The 12 Posts of Christmas
The Fourth Edition of the Turbulent Twenties Oral History Project
“The best we have from history is the enthusiasm it stimulates,” Goethe.
“If it is now asked, “Do we presently live in an enlightened age?” the answer is, “No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.” As matters now stand, a great deal is still lacking which prevents man from being….But we have clear indications ..to their release from self-incurred immaturity,” Immanuel Kant.
“A Klee painting….the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay to awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such a violence the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress,” Walter Benjamin.
Dark ages are difficult to read about because the people who are under normal circumstances the most motivated to interpret what they see in the depth that it deserves no longer have the will nor stamina to do so reliably. Every clause in that sentence is important. It does not mean that the writer never feels compelled to interpret the darkness that he feels has enveloped his surroundings. The darkness quite simply interferes with the observer’s sense perception. This imagined subject might still read regularly but the quality is regressing rather rapidly and they may have noticed that few bouts of reading end up in notepads, or are scribbled in such haste they are illegible.
The above description, I suspect, resonates, but the Dark Ages occludes as much as it illuminates as a metaphor for the structure of everyday life in 2024. The world as Braudel sets the stage in his trilogy patiently developing the system of objects so vital to the French intellectual milieu was characterized by neither control nor understanding. Kant’s famous quip on his unenlightened age, observing the proto-control apparent in the genesis of 18th century modernity, is more familiar to our predicament. Control, to be sure, but of a superficial kind—”much is lacking which prevents man from being”. The information explosion has enabled an extraordinary amount of external control, which would have shocked the senses of any 17th century peasant. (though, in an interesting aside an early 16th century peasant is somewhat less shocked, the early modern analogue to the Trente Glorious, Braudel implies). Yet the most reliable principle that exists in our common world—from Braudel’s subjects to ours—is that when good things are pursued to an extreme extent, they become their opposite.
A running theme of this blog is that in about 2005, we, and I presume I can summon the “we” here as the entire Substack universe is subject to information demands more acutely than is typical, crossed a threshold into negative entropy. At around this time, Mark Fisher was gaining currency in left circles for his blogging. Regurgitating Deleuze and Guattari but usefully proving pure theory often comes true, Fisher asserted that in Goethe’s lexicon veloziferish communicative capitalism was no longer distinct as an analytical category. It quite simply was capitalism. On the one hand, Fisher and his contemporaries in the glory days of the old blogosphere did not imagine spirits in the air. The ubiquity of data as an organizing principle of life had been realized on the ground. Apple executives relished that after a bumpy ride for the tech scene that their 80s vision of IT: The Trillion Dollar Opportunity had delivered a multiple of that wild forecast when the computer was little more than a toy the vast majority could not accessibly operate. On the other hand, as is often the case when tracing a historical smoking gun, the ground had been laid long before. Riffing off Paul Slack, Jonsson and Wennerlind argue in Scarcity that the 17th century was when the modern was born. More precisely, the doctrine of improvement construed not simply to make better but how render more profitable. The Hartlib Circle in their associational manner and faith that knowledge can alchemically liberate—”there are no limits on human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder”—were the spiritual predecessors of globe Twitter neoliberals.
I do not pretend to hide my leanings between left melancholia and the disciples of Paul Romer.1 Though, I find it interesting that neoliberal functionaries often provide the initial spark to my running commentary. I just run with it a little further. Last year on New Year’s Day, Noah Smith wrote on the third magic and the distinction between control and understanding inspired last year’s essay on the LLM revolution. I ran until exhaustion to a deeper point what could it mean for the division of labor, Schiller’s “fragmentation of human wholeness”. Could a version of the third magic enable modernity without fragmentation? Precisely the question posed in Enrst Gellner’s neglected book, as Anton Jager put to me on Twitter, Sapiens for self-respecting literate people. If Man ceases to be datum, what alternative organizing principles exist?
Enough data has come in the meantime that I consider the question asked and answered. This year’s New Year’s Day commentary which stuck to my headspace as I watched headlines pour in was would we, particularly Americans but my whole audience to extent rest of world bizarrely follows our path, forestall the descent into madness?
No, and I am troubled by the tight coupling of it to that which is desired and enjoyed. Madness is part and parcel with the information glut which has brought us our accession of riches relative to Braudel’s 16th century peasant, who may have suffered from acute material deprivation but never succumbed to madness (if Greenfeld’s account is believed). Technology, not simply the ordinary “magic” of Bessemer and the hidden processes of the material world, but rank ordering technologies of the platform capitalists and critiqued by Fisher “forces us to be free”. Fourcade and Healy conclude that life under such a society may very well be unbearable. Unbearable for simple reason that man was never before forced to be free. Thinking along similar lines, Gellner writes that modern liberal governments might be more despotic than their older cousins. On this third face of power, modes of legitimation are difficult to oppose and prospects for democratic life dismal.
Postpolitical anxiety stems from this disproportion. The system of objects which compose reality are released from finitude, but the cognitive power to comprehend remains finite. In this respect, Western philosophy is a not so veiled reference for how to navigate postpolitical ruins. To be sure, the high level description is very old, but has recently crossed a threshold such that the onus of the struggle presents itself more widely with repercussions that deluge. Symbolic forms are so endless with no ontological boundaries fixed they broadly disorient internal subjectivities. The saner side of the canon, represented by Ernst Cassirer, says simply that liberation is found in casting off anxiety by creating an internal wuwei flow state of symbolic forms which skirt the question. Almost all professional disciplines operate in this manner. All symbolic forms are wrong, but some are useful. The unsound side, represented by Heidegger is to cast off culture as fallen into truly liberated existence, nothingness and anxiety, the hermit of the black forest. The third magic is derivative of both views, what Kant called third faculties, imagination.
The resolution to their epochal debate at Davos does not exist. Yet I think the 2024 relevance of their debate in their Turbulent Twenties is to be found in the syntheses of the ambiguous essence of the symbolic form. If madness is to be overcome, it is first useful as the raw material for the deconstruction of symbolic forms. Then, via the third faculty reconstituted into that which accords with fundamental nature, of being within time, if not fixed not as elastic as previously thought. The fatal error of the last two decades is the veloziferish tendency of the symbolic form to circulate was unleashed without setting an upper bound and limiting principles of inter-connection to preclude the Gordian knot that is present before us. The Gordian knot is not so tightly wound that modernity cannot be reined in, but the questions of execution are so formidable that the Heideggerian proposal of surrendering to anxiety offers itself as an elegant temptress, relieving the burdens of imagination for a set of tasks which is without precedent. Goethe chimes in the best we have of philosophical history is the enthusiasm it stimulates.
On the first post of Christmas:
I am drifting further and further into hope about the prospects for Chinese power in the 21st century. Perhaps that hope stems from the fact that I have not set foot in the country in over five years. Wendy Brown writes in one of her seminal essays that most left thinking comes from a transference of the actual thing, the concreteness of social life, to abstractions. Deprived of concreteness in everyday experience, the melancholic mind is searching for glimpses where what the political theorist Andreas Kalyvas calls “the politics of the extraordinary”, not coincidentally like Brown latching onto Weber.
If the momentum of the EV transformation is properly heard at the level of grinding gears, China becomes the natural subject to project these broader desires for political transformation. To be sure, no more than a projection, as interestingly the disintermediation of class relations is felt just as sharply on both sides of the Pacific. Speaking to the vacuum of political alternatives which offer little in the way of reprieve from these pressures, the educated outsider, Adam Curtis, states plainly China is a “remarkably strange society that presents no [desirable] alternative.”
Political failure notwithstanding, I think for a moment we should reflect on the significance of their economic success. The ambition of the plan is Karl Polanyi’s:
“The passing of the market economy can become an era of unprecedented freedom. Juridical and actual freedom can be made wider and more general than ever before; regulation and control can achieve freedom not only of the few, but for all…freedom not as an appurtenance of privilege, tainted at the source, but as a prescriptive right extending far beyond the narrow confines of the political sphere into the intimate organization of society itself. Thus will old freedoms and civic rights be added to fund of new freedoms…Such a society can afford to be both just and free.”
The emphasis is on the potential in every part of that passage. On the question of how to realize freedom in the AI age, China is at least as mismeasured as the U.S. But I am beginning to think, against evidence2 that the sequencing is better suited in China than in the U.S., where votes follow money. Referring back all the way to my touchstone for contemporary China, ancien régime France, Chinese policymakers have perhaps been inspired by the physiocrat policy of police de grain “bring an abundant supply to same location, subject to inspection by officers of the Police…wise regulations…intended to protect and free the cultivators from the oppression of the merchants.” So long as the predators of the capitalist jungle are allowed to run wild, the default in the dysfunctional capitalisms of Latin America, Eastern Europe3, and increasingly as a series of private equity books detail, the U.S., the prospects for Polanyian liberty are eclipsed. To the extent they are restrained, the long march to liberty is worth keeping an eye on, watching to see if the abstraction of freedom makes the great transformation for human uplift, unchained from the escalatory demands of the rentier. Lina Khan will be taking notes during her period of exile, mainly from the Illusion of the Free Market’s historical detours but not wholly without a dose of inspiration from China’s Project State.
On the second post of Christmas:
If I viewed this blog in higher esteem, I would take greater care writing things into the historical record I am not 100 percent certain were actually said in the manner I characterize. But it is a peculiarity of people that it is their recollections of experience which influence belief greater than the actual experience itself. That moment, literally hours before the Western world was rocked to its core with shutdown panic and I was boarding a plane to California, is hazier than most.
But my recollection sitting in that room in LSE Old Building with my cohort paranoid I was contracting COVID-19 was that the nature of the elite mind virus had changed little since the last great deluge of the Western world. A.N Wilson quotes a revealing passage in his biography of Goethe which capture the antecedents of inherited social science expertise well:
“civilisation is a delicate and precarious thing which only an educated and perhaps unscrupulously self-preserving hierarchy can protect against the numerical revolt of the masses with their materialism, their indifference to liberty, their ready surrender to demagogic power; and the crises of civilisation consist in precisely that revolt of the masses which, however, can never prevail against the strength of conservative institutions unless it is aided from within by moral and intellectual decay.”
The elite mind virus is that avoiding moral and intellectual decay is to insulate in the coldest of cold monsters, as Tooze put it in his eye witness accounts of the protest, of state power and meritocratic expertise. Their myopia is so peculiar to the point of derangement. They have no awareness of the tension involved. That the moral and intellectual decay within conservative institutions is part of same feedback loop of “unscrupulously self-preserving hierarchy”. All the econometric evidence in the world fails to grasp the intuition every other man grasps from moment they are born. Being social animals, to be insulated means to be vulnerable to perishing to the elements.
In another sense, the cast of characters which hordes credentials are acutely aware of their vulnerability. It is the reason why neoliberal sentiment drills no further than the surface phenomena of triple threat, Trump, China, and climate change. They instinctively draw away from conflict, fixating only on the level of platitudes. These are the three boundaries where the enemy exists; each is a crisis which presents danger but also offers opportunity. The theory is that, in a tinderbox that is ready to cascade, it is much too risky to present a politics that moves beyond boundaries toward truth. A triple threat that some of us on the left might characterize as class, Gaza, and climate breakdown. If the neoliberal project is to advance beyond a circling between the left and right variants of insulation, it will have to explore what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “the art of living together”. In conviviality with Man and Nature, Goethe and his holistic science enters stage left. He corrects the great error of Newton and his mechanistic scheme which both in spite and because of its allure haunts the neoliberal psyche to this day.
On the third post of Christmas:
I genuinely believe that if politics is ever to be reconstituted such that the morbid symptoms disappear, the cast of characters in Rachman’s The Age of Strongman, the left must regain the world and recuperate the Earth. To heed to the chant of M’aidez as Linebaugh ends his idiosyncratic, passionate history of labor. The trouble for the left is the trouble discussed in the introduction. Under the veloziferish demands of modernity, consciousness raising feels like an extraordinary burden, to say nothing of time commitment genuine care demands. And yet, we—I will drag those of you not of the left into the paragraph—must demonstrate to stand against the reactionary horrors that at the End of History most of us assumed were banished to the past.
Bertrand Russell was once asked as he was protesting in Trafalgar Square in the late 50’s: why do you insist on wasting so much time with your fellow man protesting nuclear proliferation?4 He retorted it’s strange that you consider that a waste because if I do not protest there will be nobody to read whatever sequence of nonsense words I compose into a book. I think something similar can be said for issues like Gaza. Technically, short of existential (for us) but then again there is little point in existing if we have succumbed so deeply to careerist nihilism that we cannot muster the energy and/or courage to utter a few words of cathartic protest.
Russell’s retort appeals because it eviscerates the credentialed nonsense view implied in the question that men should only become active in those domains which fall under their direct sphere of competence. It’s a convenient doctrine for the Shafiks of the world, as it ensures nothing much happens. You might call it the Chinese solution, precluding mass unrest by socializing the elites into a corporate entity which can only be admitted into if there is a common understanding there are certain things which are not worth saying. The opening present in 2024, like 1968 and 1936, is that under the rot of the ruling class this socialization function is greatly attenuated, particularly for the young on full force at Columbia. Their eyes may be untrained but know enough that many things are too complex to know with certainty. Middle East studies rests on an overwhelming body of knowledge you can spend decades trying to master and still not make accurate judgments on matters of policy. The Gaza genocide is nothing like that.
I remarked on Twitter this year that with the deluge of barbarisms that call to mind Pinker’s detailed descriptions of medieval violence, both from settlers and IDF forces inside the strip, I imagine a future history with a chapter title, Yes, it’s a Genocide. This is simply the Occam’s Razor explanation of the facts. Tooze responded, they are writing it as they go along. At the time, I didn’t know there is one in media res historian he may have had in mind, Lee Mordechai. His witness statement passes my standard of beauty as parsimony. Make your description of reality as simple as possible, but no simpler:
“Israel has actively attempted to cause the death of the civilian population of Gaza…famine as de facto policy and using as a weapon of war…Israeli discourse has de-humanized Palestinians to such an extent that the vast majority of Israeli Jews supports the aforementioned measures…The evidence I have seen and discuss indicates that one of Israel’s very likely objectives is to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, whether in part or in total, by removing as many Palestinians as feasibly possible…All of the above has been made possible through the strong support of most mainstream media in Israel as well as the West, primarily in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany…America’s almost complete support has been fundamental for Israel’s conduct of the war.”
Given that collection of bullet points, the revision of the Carter book, which I asked him about six years ago, has degraded beyond what I would have thought possible, Our Extinct Moral Values. As Malm wrote in Overshoot, state action on the three pillars of left politics, stubbornly supporting the weak insisting nothing left to preserve if we refuse to carry that responsibility, were woefully lacking but have now collapsed into a barren ontology. American power is about as likely to pull the plug on Israel’s genocide, as it is to announce to the rich that class prerogatives have been evaporated and to its corporations that there is no alternative but sustained reductions in CO2 emissions. In midst of things historians who sometimes feel inclined to play the role of prosecutor stare beyond these facts and find disturbance. The disturbance impels their bourgeois mind into the disquiet of thinking, a metamorphosis of “prosecutor Marx” to “little girl Marx” by Lyotard’s distinction in an obscure text:
“If you don’t think, just watch TV and read scholarly things, you actually begin to think that things are not so bad or just little things are wrong. You have to get a little detached, then look at the world, and you are horrified,” (Howard Zinn)
On the fourth post of Christmas:
The subtext of this thought on David Shor, connecting him to the prior technologists in Lepore’s book whose ambitions ran faster than their slide rules could operate, is that there is something very important pertaining to the sequencing of knowledge into a scheme. If you acquire fast knowledge in the STEM professions and become enamored by your Midas touch, you feel entitled to enter professional judgments with those who have dedicated their lives to decades of slow knowledge. People who are acculturated to slow knowledge of the humanities, more precisely the phenomenological process of imbibing words as beyond direct experience, are perfectly capable of appending that knowledge with the tool of fast knowledge, so they can systemize relationships if they feel so compelled. But people who start with the tool and become convinced it simply is knowledge warp their neural synapses. The actionable insights they glean from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice are so horrifying that one wonders if the walls to high impact policy careers should be made higher so the Type 2 STEM people do not accidentally break in.
In truth, their presence even when contained to the outside has influenced those on the inside. Kant, anticipating both Shor and the figures critiqued by Bardach, once observed “immorality for the most part did not reflect malice but was the product of [an exogenous trend] devious rationality (vernunfteln).” So we have discovered a deeper lineage to the Orwell remark on elite sociology. We have already asserted the collapse of the corporate organizational form; do we observe a parallel collapse for elites who staff them, a One-Dimensional Man without the love of eros? As Guy Debord wrote in The Society of Spectacle, not coincidentally also prophetically published in the 60’s with Bardach, does the deviant mode of rationalization imply a general flattening such that it is the “concluding phase” of bourgeois relations. Patience for other modes of thought had been so degraded, indeed punished as many prospective type 1 slow thinkers have assumed their places among the growing precariat. Capitalism as a social whole may never make sense to naturalize under natural selection metaphors. Though, the funneling of elite by artificial selective breeding into certain fast modes of thought sapping the full potential of their being makes perfect sense interpreting what I see.
I fear the repetition is disrupting the flow. But the principle recurs for emphasis. Make things as simple as they need to be and no simpler, preferably a simplicity which folds into three. The human mind does better with heuristics than systemizations. And as Orwell logically outlined for approaches to writing. If following the accepted rules of behavior lead you to barbarism, it is the rules, no matter how fashionable they be, which should be rejected so to avoid being made into something which would make an honorable man recoil.
So we are back at my heuristic adapted from Malm, class, Gaza, and climate breakdown. To be sure, their opposites, Trump, China, and climate change (as Shor implies, in that order), are construed as political under the West Wing scheme, enemies to overcome. They are not political under their proper definition, sustained struggle over the good society, recognizing real world crises will not uniformly disappear at a dramatically produced point. Still, the worst barbarisms inflicted on people least responsible for their genesis can be avoided if we follow the advice of one of those yesteryear elites, Ronald Steel. Lippman’s biographer, he spent time with the generation begrudgingly praised by Tankus above, who may have fell short but at least recognized the mantra “to restore the promise of our neglected society”. The alternative is to continue down our current course, the warning set forth by another antiquated theorist, R.G. Collingwood. An educated elite but with an ungrounded desire to break away cannot be bothered with the past and failing to retain that which was good about what they neglect produce “change without progress”.
On the fifth post of Christmas:
John Burn-Murdoch is so refreshing because he is a member of a small group who adopts the methods of the Our World in Data (Pinker relentless march of progress) crowd, but falls on the side of NLR hyperliterate Perry Anderson types. This is an unusual combination, but I suspect he is one of the people discussed in the prior tweet, somebody with a grounding in slow knowledge in his teenage years which allow him to interpret his fast methods better than most.
We return again to the Zinn quote if all you do is watch TV and read the journal of records, i.e. The Economist’s celebration of American economic record since COVID relative to OECD world, you might conclude nothing is much is wrong or only little things are wrong. We also return to the Bill Maher New Year’s Day commentary, the Year of Sanity. As I wrote responding to another Economist commentary on sluggish growth prospects in the Canadian economy, their crisis of growth takes the form of normal populist demands to lower housing prices with a tinge of immigration baiting thrown in. Meanwhile, our statistical non-crisis makes the eyes bleed to the point where an observer does not even need a period of detachment to be reflexively horrified by the circus.
The trouble with capitalist modernity, by my “little girl Marx” view, is that to succeed economically under modernization you must make Man and his desires more machine-like. The American post-war behemoth remains exceptional at executing this particular transformation, and it is reflected in the statistics. The structure of our everyday life predicted on analgesic consumption remains an accumulation beast, which many people’s feeling senses are telling them is precisely the problem. I imagine a foreigner landing in the U.S. The first thing they spot is the “are you feeling overwhelmed?” billboards in the same manner that Huxley arriving in post-war capitalist paradise of 1960’s LA critiqued by Adorno noticed the ever-present backdrop of billboard advertisements.
As Dan Davies writes in his book on cybernetics, the science of communication & control in animal and the machine, those among us who are not afforded the opportunity of voice are smashing the flashing red button. They recognize the 19th century confidence men characters, symbolized in the Musk-Trump bromance, will undo capitalist modernity, gradually then suddenly. As Hacker and Pierson argue in American Amnesia, we have already been living on bought time with respect to initial government investments in human capital and elsewhere which made the post-war juggernaut. Now the suddenly comes, the caudilloization of American power.
On Election Eve, I had a sense of what was coming and felt compelled to read a key chapter in Jefferson Cowie’s exceptional cultural history of the working class and the 1970’s, The Important Sound of Things Falling Apart. I shared a passage with a mutual on Twitter, a much more refined theorist of contemporary fascism, Nikhil Pal Singh:
“Discotheques negated the gloom and the emptiness by manufacturing a spectacle of meaning of the very same void others feared…the experience of the discotheques dissolved the pain of the past into the celebration of the present, allowed indulgence to be the slave for the wounds of hope, and embraced the cult of celebrity in lieu of a generation’s search for authenticity—all mixed with a splash of Weimaresque fatalism…’the postindustrial, inflationary 70’s [combined] nostalgia and extravagance with devil-may-care attitude that not only perfectly summed up the times, but also foreshadowed the bleakness of what was on the horizon.”
Like most cultural history, the passage is beautiful because it captures those aspects which are collapsed in all graphical depictions of lines going up. Composing this commentary the day after my Christmas viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life, I see Jimmy Stewart roaming around the nightmare of Pottersvilles’ discotheques horrified by what Bedford Falls has been reduced to in his absence. I similarly walk around my country, horrified by what it has been reduced to in my Weimaresque fatalism.
On the sixth post of Christmas:
I do not think I linked the Grundisse passages in my initial commentary on madness timid liberals like Maher are willing to name but I do not believe have diagnosed properly. It’s worth quoting the full passage in Marx with the phrase “beware of the success trajectory, it is where mental instability creeps in” in mind:
Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery likewise for the combination of human activities…) …he steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum…Capital itself is the moving contradiction in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition—question of life or death—for the necessary. On the one side, then it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created and to confine them within the limits required…forces of production and social relations appear to capital as mere means….to produce on its limited foundation.”
So it goes my more respectable European (and Canadian) friends do not always like my answer when they pose probably rhetorically why Americans desire things which can only be construed as nuts. They have more patience for econometric evidence that madness often follows countries as they climb up the GINI index and eviscerate their welfare state to recreate Dickens. I believe they are genuine when they say they are on the side of Bertrand Russell that the aim of any industrial society ought to be to make man “happy and sane” so as to neuter Marx’s metaphor borrowed from Goethe of the rat nesting in the cellar. The trouble with the liberals is not that their desired inputs would not produce the desired outputs when policies are initiated. Every unit of inequality reduced is highly desirable and, as the New Yorker emphasized on mirage of the pandemic social welfare state that eradicated child poverty then melted into the air, has been proven to be highly desirable. So desirable it is difficult to measure the spillovers.
The trouble, I think, has been the classic liberal myopia since Keynes’ wrote The End of Laissez Faire. They cling to principles that are in effect fighting the last storm of Progress. Understanding the lessons which would have done well for Industrial Man prior to decontrol unleashed by Volcker and successors, they appear to my eyes and ears as utterly clueless to capitalism’s newer alchemies, which cause a good number of professional and working classes alike to behave like Goethe’s rat. To run around furiously, but not understanding what is being done to it from above in the techno-financial sphere “alse hatte sie Lieb im Leibe—as if love has consumed its body”. Or, as Fisher probes, in classic philosopher fashion, not with an answer but with a question: how does this condition, as if love had consumed its body, change our relationship to capitalism?
Frederic Jameson, in a similarly structured lecture series on postwar French theory, writes that to understand your condition, a standpoint epistemology, you should understand what is written against—to understand how the condition fits into the system, in Spinozian fashion not to execrate, but to extend and develop. It’s the reason why I often start with the blandest liberal commentators I suspect my best followers will allow nowhere near their inboxes. When talking about the American case, which as Greenfeld writes in her conclusion Madder than the Rest, the psychoanalytic detour is simply unavoidable. The way out is not through.
That is a difficult message to stomach and will always remain at the margins of the American psyche because madness, in small doses, has done quite well for us. I refer again to the chutzpah of writing IT: The Trillion Dollar Opportunity. As Nabeel Qureshi recommended on Twitter, The Hypomanic Edge, we have inherited the motto from the Romans after several centuries of hibernation, no great achievement without a little madness. His corporate ethnography of Palantir (which I imagine a disheveled Marx pouring over in fascination at the British Library) reveals this to be true. A question remains for companies like Palantir is when they have proven to summon the Earth Spirit sufficiently to turn effortless profits, “to call to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent.” What is the limiting principle so as to prevent a descent which deprives the Earth Spirit of its generative substance, physically destroys Man, and transforms his surroundings to a wilderness?
On the seventh post of Christmas:
The subtext of the last tweet commentary is to criticize a certain kind of American which I am not. The subtext of this tweet commentary is to criticize an American of the opposite type, which I am. Lukacs writes on Goethe in Essays on Mann, “The burden of ideas puts increasing strain on the artistic form…The tension between criticism and Utopian hope, between resignation towards the present and optimism towards mankind.” The tension begins to envelope existence so as to make the subject question the course of their decisions. Lukacs goes on to the intellectual retreat into the “small world”:
“In their thought and work they remained lifelong prisoners of the ‘small world’…their purely intellectual, purely artistic, purely formal search [VPS note: interesting biography title recently, The Impossible Man] for ‘order in general very naturally …acquires as its contents [only] the results of great social struggles…that real antagonism to which they paid no attention. Their insights are right but abstract…The retreat into the study had been forced on the best intellectuals…Originally, the aim was to save their ideals from pollution in the unaccustomed struggles of the modern world…However, the more the ‘small world’ closed in upon them, the more this hermetic seclusion became their sole reality, all the more powerfully did the reactionary tendencies of the capitalist world exert a subterranean pressure upon their problems and solutions…not unaware…but…distorted its real nature.”
Recall Marshall Berman’s description of Goethe, the powers of the mind in turning inward have turned against him and turned his mind into a prison, straining for abundance of inner life to flow in the world outside. The tension persists because I can see as well as any the Dreamer and Lover can be channeled into the Developer. Channel requires an attachment to first direct then impel through. To be sure, the dreams for humanity and love for mankind have always eclipsed the engineering capacities to execute. The novel element is feedback, the cybernetician’s variety attenuators. Engineering capacities to execute, the prophecy of capital in the social media age laid out in Marx’s Grundisse, has eliminated the discrepancy, and with it, freedom. When a phenomenon, in this case the Rosa triad of accessibility, attainability, and availability, reaches an extreme it becomes its opposite.
Hegel writes commenting on the French Revolution— but can be applied in lockstep to the ubiquitous computing epoch— in pure universality “there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction.” The past isn’t past. Bourke in Hegel’s World Revolutions continues “the destruction of the given world in the pursuit of absolute freedom is the negation…of the very substance of sociality and individuality—difference.” The Gretchen worlds which prevailed in the prior age were deeply doomed by the thundering figures arriving on horseback and served as the impetus for the successive waves of World Revolutions since 1789. They were also beautiful due to their rhythmic fluidity. This is the point of a number of recent books, including Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, to preserve the bounded anachronisms where resonance occurs. Not everything was permitted, but things could be changed. The ugliness that prevails currently is precisely the reverse holds, emblematically in Trump’s disinhibitions coupled with radically traditional GOP program. Whether enough concretely remains from Gretchen worlds to block his path flattened and cleared by prior revolutions remains an open question.
There is at least some upside to my seclusion. I may be somewhat less subject to flattening as a result. Hidden potentialities exist should some still amorphous social movement cascade, sparking me from my slumber and returning to storm and stress that is too difficult to consider bearing alone, “to enter the jaws of the shipwreck and never flinch,” Goethe shouts to the crowd.
On the eight post of Christmas:
My immediate impression reading books like Children of a Modest Star is precisely the tension of Man in the fallen artistic form, as Croce wrote history as subsumed in the concept of art. Contemporarily:
this critique fails to map onto actual state-society mechanisms, social structures, and political economic institutions, and often turn inwards towards institutions in the art world itself.… [thus] in the same place where the critical project began: one that names rather than intervenes.
There exists simultaneously a resignation toward the present given the lay of the land, more or less frenetic modernity where the concrete social state has so dissipated thoughtful texts read as nonsense. Any self-aware author admits the texts are written not so much because they are directly pertinent to the dregs of Romulus. Rather, they are writing consciously for a class of men and women within Man, typically no more than 5,000 souls without a stroke of publishing luck, who see pockets of light. They go on space journeys, refuel, and return to the Modest Star, armed with requisite guilt of necessary murder. It is a peculiarity of Man that he cannot help but live with respect to the future. And hence my optimism for Mankind has not been thoroughly extinguished. What the Hegel-Keynes synthesis of left politics, articulated best by Geoff Mann In the Long Run, believes of honorable poverty of the planet and of the weak is not wholly true but may become true if it is not wholly doubted. Bertrand Russell’s explanation on the value of philosophy comes to mind downstream of Goethe on philosophical history in the vigor it stimulates to contemplate social realities at the edge of comprehension.
Any person who enters into sustained periods of thought, what Gilman says is the analogue to a marathon, tricks his mind into believing that his book will have current affairs printed on the back cover. Gilman’s is unfortunately philosophy on the terms outlined by Hegel, again from Bourke:
‘the communication of pure insight is comparable to a quiet expansion [ruhigen Ausdehnung] or to the diffusion of, say, a perfume in the unresisting atmosphere. It is a penetrating infection which does not make itself noticeable beforehand.’ It is this process of dissemination that Hegel termed ‘enlightenment’…on the back of incremental infiltration, suddenly, ‘one fine morning’, the old ‘idol’ crashes to the ground.
An unenlightened age, which if we can raise consciousness on the bridge between what we liberals think, values, and actually do, bottom lines, has the potential to come crashing down, the Chinese novelist’ 1947 image of a fortress that swiftly crumbles. Without first thinking about the institutional problem in detail, by my eye aligning with Streeck’s latest, on subsidiary, the coming krisis, decision fork, will be wasted, descending alternatively to 1936 or 1949. To cite without developing another Mann book which I found much less satisfying, Climate X must be disciplined when The Great Recoil ambitiously realigns the whole of social intercourse with the most fundamental atom, the good.
I mentioned in the introduction that reining in the Gordian knot is a gargantuan challenge for humanity. Man being reduced to a constant state of negation no longer has the luxury to stop to reflect on the significance of the fury of destruction it leaves in its wake. Note I never followed up on my promise to make “a light jog” on Substack regarding Gilman’s book, and above is little more than a leisurely stroll to clear my head. The best I can say I’ve accomplished this year is, unlike most, I have enough privilege in my life to contemplate the transformation of Man and Nature in a pair of pieces on AI and climate breakdown which allude to a Tooze metaphor, is this what it looks like when the gears shift? The vital point is their connection:
“They [the monstrous corporate sovereigns] are riding a hockey stick every bit as dramatic as the one which exacerbates climate breakdown the two hockey sticks intersect at their midpoints. A profit machine systematically geared for optimization drives the world mad.”
Though the subjective feeling of each of those pieces, which I believe are both grounded in Goethean science of thinking-feeling, is what Wendy Brown interpreting Weber calls “the threshold of nihilism”:
Utilitarian calculation [the various financial API’s and tools of planetary sapience which are available to all interested amateurs with a modern PC] …cannot decide the question of what matters or why. It cannot answer Tolstoy’s questions. When it pretends it can, as happens with neoliberal norms of value, governing, and conduct, a new threshold of nihilism is reached, one Weber anticipated without knowing what its precise form might take…for Weber…the overtaking of what he calls ‘value rationality’ with ‘instrumental rationality’.”
Nihilistic Times indeed, but paradoxically an epoch where wonder is preserved for plenty of more space journeys for those with the privilege and have not been reduced to a one-dimensional state which saps this sense of wonder to recreate a Modest Star. The vision of Immoderate Greatness which can still stave off conflagration:
“To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,/ the walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;/ to-morrow the bicycle races/ through the suburbs on summer evenings. But/ to-day the struggle,” W.H. Auden.
On the ninth post of Christmas:
I cannot be sure if Mishra had Kant’s melancholy man in mind when he composed his semi-autobiographical novel but it fits Arun like a glove:
“The man of melancholy disposition is little concerned with the judgment of others, with their opinion of what is good or true; he relies purely on his own insight. Because his motivating forces assume the nature of fundamental principles, he cannot readily be turned to other thoughts; his perseverance can at times degenerate into obstinacy…He has a lofty sense of the dignity of human nature. He esteems himself and regards man as a creature deserving of respect. He suffers no abject subservience and breathes the noble air of freedom. To him all chains are abhorrent, from the gilded fetters worn at court to the heavy irons of the galley slave. He is a stern judge of himself as well as of others and is not infrequently disgusted with himself as well as with the world.”
The details of that novel are so on the nose to my personal biography and insecurities I have a hard time believing that he composed it without seeing me directly. I am not qualified to comment but in literature there exists a way of knowing by archetype which allows you to see reality without actually examining it. When a certain human experience—truncated as meritocracy and shunning it because an instinctive allure to freedom and an aversion to even golden fetters—is so broadly felt, a novelist can generate the illusion that he is psychologically penetrating the reader. Regarding the nature of that psychological penetration, melancholy man is a stern judge of himself and frequently disgusted with himself and the world. Other men often externally view his refusal to apply his talents in concrete social realities as betrayal, assuming the subject believes he is better than them, a Dovstoevsky God type. Internally, the imagined subject knows full well the opposite to be true. There are basic sensemaking ritualistic functions which are simply a matter of turning the mirror neurons to high gear in “normal” people which the melancholy subject cannot bring himself to do regularly. The price is high, an isolation of the Kafkaesque animal type.
Though the conscious rebuff is neither purely spiritual nor animalistic in effect. As Hesse writes in his Steppenwolf tract “for mad people only”, people have so totally misunderstood my intention for the novel that I have to include an afterword of clarification. Young people do not discount totally the transcendence which follows that path, he writes. Tyler Cowen recalls meeting a Steppenwolf as a formative teenage experience which influenced the course of his life, somebody who strived to be “an information billionaire” but was viewed by others as a failure. The archetype appears again and again throughout history, beginning with Spinoza but perhaps most evocatively, Papini’s The Failure.
CS Lewis once wrote that the acquisition of knowledge even when voraciously disproportionate of social realities and ability to deploy, and disembodied from action is little to blame for the ills of man. Virendra’s insatiable appetite for Lewis’ 3 G’s, girls, gold, and guns, particularly when the cravenness is obscured by astroturfed ideals, is. Virendra is another evocative archetype as those who currently run things are often so clueless to their heritage, they rely on mercenary acquaintances of peers who actually did the reading at uni and unlike Arun willing to suspend their qualms in a Faustian pact.
On the tenth post of Christmas:
Readers of this series may have guessed that I would slate Frederic Jameson’s tribute here. He such a towering figure in literary criticism because the criticism resonates so sharply with the hypermodern condition, the first authority one encounters on postmodernism. His aforementioned lecture tour of the French conjecture in thought begins with Sartre’s notion of liberation, foundational but also a ladder to be kicked away. As I wrote last year regarding Wittgenstein, what is left of narrative when it is hard-pressed?
“What does [liberation] mean? It means that to be influenced by somebody is not to write like him or her; rather, someone’s work suddenly opens up new possibilities that you never thought of before…Suddenly, you’re free…What Sartre did, as someone who was not just a philosopher but also a playwright and a novelist, was to suddenly open up the possibility of writing philosophy in a wholly new way. You could suddenly get rid of all the traditions of academic philosophy. You could turn philosophy into something which was like the the novel….a new freedom, which these people…—Deleuze says Sartre was ‘my master’ felt was liberating, until they reach a moment when that influence is no longer productive for them and they cast it away.”
Indeed, Sartre’s shunning of convention is the inspiration for my kaleidoscopic pastiche of an annual essay. Hubristically and foolishly, the point is to understand more than is presented in immediacy, slouching to glimmers of totality. Braudel, when he set out to write his three volume series, epochally writing his introduction in 1979, the very year of Volcker’s controlled disintegration of the world economy. In the era of decontrol, my schema to understand the subterranean, from both above and below, newly resonates, he writes:
“The market economy still controls the great mass of transactions that show up in the statistics. But free competition, which is the distinctive characteristic of the market, is very far from the ruling the present-day economy. Today as in the past, there is a world apart where an exceptional kind of capitalism goes on, to my mind the only real capitalism: today as in the past, it is multinational… official and unofficial [note: alternatively, deviant globalization].”
The Biden project is so hopelessly anachronistic, as PolicyTensor wrote in one of his cathartic threads stuck in 1995, because they still fail to spot the convulsions to global order that Braudel anticipated. They may be even more anachronistic than that, as Jameson writes stuck in simplicity of 19th century short story, completely missing all the developments of the 20th century novel:
“Peasant stories…start with order, and then order is somehow disrupted, and they proceed through a number of events and reestablish order. Now, for the the generation that went to school on these structural analyses, that was a very conservative, if not reactionary notion of what the tale does. Who wants to reestablish order? We want the narrative to do something else, something new…Isn’t the novel an attempt to undo this order of the story?”
The point of both the blog version of my Master’s thesis, The 10,000 Neoliberal Orders, and my 2022 essay centering Tsing’s understanding in all the poetic depth I have only glimpsed is precisely Jameson’s explanation. To return to an order which has long since withered away by entropy is not only impossible, but beyond that, a boring peasant tale, which inspires no-one.
Though a running theme of this essay is that to understand history you must first start with the myths believed by the practitioners, a point powerfully argued in the NLR’s review of The Internationalists. The myth which is not wholly false when repurposed is within great danger there is also opportunity. As Harper’s tribute to Jameson writes of the globalization opportunity, The Mushrooms at the End of the World:
“Unique locales…have melted into a worldwide sameness of preferences, worries, desires, satisfied by the same brands, through the same internet influences…The optimistic theme is that this stage’s losses for representation of individuals and locality can be offset by gains as ever more people are drawn into a world system…While “the new” seems to enclose and even “singularize” each mind in a cocoon of preferences and “likes”, it dialectically produces the absorption of billions into collectivities on platforms that confirm their deeper identity and affirm their human needs….’we can also see globalization, or this third stage of capitalism, as the other side or face of that immense movement of decolonization and liberation which took place all over the world in the 1960s…now, suddenly, the bourgeois subject is reduced to equality with all these former others’.”
Tooze identifies his encounters with Kojeve as formative precisely because of the partial insight in 1962 that the Russians and Chinese are simply “poorer Americans” given the flattening which was to follow from embrace of communications technology, enabling a financial knitting of entire world into Underground Empire. The prediction, Bourke writes in World Revolutions, was not demented but also, you might say, only a glimmer of totality which has now come into view. Hegel’s 19th century view was more on point on the sense of disproportion bourgeoise notions of equality inspire in those nations who resent the extraordinary prerogatives of hegemony. Even more so now that the hegemony Arrighi prophesized and Carter worried after Iraq has been finally uncoupled from all moral basis, “Equality, in this case, can only be the equality of abstract persons as which, which thus excludes everything to do with possessions, this basis of inequality.”
On the eleventh post of Christmas:
The book Anton recommended to me, Gellner’s Plough, Sword, and Book, roughly corresponding to the three faces of power, is so good because it is essentially a long meditation on the telos of History. If humanity is on the cusp of terminating scarcity and transforming Man’s relation to goods, Slouching toward Utopia mixed with Fully Automated Luxury Communism, will wealth and power tied at the hip in the Chinese word 富强 become uncoupled? Again, like our prior entanglements with Noah Smith, Jake Sullivan, and others, we start from the standpoint epistemology of Nate Silver that capitalist modernity emerged by way of natural selection. There was an experiment in the 20th century on the best way to organize human societies, and now at The End of History we have a definitive answer, the Russians and Chinese can only follow our path. The process of history Gellner affirms is, as Keynes once remarked, a frightful muddle, an unnecessary one:
“The present position is only very distantly related to Pragmatism, which it may resemble superficially. It does indeed appeal to [evolutionary] success; but only to one particular instance of it—not as generic and permanent principle. Pragmatism naively supposes the selection for cognitive effectiveness took place throughout human history….Our kind of pragmatism, should our position be characterized at all, is altogether different [from Silver’s]. It merely asserts that the one radical, traumatic shift to unified, single-purpose, referential cognition does, when completed, irreversibly confer far greater power on the societies in which it occurs. The way back is blocked.”
Gellner sees a certain Road to Serfdom in what one might call the final boss of path dependence, the incessant xrisk concerns over AGI. He sees the problem more clearly than some catastrophe which ends humanity with bang. Critiqued by Adorno and Benjamin, who in turn are in my head strolling through the capitalist splendor of a Westfield mall, subjection reduces humanity through a series of whimpers, starting with the plough through the PC, notably the cover of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man:
“[under] imminent universal leisure-without-privilege…is dilettante individualism conceivable?…what happens when consumption overtakes production and becomes the dominant element in forming the human psyche?”
He continues, can we kick away the ladder in time in a last ditch effort to control the “pollution” which results from analgesic fury of consumption in the status-differentiating megathymia under daily existence in suburbs which are otherwise, by their anonymity, isothymic? The End of History is not understood if the Greek is not also digested. The rational strain of isothymic equality is strong indeed if Man gets such a kick out of megathymia when exposed, in individuals and in nations, the suburbs of the post-war architecture. Can it be restrained without taking the Soviet-Chinese solution of removing liberty? Should we persist in stubbornly sticking to Mill’s conception of liberty when the world under the convulsions of the Anthropocene is rapidly abandoning those principles?
“Will [revival of the central faith, centrally enforced] be facilitated by the decline in that instrumental rationality which had brought about the new world, but is no longer required when the world is fully developed?”
On the twelfth post of Christmas:
If I so desired, I would summarize the Polanyian-Keynesian details of Christopher’s arguments about electrification, again emphasizing the point about path dependence and undercutting arguments which ostensibly naturalize, but on close inspection discover construction. No Star Trek civilization would have muddled into the institutional configuration Christophers’ describes in 380 pages of detail. Put a pin in that, as when my energy recovers, that is a project which is highly deserving. I will start with Julie Cohn’s, The Grid.
For now, I will fixate on the world upside down footnote, capitalism’s second nature. How do I know that the kaleidoscopic picture I have labored to paint over the last few years is not merely social contagion to the strain of romanticism which has infected those with poet’s melancholy since Byron? How do I know that this time really is different? To be sure, the rhyming never goes silent, Merchant argues for first set of gears in Blood in the Machine. Yet for the second set of thundering gears, that of Nature, the condition is new. Goethe is almost singularly genius in his anticipation of it, to the point A.N. Wilson concludes he is writing for us, not his contemporaries. Moderns know that limits to attention are fundamental but reality is interrogated through theory. Tooze similarly concludes in his interview which arrived as a Christmas Eve present to the Moderns of every nationality. The artists and poets, in their muddled state to look beyond the immediacy favored by rigid “realism” discover the sharpest of realities:
“The Eye sees no forms. It only sees that which differentiates itself through light and dark or through colour./ In the infinitely delicate sensibility for shade-gradation of light and dark as well as colour lies the possibility of painting./ Painting is truer to the eye than reality itself. It creates what man should see and what he usually does see./ The sensibility of forms, particularly beautiful forms, rests much deeper./The enjoyment of colours, individually or in harmony, is experienced by the eye as an organ, and it communicates pleasure to the rest of man. The enjoyment of form rests in man’s higher nature, and is communicated by the inner man to the eye./ The eye is the last, the highest result of light upon the organic body. The eye as a creation of light is capable of all that light itself is not capable of./ Light transmits the visible to the eye; the eye transmits it to the entire man./ The ear is deaf, the mouth is dumb, but the eye perceives and speaks. From the outside, the world mirrors itself in one eye; from within, the man. The totality of the inner and the outer is completed by the eye.”
I end this essay on a plea, that if the post-scarcity visions of Gellner are not to devolve into progressively horrifying apparitions which reduce man and destroy his surroundings, that more should leave aside time from their day job to adopt this child-like wonder in painting. Such an orientation does not necessarily involve a thorough renunciation of technology, to become the hermit of the black forest or imbibe the lessons of Wendell Berry. I rely on space-age technologies to transmit this newsletter. But in taking time to stop and be childishly primitive, we may avert what Freud called “the compulsion to repeat”, pollution-generating status differentiation tying the Gordian knot without end. That is how this Dark Age will end.
Even the apostles of neoliberal faith are beginning to have doubts that insisting on the same medicine will work though they still tell a technology-biased skill change story. “The failure not technological development, but not sharing the gains widely enough.” Braudel’s Bell Jar…
Refer back to Freudian transference/projection with China as the subject.
Though interestingly you can drum up optimism in a similar manner as China, though the division outline by Fukuyama in Origins of Political Order between historical Hungary and dynastic China is still visible.
And later the octogenarian Russell joined the youthful energy protesting Vietnam.