primal and fearful trait projected on pornography – that to watch is to be infected, to be possessed. This film has been compared especially with David Lynch. But Lynch is working in a culture in which camp has been a long established feature. Imagine a Lynch working in a culture in which camp had never existed, and you get close to the sensibility here.

the toad-eater elections

A few weeks ago I got into a dustup with someone on facebook, of all places, about the direction of a facebook group, the Non-Aligned leftists. Beyond the surface of our tactical differences, the deeper one was about the very purpose of a political group. To my mind, the “left” is nothing – the ends are everything. So, I thought that the presentation of a number of issues that the zona has made ultra-important – democratizing antique political entities, knocking down laws that cripple the internationalization of labor unions, a 35 hour week, creating a heavy regulatory regime to limit the speculative market, etc., need to be expressed on all occasions in the Anglo-sphere. My opponent, on the other hand, wanted to find common ground with ‘left” parties so that we would be good campaigners once election time rolled around – while, of course, asserting with gusto that we were going to overthrow the government and seize power from the street.

I must admit, I could give a flying fuck for that kind of babyshit.

And so the toadeater elections have rolled over Europe. The left, which now consists of a bought and paid for set of the political elite who want to “moderate’ neo-liberalism and a set who want to ‘seize power from the street” got entirely and predictably whipped. Instead of viewing the zona as the greatest opportunity to effect radical change in 50 years, the ‘left” has treated it like an annoyance. Just as the two spheres, “moderates” and ‘radicals”, were essential to disenfranchising opposition to the invasion of Iraq, they operate, now, with an evil synergy, to disarm the populace before the machinations of an astonishingly corrupt and vile right wing machine. The party of Berlusconi’s dick.

Berlusconi’s dick romped.

In the sad gray light of Napoleon’s downfall, William Hazlitt wrote a heartfelt essay about the decline of the literary tribe and the rise of the elite – seconded by its victims. The oddity of the poor and working class cheering on the rich and idle class he called toad-eating. He accurately described the way in which the press operates as a sort of projection machine, allowing the poor man to bask in the glory for which he pays with his skin, and the skins of his children.

Today, fat, comfortable, we watch the right work around the margins of the welfare state. They have been doing this long enough that the left’s only real tactic – which is to claim that the right will destroy the welfare state – rings as hollow as it should. In fact, that state is hooked up to the corporate machinery and has long, long been. The right has long ago learned how to use it to make the rich richer. And it is the left’s political destiny, imposed upon them by a political elite that came through the ranks by making sure that there was no untoward discussion of issues – my god, we have to leave that to the leaders and their committees! – is more of the same. So, the party of ditto and diddly squat, the party that righteously separates itself, in the name of all that is good in economics (a la Milton Friedman and Hayek), the Nu-Labour/PS/SPU slug’s orgy, goes down in wholly predictable defeat.

Yes, there's no protection for you from the vampires in the Central Banker’s state.

PS - fans of Infinite Thought should listen to NP on the BBC at 36:52, talking about Orwell. Although she didn't get a chance to say as much as she could have, alas.

economics - a few kicks against the pricks

If I were going to be aphoristically cruel, I’d call economics the science that can’t predict the future and can’t agree upon the past. In the Freakonomics column, my happy hunting ground for sophisms, Stephen Levitt worried that the state of macro-economics was in poor shape, especially as compared to the happy state of microeconomics. Matt Yglesias commented on the post, remarking that research programs in the sciences aren’t necessarily all captured by reductionist programs:

“But as a methodological matter, it seems deeply unsound. As a general principle for investigating the world, we normally deem it desirable, but not at all necessary, that researchers exploring a particular field of inquiry find ways to “reduce” what they’re doing to a lower level. To make that concrete, in the modern day we have achieved a decent understanding of how principles of chemistry are grounded in physics’ understanding of the behavior of atoms. But it’s just not the case that advances in chemistry were made by demanding that chemists ground all their models in subatomic physics. On the contrary, chemistry moved forward in the first instance by having chemists investigate issues in chemistry and see which models and theories held up. Similarly, though psychology is intertwined with the detailed study of the biology of the brain, it’s not deemed illegitimate to research psychological issues in the absence of a specific neurological theory.”

At this point, I’d object that we are confusing an epistemological issue with an ontological one: the division between micro and macro economics has nothing to do with the system of production per se, but is an epistemological convenience that allows economists to concentrate on certain special problems.

The comparison with chemistry is part of the bad habit of thinking that economics is some special human science. It isn’t. It is not a positive science, like chemistry or physics – it lacks a Baconian side. Economic experiments turn out to be things that are more likes sociology than particle physics. Now, it is true that economists love to make models, and they use masses of data in these models, and make the models out of mathematical relationships – but it is all a mimicry of physics. In reality, an economic model is just a poem. Now, a poem can burst open a human soul and pour the divine light of revelation on the world – but most poems don’t. Certain economists, like strong poets, have revealed the world – Smith, Marx, Veblen, Keynes, Polanyi. However, the light that streams from their models is not the same kind of light that streams from models in physics.

Mostly, though, the models reveal little or nothing. They are like the crossword puzzles IT likes so much. They merely plug in formulas, according to some outside cues (usually provided by ideology) and some internal connections (provided by the way the data is divided up). And once all the places are filled and the puzzle is done, the model is finished. But it is unlikely to do much to help us understand the economy – any more than the chance meeting of two words sharing a letter in a crossword puzzle – Georgics and borromean – will allow the puzzler to understand the language on some deeper level.

boredom (crossposted at LimitedInc

When I look back on my life and try to understand why it has been such a failure, the key, I think, is in my inability to endure boredom. Or perhaps I should say my inability to endure boredom for the sake of making money. In this, I am spiritually one with the street people, the addicts, the semi-professional criminals – with all of those who never quite grew up, whose immaturity is caught in their throat. The difference is that, among the decayed Peter Pan gang, there is – as you will find out very quickly if you talk to them - an astonishing nostalgia for the larva days – high school pranks, days of honey in the suburban hive. I hate that shit, which bored me at the time, and bores me in memory still.

And yet, at the same time, I am enmeshed in activities that may seem, and probably are, boring to most of workaday America. And, to add to the problem of being bored in America, I find the culture of entertainment that has been foisted upon that workaday world – and eagerly adopted – to be, if not completely boring, at least boring enough that I know little about it. The TV, the pop movies, the celebrity culture – I can’t keep up because I can’t concentrate, I can’t remember what it is all about. And I can’t remember because I am not moved by it.

Which makes me want to start over again and ask whether my failure, here, is not so much that I fly from boredom, as that I am bored at the wrong time and by the wrong things. Add to this another confusion: although sometimes I will say, like anybody else, that such and such a thing is boring – and mean, like anybody else, that it is contemptible, that I would like to step on it, shit on it, spit on it, expel it – at other times I despise this kind of language. Boredom, I think – at these other times – is a kind of test, an exercise. It has a necessity, especially in relation to the ecstatic, the sublime, the interesting. To fly boredom in these cases is to fly the depths. To be unable to be bored is to be unable to be. All of which ties me into knots.

Kierkegaard, in the Concept of Dread (or Anguish), has a lot to say about boredom. In the fourth chapter, Kierkegaard asks what happened to the demons. Why do Christians no longer talk about the demons in 19th century Europe? Are they ashamed?

This is the starting point for Kierkegaard’s discussion of the demonic. He makes a two-fold approach to the demonic. One approach is to see it in terms of communication. Communication, for Kierkegaard, is ultimately about revelation, and revelation is ultimately about the divine. Every act of true revelation is divine. And revelation is at the heart of communication. Thus, every act of non-revelation is on the side of the devil, the ‘spirit of negation’. The demon is, ultimately, non-communicative – on the ethical level. In the German translation I take this from, the word is Verschlossene. However, what is the content of revelation, or communication? What is affirmed? The affirmed is, ultimately, the continuous. Continuity itself. The devil’s part, then, is the sudden – the Plotzlich, that which puts itself in opposition to the continuous.

Here we have to engage in some dialectical shenanigans, because if the divinely continuous is really to be continuous, it must contain the sudden. Revelation, after all, has its own suddenness. This gets us to boredom. Boredom is, Kierkegaard maintains, incommunicable – it expresses nothing. This is because its content is the Inhalflos – the content-less. The content of boredom is no content.

This polarity between the sudden and the continuous explains the boring core of entertainment, which relies on the sudden as its structuring principle. Myself, possessed by the l’wa of boredom, long for a continuum of suddenness – for the ultimate miracle, for nothing to become something.

Here’s a bit from K. I’m translating, remember, from the German.

“The demonic is the content-less, the boring. Since I have permitted myself to direct attention to the aesthetic problem by the mention of the sudden, in as much as evil lets itself be represented, I will now once more take up this question in order to explain what I’ve been saying. As soon as one gives speech to the demon and wants to represent him, the artist who is supposed to solve such a problem must be clear about his categories. He knows, that the demonic is essentially mimic; he cannot thus achieve the sudden, then this blocks the dialogic. Like a blunderer, he won’t try to pull off an effect by beating out many words, etc. – as if that gave us a true effect! He thus chooses correctly just the opposite, boredom. To the sudden there corresponds a kind of continuity as well, the immortality of boredom, a continuity in nothingness. .. Freedom takes its rest in continuity; the sudden figures not only the opposite, but as well the opposite of the “rest”, of which a person can give us a good impression who seems as if he were long dead and buried.”

The dead and buried person is the person, to my mind, who is selling his or her boredom for money. And using that money to buy plenty of nothing – suddenness in all its multiple forms and varieties. Myself, I am, of course, bored in the culture of the bored, but I fail to find my boredom, lightly transformed, entertaining.

cioran and chamfort

Cioran and Chamfort

Last year, in Mexico, I read quite a bit of Cioran, and made notes – thinking that Cioran would make a perfect commenter on the happiness culture; or at least demonstrate the evolution of reactionary alienation from that culture.

I haven’t used all of those notes. So many notebooks of unused notes! It is my version of drying flower petals in a book – it leaves a faint scent, an impress of an intention that never quite realized its aim, and a stain on the page.

Cioran is often compared to Chamfort. Indeed, there is some uncanny sympathy between the two writers. Both threw themselves into violent revolutionary change. Cioran, in his youth, went to Germany and fell under the spell of Hitlerism. Coming back to Romania, he was a fellow traveler of the Iron Guard, Romania’s fascist party. Cioran seems to have always resented, as an almost personal affront, Romania’s insignificance. Although Cioran lived modestly, by choice, his whole life long, he lived immodestly, grandiosely, on the mental plane. And to think that the words he used, the concepts he formed, would be so wrapped within a minor language as to travel, merely, from Bucharest to Sibiu and back infuriated him.

Chamfort, too, lived a double life. In his body, he’d been a young Don Juan, until disease had suddenly made him ugly – like a Christmas tree from which all the ornaments were shaken. In his mind, he lived on the margins of the great Enlightenment system. He was capable of insights that were beyond Voltaire, or even Rousseau:

“A delicate philanthropist must reflect that there is, within the charitable gift, a material portion of which the idea must be disguised to the one who is the object of his charity. It is necessary, so to speak, that this idea be lost and enveloped in the sentiment that produces the gift; as, between two lovers, the idea of sexual pleasure is enveloped and ennobled in the charm of the love which gave it birth.”

Cioran, whose muse was dedicated to resentment, could not, perhaps, rise to such an insight. Here is where the two differ. Chamfort was well versed in the “charlatanery of the moralists” and the system that grew out of l’amour de soi. But he lived in a society in which the conditions that made vanity such an axis of social emotion were changing. He knew that. He dug under vanity. Cioran, on the other hand, witnessed a world in which vanity had turned to hate, and hate into the principle utopian impulse of his time: in the perfect society, one would crush and crush again the happiness of one’s enemies. Tertullian’s heaven – a heaven compounded of the cries of the damned – would be realized on earth. And in his long repentance and nostalgia for the crimes of his youth – which he recognized as crimes - he saw before the world only two options: terminal boredom, or terminal violence. Reluctantly, he opted for terminal boredom, but bleated out his complaints in book after book, like a beef cow under a dull knife.

To be continued.