In The Shock Doctrine , Naomi Klein spends a fair amount of time outlining the free market blather of Milton Friedman and his demented acolytes, and then proceeds to show how these policies have been implemented throughout the world, by way of one form of shock therapy or another. She compares this economic shock therapy (new economic rules implemented at the moment of crisis) to actual physical torture. I was prepared to find this torture metaphor simplistic; I find that it is not. The book is simply devastating.
When it comes to the Chicago Boys and their ilk, the question must be asked: were they extremely cynical or extremely stupid? Both? In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey argues that their rhetoric on freedom was exactly that, rhetoric, that they knew full well the damage they were doing, but didn't care, or rather that it was exactly this damage they wanted to do (that is, to echo zunguzungu's use of James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine, the very apparent failure was the desired result, was success itself: "Sometimes there are structural reasons why 'failure' only reproduces the conditions which necessitate yet more failure."). This is certainly possible, even likely. Is it also possible that they believe all their nonsense about the free market? That they truly believe that it is the best way for the most freedom, for the most people? I suspect it's some combination, with varying degrees depending on the ideologue (recalling that, for example, the American planners--men like George Kennan--of the immediate post-WWII period knew the Soviet Union was no real threat, but by the 1980s we had a situation where, to loosely quote Lewis Lapham from memory, we had a president in Ronald Reagan who believed the movie was true).
As narrated by Klein, and in more detail by Michael Schwartz in War Without End: The Iraq War in Context, the Americans in charge of the invasion and occupation of Iraq (and its anticipated magical conversion into a free market paradise) seem to have been genuinely surprised that things didn't go well, while at the same time they very clearly intended for utter destruction and chaos. The stereotype of the quiet American is of a patriot with good intentions, characterized by well-meaning bumbling. But these so-called good intentions amount to a refusal to consider that anyone would want anything other than the American way of life, such as it is, with freedom narrowly understood as commitment to free market fundamentalism (combined with an inability to understand that those genuine freedoms Americans do have, have nothing to do with the free market and have been fought for, not bestowed). In Iraq, this results in the deliberate destruction of a country, to be followed by a shiny new country completely run according to free market ideology, so they can be just like Americans (except, only poor Americans, apparently, since previously well-positioned Iraqis were not given the opportunity to even become owners of privatized firms). It being impossible to run a country according to the free market, extreme violence, as ever, is needed. Such good intentions are of course essentially malevolent.
Notes on The Great Fire of London
Numbered points or observations, possibly tangential. Cohesiveness is neither promised nor implied (nor, we can be sure, delivered).
1. Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London is, so its subtitle tells us, "a story with interpolations and bifurcations". In the story, there are six chapters, containing a total of 98 numbered sections. Readers are notified of the interpolations and bifurcations (insertions) via symbols in the margins, like thus, indicated in section 2: →I§101. In addition to these insertions, lengthy parentheticals of a sort, the writing is replete with parenthetical remarks, often nested within other parenthetical remarks, and so on--qualifications upon qualifications.
2. I read the book by following the paths set up for the reader to follow. If section 2 pointed the reader to the interpolation at section 101, I flipped to the appropriate place in the book and read, before returning to the source. Occasionally, I would hold off on interpolations till I'd read the full two or three pages of a given, numbered section, and then read all of the interpolations jumping from that section, in sequence. All interpolations are one numbered section each, at most a couple of pages in length, referring back to the original numbered section (such as: 101§2). Bifurcations are a little different. Bifurcations may potentially contain multiple numbered sections. I did not at first realize that the first few contained several sections each, not till I'd read the third one, after which I went back and re-read the opening sections for the first two, following in turn by reading the remaining sections in each successive bifurcation. The interpolations could be seen as parentheticals, the bifurcations as forks, perhaps leading to an alternative version of the narrative, if the reader were so inclined.
2a. Roubaud writes of writing a hypothetical book (perhaps the current book) which, with various such insertions, the reader would construct his or her own version of the book, which in theory would never have been read by anyone else, including the author. Putting aside the idea that this is simply a way of looking at how readers normally read anyway, constructing their own version of the story independent of the writer's intentions, I have serious doubts about this.
2b. For example, I remember reading Hopscotch. I'd been curious, before reading, whether it would be better to read the book straight through, or to read it according to the plan devised and presented by Cortazar. I asked about, and I was assured that it didn't matter. Not interested at that time in jumping around in the book, I read it straight through. I discovered that the material at the back of the book (its interpolations, possibly) seemed both tedious and irrelevant, by the time I got to them. In that case, I would argue that the strategy, far from being this great milestone on the way towards a truly interactive literary art, instead reinforced the primacy of the writer's authority. The sections filed in the back, being of a different nature than the narrative material in the novel proper (being more essayistic, if I recall correctly), would have worked much better if read in the order in which Cortazar had suggested, if I had in fact "hopscotched" from point to point within the book.
2c. I am, in any event, considerably more interested in the problems for the writer writing, than I am in these sorts of ideas about the so-called limitations of the physical book. To the extent that the conception mirrors anxiety about writing itself, I am on board, engaged, interested; to the extent that it represents twaddle about hyperfiction, I lose interest, if not consciousness.
3. The "story" is, in fact, "about" the writing. It is indeed "writing about writing about writing", though not in an epistemological sense. It is literally about this, in the sense of a writer narrating his writing. In the early chapters, I was enchanted by this: the writing about the materials, the time of day, the desk, typewriter, pens, about the handwriting, and so on. Here's a representative excerpt, copied from the Dalkey site:
5. However, the "story" did lose me, did become un-fun to read for a time, in the long fifth chapter ("Dream, Decision, Project"), a chapter I had serious problems wading through. (It is no coincidence, I think, that this is the chapter that includes the no-fun excerpt quoted in the BLCKDGRD post linked to above.) This chapter, as its title gestures toward, involves the writer's detailed recounting, theoretical and otherwise, of the dream that gave rise to the decision to embark on the project which in part involves the novel which we may or may not have in front of us. The sheer length of this chapter numbed me, as did the repetition and the difficult language. In a sense, though, the jumping about made this chapter seem more interminable than it might have, had I read it straight through (admittedly, this appears to contradict the point I made about Hopscotch), especially by comparison with the more engaging inserted material. Though chapter 5 was on balance a slog, it was not without its intermittent charms. (And I do have it marked up in several places, passages of lucidity in what were often, for me, unreadable paragraphs.)
6. The "story" being the narration of the writing, offloaded the more traditional "narrative material", I'll call it, to the many insertions. That is, the writing containing narrated episodes that could add up to some kind of story. In addition, references to the "devastating personal loss" I alluded to earlier (the death of his wife Alix some years before), become at times more explicit, but also more rare (not that they were common to begin with). In a sense, the narrative material, in part writing about elements of the writer's actual life, could be seen to be too painful to include in the novel proper, even if those sections rarely were about Alix in any discernible way. The writing about the writing, about the project, the novel, the dream, decision, etc, displaces any true narrative, though this writing includes writing about the fact of displacement as well as references to the current novel being a falling away from the more grandiose project he'd originally dreamed. It is suggested that the work might have fallen apart, become unwritable, displaced by his writing about the writing, because he was unable to face the project, in the wake of his wife's death. (I keep using the words "novel" and "project" generically, but in fact these words and others appear in numerous ways: with or without italics, inside quotation marks or not, capitalized or not, with definite or indefinite article, depending on which iteration Roubaud is discussing and in what fashion.)
What remains are traces.
7. There is a blurb from Harry Mathews on the back of the book, and Mathews himself is mentioned in passing, in one of the handful of explicit references to the Oulipo (of which Roubaud is, unsurprisingly, a member). Perhaps coincidentally, in the course of reading the book, I was reminded of Mathews' own fiction a couple of times. Roubaud's description of the text (not the structure of the text itself), his ideal vision of it and its recursiveness and the nature of the interpolations and the bifurcations, the obsessive attention to detail, reminded me of Mathews' novel, The Journalist (in which our narrator, writing a journal on advice from his doctor after experiencing a nervous breakdown, gets obsessed with the form his journal takes, with his notational system for keeping track of types of entries, over time becoming more and more fixated on the journal itself, rather than his life, etc.). (The Journalist, incidentally, was the very first Dalkey Archive book I ever saw or read, having much to answer for at this point.) And Roubaud's delightfully obsessive food writing (the bit about croissants, yes, of course, but also the wonderful stuff about the proper way to make jam), primarily in the interpolations, reminded me of Mathews' demented short story "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)" (collected in The Human Country), which is not to say that these passages are much like that story. . . This paragraph highlights the utter lack of discussion of constraint in this post, a lack that will remain unaddressed, accept to say that the writer writing about writing writes about constraints and the Oulipo (and I have completely left out mathematics, which Roubaud writes about at length, including about the mathematical treatise which is the model for his novel, etc. . .)
8. I professed an instant love for The Great Fire of London in my earlier entry. Did it meet these early expectations? Certainly chapter five appears to knock it down in my estimation (though love implies affection, not a critical assessment). Nevertheless, this remains a very special book, for its many passages of beautiful writing, some of it very funny, and its conception and ideas about writing and fiction. It was mostly fun to read.
9. I eagerly await the upcoming Dalkey edition of The Loop (though I admit that I hope its 712 pages, more than twice the length of The Great Fire of London, are not overly given to writing resembling that contained in chapter 5). (And I find, having read the excerpt from one of them in Bernardi's afterward, that I am also interested in taking a look at Roubaud's Hortense novels.)
1. Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London is, so its subtitle tells us, "a story with interpolations and bifurcations". In the story, there are six chapters, containing a total of 98 numbered sections. Readers are notified of the interpolations and bifurcations (insertions) via symbols in the margins, like thus, indicated in section 2: →I§101. In addition to these insertions, lengthy parentheticals of a sort, the writing is replete with parenthetical remarks, often nested within other parenthetical remarks, and so on--qualifications upon qualifications.
2. I read the book by following the paths set up for the reader to follow. If section 2 pointed the reader to the interpolation at section 101, I flipped to the appropriate place in the book and read, before returning to the source. Occasionally, I would hold off on interpolations till I'd read the full two or three pages of a given, numbered section, and then read all of the interpolations jumping from that section, in sequence. All interpolations are one numbered section each, at most a couple of pages in length, referring back to the original numbered section (such as: 101§2). Bifurcations are a little different. Bifurcations may potentially contain multiple numbered sections. I did not at first realize that the first few contained several sections each, not till I'd read the third one, after which I went back and re-read the opening sections for the first two, following in turn by reading the remaining sections in each successive bifurcation. The interpolations could be seen as parentheticals, the bifurcations as forks, perhaps leading to an alternative version of the narrative, if the reader were so inclined.
2a. Roubaud writes of writing a hypothetical book (perhaps the current book) which, with various such insertions, the reader would construct his or her own version of the book, which in theory would never have been read by anyone else, including the author. Putting aside the idea that this is simply a way of looking at how readers normally read anyway, constructing their own version of the story independent of the writer's intentions, I have serious doubts about this.
2b. For example, I remember reading Hopscotch. I'd been curious, before reading, whether it would be better to read the book straight through, or to read it according to the plan devised and presented by Cortazar. I asked about, and I was assured that it didn't matter. Not interested at that time in jumping around in the book, I read it straight through. I discovered that the material at the back of the book (its interpolations, possibly) seemed both tedious and irrelevant, by the time I got to them. In that case, I would argue that the strategy, far from being this great milestone on the way towards a truly interactive literary art, instead reinforced the primacy of the writer's authority. The sections filed in the back, being of a different nature than the narrative material in the novel proper (being more essayistic, if I recall correctly), would have worked much better if read in the order in which Cortazar had suggested, if I had in fact "hopscotched" from point to point within the book.
2c. I am, in any event, considerably more interested in the problems for the writer writing, than I am in these sorts of ideas about the so-called limitations of the physical book. To the extent that the conception mirrors anxiety about writing itself, I am on board, engaged, interested; to the extent that it represents twaddle about hyperfiction, I lose interest, if not consciousness.
3. The "story" is, in fact, "about" the writing. It is indeed "writing about writing about writing", though not in an epistemological sense. It is literally about this, in the sense of a writer narrating his writing. In the early chapters, I was enchanted by this: the writing about the materials, the time of day, the desk, typewriter, pens, about the handwriting, and so on. Here's a representative excerpt, copied from the Dalkey site:
I find quite obviously a slim yet real consolation in telling how my story gets underway in this circumstance which is the ever-renewed beginning of daytime arriving and nullifying (with increasing noise, with light) the peaceful, desolate yellow glow silently surrounding me on this table: one, two, three mute hours during which everything, in this house, the square, the streets, everything, or almost everything is asleep—this is the self-imposed condition enabling me to relate what, even though doing my best to wander as little as possible from the time of composition, will be above all a work of memory.I also enjoyed the writing about the vision for the book's appearance, along with the writer's conviction that the book, as he conceived of it, in its fullness, was not publishable in book form.(These sections prompted translator Dominic Di Bernardi to write in his afterward about the possibilities for realizing Roubaud's vision with computers. Few things in literature bore me more than discussions of this sort.)
And each day, if I succeed in seizing some glint, if I manage, as the old Irish hermit says, to lead the darkness to the light, my basic purpose will be to entangle it with the banality of these lines, wobbly, black, relatively crooked upon the paper, in the yellow oval slicing the table, and where soon, once daylight filters in, and I lay down my pen, it will vanish.
Thus, the conditions in which I place myself, this self-imposed constraint, will express, despite the very elementary nature of the analogy, something of my projected attempt.
5. However, the "story" did lose me, did become un-fun to read for a time, in the long fifth chapter ("Dream, Decision, Project"), a chapter I had serious problems wading through. (It is no coincidence, I think, that this is the chapter that includes the no-fun excerpt quoted in the BLCKDGRD post linked to above.) This chapter, as its title gestures toward, involves the writer's detailed recounting, theoretical and otherwise, of the dream that gave rise to the decision to embark on the project which in part involves the novel which we may or may not have in front of us. The sheer length of this chapter numbed me, as did the repetition and the difficult language. In a sense, though, the jumping about made this chapter seem more interminable than it might have, had I read it straight through (admittedly, this appears to contradict the point I made about Hopscotch), especially by comparison with the more engaging inserted material. Though chapter 5 was on balance a slog, it was not without its intermittent charms. (And I do have it marked up in several places, passages of lucidity in what were often, for me, unreadable paragraphs.)
6. The "story" being the narration of the writing, offloaded the more traditional "narrative material", I'll call it, to the many insertions. That is, the writing containing narrated episodes that could add up to some kind of story. In addition, references to the "devastating personal loss" I alluded to earlier (the death of his wife Alix some years before), become at times more explicit, but also more rare (not that they were common to begin with). In a sense, the narrative material, in part writing about elements of the writer's actual life, could be seen to be too painful to include in the novel proper, even if those sections rarely were about Alix in any discernible way. The writing about the writing, about the project, the novel, the dream, decision, etc, displaces any true narrative, though this writing includes writing about the fact of displacement as well as references to the current novel being a falling away from the more grandiose project he'd originally dreamed. It is suggested that the work might have fallen apart, become unwritable, displaced by his writing about the writing, because he was unable to face the project, in the wake of his wife's death. (I keep using the words "novel" and "project" generically, but in fact these words and others appear in numerous ways: with or without italics, inside quotation marks or not, capitalized or not, with definite or indefinite article, depending on which iteration Roubaud is discussing and in what fashion.)
What remains are traces.
7. There is a blurb from Harry Mathews on the back of the book, and Mathews himself is mentioned in passing, in one of the handful of explicit references to the Oulipo (of which Roubaud is, unsurprisingly, a member). Perhaps coincidentally, in the course of reading the book, I was reminded of Mathews' own fiction a couple of times. Roubaud's description of the text (not the structure of the text itself), his ideal vision of it and its recursiveness and the nature of the interpolations and the bifurcations, the obsessive attention to detail, reminded me of Mathews' novel, The Journalist (in which our narrator, writing a journal on advice from his doctor after experiencing a nervous breakdown, gets obsessed with the form his journal takes, with his notational system for keeping track of types of entries, over time becoming more and more fixated on the journal itself, rather than his life, etc.). (The Journalist, incidentally, was the very first Dalkey Archive book I ever saw or read, having much to answer for at this point.) And Roubaud's delightfully obsessive food writing (the bit about croissants, yes, of course, but also the wonderful stuff about the proper way to make jam), primarily in the interpolations, reminded me of Mathews' demented short story "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)" (collected in The Human Country), which is not to say that these passages are much like that story. . . This paragraph highlights the utter lack of discussion of constraint in this post, a lack that will remain unaddressed, accept to say that the writer writing about writing writes about constraints and the Oulipo (and I have completely left out mathematics, which Roubaud writes about at length, including about the mathematical treatise which is the model for his novel, etc. . .)
8. I professed an instant love for The Great Fire of London in my earlier entry. Did it meet these early expectations? Certainly chapter five appears to knock it down in my estimation (though love implies affection, not a critical assessment). Nevertheless, this remains a very special book, for its many passages of beautiful writing, some of it very funny, and its conception and ideas about writing and fiction. It was mostly fun to read.
9. I eagerly await the upcoming Dalkey edition of The Loop (though I admit that I hope its 712 pages, more than twice the length of The Great Fire of London, are not overly given to writing resembling that contained in chapter 5). (And I find, having read the excerpt from one of them in Bernardi's afterward, that I am also interested in taking a look at Roubaud's Hortense novels.)
Noted: Søren Kierkegaard
From the preface to Fear and Trembling (in the translation by Alastair Hannay):
Even if one were able to render the whole of the content of faith into conceptual form, it would not follow that one had grasped faith, grasped how one came to it, or how it came to one.
Noted: Jacques Roubaud
From The Great Fire of London:
I am always ready to yield to every sort of distraction: reading, daydreaming, romantic thoughts. To accomplish even the least amount of work, to finish even the least number of lines, I must cross an invisible boundary of inward refusal, of disgust, of my desire to escape, to put off till later, until tomorrow, indefinitely. Getting myself started requires exhausting a great deal of energy, of exhortations, self-reproaches. The conditions necessary for a working mood are so hard to come by that I sometimes wonder how I've proved able, on occasion, to manage it.
This is one of my life's constants, for which I'll seek no explanation. At times it's a rather appalling constant, since the passing years don't do a thing by way of improving it, nor do they facilitate my task; on the contrary: I've often imagined that inwardly mustering my forces with a certain regularity, accumulating victorious moments and even days, would build up a sort of reflex, an impetus, habit; and that since growing old would be accompanied simultaneously by the waning attractiveness of distractions, I would enter into a few luminous years when I would be able to do everything that I had decided and planned on doing in the span that I had consecrated to such duties. This did not occur, and I know full well that it never will.
Any good Kassandra
With the deepening financial crisis and the ascenscion of Barack Obama, there has been a lot of talk about a return to Keynesianism, a "New New Deal". I have my doubts that any likely program will have enough impact, especially given the persistence of the hugely expensive wars the U.S. is waging in Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama's apparent intention to get tough with Iran and Pakistan. But there are other concerns, as well. I've chided myself in the past for my tendencies towards "catastrophism" (what a co-worker unhelpfully calls "fatalism"), but sometimes the sky is falling, and it's important to try to figure out where one should be when that happens.
Stan Goff has been writing about this kind of thing for a while. Here is what he had to say recently:
Stan Goff has been writing about this kind of thing for a while. Here is what he had to say recently:
In keeping with the duties of any good Kassandra, let me say that we are far, far, far worse off than in 1930; so Keynesian pump-priming isn’t going to work. Moreover, there is no World War II Redux in the wings to act as the US deux ex machina to build us up on the corpses of 60 million people… yet.And, anyway, we've already been in a war economy as things have fallen apart, and there is less room for "growth" than there was back then. We already have the appliances, the cars, we have massive consumer debt, and so on. There are numerous other differences between now and 1930, some listed by Goff. Then he says:
But here is a big intangible: In 1930, the majority of the population in the US was not as utterly dependent and helpless as it is now. Consumerism has created a nation of cyborgs who will go mad when the grid begins to shut down. They are epistemologically disabled; and they are psychologically fragile. They are self-centered and avaricious, with extremely low frustration tolerance levels.
Now, with this crisis in mind, how do we think about something as nessesary by one measure and insane by another as propping up the automobile industry? Automobiles are essential to support our existence such as it is… halt them today, and many will literally die. But they are also a key part of our problem with greenhouse gases, habitat destruction for roads and the attendant sprawl, transportation of food, etc. etc. At the same time, they will stop one day, as sure as the sun rises.
When the bailout of the big three automakers was being discussed, analyzed, and ridiculed to death, I despaired at the notion that, in part because of union jobs, the proper thing to do was to support the bailout. Because the automobile industry is one of the most irresponsible industries in history. Not only because of their utter stupidity as business, but also because of the simple fact of its existence, that new cars get made and sold and bought, continuously. (Don't get me started on "housing starts".) But Goff is right: in the short-term, if Americans' cars are taken away, most of us are fucked. Given the long-term unviability of oil as an energy source, and the prospects of environmental catastrophe, it seems obvious to me that we should be trying to find ways to lessen our reliance on cars. I don't see such a thing happening. We'll continue as we are, until forced to go without, and then where will we be?
I don't have time to say more about this right now, but I expect I will be returning to this topic often in the future (lucky you) . . .
Notice
Speaking of friendship, I'd like to give a somewhat belated shout out to a friend of mine from way back, Mitch Rosenwald, who edited and contributed to a book on conflict resolution, titled One Paradigm, Many Worlds: Conflict Resolution across the Disciplines, published last year by Cambridge Scholars. Congratulations, Mitch!
Repeating is like a death grip
I found blah-feme's recent remarks on "the end of friendship" moving and accurate (and, unfortunately, personally relevant). This is only the opening:
It is a sad thing when a friendship ends – and such is the nature of the world that all things end. One can, for so long, hold out the prospect that what at the time seemed like a misunderstanding can be redeemed. But that too must pass, it seems, that too must die and the past is recast anew in the light of that passing. I’m done, we say, but are we really? I have tried to engage in useful work of mourning. But when I say ‘I’m done’, I have clearly only just begun to think over and over about words said, about moments and choices made, about responsibility, blame and recrimination. The repeating is like a death grip. Endlessly I revisit those moments. I wonder what I might have said differently, I torment myself with those possibilities. If only .....
The ending of a friendship draws one’s attention to the gut-wrenching fragility of them all, to the vulnerability of our social bonds and their endless hopeless devastating volatility. If there is anything to be done it is, it seems, to assess the extent to which a friendship can be repaired, and the extent to which one is prepared to prostrate oneself before the alter of that friendship, humbly taking on the responsibility for what is always already radically shared. To take on the responsibility for the end of a friendship is sometimes the only way to bring it back to life, but at what cost? Is the friendship more important than a truth that will all over again destroy it? Is the friendship more important even than one’s own sense of self-worth? Ask yourself this: could you prostrate yourself before it knowing that you have no reason to take on the burden of the friendships’ ending?
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