Insult, then Give it the Lie

Go, soul, the body's guest,
Upon a thankless arrant;
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant:
Go, since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.

Say to the court it glows
And shines like rotten wood,
Say to the church it shows
What's good, and doth no good:
If church and court reply,
Then give them both the lie.

Tell potentates, they live
Acting, by others' action;
Not lov'd unless they give;
Not strong, but by affection.
If potentates reply,
Give potentates the lie.

Tell men of high condition,
That manage the estate,
Their purpose is ambition;
Their practice only hate.
And if they once reply,
Then give them all the lie.

Tell them that brave it most,
They beg for more by spending,
Who in their greatest cost
Like nothing but commending.
And if they make reply,
Then give them all the lie.

Tell zeal it wants devotion;
Tell love it is but lust;
Tell time it meets but motion;
Tell flesh it is but dust:
And wish them not reply,
For thou must give the lie.

Tell age it daily wasteth;
Tell honour how it alters;
Tell beauty how she blasteth;
Tell favour how it falters:
And as they shall reply,
Give every one the lie.

Tell wit how much it wrangles
In tickle points of niceness;
Tell wisdom she entangles
Herself in over-wiseness:
And when they do reply,
Straight give them both the lie.

Tell physic of her boldness;
Tell skill it is prevention;
Tell charity of coldness;
Tell law it is contention:
And as they do reply,
So give them still the lie.

Tell fortune of her blindness;
Tell nature of decay;
Tell friendship of unkindness;
Tell justice of delay:
And if they will reply,
Then give them all the lie.

Tell arts they have no soundness,
But vary by esteeming;
Tell schools they want profoundness,
And stand too much on seeming.
If arts and schools reply,
Give arts and schools the lie.

Tell faith it's fled the city;
Tell how the country erreth;
Tell manhood, shakes off pity;
Tell virtue, least preferreth.
And if they do reply,
Spare not to give the lie.

So when thou hast, as I
Commanded thee, done blabbing;
Because to give the lie
Deserves no less than stabbing:
Stab at thee, he that will,
No stab thy soul can kill!

—Sir Walter Raleigh, "The Lie"

"Give the lie" - to show that something is not true

Upon the Broken Pillar

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

A. Pope, "The Riddle of the World"

The Broken Column House at Désert de Retz (1993) - Photo by Michael Kenna.

Defining the Post-Modern

The Man from Another Place...and BOB!

Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds
Fire walk with me.

Chinese Math

Calculating Your Social Worth

Johnson's word 'merit' is carefully chosen. The claim of merit is that it exists outside of the social context in which its' worth to other people may be determined; the OED's oldest sense of the word is 'The quality [...] of being entitled to reward from God.' The merit of a work of poetry, in this traditional view, is therefore separate from and discontinuous with its' social worth or economic value; Milton would have been truly entitled to more or less esteem if Paradise Lost had sold 10,000 copies or 10 copies in the first two years.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
---

Nothing speaks grief so well as to speak nothing
-Crasham.

There is a pang that spurns all soothing cares:
The pang the mourner feels. It matters not
If worldly goods and social worth be there,
Refinement and the cultivated man.
The case they meet not. Strong but tender cords
That link the heart to heart, the soul to soul,
Are rudely snapt; and this by Hand that gives
And takes at pleasure. When His rod afflicts,
And He the trembling soul wrings from the lump
Of vanquished clay, and dark and desolate
The scene, nor tears nor moans nor magic wand
Can change the stern, the final dread decree .
In vain our sympathetic nature weeps ;
And all that we can say or do is vain:
Dead silence is by far the better part.
The heart that still survives is struck as with
The hand of death. In moans and tears it may
Relief obtain, but comfort none; no more
Than can the pulseless heart for which it sighs.
The rupture far too deep for aught but balm
That comes from God direct, 'Tis He alone
Can soothe our woe; and He can soothe it well.
Who thus can wound, the pain can well allay;
And time, in power to heal, stands next to Him.
His instrument is time, and this He wields
For wisest purposes. And time, old time
Eternal is, except so far as He
Shall cut it short. And time shall bear away
Our woes, our pains, our sufferings, our name,
Our memory -- all, as on a gentle, sweet,
Delicious stream, to dark oblivion.
And as we thus glide on, the pangs we felt
We feel them less and less. The wounds are healed
To rigid scars; and all by kindly means
Which God vouchsafes and sends to our relief.
Forever more adored His holy name!

-Levi Bishop, "Teuchsa Grondie A Legendary Poem- The Funeral"

Aesthetics of Symmetry

SOCRATES: He knows that any want of measure and symmetry in any mixture whatever must always of necessity be fatal, both to the elements and to the mixture, which is then not a mixture, but only a confused medley which brings confusion on the possessor of it.

PROTARCHUS: Most true.

SOCRATES: And now the power of the good has retired into the region of the beautiful; for measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue all the world over.

PROTARCHUS: True.

SOCRATES: Also we said that truth was to form an element in the mixture.

PROTARCHUS: Certainly.

SOCRATES: Then, if we are not able to hunt the good with one idea only, with three we may catch our prey; Beauty, Symmetry, Truth are the three, and these taken together we may regard as the single cause of the mixture, and the mixture as being good by reason of the infusion of them.

PROTARCHUS: Quite right.

- Plato, "Philebus"

Minotaur Musings

Sorely needed because, for the umpteenth
time since landing a job as line-cook
at the Holiday Inn, those damn horns of his
have been a problem. It’s the pots
that hang overhead; he keeps punching
holes in them, Management is pissed.
The Minotaur sits on an empty pickle bucket
blowing smoke through bullish nostrils.
He lows. He laments. He can’t remember
whether the Stuffed Flounder gets béchamel
or hollandaise. Moreover, the heat chafes.
About that time he spies her coming
down the ally, that new waitress the whole
kitchen is talking about. He almost gives her
the once-over but can’t get past her breasts.
The Minotaur is a tit man. —I’m a tit man—
he mouths to the Fry Cook. —What’s that mean;
You’re a tit man?— they ask. The Minotaur
can’t answer. He sits indignant, a convicted
it man, picking at the dried gravy
stain on his apron. Feigning indifference
he nearly misses the miracle beneathing her,
this apparition in slinky black.
But as she hoofs her way up the back
steps he can’t help but notice those fine shanks.
And what offers them up is not the sensible pump,
is not the stiletto heel, is nothing less
than cloven —Things are looking up— he thinks.

- Steven Sherrill, "The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break"

h/t - Progressive Eruptions and Freethinke

Thymos

There is something profoundly strange about Peter Sloterdijk's attempt to assert - as the solution to what one is tempted to call the "antinomies of the Welfare State" - an "ethics of gift" over against mere egotistic market exchange. His proposal brings us unexpectedly close to what can only be called the Communist vision.

Sloterdijk is guided by the elementary lesson of dialectics: sometimes, the opposition between maintaining the old and changing things does not cover the entire field - in other words, sometimes the only way to retaining the old is by change things radically. So, if today one wants to save the core of the Welfare State, one should abandon any nostalgia for twentieth-century Social Democracy.

What Sloterdijk proposes is a kind of new cultural revolution, a radical psycho-social shift based on the insight that, today, the exploited productive strata is no longer the working class, but the (upper-)middle class: they are the true "givers" whose heavy taxation finances the education, health and general well-being of the majority. In order to achieve this change, one should leave behind statism, this absolutist remainder which has strangely survived in our democratic era: the idea, surprisingly strong even among the traditional left, that the State has the unquestionable right to tax its citizens, to determine and seize through legal coercion, if necessary, part of their product.

It is not that citizens give part of their income to the State - they are treated as if they are a priori indebted to the State. This attitude is sustained by a misanthropic premise strongest among the very left which otherwise preaches solidarity: that people are basically egotists, they have to be forced to contribute something to the common good, and it is only the State which, by means of its coercive legal apparatus, can do the job of ensuring the necessary solidarity and redistribution.

According to Sloterdijk, the ultimate cause of this strange social perversion is the disturbed balance between eros and thymos, between the erotic-possessive drive to amass things and the drive (predominant in premodern societies) to pride and generosity, to that mode of gift-giving which brings honour and respect. The way to reestablish this balance is to give full recognition to thymos: to treat those that produce wealth, not as a group which is a priori under suspicion for refusing to pay its debt to society, but as the true givers whose contribution should be fully recognized, so that they can be proud of their generosity.

According to Sloterdijk, the first step is the shift from the proletariat to the voluntariat: instead of taxing the rich excessively, one should give them the (legal) right to decide voluntarily what part of their wealth they will donate to common welfare. To begin with, one should, of course, not radically lower taxes, but open up at least a small domain in which the freedom is given to givers to decide how much and for what they will donate - such a beginning, modest as it is, would gradually change the entire ethics on which social cohesion is based.

But do we not here get caught in the old paradox of freely choosing what we are already obliged to do? That is to say, is it not that the freedom of choice accorded to the "voluntariat" of "achievers" is a false freedom that relies on a forced choice? If society is to function normally, the "achievers" are free to choose (to give money to society or not) only if they make the right choice (to give)?

This is just the first in a series of problems with Sloterdijk's proposal - problems that are not those identified by the (expected) leftist outcry:

Who, in our societies, really are the givers (achievers)? Let us not forget that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by the rich givers/achievers, and the "ordinary people" financed the state to bail them out. (The exemplary instance here is Bernard Madoff, who first stole billions and then played the giver donating millions to charities.)

Getting rich does not happen in a space outside the state and community, but is - as a rule - a violent process of appropriation which casts doubt on the right of the rich giver to own what he then generously gives.

Sloterdijk's opposition of possessive eros and generous thymos is all too simplistic: is authentic erotic love not giving at its purest? Just recall Juliet's famous lines: "My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite." And is thymos also not destructive? One should always bear in mind that envy (resentment) is a category of thymos, intervening in the domain of eros, thereby distorting "normal" egotism - that is, making what the other has (and I don't have) more important than what I have.

More generally, the basic reproach to Sloterdijk should be: why does he assert generosity only within the constraints of capitalism, which is the order of possessive eros and competition par excellence? Within these constraints, every generosity is a priori reduced to the obverse of brutal possessiveness - a benevolent Dr Jekyll to the capitalist Mr Hyde. Recall the first model of generosity mentioned by Sloterdijk: Carnegie, the man of steel with a heart of gold, as they say. He first used Pinkerton detective agents and a private army to crush workers' resistance, and then displayed generosity by way of (partially) giving back what had been seized. Even in the instance of Bill Gates, how can one forget his brutal tactics to crush competitors and gain monopoly? The key question is thus: is there no place for generosity outside the capitalist frame? Is each and every such project a case of sentimental moralist ideology?

We often hear that the Communist vision relies on dangerous idealization of human beings, attributing to them a kind of "natural goodness" which is simply alien to our egotistical nature. However, in his bestselling Drive, Daniel Pink refers to a body of research in the behavioural sciences which suggests that sometimes, at least, external incentives (money reward) can be counterproductive: optimal performance comes when people find intrinsic meaning in their work. Incentives might be useful in getting people to accomplish boring routine work; but with more intellectually demanding tasks, the success of individuals and organizations increasingly depends on being nimble and innovative, so there is more and more need for people to find intrinsic value in their work.

Pink identifies three elements underlying such intrinsic motivation: autonomy, the ability to choose what and how tasks are completed; mastery, the process of becoming adept at an activity; and purpose, the desire to improve the world. Here is the report on a study carried out by MIT:

"They took a whole group of students and they gave them a set of challenges. Things like memorizing strings of digits solving word puzzles, other kinds of spatial puzzles even physical tasks like throwing a ball through a hoop. To incentivize their performance they gave them 3 levels of rewards: if you did pretty well, you got a small monetary reward; if you did medium well, you got a medium monetary reward; if you did really well, if you were one of the top performers you got a large cash prize. Here's what they found out. As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected the higher the pay, the better their performance. But once the task calls for even rudimentary cognitive skill a larger reward led to poorer performance. How can that possibly be? This conclusion seems contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics which is that the higher the reward, the better the performance. And they're saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill it's the other way around which seems like the idea that these rewards don't work that way seems vaguely Left-Wing and Socialist, doesn't it? It's this kind of weird Socialist conspiracy. For those of you who have these conspiracy theories I want to point out the notoriously left-wing socialist group that financed the research: The Federal Reserve Bank. Maybe that 50 dollars or 60 dollars prize isn't sufficiently motivating for an MIT student - so they went to Madurai in rural India, where 50 or 60 dollars is a significant sum of money. They replicated the experiment in India and what happened was that the people offered the medium reward did no better than the people offered the small reward but this time around, the people offered the top reward they did worst of all: higher incentives led to worse performance. This experiment has been replicated over and over and over again by psychologists, by sociologists and by economists: for simple, straight-forward tasks, those kinds of incentives work, but when the task requires some conceptual, creative thinking those kind of motivators demonstrably don't work. The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough, so they are not thinking about money and they're thinking about the work. You get a bunch of people who are doing highly skilled work but they're willing to do it for free and volunteer their time 20, sometimes 30 hours a week; and what they create, they give it away, rather than sell it. Why are these people, many of whom are technically sophisticated highly skilled people who have jobs, doing equally, if not more, technically sophisticated work not for their employer, but for someone else for free! That's a strange economic behavior."

This "strange behaviour" is, in fact, that of a Communist who follows Marx's well-known motto: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" - this is the only "ethics of gift" that has any authentic utopian dimension.

So-called "postmodern" capitalism is, of course, notoriously adept at exploiting these elements for its own profitability - not to mention the fact that, behind every "postmodern" company granting its employees the space for "creative" achievement, there is the anonymous spectre of old-fashioned working-class exploitation. The icon of today's creative capitalism is Apple - but what would Apple be without Foxconn, the Taiwanese company owning large factories in China where hundreds of thousands labour in atrocious conditions to assemble iPads and iPods?

We should never forget that the shadowy obverse of the postmodern "creative" centre in the Sillicon Valley (where a few thousand researchers test new ideas) is the militarized barracks in China, plagued by a string of suicides by its workers as the result of their unbearable work conditions (long hours, low pay, high pressure). After the eleventh worker jumped to his death, the company introduced a series of measures: compelling workers to sign contracts promising not to kill themselves, to report fellow workers who look depressed, to go to psychiatric institutions if their mental health deteriorates, and so on. To add insult to injury, Foxconn started to put up safety nets around the buildings of its vast factory.

No wonder that Terry Gou, the chairman of Hon Hai (the parent company of Foxconn), referred to his employees as animals at an end-of-the-year party, adding that "to manage one million animals gives me a headache." Gou added that he wants to learn from Chin Shih-chien, the director of Taipei Zoo, exactly how animals should be "managed." He even invited the zoo director to speak at Hon Hai's annual review meeting, asking all of his general managers to listen carefully to the lecture so that they could learn how to manage "the animals that work for them."

But whatever the problems with such experiments, they definitely demonstrate that there is nothing "natural" about capitalist competition and profit-maximization: above a certain level of satisfying the basic survival needs, people tend to behave in what one cannot but call a Communist way, giving to society according to their abilities, not according to the financial remuneration they receive.

And this brings us back to Sloterdijk, who celebrates donations of rich capitalists as a display of "neo-aristocratic pride." Should we not counter Sloterdijk's proposal with what Alain Badiou once referred to as "proletarian aristocratism"? It is no wonder that, in literature, one of the recurring themes is that of anti-bourgeois aristocrats who finally understand that the only way for them to keep alive the core of their pride is to join the other side - the true counterpoint to the bourgeois conceit.

- Slavoj Zizek, "We Don't Want the Charity of Rich Capitalists"

Have you Fed your Earworm, lately?

Seek and Ye Shall Find

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here

e.e. cummings

Reacting to New Social Conventions

“The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Crime and Punishment"

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.

- Malcolm X

Duty Bound...

...to perpetuate the bureaucracy