Shop Class as Shit Craft, or, Peddling "Some Ancient Greek Crap"

by James Livingston

Tue Jun 30, 2009

Does this sound like Robert Pirsig redux?  Well, yes, and everybody, particularly the publisher, wants you to remember that occasion, because Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sold 4 million copies.  When I read it back in the day, alongside The Fountainhead, what I remember most is the sense of dread that saturates the prose, as if the ghost lurking at the edges of the narrator's consciousness was not the famous one who inhabits the machine of western metaphysics but a much more personal demon.

That same sense of dread animates Crawford's jeremiad, just as it animated The Crafstman, Richard Sennett's book of last year on the very same topic (you can read my review of it right here or at www.historynewsnetwork.org).  That same sense of dread unites the Left and the Right in its critique of--or rather its flight from--the dreary, apparently mindless work of the proletarian, which is now summarized by reference to The Cubicle or The Office rather than the assembly line.

It unites the Left and the Right?  How can it be that both sides of the political divide cherish the real work of the artisan--poiesis--as against that of the manual laborer, and still hope to carve out an ideal zone of use value, free from the atrocities of the commodity form?    

M.J, R.I.P.

by James Livingston

Fri Jun 26, 2009

Hell, I was listening to the Jackson 5 back in 1970, when I was flunking out of college in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  So were all my fraternity brothers, partly, I suppose, because I was playing "I Want You Back" pretty loud all day.  It seemed like a good idea at the time--it kept me awake, and back then that was an achievement.

I was also listening, and watching with disbelief, in 1982, when Michael convinced us we were all Gods and Monsters--or that he was both.  And I was still listening fifteen years later, when I got in a smackdown with a colleague about the iconic stature of Marilyn versus Michael.  

New Random Notes

by James Livingston

Sat Jun 20, 2009

That's what my old neighbor said as I pulled away with more belongings from the old house.  "Yeah, the teaching stops, but not the writing," I said, all defensive, just like my brother, who, as the head football coach at a high school outside Chicago, works all summer with his returning players and then eighty-hour weeks during the season.  He's given up, he responds with a grimace to similarly neighborly queries.  But then he's retiring in two years, at 55.

So, yes, I've been writing, dear reader, but not for this space--even though I finally got a bona fide offer of advertising support.  Turns out it is not an especially lucrative offer ($120 a year to post a questionnaire on diet!), but I like the principle of it.

Anyway, herewith some random notes culled from stray thoughts I can't seem to corral.

To begin with, can I please get a break from the likes of Charles Krauthammer, the lunatic fringe at the Washington Post, who, like the ever-confident Newtie-Boy, still all blown up and blow-dried, wants Obama to intervene, somehow, in the settlement of the Iranian election?  Was there a powerful foreign nation intervening in the United States in 2000, when a fraudulent election result was imposed on American voters by the junta over at the Supreme Court, with praise and thanks from Krauthammer?  Did the sovereign state of California intervene on the side of legality in 2004, when the Republican Party stole the presidential election in Ohio from John Kerry?  

Being and Time in Beirut

by James Livingston

Tue May 19, 2009

Where else would that happen?  I don't know, haven't been there.  Lebanon is indeed a frontier these days, but I don't mean that everybody carries a gun, or that there is no justice, no law.  I mean that it is the cutting edge of political change in the world right now, perhaps because the repatriation of its middle class professionals and intellectuals has gained momentum in the last decade, after twenty years of flight from the effects of civil war, perhaps because the coming elections may push it toward another kind of proxy war between Iran and Israel for hegemony in the Middle East.  Or perhaps because a dispersal of power from the state to society has always been the political reality of Lebanon.  In the West that dispersal was determined by the advent of modern, corporate capitalism in the 20th century; in Lebanon it was, and is, the founding gesture and enduring signature of the nation as such, with all the ambiguity--or fragility--that implies for its sovereignty as a state.

Talk About a Stress Test: Surowiecki Sends Bankers to the Gym.

by James Livingston

Wed May 06, 2009

The normally excellent Drum was citing James Surowiecki, the very smart economic writer for the New Yorker, to the effect that the great bloatation of the financial industry had finally been explained as the result of something other than de-regulation and greed.  Well, almost.

Worried After Williams: Report on the Conference Celebrating Fifty Years of Tragedy

by James Livingston

Thu Apr 30, 2009

Fifty years ago, William Appleman Williams published The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, the emblematic text of "revisionist" diplomatic history.  That anniversary was celebrated by a conference last weekend at Rutgers University which was organized and hosted by my colleague Lloyd Gardner, Williams's first PhD student at the University of Wisconsin.  The conference featured a lacerating keynote address by Andrew Bacevich, twelve papers by "revisionist" historians of several generations, wonderful stories about Bill Williams in his intellectual prime, and the graying eminence of founders such as Thomas McCormick, Walter LaFeber, Stanley Kutler, Marilyn Young, Stanley Katz, and Warren Kimball.

In spite of those wonderful stories, three brilliant papers (by Jeff Engel, Nick Cullather, Greg Grandin), and the ambient eminence, I have to say the conference was a real drag.  I attended with great eagerness, anticipating some intellectual fireworks.  What happened instead was a steady drone of self-congratulation on the superior knowledge of those in the room--of those in the know.  It was a disquieting experience because I am sure Bill himself would have protested.

Easter Morning Sermon

by James Livingston

Sun Apr 12, 2009

I feel like I should be in church today, if only because then I might be moved to preach the good news, as Ed did on that bright morning.  

Easter is the perfect holiday because it's short, and it can't be a Monday, but you have to clean up real good, anyway.  It's Yom Kippur without all the solemnity.  You're forgiven today because a young rabbi died, but not in vain.  Only the priests and the ministers get through it unsmiling, and even they look happy when the ritual is over

What's Wrong With This Poll?

by James Livingston

Wed Apr 08, 2009

What is wrong with this picture?  Let me count the ways.  First, where does the idea that taxing the wealthy "might hurt the economy" come from?  All voices, you say, everybody knows it's wrong to raise taxes in a recession because, well, because Kennedy cut them and ended that nasty little downturn in his first year as president.  And because everybody knows you have to provide incentives to the wealthy in the form of lower taxes on their incomes if you expect them to invest properly and create the jobs we need.  And because everybody knows that if you redistribute income by taxing the wealthy, why, their incentives disappear, they stop investing, unemployment goes up, and there you go, you've made a bad situation worse.  

Growth requires investment, and investment requires incentives, and higher incomes for the already wealthy are the best available incentive.  An unequal distribution of income is a requirement of comfortable existence for the masses.  Everybody knows that "the prosperity of the few is to the ultimate benefit of the many," as a Financial Times columnist put it on Friday.

To which I say, bullshit.  We have reached the point in our development where redistribution has become the condition of growth, because private investment cannot and does not create those proverbial jobs, it does not underwrite growth in any meaningful or measurable sense.  Higher wages, more consumption do, and in the absence of the former, consumer credit fills the bill--as it did between 2001 and 2007, when the limits of wage income were reached and the value of the principal consumer durable (housing) leveled off, when corporations were investing less than their retained earnings, and, oh, when growth was real, even robust.  

For the Times to assume what the Wall Street Journal does, that supply-side economics makes sense of the world, is preposterous, but that is exactly what it is doing in presenting this absurd "possibility" to participants in its poll as if everybody knows that higher income taxes serve as a disincentive to invest.

Second, the motives of those who backed the plan when presented with that possibility are implicitly impugned because the potential complexities of their response are reduced to class resentment (maybe even "populist rage") by the insertion of that little word "still."  They were reminded of the conventional wisdom and refused to change their minds.  Having been informed that higher taxes in a recession are a recipe for economic disaster, these know-nothings stuck with their ignorance and anger.  Nothing to be done about them, they're as irretrievable as the Republican base when stirred by religious passion.  

No matter that there is absolutely no evidence that demonstrates any correlation between lower taxes on the wealthy, higher investment, and stronger or faster growth.  In fact, everybody knows that Martin Feldstein fudged the numbers "proving" this correlation back in the 1970s.  Since then, it's been an article of faith at best, a text that has become a magical incantation when Republicans in Congress must ward off evil Democrats who are intent upon balancing the budget or addressing economic crisis.  

Enough already.

The Red Herring of Populist Rage

by James Livingston

Sun Mar 29, 2009

Meanwhile, here's some excerpts from Amy Goodman's interview with Thomas Geoghegan, the feisty Chicago labor lawyer, posted recently at PORTSIDE.  Geoghegan wrote a piece for Harper's claiming that the real cause of the current economic crisis is the repeal of usury laws accomplished by deregulation of consumer credit since the 1970s.  

Please note the moral universe sketched by (1) the assignment of crisis causation to legislation that distorts the potentially benign forces of unadulterated, competitive markets; (2) the image of teenagers in malls brandishing credit cards; and (3) how individual consumer preferences--as against, say, collective bargaining through unions--permitted, even validated the financial contamination of the "real economy."  

Oh, the humanity!  When will false consciousness itself fail?  When will the benighted people rise up and defeat the plutocrats who corrupt the democracy?    
_______________________________________

THOMAS GEOGHEGAN: You know, if you are Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful
Life and can only get six percent, seven percent on
your loan, you want the loan to be repaid. Moral
character is important. You want to scrutinize
everybody very carefully. But if you're able to charge
30 percent or, in a payday lender case, 200 or 300
percent, you don't care so much if the loan-in fact,
you actually want the loan not to be repaid. You want
people to go into debt. You want to accumulate this
interest. And this addicted the financial sector to
very, very, very high rates of return compared to what
investors were used to getting in the real economy, the
manufacturing sector, General Motors, which would give
piddling five, six, seven percent returns.

So the capital in this country began to shift in the
financial sector. That's why the financial sector began
to bloat up. That's why we ended up, by 2006, having a
third of all profits going into the banks and the
financial firms and not into the real economy.

________________________________________________

[NB: The disproportionalities that led to crisis were induced by political connivance, not the normal workings of the market.  In other words, the consequences of surplus capital are not the problem.  In effect, Geoghegan is claiming that a self-regulating market would work just fine, or that if the right people with the right values were making the laws--not the fat cats, not the plutocrats--why, we'd be OK, and the "real economy" would not have been contaminated by the phony baloney of the financial sector.  Classical Populist delusions.]

What's Wrong With Nationalization?

by James Livingston

Mon Mar 09, 2009

Why not then just go ahead and nationalize them, thus forcing them to do their job of moving money from savings or deposits to productive investments, of converting idle surpluses to working capital?  

Because nationalizing the banks means replacing their management with public sector personnel whose purposes are not limited to mere profitability narrowly construed as shareholder value in the form of dividends.  In the near term, that move destroys their publicly traded value in the stock market and thus leaves taxpayers holding the bag by socializing the attendant losses.  In the long term, and this is more important, that move threatens the central principle of American politics--the supremacy of society over the state.

Waking Up Dead on Wednesday

by James Livingston

Sat Feb 28, 2009

"But here's the thing, I don't wanna die with my pants around my ankles, shittin' all over my self, I seen my friends do that shit, in the Starbucks bathroom, no, I mean it, I don't wanna wake up dead, you know what I'm sayin'?  That's right.  

"Brother says go to a 'meeting,' well there ain't no 'meeting' between me and that shit, I get out tomorrow, I know where I'm goin', I can't help myself, I got the money now, they tell me there ain't no bed in detox, the rehab is six, seven days, it ain't enough, look at me, I'm still shakin, look at my hands, here, look at that, told 'em yesterday I don't feel good enough to get outta bed, they start talkin' 'insubordination,' gonna throw me out yesterday 'cause I don't wanna get up and go to a fuckin' 'meeting.'

"Shit, I'm at a 'meeting,' look at me I'm here, it's gonna start all over again, I know when I leave I'm goin' to my friend's house.  I'm at a 'meeting,' man, I'm scared to go back out there, I know what's gonna happen.  I'm gonna wake up dead, that's what's gonna happen, and then it starts all over again, I'll be in Lenox Terrace, see my grandma, and she'll tell me no more money for 'yo drugs,' that's what she said last week, that's why I'm here, got no place to go.

"Could go to the emergency room, tell 'em I got 'pain in my chest' for a few days or say I'm gonna 'hurt myself,' put me in Bellevue, yeah, but I got the money now, I'm goin' to my friend's house, score some shit.  But I'm scared, man, I know where I'm goin'.  Gonna wake up dead.  That's all I got.  Thanks."

Terrorism and the Ending of the American Century

by James Livingston

Thu Feb 19, 2009

So I went back to the reading I've been doing, off and on, since 2004, when Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies surprised me and Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism offended me (the latter is the source of the bizarre notion that al Qaeda is the direct ideological descendent of fascism).  Then I rounded up a slew of newer books, like Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want (2006) and Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent (2008), and started thinking about this old and yet brand new phenomenon.  The result, which made the chapter half again as long, is below.  I'd very much appreciate any and all comments.  The manuscript goes into production soon, so hurry up.

Here's the original conclusion of the chapter:

In addressing and shaping the second stage of globalization--when the whole world was first knit together by the new fiber of direct investment as well as trade, when the whole world could see the new horizon of modernity--these original architects of the Open Door believed they had found a way to reduce the role of militaries in the articulation of foreign policies and the conduct of international relations.  They believed they had found a way to ease the inevitable passage of the seat of empire, perhaps even dispensing with war as its spastic, deadly accompaniment.  So conceived, the American Century was a post-imperialist design for a world accustomed to colonialism, racism, and war.  Ending it will not be easy, then, because it contains real hope for a world free of fear and want and violence, a world in which freedom just is development.  Still we must ask in our own time, in this third stage of globalization, has the Open Door now been adjourned as an intellectual agenda?  Is the ending of the American Century already accomplished?  

On being bipartisan

by James Livingston

Mon Feb 16, 2009

Republicans such as Lindsay Graham and John McCain and Eric Cantor--in calmer times the exemplars of guys who'd maybe buck the party line--now whine constantly that the Democrats haven't consulted them on the stimulus package, perhaps positioning themselves to say, "See, I told you it wouldn't work," but more likely demonstrating their credentials as bona fide party hacks.  Otherwise they're Republicans in name only, might as well go over to the dark side.

Talking heads such as Ron Brownstein, Mark Halperin, and Joe Scaraborough meanwhile say that Obama has to learn how to govern from the middle of the country rather than the middle of the Democratic caucus--otherwise he's not being bipartisan enough, see, he's not letting all voices be heard equally.  Yesterday Brownstein said exactly this on "Meet the Press," everybody nodded, and at 6:44 this morning on "Morning Joe," Halperin cited Brownstein, and everybody nodded, again already.

These silly men don't seem to understand that splitting the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is not bipartisanship once the center of the political universe has shifted decisively to the Left.  To give so-called conservatives equal time under this circumstance is to ignore the reality and the trend of public opinion--it's as if you're begging the guys who lost to change the rules and play the game over again.  

Obama is in fact governing from the middle of a country that has shifted to the Left, and is nowhere near center-right.  The Republicans will never understand this.  Their partisan purposes necessarily blind them, and feed their fond hopes of a return to power.  What excuse do the talking heads have?      

And now, a word about being bipartisan

by James Livingston

Mon Feb 16, 2009

Republicans such as Lindsay Graham and John McCain and Eric Cantor--in calmer times the exemplars of guys who'd maybe buck the party line--now whine constantly that the Democrats haven't consulted them on the stimulus package, perhaps positioning themselves to say, "See, I told you it wouldn't work," but more likely demonstrating their credentials as bona fide party hacks.  Otherwise they're Republicans in name only, might as well go over to the dark side.

Talking heads such as Ron Brownstein, Mark Halperin, and Joe Scarborough meanwhile say that Obama has to learn how to govern from the middle of the country rather than the middle of the Democratic caucus--otherwise he's not being bipartisan enough, see, he's not letting all voices be heard equally.  Yesterday Brownstein said exactly this on "Meet the Press," everybody nodded, and at 6:44 this morning on "Morning Joe" Halperin approvingly cited Brownstein, and everybody nodded, again already.

These silly men don't seem to understand that splitting the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is not bipartisanship once the center of the political universe has shifted decisively to the Left.  To give so-called conservatives equal time under this circumstance is to ignore the reality and the trend of public opinion--it's as if you're begging the guys who lost to change the rules and play the game over again.  

Obama is in fact governing from the middle of a country that has shifted to the Left, and is nowhere near center-right.  The Republicans will never understand this.  But their partisan purposes necessarily blind them, and feed their fond hopes of a return to power.  What excuse do the talking heads have?      

Lincoln the Revolutionary

by James Livingston

Fri Feb 13, 2009

Since 1948, with the publication of Richard Hofstadter's essay on Abraham Lincoln, the conventional wisdom has been that he was the conservative ballast in what could have been a successful radical movement against slavery--a movement that would have obliterated the slaveholders, made "40 Acres and a Mule" the right of every freedman, and thus finished the Second American Revolution.  

He was, after all, the moderate Republican from the West who could carry Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania by persuading white racist audiences in these states with a political pantomime of Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic Senator from Illinois.  He was, after all, the president-elect who, in his first inaugural address, offered the South a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right of property in slaves where slavery already existed.  

He was, after all, the president who countermanded military field orders in 1861 which would have freed thousands of slaves in Missouri.  He was, after all, the president who issued an Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that applied only to territory still beyond the control of the Union Army.  And he was, after all, the president who said that "colonization"--the export of the social question--was the solution to the problem of the freedmen as late as 1863, that is, after the Proclamation had consigned slavery to the dustbin of history.

This conservative and quite possibly racist Lincoln is no less the product of folklore than the Great Emancipator of high school textbooks.  He was, in fact, a conservative.  But he was also a radical.  And this unstable isotope of conservatism and radicalism made him a revolutionary.  But how he could be all three?  

Spiritual Foundations, Virtual Sanctuaries

by James Livingston

Wed Feb 11, 2009

The conversation was intense, earnest, and continuous.  In fact, the six kept debating as they left the train and climbed the stairs to the waiting room.  Two females trailed behind, keeping their silence.  I don't know how the debate ended, but I can tell you it kept me thinking.  

Advertisements for Myself among Others

by James Livingston

Mon Feb 02, 2009

"Moral Hazard," a band composed of me and Matt Friedman, also of Rutgers, has uploaded its first original song at MySpace (words and music by me).  Check it out.  There are many imposters on the site, so once you search Music by artist name, scroll down to the Moral Hazard from New York, New York, and play the thing.  All comments welcome.

Enter Smoot-Hawley, Stage Left

by James Livingston

Wed Jan 28, 2009

Anal Erotism 2.0: Bernanke Shoots the Moon

by James Livingston

Mon Jan 26, 2009

So don't expect a "mark to market" movement anytime soon.  The banks can't sell these assets without disappearing--which is why they're stockpiling what Ben Bernanke calls "excess reserves" instead of using the $350 billion from TARP more creatively, as it were.  And don't expect Obama to browbeat them into making more loans.  They won't.  They can't.  That is why nationalization of the banks makes sense right now.

Anal Erotism: Cartman and Bernanke Seen Cavorting

by James Livingston

Fri Jan 16, 2009

But I must say that Obama's election did feel like an ending.  What more was there to say?  The holidays that followed helped me to take a vacation from everything.  But I'm back.  I know you're happy about it.

Today our theme is "anal erotism," as Freud so clinically called it in three, er, seminal essays.  It takes two forms here, first an excerpt from my forthcoming book that addresses the excremental obsession of "South Park."  I have revised this section of Chapter 5 (on TV, music, and computers) in response to the series editor's worries about the structure of proof; the revision contains a methodological manifesto in defense of psychoanalysis as a theory of culture which is uniquely equipped to address the extreme anality of our times.

The second form of anal erotism indulged here is a brief update on the so-called financial crisis, which takes as its point of departure Ben Bernanke's recent speech at Mick Jagger's alma mater.  Money is a sublimated and sanitized version of shit, according to Freud and Ferenczi and others.  Clearly we're up to our eyeballs in it.

___________________

Here's the excerpt.  It follows a general consideration of cartoons on TV, which, in turn, followed from a study of "The Little Mermaid" and "Toy Story" in Chapter 4.