The Great Beast

Mass man, the great conformist,..where did he emerge from? Between the unmoored, rootless individual on the one hand and the person formed by a set of inter-dependencies, the historical communal traditions of association and sociality on the other, is the average man, the man without any qualities. This statistical man is ripe for manipulation and submission because what he wants, above all else, is security and the comforts of his or her private world: the little Englander with his small-mindedness, the all-American loser who never quite made it; they can, at the stroke of a pen, be whipped up into a mindless kind of patriotism, fired by a whole host of concocted grievances and frustrations and the illusion of if not greatness then at least personal significance. A voice in the wilderness that is finally heard.

Of course, this misses the point: it is precisely the rootless cosmopolitan that gets incorporated by various techniques of power into the system. There are no real individuals once you realize that it is the very process of 'subjectivization,' individualizing, that becomes the central mechanism of exerting control. This is not a general statement of how power always operates but, rather, a description of power at a particular stage of capitalistic development.

Brando: Have you ever considered any real freedoms? 

C.W.M...
  

  

I sit at the table in the early morning light, stooped over a bowl of porridge, a jar of fresh honey, cinnamon...

I sit stooped because the broken chair shapes my body in a particular way. The honey..she said, "Come on over to collect it, if you don't mind me in my pyjamas."

"Do you know what an otter is?" I said.

"Why do you ask? she said. Is it because it reminds you of me...or I remind you of it?"

~
The Colonel said, if you have this fresh yoghurt every day then you won't die. In that case, I'll have two bowls, please.

I write on a keyboard without a 'y' or a 'g'. It's surprising how much we need them. In your mind an image of all the other things you've lost settles: time, maps, books,.. 

I'm not sure if one can "read" Ted Hughes's Bestiary. It's more like the poems read you, immerse you in a strangeness, an 'aliveness', that is not textual.

There is no more time on earth: a month floats by in a week, your voice becomes unrecognizable, Greenland becomes lighter by the day, the trees in California are decimated by disease and fire, cities and people are reduced to dust, cities with once grand names and streets named after medieval philosophers, at the outskirts taverns and inns and places of deep shade amidst which the contours of a face could just be made out, the face of a human being at ease in his world. 

The human frame is distorted by the evil in the world. It is strange to think that there was once more time. 

C.Wright Mills continues to both instruct and delight at the same time. Away from the stuffy, ambivalent academics whose supposed fullness of method is applied to the most partial of objects..here is someone telling it like it is, an "unfashionable mind". There's a difference between learning and having being schooled; a difference between a committed intellectual and an academic scholar-the former living in two worlds, her words and work a reflection of her life, her actual lived experience.

Some excerpts... 

The American Dream

If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she said. “You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.” 

“I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this … Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America."

d. bank

Scandals have proliferated at Deutsche Bank. Since 2008, it has paid more than nine billion dollars in fines and settlements for such improprieties as conspiring to manipulate the price of gold and silver, defrauding mortgage companies, and violating U.S. sanctions by trading in Iran, Syria, Libya, Myanmar, and Sudan. Last year, Deutsche Bank was ordered to pay regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. two and a half billion dollars, and to dismiss seven employees, for its role in manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, or libor, which is the interest rate banks charge one another.

The U.S. Justice Department wants to fine Deutsche Bank fourteen billion dollars for its role in underwriting and issuing risky residential-mortgage-backed securities (or R.M.B.S.) from 2005 to 2007.

---Ed Caesar, The New Yorker.

Apart from the world of finance, think about: the arms trade, oil, the big pharmaceutical companies, illicit trades (drugs, women), the lobbying of governments, the manipulation of data/evidence (tobacco), the sugar industry, the power of the media to influence the markets, all the money ploughed into advertising to convince us that we really do need all that crap after all, the concentration of economic power in the multinationals,..now, what was that story about how markets work again...I've got some wheat, you've got some wine, la de da, la de da. 

Take out power, culture, time, money and uncertainty and you're left with Edgeworth. Brilliant! A natural propensity to barter, said the man, without a jot of supporting evidence. 

First there was Krugman, then there was Buiter but this, my dear, was something special. Romer, one of the true "insiders," turning on his own in a devastating critique of macroeconomics. For thirty years the subject has been going backwards. It's not even been concerned with, you know, that bizarre little fellow, "the Truth" or with science; instead, it's been about creating artificial models. Realistic assumptions? Pfft! Apres moi, le deluge. This, folks, is post-real macro.

Of course, the chump has to wait until he's out of academia before he can muster the courage to take a stab at Lucas and the whole rotten edifice. But still...  

~

Update:

"The one reaction that puzzles me goes something like this: “Romer’s critique of RBC models is dated; we’ve known all along that those models make no sense.”

If we know that the RBC model makes no sense, why was it left as the core of the DSGE model? Those phlogiston shocks are still there. Now they are mixed together with a bunch of other made-up shocks."

--Romer.

Blanchard has also got into the act, writing about the limitations of the models. The response here has been to shrug the shoulders or, at best, rely on Friedman's cop out: the "as if" argument. We know the assumptions aren't "true" (or, more accurately, we don't care if they're true or not) since the model(s) give us predictions. That's what science is about: how things work, not why they work.

A century passes and no-one knows what pattern time will weave. And below these larger circular movements the same holds for a single human life. Some will rise and some will fall by the wayside..for some love, a country, a language will be lost or forgotten forever, only to be remembered, unbidden, by the sudden mention of a foreign word, a particular intonation of someone's voice. 

In a previous age there would have been rituals for loss, for transitions... 

The time we have is short enough but is made shorter by incomprehension. We live with our summaries, our dark understanding. 

When the last of the sunlight goes,
and shadows stretching from the shade
of trees and bushes, long hedgerows,
join up together to invade
wild grasses and flat pasture,
turning from shadow into night...

---Virgil. 

~

Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring is a lovely book. At first it seems as if it is slightly staged (this impression is reinforced by the windows being sealed, the house deaf to the outside world, and by the sharp words spoken by some of the characters, as if a definite character, rather than an individual, were speaking them).

PF is, you think, a painter of surfaces-and all the wiser for it. There is a perfect weight to the various characters, such that each person is given just the right amount of space. 

"If the writer is the hired man of an "information industry," his general aims are, of course, set by the decisions of others and not by his own integrity...

Although, in general, the larger universities are still the freest of places in which to work, the trends which limit the independence of the scholar are not absent there. The professor is, after all, an employee, subject to all that this fact involves. Institutional factors naturally select men for these universities and influence how, when, and upon what they will work and write...

The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things. Fresh perception now involves the capacity continually to unmask and to smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern communications swamp us."

--C. Wright Mills. 

That was some sixty years ago. You suspect that the situation has considerably deteriorated. Apart from a few straggling oldies the university is probably little other than an appendage of some corporation or the other. 

The Society of the Spectacle

__ posts a lot of photographs, many of which I cannot look at without feeling profoundly sad. And so you turn your face away. Pictures of the those who may be defeated but who are still defiant (all the people you've never heard of, or not wanted to hear of); other pictures of dead bodies, old people and babies lying in the dust, ghost-like. Migrants and refugees, one moment of their despair caught on film.

__ is the rarest of birds, someone's whose integrity shines through.

~~~

Re-reading Llosa's somewhat polemical writing on culture. Well, what do you want: a nuanced critique? He tells it like it is and an old man has the right to cut out all the bullshit. Uncle N, the wise old fox, said to me: after you've turned thirty you should speak frankly, candidly, bluntly if needs be. Ubo, my Jew, would never agree to that; he'd take someone down but through wit and guile and his dazzling, smiling face. Both are old-world people, from a time and place that barely exists any more...

A culture in the grip of cheap hedonism might sink as it sacrifices everything to amusement.

Light sex, light reading; travel lightly. Instant living, the revelatory "now". Religion for dummies. Einstein explained in a 3 minute youtube clip. Buddhism for CEOs. The artists decided that everything was possible. why does that remind you of Arendt: In the camps, the impossible became possible.

The 'image bath,' a form of docile submission to emotions and sensations triggered by an unusual and at times very brilliant bombardment of images.. 

Scandal, gossip, titillation, fear-mongering. That's what journalism has become. We're all on the internet highway, the road to nowhere. 

Where are the intellectuals? Instead, what you have is their pale reflection: scholars and academics who, like so many others, are on the game. 

The spectacle is everywhere: in politics, sports, journalism. Religious extremists and the war machine are the ultimate expression of this desire to convey what we knew long ago: the medium is the message. But religion more generally is spectacular, a 'show' (tamasha). the self-righteous must be seen to be religious-the final triumph of nominalism, of appearance over substance. The proliferation of sects and cults and evangelical missionaries foaming at the mouth, their pockets bursting from all the cash that's been stuffed in them by businessmen. 

Lighten up, dude.

Excitement, stupefaction, extreme boredom leading to extreme sports, excess, a drug-infused release. Cocaine, ecstasy, heroin..a release from responsibility, expectations, a return to something primitive; to lose oneself in that "oceanic feeling," to drown one's sorrows.

Musical mysticism where, to the the rhythm of raw voices and instruments, both amplified to an inaudible level, individuals are no longer individuals; they become a mass [returning[ to the the primitive times of magic and the tribe.  

The world given over to fashion, showmen, advertisers, pimps and circus performers. Frivolity and easy pleasure are the flavour of the day. 

There's so much innocence in occupation. No, no, it's more complex than that-it always has to be: we, the occupiers, the oppressors, we're human too. Gives us our moment in the spotlight. Why can't we look sexy too?