paineperdu

[paineperdu]

February 11th - Virtuous Bankers, Anne Murphy

Virtuous Bankers is a work of institutional history, but in a way that is distinct from the way I'd normally use that term - it is not just history viewed through the lenses of institutions, (compare Marc Levinson's The Box, which I would classify as history viewed through the lens of institutional actors) though it is that, but it is primarily a work of history about a specific institution. In this way, anyone hoping to discern immediately what the Bank of England was doing - the Bank of England as an indicator of larger historical trends - may be disappointed, and should instead perhaps turn to the opening sections (at least for the period in question) of David Kynaston's Till Time's Last Sand for this information as it pertains to the time period. Rather, Murphy is writing about what the institution was like, on a truly day to day level. The long arc of history is obscured by the quotidian focus. Of course, this is not a failing, rather the intended focus of the book. But certainly those looking for anything particularly earth-shattering or view-reorienting may be disappointed. Having this book as a basis may, however, allow better understanding of the Bank's function should it come up as an indicator in other sources.

The reader of this book would certainly gain more from it given three things, things that I happen to lack. Firstly, a better comparative overview of public finance and credit in other nations, in particular other European nations, at the time. In Till Time's last Sand, David Kynaston refers to interactions between the Bank of England and the Bank of France regarding the BoE augmenting its low bullion supplies, for instance. But what made English or British finance distinct would be enlightening when it came to examining the precise impacts that day-to-day operations and scope of services may have had on that. Second, a better understanding than mine of the precise nature and operation of financial mechanisms, particular the financial mechanisms of the 18th century, would be extremely beneficial. I have a passing understanding of the nature of bills of exchange but there are certainly sections where if I wanted a stronger understanding I would have to focus harder than I perhaps had been, reread a couple times, or seek out a more focused secondary source - on the functions of bills and banknotes, the process of drawing, the notion of "ready money" and the nature of regular transactions in the period. Thirdly, an understanding of the context that public debt and finance played in Britain's empire would be useful for situating the knowledge from this book in a meaningful framework. A source like HV Bowen's The Business of Empire, cited in the book, would be perhaps useful, among others.

The appendices are excellent and very comprehensive, including all the reports of the first commission and an entire list of the bank's impressive staff roster, as well as their wages. Something striking noted in the book is that the wage of 50 pounds a year had not increased in the century since the foundation of the bank, and was hardly enough to live in London except on a very tight budget. There are many things in this book that one could potentially speculate about in general terms - the involvement of clerks in stock trading and the resulting conflict of interest, or the underdevelopment of security technology at the time, or the difficulty of dealing with large amounts of paper records, but having the actual references for this information is invaluable, and many things - like the particular managerial culture of the bank and similar institutions - is fascinating granular knowledge that we should take care to research rather than our tendency to assume from thin air.

The final interesting factor is the difficulty that I have in immediately connecting this to any kind of theoretical economic approach, either modern or contemporary to the period. Certainly we know from Ricardo that the economic and financial policy of the state was influenced by economic theory, but it's not immediately clear to me what relationship the state had from a theoretical policy standpoint to the act of borrowing and public debt, or how that impacted the bank as attitudes may have shifted. (Again, this might be more of Kynaston's longer-view wheelhouse.) The connection between economic theory and specific infrastructure can wear a bit thin at times - compare again Levinson, mentioned above, on the dependency of the notions of free trade and comparative advantage on the actual physical capacities of international trade - the reference point here being the limitations of clerks and accountants working on paper records to the business of stock trading and the issuing of debt. I'd like to be able, in future, to link this granular analysis of the functioning of the bank to state economic policy and theory, as well as to a broader quote unquote 'materialist' analysis of state and capitalist structure at the time. None of this is obvious from the book, but I don't doubt it could be achieved with a little work.

[paineperdu]

September 5th - Hirschman

Over the past few days I read Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph. I think my thinking, my writing about this book might start with the small note appended after the short final part, in which he puts forward a pocket-sized - or even business-card sized - argument for intellectual history.

He points out that where the repetition of historical events is very rarely exact, the repetition of thought - of reaction to recurrent or similar problems by means of a process that abstracts away their particularities and contingencies in search of their truly characteristic core - often repeats verbatim. He presents it as "almost painful" that Keynes would present as an example of his "characteristically low-key defense of capitalism" the by then two hundred year old idea that commercial enterprise is a much less damaging, a much softer, pursuit than the pursuit of power over others. (Though, is the pursuit of money, even if not for that aim, the pursuit of a form of potential power over others?) He ends by saying

I conclude that both critics and defenders of capitalism could improve upon their arguments through knowledge of the episode in intellectual history that has been recounted here. This is probably all one can ask of history, and of the history of ideas in particular: not to resolve issues, but to raise the level of debate.

That is really what this book is about - an episode in intellectual history. It does not claim any particular causative relation of the thoughts and writings presented to the material development of society - and here I will insert a large digression.

Hirschman seems to have a kind of Marxist leaning, but not doctrinally, rather just as a sympathy. On page 81 he ascribes to Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar the "common conviction that economic changes are the basic determinants of social and political transformation" and cites Ronald Meek "in particular his 1954 essay 'The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology'" - without particular comment on the Marxist implications and leanings of what might be called a materialist perspective. Perhaps paranoically, I view this uneditorialized citation of Marxist scholarship as a sign of sympathy to Marxism.

Additionally, Hirschman seems pessimistic or at least ambivalent of the capacity of ideas to effectively shape history. Late in the book he contrasts the unintended consequences of human action with its "structural obverse" - "actions and decisions are often taken becasue they are earnestly and fully expected to have certain effects that then wholly fail to materialize." More insightfully, he points out that "once these desired effects fail to happen and refuse to come into the world, the fact that they were originally counted on is likely not only forgotten but actively repressed." The final part of the book - as described also in my introductory paragraph above - seems very concerned with the effects of forgetting, intentional and unintentional. That is why he bypasses the more "modest" and familiar (perhaps) argument that reliance on the state for subsistence restrains our capacity for dissidence - he feels the unfamiliar, the stranger argument is more provocative of examining our own thinking about capitalism. (To end the digression with an aside, Hirschman gets points with me for his single allusion to Michael Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension - there is also a fun irony in choosing the younger Polanyi in a book of economic history)

So what is the unfamiliar, the stranger argument? It is also a particular episode and a particular line of thought. Hirschman alludes in passing to the argument that private property is necessary because it provides an alternative source of subsistence to the state and thus allows for the possibility of dissent, but he mentions it only so as not to discuss it. So which argument is he discussing?

I won't reconstruct the entire lineage in detail. You should read the book for that, it's not really what this post is for. In extremely brief terms - at the tail end of the middle ages, the passions, conceptually emergent from Greek thought as inherited by the Scholastics, take a particular place in nascent political thought, particularly in Machiavelli, where they are seen as something requiring restriction. Eventually the passions cease to be seen as a block, and one passion, avarice, becomes isolated from the others and seen as a passion that can hold the others in check. From this idea of an isolated passion of avarice comes the idea of a more rational notion of "interest" which itself becomes more specifically economic. This notion of interest counterpoised to passion is used to argue that the dominance of commerce places certain restrictions on the arbitrary power of the sovereign. We jump forward, over a very interesting discussion of the use of the French doux, to Adam Smith, who in one fell swoop renders the entire discussion incoherent to modern eyes in a kind of stunning dialectical move - economic interest is resultant from a wide variety of the passions, but, in their total contribution to this interest, the entire collection of other passions and motivations becomes effectively subsumed within economic interest, and human society can then be investigated on the basis of the latter alone. The range of ground social inquiry can cover suddenly becomes tightened, restricted, readying the ground for intellectual specialization. And the whole prior discussion vanishes from view.

Of course, as the earlier discussion of failed goals may intimate, the world regulated into order by the imperatives of commerce failed to materialize, and where it did materialize, it materialized in the form of law-and-order despotism. The actualization of the image was perverse.

Hirschman says

In sum, capitalism was supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon to be denounced as its worst feature.

That is what I find most interesting about this book. I very very rarely hear arguments for capitalism that actively advocate for its restrictive-compulsive features. Those are the features I as a communist am most likely to discuss, and, if I must play devil's advocate for capitalism or if I feel a particular critique is missing the point, it is often in this direction that I'll gesture. I do feel we can get bogged down in these intellectual critiques. A particularly powerful historical-empirical critique of capitalism, say, would be to demonstrate that the conditions of the English industrial textile industry were totally impossible without the underpinnings of triangle trade slavery, without colonial land seizure etc. and tearing the false image of 'freedom' out of the real throat and guts of capitalism feels much more important and much less flippant than tearing it out of its ideological mouth. But I think, as above, there is an important place for intellectual history.

[paineperdu]

August 31st - Ellman

Today I am reading Michael Ellman's Socialist Planning, and I am reminded at one particular juncture of Raymond Geuss' short text Philosophy and Real Politics. Ellman discusses the later periods of socialist planning, saying

Even in those countries where the situation after the reforms were introduced was better than before, there was still widespread dissatisfaction with the economic system. For example, in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s there was widespread dissatisfaction with the steady increase in the gap between Hungarian and Austrian living standards. In China there was widespread dissatisfaction with corruption, oppression, and environmental deterioration. Similarly, policy makers in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s were envious of the economic achievements of Western Europe, and in China were conscious both of the lag behind the advanced countries and the need for further economic reforms.

The careful reader may notice (as one would earlier in the text) the relatively unelaborated distinction between "advanced" and "backwards" nations and national economies, but we will leave that aside for now. I remember Geuss' advice to ask the question, after Lenin "Who, whom?" - who is doing what to whom? Political life is often characterized by propositions that hide human action - "unemployment has increased" disguises "some number of employers have chosen to fire some number of employees." The Ellman passage lacks a whom, but it nevertheless brings to mind the question "who is dissatisfied" - policy makers, perhaps? This is not to argue with Ellman on the level of the presence of dissatisfaction - this is not apologetics - but it seems to be a lacking detail that is not necessarily outside the scope of the text.

[paineperdu]

May 28th - Freud and Merleau-Ponty

today, this weekend, this past little while, I am reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Sigmund Freud’s Three Case Studies. in the latter, where progress is faster, i have finished the case of the rat man, archetypal and unnervingly relatable obsessional neurotic. in obsession, memory persists but affect is severed and displaced, and the return of the negative affect, fear of which is spurred by the retention of the infantile belief in the omnipotence of one’s thoughts, occurs precisely in those places where the defense mechanisms have arisen. the wish for the death of the lover, the father, the competitor in love, &c. inserts itself unconsciously as a distraction in the prayers for their preservation, as we might be disturbed writing a letter, and we are forced in our uncertainty to repeat the procedure - unless the affect breaks through, is articulated. “May God not protect her.” Doubt spreads across the neurotic’s mental life, and the defensive gestures regress to infantile autoeroticism. obsession is a condition of misrecognition, disconnection, and regression. through articulation, the misrecognition can be put right, the affect reconnected to the memory, the patient freed from regression and repetition. (this point, incidentally, is why i do not agree with Sedgwick’s assessment of Freudian readings - Freud without the cure is not Freud at all.) His final note, made long after the fact in 1923, 14 years after the case’s original publication: “The patient’s mental health was restored to him by the analysis which I have reported upon in these pages. Like so many other young men of value and promise, he perished in the great war.”

i am on to the case of the ‘psychotic Dr. Schreber’, whose analysis is made at a distance and by virtue of his autobiography. Freud attempts to reconstruct the ‘theologico-psychological system’ that would lead Schreber to believe that himself and all of humanity would be redeemed on condition of his miraculous transformation into a woman. God as an infinite bundle of nerves, who, having only intercoursed with the dead, does not understand the living - “And thereupon comes the question, ‘Why don’t you sh--?’” - Freud insists on the reproduction of, but disavows, Schreber’s censorship of profanity - “to which this brilliant repartee is made on my behalf: ‘Because I’m so stupid or something.’” God is incapable, by his nature, of learning, and so torments those to whom he is connected (by the attractive force of the overexcitation of nerves) with repeated demands of this absurd nature. and so on. but we really see here Freud’s attentiveness, his unwillingness to dismiss the delusion outright, his recognition of Schreber not just as someone possessing excellent faculties and an absurd delusion but excellent faculties within that delusion itself.

Merleau-Ponty reads slowly for me - high-density, in a much more intense way than freud. He too, in this chapter ‘The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility’ is dealing with case-studies, in particular a patient who can complete intentional motions, such as his work in leatherworking, and that of grabbing, for instance, his own nose, but cannot point to a specific location on his body, or precisely identify a touched location, or even differentiate the two points of a compass placed on his body without being allowed to move the compass, to lift in succession the different points. Merleau-Ponty is discussing the privileged status of teleological motions and the constitution of the body-matrix, but not in terms of something the patient might lack - “Illness [...] is a complete form of existence” - the operation here is one of substitution, displacement (as in psychoanalysis). the patient is confined as regards his body as potentiality - he is only able to engage with actuality, with concrete activity. The critique of association theory is brought up again by the demonstration of the difficulty of discerning objects by stringing together their actual, immediate characteristics, rather than engaging with them in the potentiality of their other sides - the patient has to count in his conscious mind the right angles of the dice because his capacity for body as potentiality - that the dice could be turned, rather than needing to be turned - is inhibited. recall the first chapter of part one, and we see the building up of an argument about attention, potentiality, and potential attention, potential alteration of perspective.

they share an ethos of attentiveness, a search for the nature of the ‘normal’ within the exaggerated signs of the ‘pathological’ - seeing those two words together i am worried i will try again to read canguilhem.