Are friends electric?

I prefer to use the term theory..[as] something that can be put ina computer and run..the construction of a mechanical artificial world populated by interacting robots that economics typically studies."

--Lucas.

The common view that economics focuses too much on a narrow, egotistic individual with no consideration for other people or nature misses the point. There is no individual. Walras had said as much over 100 years ago!

A century of style

Red is the new pink.

A hundred years ago some men in a room smoked cigars and decided the fate of Syria. The Great Powers would civilize these barbarians yet and unleash a century of great style and panache. The classical pose. 

A fleeting image to tug at our sensibilities..then turn the page.

'Many [images] fall flat, the gestures and poses too affected; their tropes grown weary through overuse (ungainly, vamped-up, languid, exotic, arty, theatrical, 'real'): saturated novelty lacking character. There are only really three expressions now: neutral (seductive), seductive (seductive) and faux-animated. The over contrivance means a lack of drama, and loosed from their serial place in the magazine, they seem like finales without their preceding movements, revealing nothing, going nowhere.'

--Alice Spawls.

~

'Like Mill, we may be passionate about individual freedom of expression, and so about the freedom of the press to represent individuals' opinions and views. But freedom of expression is for individuals, not for institutions. We have good reasons for allowing individuals to express opinions even if they are invented, false, silly, irrelevant or plain crazy, but hardly for allowing powerful institutions to do so. Yet we are now perilously close to a world in which media conglomerates act as if they too had unrestricted rights of free expression, and therefore a licence to subject positions for which they don't care to caricature and derision, misrepresentation or silence. If they had those unconditional rights they would have rights to undermine individuals' abilities to judge for themselves and to place their trust well, indeed rights to undermine democracy.'

Onora O'Neill

~

In the attention economy the media must be able to hold our attention-for a second- and then release us back into the system of getting and spending. Nothing could be worse than being fixated on an image. Instead, we must be 'fixated' on the flow of images, news stories, gossip and trivia. Breaking news, the news that doesn't stay news, is what it's all about. Anything that generates comments, publicity..that has "impact", "visibility" (even academics are now encouraged to sell themselves in this way). Anything is as good or bad as anything else ("pushpin is as good as poetry"..there are no judgements when it comes to taste). 'Good' and 'Bad' is, so, 19th century! 

The show must go on, said the American salesman. 

And all the while let us not think of the incredible concentrations of power and wealth in the financial sector and the mass media. 

Is it me, or are Beyonce and Kim Kardashian everywhere? Is blogging just another (successful) attempt at fragmenting consciousness?    

'But thought's the slave of life, and life, time's fool

And Time, that takes survey of all the world, 

Must have a stop.' 

The sheer impossibility of imagining another's life. A photograph, a glimmering sentence in a novel, a turn of phrase in a poem, nothing too close. A pause, an interval, is what we perhaps were really after all this time. But the ordinariness of suffering, the idiocy, the petty and great hatreds that are a recurrent feature of human history, the way in which the whole bundle is in some sense what constitutes 'the world'; that, even after all these years, continues to startle. The way in which things go on without us, how everyone misunderstands the other, how no-one ever actually stops to see and take in a tree, another human being, a star. It does make you occasionally wonder if this is all little more than a brief and strange farce. People, they do come and go. 

The Allama's complaint: God, either take away our consciousness or give us greater power.

It is as if there is a witness to our lives, a mirror in which we would see ourselves whole, complete, beyond the shadow-life, the warp and woof of time's shadow-work. That sense of our first step, the recovery of our true voice- without the false words, the beclouded glance. Instead, we live as strangers, to ourselves and to one another. And you ask me where I'm from. Originally? 

~

   

A Theory of Prostitution

I quite like Skidelsky's writing-the bits I've read at least. Some chapters on Keynes and his book, How Much is Enough? Thoughtful and well-written. But stumbled across his latest article and was taken aback by just how poor it was. Two statements give a flavour of the casual thinking: 

Ultimately, all arguments against prostitution based on notions of inequality and coercion are superficial. This is incredibly pig-headed, especially when so much prostitution depends on co-ercion and inequalities.

The view of those who seek to ban the purchase of sex is as constricted as that of the economists. As St. Augustine put it, "If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust."

Really?

In the article there is reference to a certain Lena Edlund (associate professor at Columbia). In her article (co-written with Evelyn Korn) she states:

"The key to the puzzle is that a woman cannot be both a prostitute and a wife."

"Combine this with the fact that marriage can be an important source of income for women, and it follows that prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of foregone marriage market earnings."   

"But a prostitute cannot simply be a woman who sells her body since that is done every day by women who become wives in order to gain a home and a livelihood."

Then this nugget: "Humans not only mate but marry." So insightful!

"The Economist reported that Arabic women could make $2,000 a night.."

Arabic?

~

Where to start? Do economists even realize how pathetic they sound to ordinary human beings? 

It is a mistake, you think, to believe that poets or academics or intellectuals have any great understanding of life. On the part of those who cannot be bothered to live a life of their own there is a kind of reverence for all kinds of experts. But, in reality, it is forgotten that theoria is not a theory of everything, but of higher 'objects'. The theoretic impulse, when separated from ordinary life and the common sense of other people, can become a monstrous force that serves the powerful. There are various kinds of prostitution.  

A science that does not take the scale of human understanding and perception seriously, a mode of thinking that consigns religion and the soul to the category of fiction, and a form of knowledge that pretends to be timeless is not, when all has been said and done, worth that much. 

In the grand scheme of things the history of human beings clearly indicates that we managed to live meaningful lives without so much theory and abstraction. It is worth reminding ourselves that a formal kind of intelligence is quite consistent with all sorts of aberrations of the soul.  

In the land of the pure

'But where is he really?
His real self?In those last looks..
Or in his blind steps?'

-- J. Wagner.

I am up in the middle of the night, having earlier slept for hours in the dark room, the blessedly silent dark room that catches no light. I decide to close my eyes and focus on some act of petty vengeance. I decide-and there are so many options- on showing up the Vice-Chancellor with a marvelously wicked quick-witted riposte. And then replay the scene a few times in my mind, turning over the specific details again and again until I am satisfied.

I know that I will sleep through the day again, feint a welcome to my colleagues, smile at least twice in the morning and do nothing to alter the general impression of a man who stumbles through life without much direction or purpose. 

At the V &A you once saw a worn-out tapestry from the 15th (?) century, its outlines barely visible, depicting a story that had once meant something to a local notable in southern France, or Burgundy. The beautiful tapestry was kept in a large, dimly lit hall, cold and empty. The need to preserve the image in case, by chance, someone should glance at it and ask themselves who they really were.  

A colleague wears a watch to count his steps, his goal being to walk 10,000 by the end of the day. For myself, I walk blindly since only the shadows mean anything in this stunning light. I sleep, but do not sleep. Vitamin D is not the solution to weak nerves! 

_ visits a whorehouse in the middle of the city. At midday, too. The young woman wears a pencil-like pin in her hair and has a wheatish complexion. She's studied English literature. "Perhaps you could ask her to help you write one of your essays," I quip and then feel terrible for being so frivolous. How does anyone so educated end up in her position? She says to him, "I will add you to my contacts". She has an expensive phone and is in many ways better off than him. I'm not lending him any money, that's for sure. "When you are ready for an "experience, call me," she says. There's over a month to Ramadan. I can't see him holding out.

In the early hours of the morning I decide to put an end to the night's drifting and read a few pages of Feyerabend's book on Abundance, having to squint my eyes to read the small print. As the darkness clears and gives way to a softer kind of light I think that today, maybe, I'll spend fifteen minutes of the whole day actually reading anything to do with my job. The rest will be spent looking for notes, procrastinating (whence this post) and either sifting through old books to pick out some choice sentences or trawling through the net to pick out a random line: 

Koi, as they clot,
as they weave into the tapestry of blackness
their golden threads, their orbits more 
difficult to predict than comets...

The Abundance

How did we move from a world that was full of variety, colour, mystery, variation to a grey world of cold, soulless matter, the machine and the bureaucratic control of our lives? Lived time and attachments to distinct, unique places are swapped for abstract time, abstract value and uniform space. The story is older than capitalism, though it is greatly heightened by it.

How does one worldview replace another (this is the theme of Basil Willey's great opening chapter). To talk of individuals or the power and truth of ideas, as if the web of ideas-and their expression in ways of life, social relations and the understanding of the sacred- of previous generations could be simply displaced or overturned by the discovery of some new concept seems far-fetched, to say the least. 

The 'climate of opinion' cannot suddenly turn like that unless there is a prior deep need for a new kind of explanation and unless there are social frameworks, pedagogical institutions and power relations already deep at work. How is it, for instance, that the notion of self-interest can come to dominate the western social imaginary against older notions of the 'self' and morality? Not simply by 'success' since what changes is the very notion of success (or a shift in the weight that is assigned to previously 'lower' motivations..lower, but more powerful, the moderns would (and did) say). 

How did we move from the recognition of abundance to the (op)pressing feeling that we live in a world of scarcity?

~

It is humiliating. To belong to this world is humiliating..They kill humans and sell women in markets. They are destroying museums.. 

But in art there is no East and West. You see it in the paintings of Paul Klee and how he was inspired by Tunisia and Eastern Arabia. You see it in the paintings of Delacroix and how he was inspired by Morocco. When you read Rimbaud, you see that the best thing about Rimbaud is that he is not a Westerner; although he was born in the West, he was completely against the West.

The world is mud. We are primitive.

And if identity is a creation, then the "I" does not exist individually; it exists with the other, and the other is a part of it. For me to be myself, I have to pass through the other. Likewise, identity in Sufism is infinitely open.

The Sufi who calls himself a believer believes in a god that is completely different than the the official Islamic God-the God of tenet, law, and institution. So the true power of the human being is not in giving an answer..

Adonis, NYRB.

Lots to contemplate there. For reasons that those who have followed this blog will immediately understand I have a lot of sympathy with Adonis's views as expressed here. At the same time, the question of the relation between the modern west and extreme forms of violence is not posed. Which is regrettable. 

But the underlying sentiment is surely correct: religion is over. 

When the heart comes to its last stages is bitterness par for the course? 

~

Not sure, but why is the New Yorker increasingly fixated by popular culture (Prince, Beyonce and television)? Or maybe it always has been?

Smarminess

There's something quite irritating about Annie Dillard. Irritating, but not infuriating. Perhaps you were overly influenced by W.D.'s review or perhaps it's the picture of her, brimming in a kind of all-American self-assurance that makes you slightly nauseous. Can't put my finger on it, to be honest, but it does seem like a pose, a mish-mash of quotes that are likely to appeal to those who like to convince themselves they're off the beaten track, "spiritual" but not religious. 

At all steps it is worth asking whether the disliking of an author is really just a reflection of some deeply buried, irrational animosity (to women, to white people. No, in my case I don't think that's the case).

But, what I liked from the book: 

Dated clouds. A child's fist is first closed, as if it wants to tightly hold on or possess the world; the old man's hands, his final gesture, are flat, open, on the verge of letting go.

"What can poor mortals say about clouds?" While people describe them they disappear.

T. de Chardin: "More than 3,000 years before our era, people were living there who played with dice like our own, fished with hooks like ours, and wrote in characters we can't read."

That is a nice thought: how similar we are to our ancestors and yet, at the same time, how distant!

Solutrean yellow blades:

"To any human on earth, the sight of one of these means someone thought of making, and made, this difficult, impossible, beautiful thing."

"The religious idea sooner or later challenges the individual."

"He [God] shows an edge of himself to souls."

Then there is this strange line which, perhaps, gets to the heart of your unease:

"Were these two men (De Chardin and Bonhoeffer) especially dense, that they spent years learning what every kid already knows, that life here is all there is?"

A. Dillard always seems to write as if she knows what God is, as if she were at the centre of the world, or from the belief that she was profoundly aware of realities that other people hadn't yet fathomed. And there's almost this child-like fascination with numbers. I, for one, was decidedly underwhelmed by it all.   

A line by Augustine from the same book has it:

"If you do understand, then it is not God." 

Snow in April

Water, be a string to my guitar.
It's difficult to remember my face in mirrors.
Be my memory that I may see what I lost..

I know who I was yesterday 
so who will I become tomorrow?

I will know that I perished here and left my best 
behind me; my past. Nothing remains for me except my guitar,
O water, be a string to my guitar. 

(--Darwish)

~

Crow falls to earth but there is no land in this land. A thin man in a vest cups him in his hands and presses down on the fallen bird. And in one swift, continuous circular movement stretches his arms to the sky, like a windmill, releasing the crow into the blue..the blue and the black. Sometimes there is the memory of April in the snow; and sometimes, ever so rarely, snow in April. 

~

And love isn't love,
until it's past.

War Citzenship

The jolly free-for-all, which we like to imagine as forming a timeless human bond between us and the ancients, was based upon the existence of a vast and cruel "zone of free access" provided by the enslaved bodies of boys and girls. Slavery, "an inherently degrading institution," was absolutely fundamental to the social and moral order of Roman life.
---Peter Brown, NYRB.

War horse, war economy. Enclosure: of energy, the land. A way of capitalism getting things on the cheap. Property and institutional order are the so-called respectable side of a system of exploitation and appropriation. One cannot separate the "free" markets from the exercise of power, historically speaking. Not so much that one becomes a slave of one's desires (though that too) but, rather, that our so-called free desires rest on the capture and chaining of nature, the body. And that "capture" occurs in both theory and practice: nature, in the mechanical way of thinking, is so much dead matter. What is Red but matter in motion? 

~

Slavery is now sold as titillation. Bread and circuses, the Romans would say. Erotic capital. Spartacus, Rome, and Game of Thrones-though I haven't watched any of them-seem to be about nothing but violence and bit of slap and tickle. I can't think of what could be worse. Wolf Hall, perhaps?

They do make you laugh, though. These "historical" pieces of junk are enticing to the eye, no doubt, but a "golden age of television"? I'm sure I miss out on a lot of good stuff, but, really? An interesting observation in the Guardian: the most workaholic societies watch the most television (4 hours a day, on average). Is it because they're so tired that they need to dumb down, enter some sort of stupor?

Democracy? Huh? Don't mention that word around here. The rest of this post is sponsored by Goldman Sachs. 

~
The regimentation of labour, standing armies. That rationalization of their organization is similar to planting crops in straight lines (James C. Scott in Seeing like a State is excellent on this). Agriculture, work and the state (war) are all intertwined with one another. Later on: housing, the factory and the school become sites for the concentration of power, yet more discipline and ordering. 

A war against women (Zerzan), a war against nature and the land. A military-industrial complex stretching way back to our fixation with unending growth. Everything must be put to service that endless end.

War is peace,
and we're all free. 

The other side of Eden

'It gets dark, difficult to see.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine...'

--Transtromer.

Before the Fall, silence, same as it ever was. For 80-90% of human history there was very little "history". It is estimated that only 10% of our languages have ever been committed to the written form, the rest we remembered off by heart. The letter killeth...

Agriculture, "civilisation", came to us late. In the original abundance, affluence, there was no sense of extended loss, no desire for a fallen land, no memory of a golden age. And in that instant, that dream state that was our abiding reality, what kind of war was possible? 

Does war only become totalitarian with the invention of the state, the production of surpluses, the "advancement" of technology? Are these, in the final saying, not one and the same thing? Wouldn't the recovery of our true image, a recollection of the way we used to speak to one another, involve us in living a day without organization. The decadence of an industrial civilisation encapsulated in a barbaric saying: Work shall set you free!

Ritual and remembrance, state archives, the cloud, "lest we forget". The maps that we, the modern-day illiterates, have forgotten and yet despite all that-or maybe because of it- cling on to in the belief, held with the fervour of a fanatic, that it will guide us to the true North. It dawns on us that it is a time for closing the books, Bulleh, a time for finding North close at hand. 

Religion has destroyed what it found.

What was there on the other side of Eden (Brody's question)? Does anything of it survive except, perhaps, in anarchist tendencies?What kind of life was that? Is the domination of nature coeval with the domination of women? Both passively waiting to become (re)productive, fertile. Was there another kind of inwardness that was at peace with the world? Not Descartes' withdrawal, his philosophy of doubt, but a small-scale intelligence, a low flame, a mind knowing, finally, what the hand did and a heart that remembers the precious stones. 

And now: a core-tiredness, an exhaustion that finds expression in a clamouring for ever-wilder "experiences" or drug-induced fantasies. Anything but the earth or reality as it is. Whither shall we flee? What could be more symbolic of our childishness than the dream of escaping earth, as if we were never bound to its fate, never responsible for its destruction. Above it all. 

And the irony: we, the unbound ones, without essence, have in all our carelessness brought on the great unraveling that takes everything down with us.  

Abstraction-in painting, thought, science, religion..is this not a way of escaping life, which is to say: death? To halt the flow or reverse it means to be without that first sense of wonder. In abstract space we can traverse great distances-in fact, there are no distances, because there is no time! We see the world with the jaded eye of a distant God, participating in nothing, predicting and theorizing everything under the sun.

For those of us who are convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future has no other meaning than that of an illusion..
--Einstein. 

And now that the great transformative projects are collapsing all around us, now that linear time itself has been reduced to a series of isolated moments thus rendering us incapable of dreaming up a future or drawing on a past, we discover ourselves to be nothing but bored, restless animals, confined to the cages of our own making.  

'Religion is full of colour'

Philosophers have destroyed what they have found.

--Feyerabend.

There is silence. Why alter it by a jot or tittle? Not the blank, white space, which is just another abstraction of the mind, but the place that is full of wild ways, the tracks that appear even after many seasons have passed and been forgotten. 

The immense power of the sun-solar generosity (Larkin); it is there early in the morning, hours before everything else, cloud and leaf, faint morning breeze and shadow. It has been there with the distant stars through the night! And for thousands and thousands of years after we are no more and the grass grows long again. 

Our words will cease to be lyrical, there will be no time for flourishes or abundance; and the spare, linear and elegant sentences we spoke will come to seem like so many treasures from a foreign land or an unused Norman canal network that reminds us of a time of simpler energies.  

Could it be that we were mistaken all along..the Tree of Life..life, life itself, living..

Have we not fooled ourselves? Have we not always? There has been a surplus from time out of mind.

What would we trade for more time? Only the sage says with equanimity: my time has come, my time is done, though we wonder if that's the full human response, as if to say: there is more perfection in imperfection.

Did I really know anything? I have forgotten and cannot say if I am the worse for it. 

Nostalgia for the light

The clouds in the morning are tired, straggling, empty and vacant-looking. The amazing newness at each instant. Or maybe this pattern is repeated every ten thousand years and we're not just here to witness it. Perhaps there are signs already of nature carrying on without us: the great silence of the oceans already in us, the distances between us opened up, as if love never existed, the scattering of human beings to distant corners..and when someone asks you where home is you have to stop, look her in the eyes, and say, originally? 

A crow stands in the shade, gasping. Another puts its beak close to a water tap trying to suck out the last drops. All around the light presses down on you and the sun burns your skin. Somewhere, a long time ago, lies buried an idea of north, my childhood..

Old places that have been lived in for many years have the feel of being at one with the land, or at least not too opposed to it. The way stones are haphazardly heaped to form a wall.  

Then and Now or: A frontier civilisation

Tom Clark has these words to say, both harrowing and precise:

"It feels sometimes as though history had turned back upon itself toward an earlier stage of things,..a scattering and reaping, awful to behold." 

Mention of "a scattering" makes you think, of course, immediately of the Qur'an.

~
Watched parts of Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything (after having read about half of the book). Think the students liked it too.

My opening thoughts were as follows:




~

Followed by a great lecture by a physicists on energy as enclosure. The most fascinating thing about the talk was, for me, the overlap between physics and economics (which is the theme of Mirowski's book, as it happens). How we moved from "vernacular" energies (plural) which were embedded in society's way of organizing life to "Big-E" energy, an abstract notion that allowed for commensurability between all the other forms. So, in theory and in practice, different types of energy could be translated/transformed/reduced to abstract 'E'. In a similar vein, everything must be viewed as an argument in a utility function and real-world markets play the role of establishing a system of equivalences. Which is another way of saying that money becomes the measure of everything.

Economics, for its part, has relied on concepts of equilibrium, comparative statics and efficiency- and so was quite accurately called an 'engineering approach' to reality by Amartya Sen (Ethics and Economics)

What's important to think about, then, is how ecology and capitalism are deeply intertwined, right from the beginning. The enclosure of land and the enclosure of energy are necessary for capitalism to thrive. And here's the contradiction: on the one hand there is a greater and greater tendency to commodification (land, labour etc must become commodities); but on the other hand, capitalism, in order to thrive, needs non-commodified sectors in which it can appropriate value (think about slavery or the work by women). Add to that, now, nature which is an unaccounted for "input" into the commodification process. 

One thing the neo-liberals have been able to see with some great clarity: the red and the green go together. There is no solution to the environmental crisis without thinking about justice, sociality, and the commons. 







~

The concept of life in the West results from a perversion of the Christian belief according to which God, who is Life, became man. From this promise, this offer of a gift, this mysterious opening to what lies beyond, a this-worldly entity was derived. Life became an immanent idol, an all-purpose polemical label, a conceptual justification for boundless acquisition in this world. Indeed, life permits the formation of a foundational category, separate from the cosmos, for possessive individualism. 

From there it is easy to see the leaps to the struggle for life against nature, other individuals and society. In this construction, life cannot be understood apart from the"death of nature." In a continuous thread that runs back to Anaxagoras(500 - 480 BC) and up through the sixteenth century, an organic, whole conception of nature was a constant theme in the West. With varying nuances and emphases, nature was seen as alive, sensitive, at times animistic, correlated with human action. With the Scientific Revolution, a mechanistic model came to dominate thinking - nature was then seen as dead. This death of nature, I would argue, was the most far-reaching effect of the radical change in man's vision of the universe. 

But an insistent question then presented itself: How do we explain the notion of living forms in a dead cosmos?The modern substantive concept of life thus appears as a kind of mindless movement to fill the void.

----Ivan Illich

The non-book book

The TLS has this as its lead image on its website, referring to-of course-a very serious book about porn. Is the book industry just a version of porn anyway?

Alice Spawls has a really interesting blog on non-books. She writes,

"Gifts now seem to take up as much space as books, at least on the tables, where the prettiest paperbacks are distributed among Orla Kiely pots and enamel cups...

Books can function as gift objects, lifestyle signifiers, thematic attributes; they can be non-bookproducts too, word-based diversions, colour-me distractions, bucket lists, how-tos, extensions of celebrity brands. Putting something between two covers doesn't make a book, and putting them on shelves doesn't make a bookshop." 

At which point you felt like saying, thank God, the cavalry..

~

Over here in the land of the pure you come across so many books by charlatans like Osho or Deepak Chopra; then there's the cheap copies of Dan Brown and Coelho, thousands and thousands of these non-books, rotting next to old copies of GQ and Moshin Hamid (or, more accurately, his books-if that makes any difference). Everything's, ultimately, a spin-off (retro, repackaged, rebooted).

When did it start though? The 1960's and the stream of mumbo-jumbo emanating from the freer, looser, hip, hypnotic rambling-stream-of-consciousness-I-can't-be-bothered-with-structure or even with ending this sentence, like, properly, man? The mystical east and Zen life strategies, sold to you as the gen-u-ine article by some second-hand Texan salesman? A thousand years of wisdom condensed for you in the gleaming smile of a Californian trickster or in a pocket book of cartoons. Or does it go back further..the stuttering century, the ranters, the marginal man emerging from the underground, stumbling in the light streaming down onto him, those drop-outs and losers who would speak in tongues to the men in pointy hats as respectable people looked away aghast?

"In which anyone is up for anything and everyone's desires are compatible with everybody else's."

Is that a description of pornutopia or the free market? 

~

And Alice Spawls has another piece which refers to a place that I am very familiar with, having walked there and thereabouts at least a million times:

Hammershoi, whose wonderful paintings-this is not one of them- you were lucky enough to see (two days in a row, the second time borrowing the swami's ticket) at the Royal Academy. The only other artist for whom I've done that is Rothko (at the Tate), though I paid both times on that occasion.