Homeland Synecdoche

so though i dont believe more then half of what rand paul believes -hes right on war drones and civil liberties RT @bcls4: @jason_howerton

— John Cusack (@johncusack) March 24, 2013

My immediate reply to John Cusack was that if you grant a libertarian his point about civil liberties you grant almost everything. But it may be more precise to say that you grant exactly half of it, at least as goes Ron Paul libertarians. The other half is foreign policy, for which the Drone War of course stands synecdochally. Either way, I don't think Cusack really disagrees with Rand Paul about "half of what he believes". I think (like many of us) he's just having a hard time letting go of that last tenth worth of sentimental attachment to the welfare state.

The argument for the drones is that they are part of an elaborate, pro-active, and more or less permanent act of self-defense. But is it really true that ... if the Empire pulled back to its sovereign territory, i.e., those fifty "united states" in North America, and guaranteed to its population at home the liberties it claims to be spreading abroad ... is it really true that the result would not be vibrant, free, caring communities, but, rather, communities overrun by foreign hordes that "hate freedom"?

I don't think so. I think the homeland would do just fine if it allowed communities to organize their creative and productive energies themselves through free, local collaboration. Obama once rejected the false choice between freedom and security. I must admit I was charmed. But I now see what he meant. A libertarian would have been (they no doubt were) worried, and rightly so. Because it actually is a choice.

90% of the problem is liberty and security. End the Drug War at home and the Drone War abroad and you solve it almost entire—again, at least synecdochally. To continue to insist that libertarians are "half wrong" is just another example of business as usual for War, Inc. The anarchist left, that is, must recognize that "End the Drug War at home and the Drone War abroad" also addresses, synecdochally, 90% of their concerns, and stop distinguishing itself from the so-called "right". Let's get it together. Let's get it done.

Post Script
What I'm saying is that, on matters of homeland security and foreign adventure, the left and the right are almost entirely in agreement. I mean the actual left and right, i.e., those who do not hold to what Norman Mailer called the "the pusillanimous sludge of liberal and conservative bankruptcies", namely, the center. (See this post, from a time when I was nurturing the hope that Obama would facilitate Mailer's "hip" coalition of left and right.)

What I am saying is that, if they really thought about it, the grass roots of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street would see that they agree on 90% of the issues. If they could begin with those issues, they would move America, and therefore the world, toward an audaciously hopeful future. It would not be the utopia that either of them imagine of course, mainly because it would not express their sentimental attachments to race and class (a complicated set of a attachments I don't want anyone to try to understand too quickly.) But they would also realize how little this utopia actually matters to them once they get down down to the ordinary work of building their communities, i.e., rebuilding them after the ravages of the last seven decades of incorporated war.

Basics

Fresh air,
exercise,
meaningful work and
sensual play.

Once what Brecht called "the basic food position" has been sorted out, a decent society, it seems to me, would safeguard opportunities for these four elements.

As always, I suppose I'm being simple-minded and naive. But I'm trying to construct a scale of values. I think we're too eager to do big things in this world. I think we need to get back to basics.

A Poem

Dressed as a servant
she goes often to the sea.

As if to return the stones
the shore keeps stealing.

In the moonlight, she lets
the garment fall, and steps

into the soft, black waves,
her servitude complete.

(Note: This poem has been with me for years now. I don't know what it means, and I'm not even sure I like its imagery. But there it is. Sometimes one just has to accept the poems one is given by the muse.)

Imagination

"We make ourselves pictures of the facts," says Wittgenstein (T2.1). It struck me this morning, after my run in beautiful spring weather, where WCWilliams' Spring and All was on my mind (and on my lips, actually: I ran into my old boss), that this has been the theme of all my thinking for the past ten years at least. Sometime during my PhD studies I got stuck on a simple question:

"Yes, Ludwig, that may be, but HOW?"

I even played the ball over to Williams:

"If you can imagine the red wheel barrow, we'll grant you all the rest." (This is also a play on the opening sentence of Wittgenstein's On Certainty.)

Wittgenstein and Williams had, from opposite directions (philosophy and poetry) discovered, let's say, the "modern imagination". They both realized that it was in trouble.

Williams was very explicit about this in Spring and All. Like him, I believe there is a sense in which life is "hell" (S&A, p. 43) for those who, while trying to stay alive (and viable) in the modern world, insist on the primacy of imagination. We are under constant siege by entirely well-meaning people who simply don't know what they are working day and night to destroy.

Somebody's got to imagine the facts. Acts, too. Or we'll live in a world of mindless facticity, a history of heartless activity. We're getting there.

Proportion

I used to talk about pangrammatical "homologies", but I now think (and I think someone did point this out to me once a long time ago too) that they should be called "analogies", specifically "identities of relations". Here's one:

Understanding is to science
as
obedience is to politics.

Here's another:

Knowledge is to power
as
understanding is to obedience.

This way of thinking about abstract notions owes something to Pound's "ideogrammic method" and Wittgenstein's "method of perspicuous presentation", both of which approach the alleged "essences" of things in terms of the "family resemblances" that can be established between them.

The Greek analogia, Wikipedia tells me, was at one time translated into Latin as proportio. That sense is useful to me here. I believe in keeping things "in proportion". I believe that our culture has become unhinged because it has lost its sense of proportion about stuff like:

Nature : Culture :: World : History

World : History :: Science : Politics

Science : Politics :: Space : Time

And time is, accordingly, "out of joint".

Democracy in a Free Society

In my last post, I tried to describe the basic monetary and fiscal structure of a "free" a society. The title of this post is intended to be a bit disorienting: we have grown used to thinking of "democracy" as a kind of synonym for a "free society". But it seems to me that Western democracies today draw this assumption into question. We elect our leaders, but our state is highly controlling.

So I want to raise the question of whether democracy has a place in a state that (a) taxes only the productive capacity of its land (over which it is sovereign) and (b) pays a minimum living wage indexed to the price of basic food and shelter to all citizens.

First of all, the state will still have military and police forces. It will therefore have foreign and domestic policies that will be enforced. It will also run a range of services and utilities. In my view, in fact, it would be best for the state to provide free education at all levels (access to which would solely be based on merit, i.e., demonstrated ability at the previous level). I'm also in favor of state-supported research, and the integration of research and teaching at the university level. I tend to think that the state should build and fund hospitals (but I must admit that the health care debate in the U.S. has produced persuasive "libertarian" arguments against the "market distortions" that this implies).

I believe that the state should run all power, water, sewage, and waste utilities for the simple reason that major utilities are best run as monopolies and therefore will not benefit from exposure to market forces. Here the state's "industrial" aspect would become apparent. After all, it will be taxing the "productive capacity" of a particular plot of land. If that land has access to large amount of publicly supplied water and power, then surely it will have higher capacity for production. A suitable site for a factory, therefore, will pay much higher taxes than a comparably sized area in a desert.

Those are just my suggestions for how to use the sovereign power of the state to tax land owners and distribute purchasing power. Obviously, it would be possible to make all the relevant policies by a democratic process.

Here's how I think that could be organized. Every 1000 citizens living a particular area, elect one representative. "Cities" (boroughs) of 300,000 now have a representative body of 300, who select a council of 30. They select a representative to a state congress, which also selects a smaller group of councils. There would be no national elections for "national office". Officials at all levels would be selected from the population of representatives of 1000 citizens.

In my utopia, then, taxes are paid solely by those who own the land. And the laws are made solely by representatives elected by the people who live on the land, who then elect representatives at higher levels. Taxes would be paid proportional to wealth, not income, and laws would be made proportional to the will of the people, not money. The nation's leaders would constantly be talking to and negotiating with the "tax payers" (a limited and surveyable bunch of tycoons, one might imagine) on behalf of the citizens. And the nature of that conversation would be largely about the distribution of purchasing power in the society.

I understand the somewhat unhinged, utopian feel of this proposal. But it really is merely an ideal. I intend to approach reality with it "in mind" in the weeks to come.

A Simple Solution

I've given the subject of this post some more thought. And it has resulted in what I think is my basic political manifesto, at least in regard to fiscal and monetary policy, which is of course at the heart so much other policy.

I believe in doing away with all forms of taxation except for a tax on the productive value of land*. A government, after all, is territorial. My political philosophy, in any case, is to keep governments tied to their territories.

I also believe in doing away with all forms of social benefits except for the payment of a basic living wage to all citizens. The wage should be indexed to the cost of renting a reasonable home and buying a reasonable amount of staples. It should ensure survival without any draw on the citizen's time. It should also ensure the existence of a market for goods and services within the borders of the nation.

That is: the only money the state collects is a tax on land owners. And everyone gets a particular amount of money, printed and paid by the government, I guess every month would be the most suitable. ("Printed" would today probably mean simply direct deposit to whatever account a citizen specifies.)

Only people who want to own land will therefore have to deal with the revenue service. It would be part of the decision to get into that business. The cost of collecting and policing taxes would be unproblematic, and any evasion could be dealt with simply by appropriating and selling the land on which taxes are owed. (There would obviously be all the usual "due process" around this.) I think of the money collected by this means as money that would simply be collected and destroyed.

What is interesting here is that taxation would be the main instrument of monetary policy. It would keep inflation in check. Fiscal policy, the spending of the state would be fundamentally inflationary. The state would simply print whatever money it needed, fully cognizant that it would devalue the currency if it did not, over the long term, collect the money from the land owners.

This idea is age-old. I believe it is vaguely "Jeffersonian", and certainly something Ezra Pound would understand. It would seriously impede "progress" (understood as the process by which the rich become richer). It would not make the concentration of wealth impossible, but it would make those who are very wealthy, i.e., own a lot of land, much more responsibility.

It would also solve the unemployment problem (without, intriguingly, solving the employment problem.) Consider, people would want jobs (to earn more money than their living allowance) but they would not need them (because of the allowance) and they would have time to do whatever they wanted. So they could volunteer in whatever organization they hoped to work for. At some point a manager would notice that this is the kind of person we want to have around, and a contract would be negotiated. Simple.

I don't have any particular demands of the level of "democracy" that I hope to see, by the way. So long as everyone had money to buy food and basic necessities, and were otherwise not interfered with by the state, I think "freedom" would have arrived. Finally, let me say I would not be against implementing this kind of government globally.

Lots of things would change under this system. I'll write about that in the days to come. (What this has to do with language, philosophy and poetry, will soon become clear.)

___________
*Update. May 10, 2013: My heart is in the right place, but I think this focus on "land" is a retrograde agrarian fantasy. It seems like there's a pretty simple alternative, namely, a "wealth tax". Let all taxation be a tax on the wealth of the citizens, i.e., whatever the government needs to collect it just takes from the accumulated wealth of those who have it. If you own say, .0001% of the nation's wealth, you pay .0001% of the nation's bills. Simple. (Actually it's even simpler since the nation doesn't really have to collect money to "pay its bills". It just prints whatever money it needs. Since those who accumulate wealth, however, are really just using their activities to collect the money distributed by the national dividend, i.e., harness its purchasing power. It is entirely fair to have them hand over the money they've collected in proportion to their long-term success in collecting it.) As proponents of a wealth tax point out, you are simply paying your fair share for the basic government service of protecting your property rights. The mere act of destroying all the money collected in taxes is already protecting the value of your property against runaway inflation (since the government is already printing the money for the following year's national dividend.)

Dasein and Duende

Dasein is the not-quite-objective object of philosophical analysis. Duende is the not-quite-subjective subject of poetical synthesis.

Dasein exists, it is not merely extant. Duende inspires, it does not merely breathe.

The aim of philosophy is to understand Dasein. The aim of poetry is to obey the duende.

Harmless and Useful

I haven't thought this through, but it occurs to me that the modern malaise is rooted in the fact that you can only "earn a living" by doing something that someone will pay you for.

That is, you can't earn a living by cleaning up your local park (unless you're hired by the city to do it), or any number of other perfectly useful things. So people who could just "get to work" at something useful, to everyone, instead seek employment doing something entirely useless or even harmful, like making commercials or selling drugs, simply because there's a "market" there, i.e., a point at which labor is exchanged for money.

This attitude has even been taken up at the institutional level. So schools and hospitals and prisons (as ever, especially in the U.S., but the attitude can be seen everywhere) are trying to conceive of their activities in terms of the "income" they generate instead of the contribution they make to society.

I thought about this when reading Graham Peterson's comment on this OrgTheory post. I completely agree that legalizing drugs will solve a lot of problems. But it will also put a lot of people "out of work", police officers, prison wardens, drug dealers among them. They will all have to find other things to do, simply to make a living.

Some can of course go into the legal drug trade, but it's really not the same kind of profile.

The only solution, to my mind, is the age-old one of just handing out a proper living wage by printing up federal bank notes. Let no-one be forced to do something useless or harmful just to get by. Then let them overcome their boredom, not by consuming useless trinkets (produced by people who are making useless shit to get by), but by looking around their environment and seeing if anything needs fixing.

Perhaps I'm naive in thinking that people turn to crime mainly out of economic need. Perhaps some people would look around and immediately try to put together a private army and go kick some ass to get other people's stuff, rather than doing some useful community improvement project.*

I suppose that's something for the police to keep an eye on when they're not busting street pushers. In any case, I'm definitely one of these people who would be perfectly harmless and entirely useful even if I didn't have to worry about getting paid all the time. I think there are many like me.

___________
*Or at least confining themselves to loafing. Consider: 1% of the American population is in jail. Surely it would cost society less if they just sat around on their porches sipping beer all day?

Plus ça change motherfuckers!

Just discovered Jacob Bacharach's blog. I liked this category, which has two posts, beginning with the words "I never really believed in..." and "I've always been suspicious of..." respectively.

And there's this great post on Christopher Lasch.

Impotence

Thus,

whereas ignorance is
false, unjustified belief
or the lack of belief
however true or justified
it may be,

impotence is
wrong, illegitimate desire
or the lack of desire
where it would be
right and legitimate.

If we are powerless, this is why.
We are oppressed by forces
that rob our bodies of just desire
or rob our desires of legitimacy.

Power

If knowledge is

justified, true belief

then

power is

legitimate, just desire.

(I.e., that's not all there is to it,
but it gives you something to look for.)

Self-evident Truths and Inalienable Rights

In everyday experience, we encounter people and things. How do we encounter them immediately? How do they manifest themselves as things and people? My view is that an encounter is either a sign of the truth about something (and then it is precisely a "thing") or a sign of someone's rights (which makes him or her a "person").

Now this only works if, in the immediate experience of the thing, some truths are self-evident and, in the immediate experience of the person, some rights are inalienable. I want to define "honesty" as the recognition of the self-evident truth of a thing and "decency" as a respect for a person's inalienable rights.

Something interesting: if are not honest about a thing, i.e., if we don't recognize its self-evident truth, then we are actually turning the encounter into a "personal" one. Likewise, if we don't respect a person's inalienable rights, we are "reifying" the encounter, turning him or her into a thing.

A thing has no rights (it has truths). There are no truths about people (they have rights).

Poetry is not

just the activity by which poets achieve their fame. A vast amount of literary criticism can be dismissed outright on this basis.

Consider pop music, by contrast. The technique and technology of pop make the pop song available as a vehicle to the ambitious young man or woman who wants to become famous. It is like any other tool. You buy it and use it to some end. There is no guarantee that you'll succeed, of course; the point is merely that the song's only value lies in the end it achieves for the would-be star. It has no aesthetic value, only an instrumental one.* A poem, however, lacks the institutional immediacy to present itself to the public as a temporary means to the end of the poet's destiny. The poem is itself the poet's destiny. It is permanent or it is nothing.

The surrealists wanted to put poetry (art in general) at the service of the revolution. They were half kidding, of course. The impossibility of revolution does not render artistic activity meaningless. It is meaning.

The situationists reversed it: they wanted to put the revolution at the service of poetry. Again, the impossibility of revolution does not undermine the possibility of poetry.

___________
*Before you defend one or another gem of a pop song as "art" in its own right, keep in mind that I'm thinking of pure forms here. Some songs accomplish, within the technical and institutional framework of pop an "aesthetic" quality that is often admirable. (I can enjoy any number of popular songs.) But in these cases poetry (art) struggles against "the industry" (commerce). And the artist is, damn blast yer intellex, complicit in the compromise. You cannot record a popular song for purely artistic reasons. But you can (and must) write a poem for such reasons.

Institutions and Media

Some things are experienced immediately. We know right away what we're looking at, what we're dealing with. I'm not talking about moments of instant recognition, about which we could be mistaken. I'm talking about the comfortable way in which we know our way home through the park. The certainty that this is the park, which would be true even in a dream (a dream about the park). I'm talking about what it is like to be at home in the ordinary way.

I thought about this when Liam Stanley tweeted the following slide to explain "what, exactly, an institution is in political and social science":

These are all perfectly good definitions. But I've always thought we should define institutions in contrast to mediated forms of experience. If you have to ask what an action means, it is not "typical", i.e., it is not institutionalized.

I think specifically of Kant's definition of intuition as a model. Intuition is that through which knowledge of things is given to us immediately. The "that through which" is important because it actually suggests mediation (going through something). So intuition is the medium of immediate knowledge, almost a contradiction in terms.

But then, immediacy is probably an essentially paradoxical notion.

Anyway, institution is that through which the power of people is taken from them immediately. Or the way in which people are immediately taken with experience. Institution is the immediacy of people in experience. (What one definition refers to as the identification of "categories of social actors".) Institution is the immediacy of social experience.

Likewise, intuition is the immediacy of material experience. We experience the world as a collection of things because of intuition. We experience history as a collective of people because of institution.

_________
Update (02-10-2016): Reading this just now it occurred to me that intuition/institution is that through which knowledge/power is distributed in experience immediately. It is the immediacy of sense and motive in experience. That is, institutions don't just take power from people. It is also the medium in which they, immediately, have certain powers. Likewise, intuitions don't just reveal things immediately in any give situation, they also conceal things.

Mayhew's Duende, and Mine

Last night I left a somewhat unhinged comment on Jonathan's post about the duende. This post is just a slightly cleaned up version of that.

I was struck by Jonathan's description of me as a "Danish reader". I don't think there's anything very Danish about my reading of Apocryphal Lorca, and I've never really liked the idea of national literatures. (Pound says that we should no more speak of "American literature" than we should speak of "American chemistry".) In fact, much of the "apocrypha", the kitsch, surrounding the duende derives from tying it essentially to Andalusia. Still, there is of course a way to understand the duende by way of the socratic daimon, which inspired, if you will, much of Kierkegaard's work. In particular, we can distinguish between the "genius" and the "apostle". And we can note that too many readings of both Lorca and Heidegger do not proceed from the reader's own particular genius, but the desire to be an apostle.

Jonathan writes that the duende "is a name for Lorca’s own exceptional poetics, universalizable, in principle, but also irreducibly his own." I think that exactly captures the nature of the interpretative problem, and the problem of translation. He goes on: "In Apocryphal Lorca I suggested the duende—an untranslatable term—was at the same time a master trope for translation itself." Yes, but he also questioned its untranslatability, and suggested (at least to me) that its misreading, and reduction to kitsch, is a function, precisely, of the insistence of translators and followers not to find an equivalent notion in their own language. The whole point of the duende (if we take it "as master trope for translation itself") is that you must appropriate the translated work. The duende is not about Lorca or Spain. It is about you, dear reader.

Kierkegaard says somewhere that if you have to ask how and when sin came into the world, you haven't understood the question. It's sort of like that. "It took eighteen centuries of Christendom," writes Norman Mailer, "before Kierkegaard could come back alive with the knowledge that ... the characteristic way modern man found knowledge of his soul [was] ... by the act of perceiving that he was most certainly losing it." (From the preface to Deaths for the Ladies, reprinted in Existential Errands.) That is, we learn about existence for ourselves, because existence simply is the mystery of self in the world.

The duende is universal and therefore translatable into the name of the ineffable breath of genius in all languages and traditions (daimon, muse, genii, what have you). The idea of Mayhew's duende is jarring (a much needed jolt) for the same reason that, say, Basbøll's Dasein would be jarring. We think these concepts, if they mean anything at all, can only mean what Lorca and Heidegger meant by them. But that misses what Heidegger calls the "in each case mine". Or as Pound said: metaphysics is that about which we can only know what we find out for ourselves. This, I guess, is "what Lorca knew".

By invoking his own duende, or Dasein for that matter, Jonathan is merely (and rightly) insisting on the universal (primordial) meaning of the term. We can go further (via Saint Teresa, perhaps): when Jesus said he was God's son he didn't mean that he, alone, was God's son, he meant we all are. The kitsch of Christianity, then, comes from granting this claim to only one man, who "walked the earth", etc. It was an attempt to stave off a general emancipation with talk of a miracle, an exception. The good news, meanwhile, was meant to be universal. And that was why Kierkegaard ultimately could not call himself a "Christian".

I'm no expert on Lorca's duende. (Nor, for that matter, on Heidegger's Dasein.) But the issue here is what kind of "expertise" is required. Mayhew's approach teaches us (or at least me) to think outside the frame of Spanish, and indeed Lorquian, "exceptionalism" (a frame within which I'm in any case unqualified to think) and try instead to understand, in my own case, "the subtle link that joins the five senses to the living flesh". Likewise, we cannot continue to think of an expert on Dasein as necessarily an apostle of Heidegger. We must, finally, find our own genius.

Image and Meaning

I feel like I'm on the verge or cusp of an insight.

I've been reading a book by Richard Biernacki called Reinventing Evidence, which draws attention to the puzzling status of "the fact of meaning" in the social sciences. Texts and practices are meaningful and the social sciences (especially ethnography) tells us what they mean—what they mean.

They try to describe human activities as underpinned by (the) facts (of their meaning) to be discovered. And this raises the question of method. The social sciences provide us with a "theory of meaning" for social phenomena, a science of their interpretation. So they must have a "method", which gives them access to the "facts".

The humanities, I sometimes argue, don't have theory and method. They have style.

So we have a choice. We can engage stylishly with our culture or we can undertake to know the facts of social life.

The second option forces us to search, not just for "the meaning of life", but for its particular meanings (pl.). The first, by contrast, and which I favor, requires imagination. It says, not that there are meanings that must be brought out from under the phenomenal flux of experience by means of a method, but rather, and trivially, that there are images, that we imagine things, and, somewhat less trivially, that who we are is shaped by this imagery.

On this view, there is no truth about social life until we understand it.

Like I say, I'm only just now leaning into this insight.

Truths and Rights

I normally say that the pangrammatical supplement of "truth" is "justice". This has much to recommend it, but also one clear defect that I've noted before: there are "truths" in the world, but not corresponding "justices".

I just discovered a way to resolve this problem that might be more elegant than I previously suggested. Can we not distinguish simply between "truth" and "rightness" (i.e., justice). Our beliefs about the world are true and false, while our desires about history are right and wrong.

This also lets us posit truths and rights, and I mean "rights" in the ordinary sense. A right is just an individual just-ness. Our experience, then, is subtended by truths and rights.

Now, the truths are known to us or not. While the rights are mastered by us or not.

(Note that social progress since, say, the Enlightenment has consisted in the increasing mastery of the rights that, we increasingly recognized, we already had.)

One big issue is whether all grounding of actions depends on rights. Are some "abilities" not grounded in "skills"? This is where moral and practical "rightness" intersect. There are right and wrong ways to do things, but there is no simple way to distinguish the social license we have for action from physical ability we have to do it.

We have a "right" to do something, or not. We are able to do it or not.

"You're doing it wrong!"
"What you did was wrong!"

Both of these expressions depend on the experience of an action having "rightness". When we propose "inalienable human rights" or suchlike, are we not just saying that, just as our experience gives us access to truths, it affords us rights?

Error

(I'm not claiming that these platitudes are profound. I'm just noting them down.)

When science errs
it errs against wisdom.
When politics errs,
it errs against love.

Without a viable process
of correction, we'll have
a witless academy and
a loveless polity.

Love and Wisdom

Philosophy is the love of wisdom,
poetry the wisdom of love.

Wisdom is to know what knowledge is.
Love is to master who power becomes.

Knowledge of knowledge, power of power.
Self-knowledge. Self-mastery.
Wisdom. Love.

Philosophy is an inquiry into knowledge
for the love of wisdom.
Poetry is the governance of power
in the wisdom of love.

Of course, in the world,
there will be knowledge without self-knowledge,
and throughout history,
there will be power without self-mastery.

But there will always also be philosophers
and poets, not to mention wisdom and love.

There will be sages and lovers, too.