Gold, Man.

Goldman Sachs gets a 5 billion dollar 'fine' (or is it a settlement?). In reality the figure will probably end up being less than the headline figure. But it's worth thinking about all the "fines" that the big players have had to cough up (or, more realistically, that they've been happy to settle for).

Now, of course, you can keep on talking about how great markets are (I've got some wheat, you've got some cheese; let's trade! What's there not to like?! We're both better off, aren't we?).

But for heaven's sake let's stick to such examples and not talk or think about the vast power of corporations, the military-industrial complex, the financial industry and the media. Phishing for fools, as Akerlof would say. 


When you get away from the textbooks you see that actual real world markets are full of imperfections (of information), incomplete contracts, transaction costs, uncertainty, social norms, asymmetric power relations, and various motivations beyond simple self-interest.

David Harvey might be closer to the mark when he writes,

[t]here is a vast array of what we would now consider extra-legal activities, such as robbery, thievery, swindling, corruption, usury, predation, violence and co-ercion, along with a range of suspicious and shady practices in the market (monoplisation, manipulation, market cornering, price fixing, Ponzi schemes etc.)

Here's a simple question I ask my students:

If you're in a one-off game (or a situation in which you're only transacting with someone on a one-time basis) then what should you optimally do? Should you, for instance, cheat the other person (e.g. default)? If students have been well trained they'll think of the incentive compatibility constraint. In simple terms: let me look at the benefit of cheating and let me look at the costs of doing so. If I can get away with cheating (low probability of detection, small fines) and if the benefits are large then why not! There are no future consequences, remember (even if this was a finitely repeated game you might get the same result through "backward induction").

So, you cheat. You're not constrained by morality but simply following your self-interest. And that's supposed to be a good thing, isn't it? Your actions are imposing a cost on the other person (who could be someone in the future,a s in the environmental problem) but why should you care about that? Especially if it's legal (Or, to take a more general case, if the following of your self-interest hurts other people but you do not intend them harm).

It gets worse! Not only is the maximization of my self-interested preferences what I 'ought to' do; it is the rational thing to do (since rationality is usually conflated with self-interest). 

If I can corner the market, exploit informational asymmetries, swindle you, gain from your trust in me, exploit workers to cream off all of the surplus value they create for myself, then why not? Well, other people have rights, don't they? But who allocates those rights? The market? Once you start to ask that question you're in the territory of G.A. Cohen. Does the market itself determine the distribution of property rights?

Where are the counteracting forces? Not just against industry-wide concentration of power but within the firm as well? If, on efficiency grounds, it doesn't matter if capital hires labour or labour hires capital why do we typically see bosses/managers with tremendous amounts of power and labour with very little? (You won't see questions of power discussed in Econ 101!). 

Are the only balancing forces the state and unions? Regulation, labour standards, anti-monopoly legislation, "fines"? Or are the unions, or what's left of them, just trying to get a better share of the pie without questioning-as an older left tradition might have and, actually, did-the processes involved in the production of the 'pie'. And to what end? One cannot divorce production from consumption.

An interesting quote from Marglin's fascinating paper. Old, but not dated.

'First of all they [trade unions] would have to break their pattern of not thinking about work, the nature of work, their relationship to work, and what they can do about work..But do they ever say: Hey, the whole concept of production of an automobile on a line stinks; the whole thing is wrong; what we ought to be doing is figuring out new ways of looking at the problem of work? No, these are questions from which every union withdraws.'   

The Seer

Wendell Berry is, like Merton, one of those writers, 'thinkers', who writes and speaks with a profound simplicity, getting to the heart of things because in the final analysis there is no analysis (which means to 'break down') and only sound thought, an approach that requires a clear heart and not a sharp mind. 

'Oversimplified moral certainties-always requiring hostility, always potentially violent-isolate us from mercy..'

That is not a case against moral certainties per se but most definitely one against the hubris that results from a lack of humility. 

It hasn't escaped your attention that the world is full of missionaries: everyone thinks they've got the answer and that the world's problems would be solved once and for all if you simply toe their line. Other people's truth will always set you free.

Wendell Berry is spot on in connecting freedom to attachments to the local (a paradox to modern ears since how can a limited perspective afford more autonomy? Yet, it is precisely this stance that another brilliant thinker took over thirty years ago: Ivan Illich).

In opposition to that is the 'private government' of the corporations. This is one thing you simply won't study in economics (possibly in IO but not mainstream, core courses). How is it that the firm is a centralized, hierarchical organization when capitalism is supposed to promote autonomy? In short, why isn't there economic democracy and why are so many people wage slaves, living under the spectre of uselessness? 

Precarious and flexible labour: temporary contracts, job insecurity, inequalities in (bargaining) power, exploitation, a lack of creativity and autonomy, and the meaningless of work. All of that would have been part and parcel of a critique by the old left. 

Based on an 18th century of exchange it is assumed that there is formal equality between contracting parties. The Brewer, the Baker of Adam Smith all a million miles away from the satanic mills he couldn't have foreseen and the huge corporations with unbelievable economic and political power. In a word: big business. And that's, precisely, what is not taught at the university. Instead, we have the black box of 'the firm' or stylized examples of competitive wheat producers. Note: in the Edgeworth analysis of exchange there is no money, no debt relations, no uncertainty and no transaction costs. Again, an outdated, 19th century idea that still finds its way into mainstream economics textbooks.

~

The Dream

Now, each year, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of renters are put out on the streets.
--Katha Pollitt, The Guardian. 

In the U.S. 27% live alone (up from 5% in the 1920s). Stockholm: 58%. Of course, living alone doesn't necessarily mean you're lonely, just as being old doesn't, but they might be contributing factors. As is the decline in social capital-the lack of permanent residence in a place and/or a lack of job security. Transience and flexible labour. 

[And what about the quality of housing? China's "floating population".]

London (2025): estimated that 60% will be renters. L.A., N.Y. and San Francisco: around mid 50's.
--C.M. Gillies, The Guardian.

The dream of private property (Thatcher). Two things: what kind of dream was that and how was it connected to the ideology of the market? And, secondly, it ain't gonna happen.

Back in the land of the pure. Been teaching since 1993 and am, as salaries go, very privileged compared to most of my fellow citizens (who are only citizens in name). But still could never imagine buying a piece of land or constructing a house unless I prostitute myself a bit. Even then: unlikely. 

Inescapable frameworks?

What we want is spirituality without religion, religion without faith, faith without God. We do know what we want, only what we do not want. Do we have any idea of what we need?

[ religion ]

Girard is quite right to claim that the Enlightenment succeeded in convincing everyone that evil comes from (religious) institutions and what constitutes freedom is an escape from repression, domination (negative liberty). To think that any collectivity could play a positive role in one's self-determination is to really tread the road to serfdom. 

Since human beings are now considered to be good in themselves (without the aid of grace) evil-if it is allowed to exist-must be located elsewhere. And to be free is to be 'free from' (other people, society, the family, organized religion, the state).

All heady stuff, you might think, except it does make you wonder whether that view has contributed to the dissolution of the self (or, more accurately, of the person..to talk about 'the self' is already to give too much to modern sensibilities).

It was the best of times, the worst of times. That seems to be one of Girard's messages. and since that is a confusing statement it isn't likely to gain much support in an age that wants simple, black and white answers: "you're either with us or against us."

Can't help but think-and this is without reading him and therefore totally unfair-that the last lines of his interview got to the heart of your scepticism towards him. His "passion for ideas", for "solving problems", "like a scientist". he sounds too much like a theoretician, an academic, a French academic! When you read Merton, in contrast, you get the feeling of a lived spirituality, an inward relation to faith that shines through in the simplicity and elegance of his language and clarity of thought. A spirituality and understanding that has been worked at. 

Girard, somewhere else, claims that Islam doesn't seriously engage other faiths in dialogue because of its emphasis on the falsification of the older texts. I'm not sure what his training in Arabic or the history of Islamic thought is but it's quite a remarkable statement coming from someone whose perspective maintains that there is only one way to salvation (pre-Vatican II and pre-Ratzinger's stunning recent comments).

It is remarkable because even a cursory glance of the texts would point to this rather strange term that crops up again and again: the People of the Book. And he couldn't be unaware of the deep reverence Muslims have traditionally held for the prophets from the Jewish and Christian faith who are thought to be part of the same islamic tradition (small 'i'). At one point Muslims are told to "compete" with people from other faiths 'in good works' and are also informed that some are righteous ( a momentous word, I think, in the Qur'anic lexicon).

And then there's what to me is a canonical verse:

Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law and way of life.
Q. 5.48

In the traditional formulation: the haqiqah (inner truth) is one; the sharia (laws) are many.

This phrase (or word), "way of life", is something to be explored. Asad has it down as "an open road", abstract, not specified. In that sense at the very heart of an inescapable framework that forms a community is the openness of the spirit. If one brings you home, the other keeps you a stranger, wandering. 










   

A London child

Well, I'm not really a Londoner (though it is the city I love mostest). Neither Greek nor Jew and all that. Too many stray thoughts by far, too many false starts. Where to begin? Wales, Kashmir, Taxila? And now? And now I live too much out in the sun, and my sensibilities are increasingly formed by this excessive light, though I maintain a craving for dark grey skies, the stillness and anonymity of a remembered grey. 

'Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.'
--another Saul.

The importance of not fitting the narrative: be ye not conformed. 

Q: How would you like your Paki, Sir?
A: Not too rare, thank you.

Of course, it's a lot easier when you're put in a box: are you a lunatic (fundo) or one of us, a barbarian or a lackey? What cannot be tolerated, at any cost, is the strange hybrid that loves aspects of western culture but sees through its materialism and detests its war machine (the reality, though you'd never know by watching t.v., is that there's quite a few of us out there. Iran, for instance, is full of young people who hate the mullah as much as they do 'the west' (politically speaking, of course)).

Ec-centric, off key. 

But this too is a game for some. The breakdown of narrative is precisely what is engendered by (one might even say required of) capitalism. There can be no narrative, just moments of instantaneous pleasure. Identity, as the academics love to tell us, is a construct (well, what else could it be when talk of essences or human nature is not permitted).

There's no place like home, there's no place.

The ridiculous claim to be a citizen of the world. Or, equivalently: world cinema, world music. One must accept this vacuousness on pains of being drawn to the other camp, the culture industry's manufactured nostalgia or the right-wing reactionary tale of the loss of purity. The false universality of market choice is the only 'world' that is allowed to stand, which is to say: one must take up a perspective that is equivalent to a 'view from nowhere' (or, to put it in its older, pre-scientific formulation: 'the view from the point of the universe').  

To see something today, to truly see it, is not to participate in its being like a shaman but, instead, to take a step back and think of it from a distance, as it were, so that one catch the phenomenon objectively..and already one eye is focused on what use can be made of it (Jonas was surely right here: we live under the shadow of technology). 

We live in the world like voyeurs. What would be meant, today, by the notion of 'right looking', the 'loving glance', the restrained gaze? We've lost the words for different ways of looking (Illich). 

To look out innocently again, the child's unchanged song of innocence remembered with great clarity..an older street in London that still exists, somewhere in the shadows, and even if unfound always there, indestructible, from time out of mind. 

In an age that sets great store in the expansion of knowledge it is surprising that it is never asked: what is really worth knowing or: how deeply do you know anything. Can an expansion in one domain lead to a forgetting in another? There is, no doubt, a lot of empirical and theoretical knowledge that is quite useful, but there is another kind of practical and empirical knowledge that has to do with how one can live a good life. And there is a different 'theoretical' perspective that is not pure method but aims to understand the 'higher' things. Theory, in that sense, is as much determined by its object as it is by its procedures. Such an understanding of theory goes against the grain of modern thought whereby everything (there is no 'higher' or 'lower') can be theorized (Jonas, again). 

In that older form of understanding one could be quite 'unread' and lacking in technical know-how, almost to the point of naivete, but still wise. Contrast that to the people who know an awful lot about their own very narrow field of specialization. That is not to deny the very real societal advantages of this division of labour, but only to pose the question of what actually counts as intelligence. Formidable advancements in the scale of information and knowledge still do not amount to greater understanding. In fact, the scattering of it across various disciplines and the increasingly theoretical nature of it means it has often lost its ability to represent anything meaningful to us. 

'The hand tells the bowstring:
   Obey me.
The bowstring answers the hand:
   Draw Valiantly
The bowstring tells the arrow:
   O arrow, fly.
The arrow answers the bowstring:
   Be my light
The target answers the arrow:
   Love me.

--Aleksander Wat.

Lost words, worlds

He would think of a word
and he had to remember the tree or the species of frog..

the tree itself, or the frog, or the state of mind..

the speech, the graves, the wedding songs

while the years of silence gathered..

[ ..]

...


......

whispered the name of a bird
in his mother tongue
while memories of snow and market days...
]
..
[
his father's hands...

nothing he said was remembered.
[the last word, found in nobody's heart]

--John Burnside (more or less. Less, actually].

~~

1534

In less than half an hour we filled two boats full of them (Great Auks), as if they had been stones.

Our whole modern tone of mind is not conducive to questioning the thought that human beings are anything but clever animals, subject to the same natural processes of decline and adaptation as every other living thing on earth. We have lost the words to describe ourselves in any other way. 

Men and women are not made in the image of God and have no special status, no stay against the briefness of time, no imaginative faculties that can transport them to other worlds, no glint of transcendence, no distinct centre, no creative spark, just the same fixed horizons that fade with his own death, as everything else in the universe fades out of memory.

[Is this somehow related to the point made in the previous post: politics reduced to the body, to its display (spectacle) and management? To be small, out of the limelight, is to be condemned to obscurity. One must stand and up and be counted (by the state) and sell oneself or one's wares on the market. Transparency! How the white man hated the Red Man's secretive nature... ]

All that can be admitted today is that Man's unique quality-if he has any at all-is his inclination and capacity to destroy all around him.

If the former view, that of men and women being the apex of creation, bordered on the arrogant then what are we to make of the modern view? Is it one of humility or an expression and symptom of nihilism?

What is one to make of the view that man is the measure of all things? Does the lack of a transcendental dimension inevitably result in that view being transformed into a picture in which Man is nothing but a thing, a number? But before that, the intermediary stage of thinking that nature, animals, all that was living was devoid of intelligence and simply a "resource" to be used for the comfort of human beings.

In less than half an hour we filled two boats full of them (Great Auks), as if they had been stones.

~

Moments of beauty

Is there anything sweeter than seeing England lose? (India, perhaps?). A sheer moment of beauty. 

~

M&S have introduced a "Burkini". Created quite a stir amongst the usual circles of fascists and racists. Western civilisation under threat blah blah blah. Our values, blah, blah, blah. We didn't fight two world wars to see freedom eroded like this. Another regressive step that will see women go back to the medieval ages.

One of the most interesting comments I saw was along these lines: cut it out with your hypocrisy and whining. Where were you when so many women's bodies were mutilated by the bombs that are a direct or indirect result of western 'interventions'.

And, of course, they were nowhere because culture, private or personal matters -"the body"-are what count as political nowadays. Or, to put it more accurately, they are the paramount political concerns.

"I am not an Islamophobe. Women have the right to wear headscarves, but I do not see why we are going towards this religion, these practices and mores, that are absolutely incompatible with our western freedoms."

"Designers are there to make women more beautiful, to give them their freedom, not to collaborate with this dictatorship."

--Pierre Berge.

H&M: "There are no rules in fashion."

"Of course, there are women who make the choice..there were also..american negroes who were in favour of slavery."
--Rossignol, French minister for women's rights.

~~

Nothing grates on people's nerves more than the word 'modesty' or the idea that there might be some standards of appropriate dress/behaviour. Who the fuck do you think you are telling me? And, of course, there is often good reason to resent standards because they've been imposed (usually by men) in order to control and subdue others. 

But the very idea that men and women could choose moderation, austerity or reticence, goes against the grain of the culture of late capitalism where perpetual growth is the driving force and limits, of whatever kind, impede the expansion of the markets. And nothing can be allowed to remain private or secretive. Everyone is in thrall to the latest revelations, to the goss that lays it all bare.

To say we live in a consumer society is to say we live in a labouring one (labour in the sense of producing enough for the body's renewal, producing something that is consumed and then disappears). Life, bios, becomes a supremely political notion (or rather the efficient management of it does). Not life as a 'way of life' but sheer animal existence (the unnatural growth of the natural, Arendt would say).

The biopolitical, the bringing of the forces of what was previously hidden (the economy) into the public realm ends up destroying both the private and the public. 

But no-one even flinches when they think what this has led to. Foucault, on the other hand, was quite explicit. The totalitarian aspect of the management of life is exemplified by the camps: work shall set you free.

   


  

The Red & the Green

For the Red Indian seems to me much older than Greeks or Hindus or any European or even Egyptian. The Red Indian is a civilised and religious man..is religious perhaps in the oldest sense, and deepest sense of the word. 

All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shalt-not moralisms, and shut up fast in her own 'productive' machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce.

--D.H.L.

War on...

The war on people:

~

The war on: women, obesity, terror, drugs, crime, immigrants, civilisation, refugees, scroungers, the natural habitat..war citizenship.

(Stunning photos by Adriane Ohanesian).

News from a strange planet:

By 2025 20% of the world's population will be obese (outnumbering the people who will be undernourished).
--The Guardian.

Antarctic ice less stable than once thought
--Elizabeth Kolbert.

'"Behead all Muslims" were daubed in foot-high capital letters beside beach huts that lined the coastal path'
--(The tragic story of four kids radicalized in Brighton), The Guardian.

"Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife."
--Trumpet.

"And look, and look!! The helicopter has scampered off, with its tail between its legs."
(A crazed mullah after inciting the mob to throw their slippers at an army helicopter flying above them. There's a hilarious online video as well. Who needs Monty Python!).

"He started to tell me it [to sit next to a woman] was forbidden by the Torah. I interrupted him to say the Torah says nothing about a man sitting next to a woman. He conceded I was right, but said there was a general principle that a person should not put himself in a dangerous position."
--R. Rabinowitz, an eighty-one year old aeroplane passenger.

~

The human mind delights in seeing (or positing) continuity. So, we immediately see the pictures above and think of some timeless, almost Biblical, scene of displacement. We need our words and images to carry us over the abyss of time. 

But what if the human story is coming to an end? Not human beings per se, but human beings with a past and a future?

There are no more storytellers. 

At the end of time there is no more time, and no more place. No more place for human beings, for human habitats, gestures, responses. No more dwelling because that implies continuity, order, but only aimless wandering and transitory, weightless pleasures: instagram, a few scribbled words stored on a distant "cloud". A mechanical world that is at once a product and cause of our mechanical thinking. And in that world which is not a world no-one loves no-one.

Radical Hope: a faith in the continuation of the good of the world (Plenty Coups). But after the 20th century did history come to an end? 

Plenty coups, again: After that, nothing happened.

Huddled together, next to the dying flames, what is there to do but wait?

~

The small, enclosed world we once knew gives way to abstractions, movements through "space" (like the American/Israeli settlers or the American woodsman). 

The last hour of the sun. For centuries these bent backs, this gathering and passing down. Hands that would have known, rich and old. There, behind the trees, the knot of uneven graves cast in shadow, the queen's words dry on her lips, her folded hands unmoved through the centuries, her brow still fresh.

The fruit lay waste on the ground, some allowed to fall and lie, as is the custom of this place, as long as anyone can remember. The gnarled apple tree at the edge of the field, near the slow river. And she looks out from the high window with the light from the east: who will dress me in red and green? 

'Great summer sun, great summer sun,
All loss burns in trophies.' 
--G. Barker.

Joyful Forms

The invisible axis around which all revolves, the space, still, open, in which all forms find their origin, the white space of possibilities, the second space of second chances, beyond "height", the dark brilliance inside the 'No'. The Hindus would say, "not this, not that". 

The Garden of Flames. What shape does the day take today, which hat to wear!

A Qur'anic saying which, to me, gets to the heart of it:

And God's is the East and the West: and wherever you turn, there is the Face of God.
--2.115.

Times Square. From across the centuries, through all that flux, still something survives, as elementary as the gesture of a hand, a wry smile, a few stray or dissonant notes in a composition. A child, your child, looks at the haphazard movement of a butterfly, unpredictable as ever, and is as bewildered as the first child on earth ever was. I have only five words; I need only one. But to think only of one's child in these times is a monstrosity. No-one knows.  

~
A small and flexible tin with perforated sides, the soursal creates a buzzing sound when the strings of the gnbri are plucked. That "sizzle" is a reminder of the Gnawa's West African ancestry, and makes the gnbri a "ritual instrument," Schuyler says.

--NYRB.

This reminded you of the mesmerizing music of Makran in which you think you can pick up reminders of African roots, as if something old had been woven, concealed with great care, in the new forms, as if to say: no matter how far we travel we will never really leave home: fidelity to the true note in our lives.

~

Ko-Ko

"That's the Negro's life," he said. "Hear that chord!" Ellington played it again. "That's us. Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part."

[Kadosh ]

Ko--Ko, written in 1939, evokes the drum-and-dance ceremonies that slaves once performed on Sunday afternoons in New Orleans.

--from Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise.

~

Some wonderful music here