Critique of essay by Boris Groys, "Comrades of Time"

The views of Ptolemy, the blogger, are interlineated into Groys's text and are indicated by brackets:

Boris Groys

Comrades of Time

1. The Present

Contemporary art deserves its name if insofar as it manifests its own contemporaneity—and this is not simply a matter of being recently made or displayed. Thus, the question “What is contemporary art?” implicates the question “What is the contemporary?” How could the contemporary as such be shown? [Throughout this essay there is a confusing back and forth between “contemporary” and the “immediate present.” I trust that Prof. Groys is not unfamiliar with past attempts to address the “contemporary” or to attempt to depict reality at a given moment, such as Gertrude Stein’s famous dictum that “Everyone is contemporary” or her sitting by a rural garden wall writing a text and inserting a statement that a nut had just fallen off a tree and thus interrupting the continuity of whatever she was writing at that sitting. Cf. also the entire enterprises of Cubism and Futurism.]

One facet of Being contemporary can be understood as being immediately present, as being here-and-now. In this sense, art seems to be truly [the word “truly” is superfluous and didactic] contemporary if it is authentic, if for instance it captures and expresses the presence of the present in a way that is radically uncorrupted by [why not omit the dramatic and simply say “that excludes”] past traditions or strategies aiming at success in the future. Meanwhile, however, we are familiar with the [not “the;” merely “a] critique of presence, especially as formulated by Jacques Derrida, who has shown—convincingly enough—that the present is originally corrupted by past and future, that there is always absence at the heart of presence [“Absence?” Groys and Derrida radically need to get back to basics by reviewing Plotinus and Augustine, as in Book IX of Augustine’s “Confessions”: “Who can lay hold of the heart and give it fixity, so that for some little moment it may be stable, and for a fraction of time may grasp the splendor of a constant eternity? Then it may compare eternity with temporal successiveness, and will see there is no constancy, and will see there is no comparison possible.” Where Derrida saw absence, the Desert Fathers saw fullness and re-union with the One. Something has gone off the track here. Perhaps Derrida left the desert too soon], and that history, including art history, cannot be interpreted, to use Derrida’s expression, as “a procession of presences.” [No argument from Augustine or me. History is almost definitionally a transcendent aggregation of data points.]

But rather than further analyze the workings of Derrida’s deconstruction, I would like to take a step back, and to ask: What is it about the present—the here-and-now—that so interests us? Already Wittgenstein was highly ironical about his philosophical colleagues who from time to time suddenly turned to contemplation of the present, instead of simply minding their own business and going about their everyday lives. For Wittgenstein, the passive contemplation of the present, of the immediately given, is an unnatural occupation dictated by the metaphysical tradition [the myopeia of a philosopher out of the Austrian empire; anyone todays knows that the on-off swich for passive contemplation is dictated by the needs of the process of capital.], which ignores the flow of everyday life—the flow that always overflows the present without privileging it in any way. According to Wittgenstein, the interest in the present is simply a philosophical—and maybe also artistic—déformation professionnelle, a metaphysical sickness that should be cured by philosophical critique. [Au contraire. It’s the concentration on the flow that needs to be cured by an awareness of divine immanence in the present.]

[There is something not quite right about the author’s transition at this point from “contemporary” to “present.”]

That is why I find the following question especially relevant for our present discussion: How does the present manifest itself in our everyday experience—before it begins to be a matter of metaphysical speculation or philosophical critique?

Now, it seems to me that the present is initially something that hinders us in our realization of everyday (or non-everyday) projects, something that prevents our smooth transition from the past to the future, something that obstructs us, makes our hopes and plans become not opportune, not up-to-date, or simply impossible to realize. Time and again, we are obliged to say: Yes, it is a good project but at the moment we have no money, no time, no energy, and so forth, to realize it. Or: This tradition is a wonderful one, but at the moment there is no interest in it and nobody wants to continue it. Or: This utopia is beautiful but, unfortunately, today no one believes in utopias, and so on. The present is a moment in time when we decide to lower our expectations of the future or to abandon some of the dear traditions of the past in order to pass through the narrow gate of the here-and-now. [Contemplation as postulated here by Groys impedes the flow of daily life. I give him credit for using the word “initially” above, but thank goodness active, healthy human beings not depressed by association with academics and curators often if not usually find refreshment and strength in occasions of awareness of the present.]

Ernst Jünger famously said that modernity—the time of projects and plans, par excellence—taught us to travel with light luggage (mit leichtem Gepäck). In order to move further down the narrow path of the present, modernity shed all that seemed too heavy, too loaded with meaning, mimesis, traditional criteria of mastery, inherited ethical and aesthetic conventions, and so forth. Modern reductionism is a strategy for surviving the difficult journey through the present. Art, literature, music, and philosophy have survived the twentieth century because they threw out all unnecessary baggage. At the same time, these lightened loads also reveal a kind of hidden truth that transcends their immediate effectiveness. They show that one can give up a great deal—traditions, hopes, skills, and thoughts—and still continue one’s project in this reduced form. This truth also made the modernist reductions transculturally efficient—crossing a cultural border is in many ways like crossing the limit of the present. [“Modern reductionism is NOT a strategy for surviving the difficult journey through the present. It’s a strategy whereby the formerly disadvantaged and lower orders of society, having attained sufficient wealth as the result of surplus produced through the process of capital, turn on their predecessors, arbitrarily proclaim a new order, such as a Corbu couch, and attempt to displace those predecessors.]

Thus, during the period of modernity the power of the present could be detected [by those who had distanced themselves from the “spiritual”] only indirectly, through the traces of reduction left on the body of art and, more generally, on the body of culture. The present as such was mostly seen in the context of modernity as something negative, as something that should be overcome in the name of the future, something that slows down the realization of our projects, something that delays the coming of the future. One of the slogans of the Soviet era was “Time, forward!” Ilf and Petrov, two Soviet novelists of the 1920s, aptly parodied this modern feeling with the slogan “Comrades, sleep faster!” Indeed, in those times one actually would have preferred to sleep through the present—to fall asleep in the past and to wake up at the endpoint of progress, after the arrival of the radiant future. [No argument here.]

2. Disbelief

But when we begin to question our projects, to doubt or reformulate them, the present, the contemporary, becomes important, even central for us. This is because the contemporary is actually constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision—by the need for prolonged reflection, for a delay. We want to postpone our decisions and actions in order to have more time for analysis, reflection, and consideration. And that is precisely what the contemporary is—a prolonged, even potentially infinite period of delay. Søren Kierkegaard famously asked what it would mean to be a contemporary of Christ, to which his answer was: It would mean to hesitate in accepting Christ as Savior.1 [Highly doubtful that this statement had anything to do with an analysis of the present. One is always either decided or tentative in the present.] The acceptance of Christianity necessarily leaves Christ in the past. [Groys evidently hasn’t listened to any sermons informed by the cult of immanence lately. They are now legion.] In fact, Descartes already defined the present as a time of doubt—of doubt that is expected to eventually open a future full of clear and distinct, evident thoughts. [The present is a time of conviction for a suicide bomber at the instant before he detonates his bomb, n’est pas?]

Now, one can argue that we are at this historical moment in precisely such a situation, because ours is a time in which we reconsider—not abandon, not reject, but analyze and reconsider—the modern projects. [If you have nothing else to do.] The most immediate reason for this reconsideration is, of course, the abandonment of the Communist project in Russia and Eastern Europe. [Of course? The Communist project was always overrated (but for Soviet possession of nuclear devices), and it is now generally recognized as just another tiresome exercise in the creation and pursuit of differing forms of capitalist subjectivity. See, for one example among the countless, Felix Guattari, “Molecular Revolution in Brazil,” page 39 and passim.] Politically and culturally, the Communist project dominated the twentieth century [perhaps those of us born in East Berlin think so]. There was the Cold War, there were Communist parties in the West, dissident movements in the East, progressive revolutions, conservative revolutions, discussions about pure and engaged art—in most cases these projects, programs, and movements were interconnected by their opposition to each other. But now they can and should be reconsidered in their entirety. Thus, contemporary art can be seen as art that is involved in the reconsideration of the modern projects. [Perhaps it’s a bad translation from German, but surely not “Thus.” How does he jump from a reassessment of Communism to a characterization of contemporary art? In my experience an important characteristic of persons engaged in thinking about contemporary art today is a gross absence of any knowledge of history in the conventional sense.] One can say that we now live in a time of indecision, of delay—a boring time. Martin Heidegger has explained boredom precisely as a precondition for our ability to experience the presence of the present—to experience the world as a whole by being bored equally by all its aspects, by not being captivated by this specific goal or that one, such as was the case in the context of the modern projects.2 [My guess is that Heidegger became bored with the daily commonplace succession of events and subjection to the capitalistic subjectivities that demanded constant concern with projects and fled to contemplation for relief.]

Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. [Leaving aside the millions of people in the West who have been amply rewarded by those promises.] Classical modernity believed the future to be infinite—even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all [well, a small part of it at least]: archive, library, and museum promised secular permanency, an infinitude that substituted the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. [Speak for yourself, Groys.] During the period of modernity, the “body of work” replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. Foucault famously called such modern sites in which time was accumulated rather than simply being lost, heterotopias.3 Politically, we can speak about modern utopias as post-historical spaces of accumulated time, in which the finiteness of the present was seen as being potentially compensated for by the infinite time of the realized project: that of an artwork, or a political utopia. Of course, this perceived compensation obliterates time invested in the production of a certain product—when the final product is realized, the time that was used for its production disappears [Notwithstanding that God has been watching and been aware all of the time? There is no such thing as lost time.]. However, the time lost in realizing the product was compensated for in modernity by a historical narrative that somehow restored it, using a narrative that glorified the lives of the artists, scientists, or revolutionaries that worked for the future. [If, as Foucault might say, that is what a person or entity with enough power wanted in that way. Previous repositories of power, like certain Popes, would simply buy a material manifestation of that project, such a Moses in marble. Is it possible that media art is the result of a lack of concentration of power in present-day equivalents of the Popes?and its transfer to the Beuysian masses of pseudo-artists Groys describes below?]

But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. [It never had any plausibility either to people who didn’t get modernism or to those, like Augustine, thought that any awareness or contemplation of a future was evidence of a distancing from the One.] Museums, for example, have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned—the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable. And the past is also permanently rewritten—names and events appear, disappear, reappear, and disappear again [As Orwell foretold, sensing early that the dispersion of power in the course of the process of capital would cause these events]. The present has ceased to be a point of transition from the past to the future, becoming instead a site of the permanent rewriting of both past and future—of constant proliferations of historical narratives beyond any individual grasp or control. [Why can’t it be both?] The only thing that we can be certain about in our present is that these historical narratives will proliferate tomorrow as they are proliferating now—and that we will react to them with the same sense of disbelief. [Agreed.] Today, we are stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future. We simply lose our time, without being able to invest it securely, to accumulate it, whether utopically or heterotopically. The loss of the infinite historical perspective generates the phenomenon of unproductive, wasted time. [The masses never had any perspective.] However, one can also approach this wasted time more positively, as excessive time—as time that attests to our life as pure being-in-time, beyond its value within the framework of modern economic and political projections. [Hallalujah! Groys suddenly sticks his head outside the dark cave.]

3. Excess Time

Now, if we look at the current art scene, it seems to me that a certain kind of so-called time-based art best reflects this contemporary condition. It does so because it thematizes the non-productive, wasted, non-historical, excessive time—a suspended time, “stehende Zeit,” to use a Heideggerian notion. It captures and demonstrates activities that take place in time, but do not lead to the creation of any definite product. [This is news? The caveman did lots of things that didn’t end up in a product. So did Jesus and Ghandi. Can we just let Marx fade away?] Even if these activities do lead to such a product, they are presented as being separated from their result, as not completely invested in the product, absorbed by it. We find exemplifications of excessive time, that which is not completely absorbed by the historical process. [Nothing is excluded from the historical process; it might be from specific histories.]

As an example let us consider the animation by Francis Alÿs, Song for Lupita (1998). In this work, we find an activity with no beginning and no end, no definite result or product: a woman pouring water from one glass to another, and then back. We are confronted with a pure and repetitive ritual of wasting time—a secular ritual beyond any claim of magical power, beyond any religious tradition or cultural convention. [I hope so. Isn’t this video just a follow-on to Naumann and his attempt to strip away all representation except for that is basic and “zu Hand.” I don’t think the work is about what Groys wants it to be about.] One is reminded here of Camus’ Sisyphus, a proto-contemporary-artist whose aimless, senseless task of repeatedly rolling a boulder up a hill can be seen as a prototype for contemporary time-based art. This non-productive practice, this excess of time caught in a non-historical pattern of eternal repetition constitutes for Camus the true image of what we call “lifetime”—a period irreducible to any “meaning of life,” any “life achievement,” any historical relevance. [Camus, if properly interpreted here, veered off the track. The Sisyphian rock rolling had a meaning; it was punishment for arrogant flouting of ethics and social convention.] THE INFERNO The notion of repetition here becomes central. The inherent repetitiveness of contemporary time-based art distinguishes it sharply from happenings and performances of the 1960s [who wanted to create sharply defined moments intended to rouse the public from its slumber rather than documenting that slumber]. Now, a documented activity is not a unique, isolated performance—an individual, authentic, original event that takes place in the here-and-now. Rather, this activity is itself repetitive—even before it was documented by, let us say, a video running in a loop. Thus, the repetitive gesture designed by Alÿs functions as a programmatically impersonal one—it can be repeated by anyone, recorded, then repeated again. Here, the living human being loses its difference from its media image. The opposition between living organism and dead mechanism is obscured by the originally mechanical, repetitive, and purposeless character of the documented gesture.

Francis Alÿs has also spoken about the time of rehearsal as a similarly wasted, non-teleological time that does not lead to any result, any endpoint, any climax. An example he offers—his video Politics of Rehearsal (2007), which centers on a striptease rehearsal—is in some sense a rehearsal of a rehearsal, insofar as the sexual desire provoked by the striptease is itself unfulfilled. In the video, the rehearsal is accompanied by a commentary by the artist, who interprets the scenario as the [a] model of modernity, always leaving its promise unfulfilled. [Stop it.] For the artist, the time of modernity is the time of permanent modernization, never really achieving its goals of becoming truly modern and never satisfying the desire that it has provoked. In this sense, the process of modernization begins to be seen as wasted, excessive time that can and should be documented—precisely because it never led to any real result. In another work, Alÿs presents the labor of a shoe cleaner as an example of a kind of work that does not produce any value in the Marxist sense of the term, because the time spent cleaning shoes cannot result in any kind of final product required by Marx’s theory of value [I had a job shining shoes as a kid, and I got paid for it because I added value to the shows and the customer. Again, the portrayal of a shoe shiner is an exercise in phenomenological practice and not a lame excursion into outmoded Marxist theories of the value of labor].

But it is precisely because such a wasted, suspended, non-historical time cannot be accumulated and absorbed by its product that it can be repeated—impersonally and potentially infinitely. Already Nietzsche has stated that the only possibility for imagining the infinite after the death of God, after the end of transcendence, is to be found in the eternal return of the same. And Georges Bataille thematized the repetitive excess of time, the unproductive waste of time, as the only possibility of escape from the modern ideology of progress. [So is playing soccer. So what?] Certainly, both Nietzsche and Bataille [obligatory references to post-modern deities that do not advance this discussion] perceived repetition as something naturally given. But in his book Difference and Repetition (1968) Gilles Deleuze speaks of literal repetition as being radically artificial and, in this sense, in conflict with everything natural, living, changing, and developing, including natural law and moral law.4 [Did Deleuze mean like a stutter or a Grogorian chant? Give me a break.] Hence, practicing literal repetition can be seen as initiating a rupture in the continuity of life by creating a non-historical excess of time through art. [Alys and, say Ceal Floyer, don’t rupture anything. They produce artworks about repetition as a part of the capitalist flow in which we are all engaged and entrapped.] And this is the point at which art can indeed become truly contemporary. [We are now sinking to unsupported gibberish.]

4. Vita Activa

Here I would like to mobilize a different meaning of the word “contemporary.” To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be “with time” rather than “in time.” “Con-temporary” in German is “zeitgenössisch.” As Genosse means “comrade,” to be con-temporary—zeitgenössisch—can thus be understood as being a “comrade of time”—as collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties. And under the conditions of our contemporary product-oriented civilization, time does indeed have problems when it is perceived as being unproductive, wasted, meaningless. [Time has problems? People have problems when they spend unproductive time.] Such unproductive time is excluded from [certain] historical narratives [depending on the power and situation of the historian], endangered by the prospect of complete erasure. This is precisely the moment when time-based art can help time, to collaborate, become a comrade of time—because time-based art is, in fact, art-based time. [I am always avoiding trying to define “art,” but this formulation by Groys really tests anyone’s resolve in that respect.]

Of course, traditional artworks (paintings, statues, and so forth) are time-based as well, because they are made with the expectation that they will have time—even a lot of time, if they are to be included in museums or in important private collections. But time-based [media] art is not based on time as a solid foundation, as a guaranteed perspective; rather, time-based art documents time that is in danger of being lost as a result of its unproductive character—a character of pure life, or, as Giorgio Agamben would put it, “bare life.”5 But this change in the relationship between art and time also changes the temporality of art itself. Art ceases to be present, to create the effect of presence—but it also ceases to be “in the present,” understood as the uniqueness of the here-and-now. [Valid point, but the last time I looked films are run and DVD’s are played and watched in the present.] Rather, art begins to document a repetitive, indefinite, maybe even infinite present—a present that was always, already there, and can be prolonged into the indefinite future [Douglas Gordon’s finger, yes. Takeshi Murata’s reworked movies, no.]

The ideology of modernity—in all of its forms—was directed against contemplation, against spectatorship, against the passivity of the masses paralyzed by the spectacle [and economic ordering] of modern life. Throughout modernity we can identify this opposition between passive consumption of mass culture and an activist opposition to it—political, aesthetic, or a mixture of the two. Progressive, modern art has constituted itself during the period of modernity in opposition to such passive consumption, whether of political propaganda or commercial kitsch. We know these activist reactions—from the different avant-gardes of the early twentieth century to Clement Greenberg (avant-garde and kitsch), Adorno (cultural industry), or Guy Debord (society of the spectacle), whose themes and rhetorical figures continue to resound throughout the current debate on our culture.6 For Debord, the entire world has become a movie theater in which people are completely isolated from one another and from real life, and consequently condemned to an existence of utter passivity.

However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, art entered a new era—one of mass artistic production, and not only mass art consumption. To make a video and put it on display via the Internet became an easy operation, accessible to almost everyone. The practice of self-documentation has today become a mass practice and even a mass obsession. Contemporary means of communications and networks like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, and Twitter give global populations the possibility to present their photos, videos, and texts in a way that cannot be distinguished from any post-Conceptual artwork, including time-based artworks. And that means that contemporary art has today become a mass-cultural practice. [Not so sure. Are these people doing art or just consuming Apple products?] So the question arises: How can a contemporary artist survive this popular success of contemporary art? Or, how can the artist survive in a world in which everyone can, after all, become an artist? [Are we restating Walter Benjamin here?]

One may further speak about our contemporary society as a society of the spectacle. However, we are now living not among the masses of passive spectators, as described by Guy Debord, but among the masses of artists. In order to recognize himself or herself in the contemporary context of mass production, the artist needs a spectator who can overlook the immeasurable quantity of artistic production and formulate an aesthetic judgment that would single out this particular artist from the mass of other artists. But it is obvious that such a spectator does not exist [isn’t that your job?]—while it could be God, we have already been informed that God is dead. If contemporary society is, therefore, still a society of spectacle, then it seems to be a spectacle without spectators. [We have wandered off-message here.]

The new oppression

From an announcement of an art exhibition in Bucharest:

EXPLORING THE RETURN OF REPRESSION
September 10 - November 22, 2009

Curator: Răzvan Ion

PAVILION UNICREDIT
center for contemporary art & culture
Sos. Nicolae Titulescu 1 (Piata Victoriei)
Bucharest 011131 Romania
T: + 4 031 103 4131
E: pavilion@pavilionmagazine.org

http://www.pavilionunicredit.ro
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Participants: Luke Fowler (GB), Jean Genet (FR), Hanif Kureishi (GB), Thomas Hirschhorn (CH), Renzo Martens (NL/CG), Alex Mirutziu (RO), Naeem Mohaiemen (BD), Sebastian Moldovan (RO), Taller Popular De Serigrafia (AR), Colm Toibin (IE), Michel Tournier (FR), Pavilion Resource Room (RO).

"The return of the repressed" is a crucial theme, a key to understanding recent history. "The project of the West, the Nietzschean project, has been to drive out religion and to produce a secular society in which men and women make their own values, because morality is gone", writes Hanif Kureishi, British writer of Pakistani descent. "Then suddenly radical religion returns from the Third World. How can you not laugh at that? How can you not find that a deep historical irony?"

The return of the repressed is the process whereby repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, tend to reappear, in consciousness or in behavior, in the shape of secondary and more or less unrecognizable "derivatives of the unconscious." This return of the repressed, of ideologies forced to marginalization, of sexuality subject to forced secrecy, has resulted, in recent years, in an almost dramatic change of a society filled with anguish, hallucinations, repression imposed by unnecessary regulations that serve to the repressive violence of governments against their own citizens.

Repression as a conscious and voluntary psychological process, consisting of giving up the fulfillment of a desire which is not in full accord with the moral being, leads to the annihilation and alienation of the simplest desires and rebellions.

The main apprehension is now the model of a new international division of labour. This concept has apparently been borrowed by the capitalist leaders from the old socialists, and it is actually hiding something even harsher, something that will bring forth the strengthening of the state as instrument of repression. The new international division of labour is a more important issue to discuss than others, because it is, perhaps, the most important cause of both the political and the civil repression.

On the other hand, if we examine carefully the present legal system, it is reveal itself as a revolting system, supporting the class exploitation, the radicalization of the chasm among social classes and the supremacy of the white heteronormative and macho-patriarchal majority. The legal system supports the creation of the political obedience and it deals with the adjustment of the value of work. Actually, it protects the capital creation and a type of legal inequity.

In order to understand the main effects of the state violence, we also have to consider the alternative: the social assistance for the poor and for the working class. Frances Fox-Piven and Richard Cloward wrote in New Class War: "the connection between the income maintenance programs, the labour market and profits is indirect, but not complicated". Too much social democracy will make people stop being grateful for low wages and poor work conditions. Thus, even with the converse, the link between state repression, labour market and profits is not complicated at all.

Repression manages poverty. Poverty depresses wages. Low wages increase the rate of exploitation and create profit. Which is the main purpose of the state. (Excerpt from Răzvan Ion, "Exploring the return of repression" in the newspaper "Exploring the return of repression").

Discursive Events: Urban Larssen (SE), Sina Najafi (USA), Alex Mirutziu (RO), Cosmin Marian (RO), Sebastian Moldovan (RO).

Publication/Newspaper: 32 pages, 31,5 x 42 cm, b/w, english, distributed for free.

With texts by Andrei Crăciun (RO), Tatiana Greif (SI), Daraka Larimore Hall (NO), Răzvan Ion (RO), Rolling Thunder (USA), Ronald F. King (USA), Urban Larssen (SE), Jose Louis Meiras (AR), Suzana Milevska (MK), Naiem Mohaiemen (BD), Maria Eva Blotta & Diego Posadas (AR), Eugen Rădescu (RO), Michel Tournier (FR).

With special booklet insert by Taller Popular De Serigrafia (AR).

Assistant curator: Silvia Vasilescu

Possible market reforms; insurance as a precedent

Part of a dialogue with a friend who asserts that large scale program trading is causing havoc and ruining the markets:

"Michael, let me focus on this part of your excellent letter:

"'Assert the original purposes of the market. Suppliers of investment capital generally do not need to trade in milliseconds. Buyers of capital certainly do not benefit from program trading in their stocks. The general notion that efficient market theory needs to support vast trading flows in micro-time is nothing but the swill of perversion merchants.'

"Asking anyone to forego the reality of the ability to trade in milliseconds is equivalent to asking Tim Lincicum to slow down his fast ball to 50 mph. Never happen, nor should it. Isn't the real culprit the trading in indexes and other abstract entities that, however well intentioned as legitimate hedging devices at the outset, are now merely entities that facilitate gambling on a vast and often harmful scale? As a long-standing contrast, the laws governing insurance in California and elsewhere for decades have prohibited insuring any objects or situations that did not have an "insurable interest." For exanple, you can sell insurance covering the probability of an accident to a particular auto (that auto being an "insurable interest"), but you can't issue an insurance policy against the probability that some percentage of autos will be involved in accidents this year. In the insurance world, the latter is termed a gambling contract and is illegal. There are too many gambling contracts being issued in the markets today, and, while I am generally against any regulation whatever (most people should recognize that they are fools and should just not play), this would be a regulation I would strongly consider. I think it would take care of most of your problems."

11th International Istanbul Biennial and Berthold Brecht

"The 11th International İstanbul Biennial takes its title from the song 'Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?', translated into English as 'What Keeps Mankind Alive?'. The song closes the second act of the play The Threepenny Opera, written in 1928 by Bertolt Brecht, in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill. Based on Brecht's assertion that 'a criminal is a bourgeois and a bourgeois is a criminal,' the play set out to revolutionise theatre as both an artistic form and a tool for social and political change. 'What Keeps Mankind Alive' will serve as a script for the exhibition––even a quick look at the lyrics discovers many possible themes, such as the distribution of wealth and poverty, food and hunger, political manipulations, gender oppression, social norms, double morality, religious hypocrisy, personal responsibility and consent to oppression, issues certainly 'relevant', almost predictable.

"It certainly seems that, seen from the dominant contemporary perspective(s), Brecht's Marxism and his belief in utopian potential and open political engagement of art all look a bit dated, historically irrelevant, in dissonance with this time of the crumbling of institutional Left and the rise of neoliberal hegemony. But the real question is, isn't this in fact symptomatic? Isn't the way in which Brecht is now 'forgotten' and 'unfashionable'—after his immense popularity in the 1960s and 70s and a smooth transformation into 'a classic'—precisely the indicator that something has gone wrong with contemporary society, and with the role of art within it?"

No. It isn't an indicator of anything except that Brecht and the Ottoman Empire are gone with the wind.

Ptolemy's Amazon Review of Alex Kuguschev's "Resilient America"

Optimism for America,

May 10, 2009

By	Themistocles G. Michos "Themis" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

I concur fully with the views of Reviewers LaCosse and Coleman. This is an important read for these times of uncertainty, often over-exuberant and wishful thinking optimism and aloof or undiscriminating pessimism. The values of the American nation are superbly and realistically endorsed. The author's knowledge of history and earlier critical writing on American culture is impressive. I came away thinking "I needed that," as any serious reader will. The author does not go deeply into the murkier areas of economic analysis or how the past might or might not be constitutive of the future given the enormous growth in American and world population and the new communications environment. Notwithtanding these minor objections, all in all, five stars for this splendid and timely writing.

Ptolemy's Amazon review of John Searle's "Philosophy in a New Century"

May 10, 2009:

At last, sanity from Berkeley,

May 10, 2009

By	Themistocles G. Michos "Themis" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

The author and I are about the same age. After years of strong immersion in contemporary art and tentative entry into Continental philosophical "thought," to be kind five percent of the latter being, after all, incisive and illuminating, I can turn to John Searle for clarity, reasoned argument, coherency and a feeling that after roiling in the surf there is a floor out there somewhere. I come away from each essay with a warm and secure feeling that I rarely find in "post-modern" philosophical writing, which consists of tired invocation or repetition of the times, long past, when it was hip to be protesting that the common people aren't getting a break or that meaningful communication is impossible. Would all those old, gray-haired confused obfuscators of Marx and Nietzsche and their frazzled ponytails just go away?

Marginal notes on the defense industry in the long ago

April 30, 2009:

In the course of multiple and multifarious e-mail exchanges on any number of political topics with any number of people, I received an e-mail lauding the competence and dedication of scientists who worked for the various U.S. Defense Department development laboratories. The following is my response:

"I respectfully exempt the entire national defense establishment, government and private, from any and all criticism of government, which I indulge in from time to time. I spent years with two private defense contractors attending meetings, negotiating and whatever both internally and with the government and other contractors. I second everything (my interlocutor) says. What I carried away with me were the countless photos on desk after desk and cubible after cubicle of fathers, sons and brothers in the military. These folks all knew that what they were doing literally had life or death consequences for the nation and for their loved ones. Every day was zero defects day for these folks, so no one ever slacked or wavered.

"Defense had a high priority [through the end of the Viet Nam war], so nor only was morale high in the industry but the government supported this with funding equal to the task. Would these priorities were still so valued. The US is periodically handicapped by a fallback to the primeval feeling of security spawed by the barrier of two oceans. I worked with a French defense company as a co-venturer and as a client, and I soon learned that the French never (at least until 15 or so years ago) skimped on defense spending because they all know down to their bones that war is just a few miles away.

"Having said that, I can dimly remember in the long, long ago a junior private contractor employee just accidentally vacationing in a Hawaii condo next door to a Major he just happened to know while an RFQ was outstanding. On his own salary I doubt if the Major would have made it past Tijuana.

"I also knew a character, who among other distinctions was married for a while to Eva Gabor, who took a group of Greek Air Force officers to the Desert Inn for three days (I'm talking late '60's) and escorted them to the tables where, mysteriously, they all came away with substantial winnings. And then there was a brilliant Englishman, Alec Samson, who worked for British Aircraft Corporation in the heyday. Alec would spin spellbinding tale after tale about selling arms to Arab kings and sheiks over martinis at the RAF's London club.

"I've got dozens of them. Whatever happened to the good old days, anyhow?"

Visit to the Berlin headquarters of a big German bank

April 29, 2009:

This morning I visited a good young friend and fellow fan of the Berlin professional soccer team, Hertha B.S.C. He also looks after my modest German bank account. R. was in his new office in the headquarters of the Commerzbank in Berlin, where he was recently permitted to set up an international private banking function.

The headquarters is housed in a small, utterly charming yet modest classical building on the now elegant Pariser Platz, the showplace square of the city, sandwiched between the Brandenburg Gate and the new U.S. Embassy. It sits across the square from the prestigious Hotel Adlon and the French Embassy. I had been eager to enter that building since it was remodeled three or four years ago, and today was the day.

I found upon entering that the headquarters was like the Berlin offices of many national firms, such as Deutsche Telecom and Deutsche Bank, in that the building is basically a shell and a showplace. The building houses an enormous conference room, an large room for meetings and lectures and a generous space that serves as a ballroom or cocktail party area - in short all the elements needed to show the corporate flag in the new capital city but nothing essential to the direction or operation of the bank, all of which remain safely in Frankfurt. The windows are Canadian oak, and the parquet floors gleam to distraction. There is a pretty garden behind the building that fronts on the street that runs from the U.S. Embassy on the south to the Brandenburg Gate immediately to the north just west of Pariser Platz. The Tiergarten is across that street. The garden is separated from the street by a massive iron fence, and R. remarked that he was never sure whether the people on the street were being kept out or the bankers were locked in.

I was struck by two items of information that R. imparted to me:

1. He reminded me that some months ago, at the polite request of the German government, Commerzbank had absorbed the venerable Dresdner Bank, which had fallen on hard times. The government was in no mood for a failure of a major bank and even less in the mood for a nasty takeover of a key financial institution by some Arab or Asian sovereign fund. The government now owns about a third of the stock of Commerzbank, and the stock is selling for about one-third of book value.*

2. There is a spacious office on the same floor near R.'s - there might be the only two in the headquarters - occupied by an important Herr V. I was not invited to visit it. Herr V. must be important because his name was whispered, so of course I couldn't catch it, although I think I was expected to know it. It happens that Herr V. is the chief, or at least a highly placed, liaison between the German Armed Forces and the government, presumably the Chancellor and the Bundestag. At the same time he works for the Bank.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have Europe in a nutshell.

* I have not verified the book value to stock price ratio.

Taking the temperature of contemporary Mexico

April 21, 2009

Is this advert for an upcoming Mexico City contemporary art fair something we should concern ourselves with?

THE FINAL COUNT DOWN HAS BEGUN FOR THE OPENING OF ZONAMACO® , THE YEARS MOST ANTICIPATED ART FAIR

· More than 900 artists and 80 galleries of 19 countries together in the most important Art Fair in Mexico and Latin America. · Adriano Pedrosa will present ZONAMACO® SUR, featuring solo projects from 15 Latin American artists. · During the Fair, there will be a grand number of activities as openings, expositions and private events that will make of Mexico City a unique attraction center for tourism and arts. The final countdown has begun for the opening of ZONAMACO® MÉXICO ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO that takes place on April 22nd-26th, 2009 at Centro Banamex, Hall D.

Essay on Order and Disorder

[Footnotes are omitted from the Ptolemy Blog version of this essay.]

SOME PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE CLOSING OF THE VIRGIN MEGASTORE IN SAN FRANCISCO, MARCH AND APRIL, 2009

Events at the Virgin Megastore:

Several weeks ago it was announced that the huge Virgin Megastore at Fourth and Market in San Francisco would be closing. I have been a once-a-month visitor to the store, in particular to the Dance/Electronica section of CD’s on the second floor. While I was well aware that retailers selling music, movie DVD’s and pop clothing and paraphernalia of the gaudy/shabby/hip/pop variety over-the counter were in trouble, it hardly seemed possible that this particular store, squarely in the territory of those questionably educated and hip kids who appear to make up the preponderance of San Francisco youth could succumb to Internet purchasing, file sharing or the recession. With that news, I walked through the store on three separate occasions at the end of March. Nothing had prepared me for the upheaval that I saw and that increased with each visit. It was one thing, and expected, that the world financial structure might bend or break, but the creation and distribution of popular music and mass consumption films would surely hold fast.

Everything in the store was discounted at least 30 percent, and signs indicated that the sale of merchandise, and fixtures would continue until all items were sold. At the first visit the pre-established but not necessarily segregated categories of products were being maintained. Various genres of music – pop, rock, soul, rhythm and blues, dance, country, new releases - remained separated, although some of the categories were scattered in various places in the store, so that if a new release by Kelly Clarkson or Coldplay were passed by the target consumer with a cold eye at first glance, that consumer might buy on the third pass. If a division in a rack announced that the CD’s of the Beatles or Bob Dylan were in that spot, those CD’s were still there, and the names of the bands and artists were kept as tidy and alphabetical throughout the racks as they had ever been. Each listening post with headphones for sampling the recordings had six CD’s racked below, each DC carefully numbered so that a browser could listen to the music before deciding to buy or not.

By the second visit the order of the last few years was in disarray. CD’s and DVD’s in the racks were being consolidated by the staff to clear shelf space, and customers appeared to be inspecting the goods and putting the items back on the racks randomly. Everything was everywhere, in many cases every which way, and the rack labels were useless. The received order appeared to have been scrambled into chaos. The effect was disorienting to say the least.

What is order anyway?

Upon reflection the long-standing order at the Megastore had always been suspect. Let’s stipulate that, for example, two films on DVD, “Booty” a “comedy” from the hip black culture and “Bourne Identity,” a thriller probably appealing to white adventure seekers, would be found more or less adjacent on the rack for the eminently practical reason that both titles began with the letter “b.” Apart from that link, what on earth did the two movies have in common?

This question referred me to an ancient script, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, a treatise so seminal to our current understanding of how the world is or might be organized that it would surely hold the answer.

Foucault begins his Preface (page xv) with a famous passage wherein he reports his amusement and then disorientation upon reading a passage from Luis Borges. Foucault claims that this passage breaks up “all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things” while subsequently threatening to collapse our “age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.” I hadn’t really spent much time figuring out whether “Booty” was part of the Same or banished to the Other, but I kept reading.

In the cited passage Borges purported to quote from “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” that said that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”

At an earlier reading of The Order of Things I had taken Borges literally, but I decided on this reading that Borges had played a game. Foucault continues: “In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. (page xx.)” Another revelation: Beethoven and punk rock are united in a taxonomy; that they represent music is incidental. If we follow Foucault, what “Booty” and “Bourne Identity” have in common, as it turns out, is being grouped only through a linguistic convention that many would argue doesn’t “really” exist, namely, that items with names starting in “b” are to be placed between items with names starting in “a” and those starting with “c.” It’s just that superficial and illusionary.

Foucault continues: “The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from the first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.” At the other pole, scientific and philosophical theories try to explain why a particular ordering has been chosen by the culture. The domain between these fundamental codes and such scientific musings thereon “…is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyze. It is here that a culture, imperceptively deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, causes them to lose their initial transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exists, below the level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists.” At this point, argues Foucault, “…the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state.”

Well, not exactly or in all cases. Rather than the slow changing of cultural expectations predicating Foucault’s analysis, here before my eyes American, and indeed worldwide, popular culture was transforming in a matter of days with a wrenching acceleration. What sort of “order in its primary state” might emerge or subjectively be made to apply from all of this? Writing in the late ‘60’s Foucault’s bias as an outsider on more than one count, being at the same time French, a lot smarter than everyone else and an early European participant in the American practice of cruising, was to claim that a fundamental order always exists but that our mores and standards form a superstructure that rarely if ever gets it right and, in any event, is always subject to major paradigm shifts.

Was the Megastore closing process evidencing the post-modern condition?

Let’s look at this question from another perspective: It has been proposed that modernity - and it is a strong tendency of my American generation, at least, to believe that we are living in modern times - “takes place in the withdrawal of the real and according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable.” In terms of the Megastore I would essay that my (no doubt shared) concept of the Megastore I had been patronizing was an idealized mechanism of near perfect organization and functioning – go in, find the DVD, pay and leave with no questioning of the store or my role as consumer. I could conceive this, but, accepting Foucault’s theories, that was always “a withdrawal from the real.” What the store presented had always fallen short of that ideal concept. As the store imploded and dissolved what was presentable, i.e., how the Megastore was functioning even in “normal” times and later as it was closing, deviated more and more from the concept.

Going a bit afield, is there is a parallel between an attempted description of the dissolution of the Megastore and what could not be adequately described in that process with postmodern works such as the writings of Proust and Joyce? Perhaps. Jean-Francois Lyotard argues in the last chapter of his landmark book, The Postmodern Condition, that works by Proust and Joyce evidence an “aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents…”, in our case the unpresentable would be the disorder attendant upon the rapid, daily disappearance of merchandise and fixtures from the Megastore. Lyotard continues, “The postmodern would be that which … puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible to share the nostalgia for the unattainable;…” Form and taste were collapsing at the Megastore as the attainable increasingly diverged from the concept. The Megastore was becoming like a postmodern author, “working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.” The collapse was writing its own rules and establishing a new order – or not – as it was going along. It is unlikely that the phenomenon of the closing could be shoehorned into a unified, always applicable concept, otherwise describable as a concept representing “the whole and the one.”

Lyotard concludes with these chilling observations: “Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.” Presenting the imperfect cannot be reconciled to the ideal except by a “transcendental illusion” a la Hegel, “But Kant also knew that the price to pay for such an illusion is terror. “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia for the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return to terror [e.g., jihad] for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality.” Lyotard’s answer is a call to wage war on totality, i.e. the heritage of the Enlightenment itself.



What about some new ways of reclaiming order from confusion and entropy:

Establishing order within a given genre or territory was formerly the work of experts. Today it may be argued this is better made the work of the crowd.

Lyotard created opposites between artistic or philosophical domains that were relatively free in the marketplace, i.e., between experimentation and the avant garde and those over which government or capitalistic interests might control or shape, i.e., the social realism of the USSR, the suppression of degenerate art by the Nazis the cartoons of Disney or the conventions of commercial television.

Lyotard noted: ‘The Salons and the Academies, at the time when the bourgeoisie was establishing itself in history, were able to grant awards for good plastic and literary conduct under the cover of realism. But capitalism inherently possesses the power to derealize familiar objects, social roles, and institutions to such a degree that the so-called realistic representations can no longer invoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery, as an occasion for suffering rather than for satisfaction. Classicism seems to be ruled out in a world in which reality is so destabilized that it offers no occasion for experience but one for ratings and experimentation.”

When power is in the hands of capital, eclecticism rules, i.e., for the purposes of our argument, the Megastore while in its functioning state. Aesthetic criteria vanish for all that music and those movies, and “it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield.

Enter the new models now used to create rankings of and connections between disparate cultural productions, whether pieces of music, movies, artworks, artists or performers. In brief, these are the techniques employed by Amazon, You Tube, Google and “American Idol.” Chapter 8 of Crowdsourcing. for example, is entitled “What the Crowd Thinks – How the 10 Percent Filters the Wheat from the Chaff.”

“American Idol” put itself in the vanguard with Internet related creation of links and rankings at its inception in 2000 by soliciting and receiving millions of votes from its audience regarding the contestants who would be selected as the Idols. By 2006, 80 million votes were being cast, about the same number as were participating in U.S. midterm elections. “Voting became part of the culture of consumption.” Voting by phone or over the Internet is now a staple of granting the lay audience greater control over the production process. The filtering of winners from losers, whether performers or products, is accomplished by measuring ratings and downloads. YouTube uses a five-star system, a kind of Michelin Guide for the masses, all put into the hands of the viewers. “Only the collective power of the crowd has the manpower to create an effective filter, implying that panels of experts or smaller samples of voters could not filter with any comparable degree of accuracy or acceptance. Without this system, the author says that YouTube would be an undifferentiated morass of stupid pet tricks, although one might not rate the final products of the massive filtering substantially “better” than just that. The 1979 statement by Lyotard about ratings and experimentation quoted above appears prescient.

How did the inventory of the Megastore before the closing take shape? Initially, buyers for Virgin applied something like Sturgeon’s Law, which states that of all products created in a given field and during a given timeframe, 90% are trash. In many fields, for example in contemporary art, the formula must applied in series, i.e., 10% of 10%, or one percent of artworks produced in any given timeframe are worthy of serious consideration. But with the crowd referenced by Virgin, quality in the old-fashioned sense as noted above from the myriad of titles on the racks becomes suspect.

Many of the links applied by museums, artspaces, curators and critics, for example, to artists or works of art – or pieces of music plus performers and composers – to create a collection, an exhibition or a concert program come out of the perceptions of and from networks of peers and experts that operate much the way that Google ranks links to an item one is searching for on the web, namely, how many other Internet addresses reference or feed into the link under consideration. It follows that the opinions and criteria of experts, a very small sample of an audience, are now in the age of Google being encroached upon or displaced by judgments of the Crowd, i.e., consumers of the cultural productions in the field, both by the number of times a particular cultural production has been cited and how many sources have cited or valued it.

To propose one example, before what now appears to have been the art market decline of the fall of 2008, the function of experts had been substantially usurped by the large number of collectors in the market and the sheer wealth expended by persons invidiously were referred to as “the hedge fund guys,” who bought what they wanted and paid what they wanted, usually with little or no advice from the professionals.

Add “tagging,” which are the names of categories of products applied by members of the Crowd as they buy or comment, and entire taxonomies formerly the province of experts are changed or swamped. Henceforth, one is advised to refer to “folksonomies.”

Back to the Virgin Megastore:

At the end of my last visit to the Megastore, I ascended the long escalator to the Dance/Electronica section on the second floor only to find that all the racks had been emptied. It was like going to New York harbor and finding that the Statue of Liberty was missing. Upon inquiring, the last sad sack at the cash counter lamented that all remaining contents had been taken down to the first floor “in the rear, by the elevator.” Dutifully I descended on the down escalator. There was not much left. CD’s of this genre to my taste such as Stephane Pompougnac and his Hotel Costes series, Buddha Bar (8 Bis, Rue Boissy d'Anglas 75008 Paris, France), or Berlin techno by Ellen Allien, Paul Kalkbrenner, Sascha Funke or Modeselektor had long since vanished from the racks, preempted by women and men of good taste who had preceded me.

As I cruised the disheveled aisles I decided to list what I was seeing in all its apparent disarray and overflowings. Another issue emerged: Was I seeing everything without bias, or was it inevitable that my eyes were registering mostly the titles that I already recognized? If so, that was involuntary but unpreventable. Here is what I saw and recorded on my iPhone memo pad more or less in sequence:

Franz Ferdinand
Rod Stewart
Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
Pearl Jam
B spring
Deadmaus5
Marianne Faithfull
Raphael Saadiq
Middle Cyclone
The Eagles 71-99
AC/DC
Stallone First Blood
Ghandi
Bee Gees
Jamiroquai
Jewel
The Clash at Shea Stadium 1982.
The Doors
Duffy
Spice World
Patton
Schindler’s List
Gloria Estefan
Britney Spears
U2
The Bourne Identity
Mamma M
The Chronicles of Narna
Mummy
Booty
Animal House
Rush Hour
Friday the 13th
House Bunny
Treasure of Sierra Madre
Radiohead
L.A. Mothership poster
Star Trek
Para Siempre by Javier Solis
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Quarantine
The Great Ziegfeld
John Wayne, The Searchers
Casino Royale
Blackchristmas
Batman, Gotham Knight
An American in Paris
House of Games
Stargate Atlantis
Starter Wife
Bellboy II
Dirty Harry
Righteous Kill, Al Pacino and Robert Deniro
All about Eve
Rosa Parks Story
Builders of the Lost Ark
Swing Vote
Strangers on a Train
The Exorcist
Bucket List
Get Smart
Rocky
Dreamgirls
Princess Bride
Hud
Snakes on a Plane
Hard Candy (Madonna)
Shanghai, the Sex, the City, the Music
He'd Kandi
Thievery Corporation’s Radio Retaliation
Smooth Grooves
Best of Trance, Hits
Destination Marrakesh
Paris (Nothing French)
Sister Bliss

In Foucault’s formulation, had I at last “come face to face with order in its primary state?” Devoutly wishing not, I struggle to find some way out of the morass. Or should adopt Foucault’s pose that “I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once again stirring under our feet?”

“Stirring” 40 years ago. “Erupting” today.

My struggle lasted about five minutes, whereupon I sucked it up, strode out into the bright sunshine, crossed to the bus stop island in front of the already fading Megastore on Market Street, blinked a few times and took the Number 9 bus home.


Themistocles G. Michos
San Francisco, California
April 7, 2009




By the same author(partial listing):

“The Mayflower Compact, a Historical Fantasy in Three Acts,” play (1986)

“Thanksgiving in Space,” a play in two acts (1987)

“A Theory of Presentation (or Why Ezra Pound, Richard Serra and Ronald Reagan Are the Same Person),” essay (1990)

“Jesse Helms Tours the Polke Show,” essay (1991)

“How Ulysses S. Grant Discovered the Twentieth Century,” essay (1991)

Relevance of Keynes today

I think it's interesting and somewhat humorous that Keynes is being invoked all over the place but that, as usual, no one has actually read him.

The book was "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money," written in 1935. The Great Depression was still raging, and politicians, economists and business men were were preoccupied with the main problem of money societies, i.e., the business cycle. To make matters even more urgent, the severities of these cycles over the 150 years before the Great Depression had given great impetus to communism. Analyzing from within a particular capitalist economy, there didn't appear to be a way (nor has one really been discovered since) of stopping the cycle of shortage/demand, followed by overproduction to meet that demand, followed by depressions caused by the overhang of supply.* As long as a culture has only one way of valuing individuals in a society, i.e., by their productivity and net worth, the poor and unproductive will always be despised. Prevalent Christianity and Judaism took some of the sting away, but now that that's gone those left out have no recourse but (mostly talking about) political action.

The most cogent recent thinking on these issues and the supersession of controls by governments over credit and money supply by an amorphous international hoard of capital accountable to no one, has come from a few left-wing Italians.

13th century in France (please give me some leeway here) had it all figured out, and while it's been 25 years or more since I last glanced at the Keynes book,* which had been a bible until at least 1950, I believe Keynes cited the example of Chartres. That region of France was rich enough to be able to produce a surplus of food with, let's say 75% of the work force for the sake of argument. What to do with the rest? The answer is, "Build a cathedral." That society was wise and devout enough to value building the cathedral, which in economic terms was hardly a capital asset, equally with growing crops and building houses, etc.

We desperately need an equivalent of building the cathedral. Stiff-necked outcries against the excesses of business by those of lesser economic means won't do, just as business arrogance and belittling of the poorer won't do. These are just two sides to everybody's preoccupation with and valuing of money. Valuing, say, Peace Corps or national service is a start, but we need the old maid school teacher and the nun-nurse back. We need dignity for the housewife and mother. But mostly we need a place for those not employed productively in the econmic sense, where they can be entitled to nurture, health care, etc. As it stands now, I and others are opposed to extending health care coverage because under the prevalent value system it makes no sense to keep an unproductive person healthy. Democrats want to extend such care as virtual charity, with reference to "rights." Neither position will do. We have to find a way to value what those who are now deemed unproductive do, and they will have to do something that we wll value.