crytical

Malise Ruthven

Bibliothèque Nationale de France
A detail from the Catalan Atlas, attributed to the Majorcan Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques, 1375
Over the next two months the great domed interior of what used to be the British Museum’s reading room, where Marx researched Das Kapital and Bram Stoker (creator of Dracula) was a reader, is host to Hajj, a remarkable exhibition that celebrates the most sacred event in the Islamic calendar, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The exhibition seems more than a cultural event—a milestone, perhaps, in the public recognition and acceptance of Islam at the heart of British life. Conceived by British Museum director Neil MacGregor and the museum’s Islamic art curator Venetia Porter with assistance from the Saudi Arabian government, it is an unusual collaboration between a museum dedicated to secular learning and the current rulers of Islam’s holiest sites, who have lent many important works.
Presiding over its opening in late January were Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah, deputy Saudi foreign minister and son of the Saudi King, and Prince Charles—the heir to the British throne. There was a pleasing irony in the ceremony’s being held (with soft drinks only) in the gallery devoted to the eighteenth century Enlightenment with the princes reading their speeches in front of a Roman statue of the goddess Minerva. Prince Charles, who will presumably be the next Supreme Governor of the Church of England, spoke of the show’s “timeless truth that all life is rooted in the unity of our Creator.” Prince Abdulaziz—by Saudi standards an enlightened figure who sponsors translations of scientific texts into and out of Arabic—referred to his country’s “tangible efforts to spread peace all over the world,” a comment that raised few eyebrows from the assembled ranks of the British establishment, despite recent Saudi efforts to help the ruling Sunni dynasty in Bahrain suppress demonstrations by mainly Shiite protestors.
But while there were political implications, this was not in any strict sense, a political forum and in any case British royals, including Prince Charles, appear more comfortable with the hereditary rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, whom they regard as kindred spirits, than the uncertainties unleashed by the Arab Spring.
Hajj was organised in partnership with the King Abdul Aziz Public Library in Riyadh, which facilitated the loan of objects from Saudi Arabia, and helped with some of the texts, as Porter explained. (Funding came from the HSBC Amanah bank and the British government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.) And while Saudi Arabian officials had no role in the choice or presentation of other objects loaned from more than thirty other collections, the organisers have clearly gone to some lengths to accommodate Saudi sensitivities and to undergird the monarch’s role as Guardian of Islam’s two holiest shrines (namely Mecca, where Muhammad was born and Medina where he is buried).
One of five obligatory “pillars” of the Islamic faith, the Hajj unites Muslims from all classes, backgrounds and traditions. It includes the ritual circumambulation of the Ka‘ba, the cubular building that stands at the centre of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, in the direction of which Muslims in all parts of the world face during daily prayers, as well as other demanding rituals conducted in the neighbourhood of Mecca.

Abdel-Haleem Said
Graffiti depicting the Hajj on a house in al-Asadiyya, Egypt, 2010
The Ka’ba is a somewhat stark flat-roofed structure, fifty feet high with a forty-foot façade and slightly shorter side walls, constructed from the layers of the grey-blue stone found in the hills surrounding Mecca. As the captions in the exhibition state, Muslims believe it was built by Abraham (Ibrahim), the original monotheist and with his son Ishmael (Ismail) ancestor of the Arabs). Abraham is said to have instituted monotheism and ordained the pilgrimage at God’s command, but later generations fell away, allowing idol worship to prevail until Muhammad “restored” the true religion of Abraham. The show does not mention the scholarly questions that have been raised about the Abrahamic account. The Encyclopaedia of Islam—the canonical source for non-believers, states that “aside from Muslim traditions, practically nothing is known of the history of the Ka‘ba,” although Mecca (under the name Macorba) is mentioned in Ptolemy’s Geography, so it is assumed that the shrine existed in the second century CE.
In imitation of the tawaf (the ritual of circumambulation around the Ka’ba, which is performed by pilgrims by walking seven times around it in a counter-clockwise direction) the visitor to the beautifully-designed exhibition glides up a curving gallery, to encounter a series of displays showing the history of the Hajj through the ages. A Saudi lady, who had performed the pilgrimage several times, told me the experience brought tears to her eyes: “When you enter this exhibition you feel you are entering Mecca”—a city forbidden to non-Muslims, including the British Museum people who curated the show. The exhibits include artifacts, maps, textiles, documents from some forty collections, including those loaned from Saudi Arabia, notably the great kiswa, the black silken hanging embroidered with gold calligraphy, that covers the building.

Nasser D. Khalili Collection
Mahmal, red silk with silver and gold thread on a wooden frame, Cairo, 1867-1876.
Until the Saudi occupation of Mecca in 1926 the kiswa was sent annually from Cairo in a richly decorated camel-borne palanquin known as the mahmal, of which the exhibition has a superb example. Archive footage from 1918 shows the pomp with which this august aniconic symbol of Islamic devotion began its journey.. An edited version of Journey to Mecca, a recent Imax film, conveys some powerful images of Islamic faith in action: the ritual of prostration, honed over fifteen centuries – as the believers bow in perfectly coordinated movements in circles that radiate outwards from the Ka‘ba; the standing at the sacred mount of Arafat outside Mecca, which the white-robed pilgrims cover completely, like some vast colony of sea-birds; and a speeded-up view of the tawaf, where the Ka‘ba stands majestically—like the mysterious black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001—an otherworldly symbol surrounded by the blurred gyrations of the worshippers.
The impression is underscored by a striking statement about the merging of individual identities in the mass by the Shiite intellectual Ali Shariati, who died in 1977 two years before the outbreak of the Iranian revolution he helped to inspire: “As you circumambulate and move closer to the Ka‘ba you feel like a small stream merging with a big river. You have been transformed into a particle that is gradually melting and disappearing. This is love at its absolute peak.”
The skeptically-minded will find some significant gaps in the show’s presentation of its subject. For example the caption for the mahmal footage is somewhat reticent, pointing out only that the practice of sending the embroidered palanquin from Egypt was discontinued in 1926. No mention is made of the trouble that erupted between the Egyptian pilgrims and the Saudi Wahhabis who had recently taken over the holy city. Leadership of the Hajj and protecting the pilgrims from marauding beduin were the foremost prerequisites of Islamic legitimacy and were reflected in contests over Mecca, the ritual centre of the Islamic world. In 930, for instance, ultra-radicals of the Carmathian sect wrenched the sacred Black Stone from the south-eastern corner of the Ka‘ba and took it back to their stronghold on the Gulf near modern Bahrain. It was only returned – in pieces – more than two decades later, after the Abbasid caliph had paid a massive ransom. Given its historic and ritual significance, it would have been useful to have had a display showing the stone’s interesting but mysterious provenance. The captions relate only the Muslim belief that the stone, said to have been brought by the Angel Gabriel, was originally white, but became blackened by its contact with sinful humanity.
Some observers, including the English travellers Richard Burton who visited Mecca disguised as an Afghan in 1853 and Eldon Rutter who made the pilgrimage in 1926 considered it to be meteorite, others a fragment of rock created by meteorite impact. Such theories point in the direction of an object rendered sacred by reason of its extra-terrestrial origin. Fortunately some of the exhibition’s omissions are filled in the catalog, which contains informative articles by Robert Irwin and Ziaduddin Sardar. (My own contribution to the catalog, over-generously acknowledged, was limited to providing minor editorial suggestions, although I will have the opportunity to discuss some of the anthropological dimensions of the pilgrimage at an event scheduled for March 23).
Irwin’s essay balances the exhibitions wholesomely positive displays by pointing out how the pilgrimage had the disastrous side-effect of spreading cholera during the nineteenth century; while Sardar mentions several recent disasters, including the deaths of more than 1400 pilgrims in a stampede in 1990 and more than 300 when fire swept through a camp in 1997. Sardar also acknowledges the astonishing “improvements” being made to the holy site by its Saudi beneficiaries, which include the Royal Clock Tower, a replica of Big Ben five times the size of the London original. No surprise, perhaps, that this astonishing testimony to the taste of Saudi Arabia’s princes finds no place in the British Museum’s hallowed precincts, though images are freely available on the Internet.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France
A painting from the Maqamat of al-Hariri by Yahya al-Wasiti, Iraq, 1237 C.E.
In part, the exhibition’s unskeptical approach seems also to reflect the fact that it is dedicated to a living religion, not an antique belief system. It lays out Muslim beliefs without exploring the archaeological and anthropological matrices from which they issue. The question this raises is: should a scholarly and secular institution refrain from such exploration in order to accommodate religious sensitivities?
In this regard it may be noted that the lead essay on the early Hajj was commissioned from Hugh Kennedy, a “safe” medieval historian, rather than a scholar of religion such as G. R. Hawting. In line with the views of some western revisionists Hawting suggests that the “idolatry” against which Muhammad inveighed may not have been an actual practice, but a rhetorical trope used in arguments between rival monotheists.
On the other hand, the exhibition’s endorsement of orthodox Muslim beliefs conveys an important public message. Within a week of the exhibition’s opening nine Muslim men including seven British citizens, received prison sentences of 12 to 13 years after pleading guilty to a series of terrorist offences, including plots to place a bomb in the toilets of the London Stock Exchange. Inspired by Anwar al-Awlaki, the US citizen and al-Qaeda leader killed in a drone attack in Yemen last year, the group epitomises the alienation felt by many young Muslims from mainstream British society. An exhibition that celebrates the Islamic faith inside Britain’s foremost institution of culture must serve to counter feelings of exclusion.
Numerous schools with Muslim pupils have signed up for group visits to the show, not to mention coach loads of visitors from cities with substantial Muslim populations. The exhibition, with its blend of history, culture and the art that speaks to faith, and arises out of it, takes the British Museum beyond its traditional remit of preserving the past and puts it at the heart of the public debate about Islam and the place of Muslims in British society. Tactful, non-critical references to the beliefs held by Muslim majorities seems a reasonable price to pay for this bold initiative which MacGregor sees as serving the Museum’s “guiding principle of using objects and the forum of an exhibition to try to understand the complex world in which we live”. Minerva’s owl may fly at dusk but for Islam’s active believers, and the petrodollar Guardians of the Holy Places, this is still mid-afternoon.
Hajj is on view at the British Museum through April 15.
nyrb.com

29.2.2012

“… It greatly confuses the issue to assume … that social status is determined solely by income. Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but – and this is the essential point – generally persist from birth to death. Hence the anomalous individuals that you find in every class of society. … you find petty shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the bricklayer and who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are considered) the bricklayer’s social superiors; you find boarding-school boys running Indian provinces and public school men touting vacuum cleaners. If social stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, the public-school man would assume a cockney accent the day his income dropped below £200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the Old School Tie as to a life-line. And even the (“H”-less) millionaire, though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and learns a B.B.C accent, seldom succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to. It is in fact very difficult to escape from the class into which you have been born [emphasis added].
As prosperity declines, social anomalies grow commoner. You don’t get more (“H”-less) millionaires, but you do get more and more public-school men touting vacuum cleaners and more and more small shopkeepers driven into the workhouse. Large sections of the middle class are being gradually proletarianised; but the important point is that they do not, at any rate in the first generation, adopt the proletarian outlook. Here am I, for instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class income. Which class do I belong to? Economically, I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with: the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners? It is probable that I personally would side with the working class. But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who are in approximately the same position? And what about that far larger class, running into millions this time – the office-workers and the black-coated employees of all kinds – whose traditions are less definitely middle class but who certainly would not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realise it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready made Fascist Party.”
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell 1937

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Enrique Chagoya: The Headache, A Print after George Cruikshank, 2010
The title “Infinite Jest” gives a very partial impression of the survey of caricatures showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 4. Hamlet said those words about Yorick, but Yorick was a jester at the court of Elsinore. That is not the same as a satirist. There may be something expansive about the very idea of jest, because it obeys no rules and draws hints from the humor of the audience. The art of caricature, by contrast, is finite, bounded and severe. Blake might have been speaking of caricature when he blasted the “soft” outlines of Rubens: “The Man who asserts that there is no such Thing as Softness in art, & that every thing in Art is Definite & Determinate, has not been told this by Practise, but by Inspiration & Vision.” A bad jest may redeem itself by having a better for its sequel. A flat or vapid or wrong-headed caricature cannot be pardoned. The province of satire is wit, and when wit goes wrong it signifies not a tactical error but a defect of mind.

Max Beerbohm: George Bernard Shaw, 1906
The show at the Met is limited in another sense. It is deliberately modest and selective, a sampler to whet the appetite of the stroller. It scarcely pretends to cover the history of a mode that was made possible by Hogarth, and was brought to perfection by his successors during the Napoleonic wars. The exhibition takes up three small rooms and a few feet of a wall. The great names of caricature—James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Honoré-Victorin Daumier—are all present but lightly accounted for; the span is from the last decades of the eighteenth century to David Levine at the end of the twentieth.
One genius of the art has been inexplicably omitted: Max Beerbohm. Yet Beerbohm’s caricatures are as inseparable from the Edwardian age as Gillray’s are from the reign of George III and the Regency years. The victim of a Daumier or a Gillray might touch the wounded part and wonder how long it would take to heal; but Beerbohm’s models were rendered so finely and dispatched with an air so free of malice that they had no grounds for protest. His characters, from Winston Churchill to Bernard Shaw to Henry James, never knew how incurably they were themselves until he caught them. It would have made a welcome relief at the Met—between Rowlandson’s pustuled whores and the monstrous jowl of Siegfried Woldhek’s Cheney (secret papers protruding from every fold of his jacket)–-to come upon “Mr Tennyson, reading ‘In Memoriam’ to his Sovereign.” Beerbohm’s print showed the Poet Laureate and the Queen in a palace reading room which only they were formed to inhabit, Tennyson ceremonially seated but kicking up his legs with restrained enthusiasm, while Queen Victoria sits in a far chair across the room, her hands folded in her lap. Poet and sovereign are separated by a shoreless politeness.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Wendel Dietterlin, the Younger: Procession of Monstrous Figures, 1615
“Infinite Jest” locates the beginnings of caricature, as other histories have also done, in Leonardo’s grotesques (visi monstrosi), closely followed by a “Procession of Motionless Figures” by Wendel Dietterlin the Younger (1614-69). Where Leonardo offered a view of deformed physiognomy, Dietterlin is on the track of true obscenity, with his creature-like humans and barely human creatures, drawn, as the catalog says, from the arsenal of Bosch and Breughel. A short jump further on and we are surrounded by artists who paint as successors to the prose of Swift and the poetry of Pope. They may have supposed they were working a topical sideline, but somehow they show a new expertise. They seem to have looked closely at Hogarth’s “Election” and “A Rake’s Progress” and “Marriage a la Mode.” At the same time their palettes throw off allusions with the greatest of ease to Michelangelo and Raphael.
Caricature is the most evanescent and pedantic of the visual arts. Spend an hour or two in a great collection like the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, and the impression is exhausting—so many rich and recoverable jokes are waiting to be unlocked, yet even a reasonably informed viewer stands on the outside looking in. It takes the unearthing of controversies, month by month and often week by week, to catch the meaning of a posture or the sense of a punch-line. For in the eighteenth century, the words of the visual satirist were almost as important as the image; the thought balloons in Gillray are commonly full to overflowing. Among the satirical draftsmen of the later eighteenth century, the words of the day and the density of art-historical echoes are equally essential to the intended effect.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Honoré Daumier: Le Cauchemar (The Nightmare), 1832
This brings a curious risk to any exhibition. The isolation of an image can sap it of relevant meaning. The Metropolitan show gives us, for example, “The Nightmare,” a Daumier improvisation of 1832 in which Lafayette’s sleeping frame is rudely haunted by a dream in the form of a pear sitting on his stomach: familiar shorthand, the catalog tells us, for the drooping oval figure of Louis-Philippe to whom Lafayette had “agreed to give up his republican aspirations.” Here, then, is an instance of a shape becoming a person: the sort of casual allegory on which a great deal of caricature depends. And Daumier’s cartoon seems plain enough, but arbitrary and a little flat, unless you know that it stands at three removes from its prototype: Henri Fuseli’s gothic “Night Mare.” Fuseli’s erotically exposed dreaming woman, an incubus crouched on her belly, had already received a first homage in John Boyne’s “The Night Mare or Hag Riddn Minister” (1784) where Charles Fox, perched atop a sleeping Lord Shelburne, showers turds on his face. Fox was the insupportable ally who spoilt Shelburne’s chance of ministerial advancement. The same image was quarried yet again in Rowlandson’s send-up “The Covent Garden Night Mare,” in which Fox himself lies supine, knocked out by satiety from drink and gambling, and the incubus looks bored and put-upon. All of this baggage—unpacked with care by Diana Donald in her book The Age of Caricature—Daumier knew well; and for him and his cleverest viewers, it thickened the comedy of Lafayette and the royal pear.
James Gillray (1757-1815) was a genius as astonishing and as visionary as Blake. But he worked from the outside in. When he draws William Pitt the Younger, who was twice prime minister between 1783 and 1806, or Edmund Burke, or the Whig leader who was Pitt’s archrival, Charles James Fox, he captures these politicians as determined entities. (And they are always the same: Fox is a bandit, Burke is a Jesuit, Pitt is a benign but insinuating house-guest, his backbone flexible as a closet rod.) They are helpless abstractions of what they were always going to be. With Gillray, the costume becomes the man, and visage and posture are the leading elements of costume. So, where Blake drew the “Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth” and made it the terror of two continents—“that Angel who, pleased to perform the Almighty’s orders, rides on the whirlwind, directing the storms of war”—Gillray saw Pitt as an almost expressionless personage of mediocre pretensions, unusual only in his ability to carve up the world with a knife and fork.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
James Gillray: The Plumb-Pudding in Danger;–or–State Epicures Taking un Petit Souper, 1805
“The Plumb-Pudding in Danger;—or—State Epicures Taking un Petit Souper” (1805) is in the show, and it is one of Gillray’s best. You see Pitt lean and joyless here, yet wonderfully potent; he holds in reserve the shrewdness of a card player and the patience of a master poisoner. As he slices the pudding of Europe with his fellow diner, Napoleon, his eyes are calm and focused while Napoleon’s are popping with appetite. Poor Napoleon: his huge hunger is mounted on a tiny frame, and the red and blue feathers that sprout from his cap are as long as his legs. We are put in mind of the traits that made Pitt the longest-serving prime minister in Britain, and prompted William Hazlitt’s wonder at his power “to baffle opposition, not from strength or firmness, but from the evasive ambiguity and impalpable nature of his resistance.”

Metropolitan Museum of Art
George Cruikshank: The Prince of Whales or the Fisherman at Anchor, 1812
For Gillray, all politics was grotesque. He began as a Whig but was paid at last by Tories, and he made them look good, more or less. His misanthropy (anarchic, at bottom, as misanthropy tends to be) found itself checked and pushed to favour authority by an inveterate hatred of the crowd; most of all, of course, the Parisian crowd of the 1790s. Gillray’s cartoons often have the scope of canvasses, and they evoke large actions and relations; yet his faces are good enough to temper one’s appreciation of any other cartoonist. His influence was wide, beginning with George Cruikshank—whose “Prince of Whales or the Fisherman at Anchor” (1812), an obese George IV swimming among his allies and his mistresses, is a “teaser” deployed to open the show with a flourish.
Probably Gillray’s closest competitor is Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), an artist who seems far more satisfied in the new mode. His cartoons never struggle to be something more. A disgusting and well-executed piece like Rowlandson’s 1792 “Six Stages of Mending a Face” (perhaps an allusion to Jonathan Swift’s repellent “Progress of Beauty”) shows the pox beneath the powder of a well-made-up woman of the town. A certain professionalism and continence in Rowlandson, working up vulgar conceptions to a sensible limit, betrays an aspiration with a low ceiling. Compare any of Gillray’s crammed and eventful works with a typical piece like Rowlandson’s 1810 “Dropsy Courting Consumption” and you see that for the latter the title has cued everything: rouged cheeks, unmeaning smiles, a disagreeable complicity in disease.

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thomas Rowlandson: Six Stages of Mending a Face, Dedicated with respect to the Right Hon-ble. Lady Archer, 1792
Rowlandson has no gusto and no superfluity of invention, but he can produce on command a correct and full-bodied slander. A straight political comment like his 1784 “Infant Hercules” shows the toils of the serpents Charles Fox and Lord North easily pushed away by the substantial infant Pitt. It is a bland compliment that loses almost nothing in the description. Compare Gillray’s “Sphere, projecting against a Plane” (1792), which renders Pitt sharp as a fishbone beside the swollen paunch that is the Honourable Albinia Hobart, and it is no surprise to discover, later in the show, Eugene Delacroix’s admiring “Studies of Four Figures after James Gillray” (1817-1825). Gillray took what turned out to be a permanent detour; but among the masters of caricature, he was the one whose work eventually could reward study by a great painter.

Lyndon Johnson; drawing by David Levine
The choices of “Infinite Jest” after the eighteenth century become haphazard. Goya’s Caprichos today are much in need of annotation: the wildness of conception and the keenness of execution take us back to the mixed mode of Dietterlin’s “Procession”; yet a specific intention and application seem to hover just above images like the monkey serenading on guitar a calmly seated donkey, with two shadowy figures applauding over the caption “Brabisimo!” Things get suddenly sparser in the twentieth century, and the selection from David Levine is one of his more obvious cartoons—Claes Oldenberg, drawn as his own “soft toilet,” the lid open on top of his head. A better specimen from Levine would have been his LBJ with lifted shirt, revealing the scar of a removed gallbladder in the exact shape of a map of Vietnam. The indiscreetness of the president’s gesture in front of reporters at Bethesda Naval Hospital was made to allude to his obsession with the bombing maps. A hard and deserved hit, sparer than Gillray but worthy of his piercing example—an image for the politician to carry to his grave, and with no false regrets about the speed of his departure.
Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine is on view at the Metropolitan Museum through March 4.
David Bromwich

nyrb.com 19. 2.2012

How Neoclassical Economics Deploys Psychotic Reasoning to Explain Human Behaviour

A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy.
– Milan Kundera
Imagine a world where everyone could read everyone else’s thoughts. There would be no privacy, of course, and no trust. We would all know what each other were thinking and would act accordingly. We would not be able to hide certain thoughts we had about others – and we would be aware of every intention others had toward us.
In Milan Kundera’s seminal novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being he explores privacy in great detail. Teresa – one of the novel’s main characters – is a deeply traumatised young woman. When she was growing up her mother allowed her absolutely no privacy and this invasion of her personal space haunted her into her adult life, colouring all her relationships.
Kundera:
Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.
Kundera cleverly uses Teresa’s psychology to raise questions about what it means to lead a private life as a dissident under Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s. The authorities there secretly record dissident’s personal conversations in order to broadcast on the radio; they trick dissidents into sexual encounters which they videotape and then report in the media. In modern democratic societies, we have institutions in place that do this, but they leave citizens alone and focus on celebrities (who, naturally, none of us sympathise with).
Kundera:
When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
But the life of a dissident in the Soviet Union or the celebrity in a Western democracy would be nothing compared to a person living in a telepathic society. Toward the end of 1984 George Orwell makes the convincing case that we are still free when our thoughts are still our own. A person living in a telepathic society would not even have ownership over their own thoughts, which would be broadcast at every moment to everyone around them.
Tragically, there are indeed some who live in such a world. They are not telepathic, of course, but they may come to think that they are. These are people who psychiatrists refer to as suffering from a severe and usually chronic form of psychosis: paranoid schizophrenia.
The most famous case of paranoid schizophrenia in the case literature is that of Daniel Paul Schreber – a high profile judge who lived in Germany at the turn of the 20th century. Schreber is famous in part because his case was picked up on by Sigmund Freud, but his case was only picked up because it was so fascinating. Schreber – a highly gifted and intelligent writer – wrote a long book about what he had experienced while in the throes of paranoid schizophrenia.
Here is a good characterisation of the role of telepathy in the Schreber case by the psychoanalyst Michael Vannoy Adams, taken from his book The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination:
[T]he essence of the ‘paranoid style’ is rampant, pervasive suspicion. Paranoid schizophrenics are suspicious that someone might ‘influence’ them. In just this way, Schreber suspects that his psychiatrist’s ‘nerves’ might influence his ‘nerves’ – that is, murder his soul or destroy his reason. Schreber believes that his psychiatrist has exerted the influence of telepathy. He assumes that his psychiatrist is attempting to read his thoughts for the purpose of, as he says, “appropriating his mental powers.” In order to defend himself, Schreber pretends that he is demented – that he has no thoughts that his psychiatrist might read. This is what Schreber means by “the so-called not-thinking-of-anything-thought.
Schreber’s delusional state, then, puts Teresa’s neuroticism and totalitarian state/celebrity culture invasion of privacy in their proper light. The latter are bad; but they’re not that bad.
In cases of paranoia, as the psychic structure disintegrates various last gasp defences are often summoned up. In cases where telepathy plays a role a typical manifestation of this is that the sufferer begins to think that they can read the thoughts of others. By assuming that one can read the thoughts of others, one insulates oneself from the notion that others might be reading one’s own thoughts. This gives the sufferer a defence with which they can (usually temporarily) control the disorder and maintain some sort of control over the world around them.
And this brings us to the case of John Forbes Nash Jr. Nash – who many will remember from the film (or the book on which it was based) A Beautiful Mind, which depicted his struggles with paranoid schizophrenia – played perhaps the most significant role in the development of post-war neoclassical economics.
On October 12th 1950, Nash delivered a paper on game theory to the Cowles Commission – a group of mathematical economists who were intent on formalising the discipline. What Nash gave this audience was a means to close off the theoretical edifice of neoclassical economics once and for all – something that previous generations of neoclassicals had been unable to do and which leading figures like John von Neumann and John Maynard Keynes had essentially declared impossible.
Nash employed some fancy mathematics to do this, of course, but, like all applications of mathematics, it was in the assumptions buried within the equations where the truly relevant assumptions lay.
First Nash assumed a fearful and paranoid universe where everyone was constantly scrutinising each other and weighing up what each would do next. In Nash – as in any paranoid universe – there was a total elimination of trust. In their book Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World the economists Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Haveli and Nicholas Theocrakis, put it as such:
Nash proves that bargainers [that is, economic agents] will only settle for an equilibrium of fear agreement and then proves that there exists only one such agreement: his solution to the bargaining problem. [Authors’ emphasis]
In his book Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, the historian of economic ideas, Philip Mirowski, ties this directly to the ‘paranoid style’, as portrayed by Vannoy Adams above:
The Nash solution concept was not a drama scripted by Luigi Pirandello or a novel by Robert Musil; it was much closer to a novella by Thomas Pynchon. Just as von Neumann’s minimax solution is best grasped as the psychology of the reluctant duelist, the Nash solution is best glossed as the rationality of the paranoid. Nash appropriated the notion of a strategy as an algorithmic program and pushed it to the nth degree.
From these paranoid premises where all trust is eliminated and all action taken on the basis of perpetual fear, Nash then slips in an assumption that completes the circle and makes his vision of the economic agent truly in line by assuming telepathy on the part of the actor. From Modern Political Economics:
[Nash’s proof] only holds water if we can assume that [the economic agents] can potentially share common knowledge of the probability of no agreement [taking place when one agents threatens another]. But how can they, given that [each agent] has an incentive to overrepresent it [in order to strengthen their bargaining position]? As rationality alone cannot bring about such common knowledge, something closer to telepathy is necessary.[Author’s emphasis]
Or, Mirowski again:
In the grips of paranoia, the only way to elude the control of others is unwavering eternal vigilance and hyperactive simulation of the thought processes of the Other. Not only must one monitor the relative ‘dominance’ of one’s own strategies, but vigilance demands the complete and total reconstruction of the thought processes of the Other – without communication, without interaction, without cooperation – so that one could internally reproduce (or simulate) the very intentionality of the opponent as a precondition for choosing the best response. An equilibrium point is attained when the solitary thinker has convinced himself that the infinite regress of simulation, dissimulation, and countersimulation has reached a fixed point, a situation where his simulation of the response of the Other coincides with the other’s own understanding of his optimal choice. Everything must fit into a single interpretation, come hell or high water.[My emphasis]
Welcome to the concentration camp in which telepathy reigns and all privacy melts into ether!
We should, of course, take this as a powerful critique of the game theoretic foundations of modern neoclassical doctrine – foundations which were then built upon by Nobel prize winners Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu and many others. But we should also see this as something more.
Those who came before Nash recognised that the economy – inhabited as it is by people whose decisions are impossible to pin down – cannot be wholly reduced to some model or others. Keynes’ theories were the most eloquent expression of this, but even von Neumann who did develop game theoretic and general equilibrium models which he deployed for the purpose of economic explanation recognised the limits of this axiomatic way of portraying a capitalist economy. And yet, after the war, the neoclassicals pursued their closed, autistic models with gusto.
What we should see in this example is something about the very nature of trying to apply mathematical models to systems that are created and inhabited by humans. Modelling these systems is equivalent to trying to model those around us. And while many neoclassicals (we hope) would not try to write equations to explain their spouse’s or their child’s behaviours, they seem perfectly content to do so for everybody else – absurdity be damned!
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland
nakedcapitalism.com 16.2.2011

Artist Takanori Aiba has been sculpting his miniature worlds for nearly a decade. His Lilliputian constructions are dense, meticulous works, detailed to a manic degree that easily diminishes that of their Disney predecessors (which the artist cites as inspiration). Aiba, who previously worked as an illustrator and architect, designing the eating hall of the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum in 1994–for which he recreated a small Japanese urban cloister circa 1958, complete with era-store fronts and fictionalized histories and landmarks–fuses sprawling networks of scaffolding, stairways, windmills, and turrets to his bonsai and suiseki mediums.


The architectural flourishes are enmeshed in wild clusters of flora and rock, presenting natural barriers which force the tiny structures to react and adapt in novel ways. Stairways dart down grottoes only to resurface unexpectedly several stories down, a large dining deck takes advantage of the structural fortuitousness of branches joined at right angles, and several large rooms fill out an infrastructural shell erected to buttress a falling cliff face. Abstractions and compositional devices such as systems of proportions find little place in Aiba’s micro-architectures; they are, instead, machines of desire, wandering, opportunistic and ravenous.


All images: Takanori Aiba
[via Laughing Squid]
16.2.2012

Last month the European Union officially signed the controversial “anti-piracy” trade agreement ACTA.
The EU followed in the footsteps of Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States, who already signed it last October. This brings ACTA a step closer to passing, but individual EU member states and the European Parliament still have to ratify the treaty later this year.
To prevent this from happening, hundreds of thousands of people across the world are taking to the streets today, and millions more are expected to do their part online. In Europe demonstrations are being held in more than 200 cities, the largest in Sofia, Bulgaria, with more than 50,000 participants.
These staggering numbers amount to the greatest offline protest against any type of copyright legislation, ever.

Anti-ACTA protests across Europe

Although ACTA has been discussed for four years already, it is only recently that the public got involved on such a broad scale. In part, the increased attention for ACTA has been sparked by the historic SOPA/PIPA protest last month, where Wikipedia, Reddit and many others blacked out their websites.
Thus far the anti-ACTA protests, which started in Poland a few weeks ago, haven’t been without result.
Several countries that were intended to ratify the treaty, have put their decision on hold. Poland was the first to cave in, followed by Slovakia, Czech Republic, Latvia, and yesterday Europe’s largest economy Germany backpedaled as well.
Within the European Parliament, whose members will vote on the ratification ACTA later this year, there is also a healthy resistance. In a guest article for TorrentFreak, parliament member Marietje Schaake urged fellow politicians to not let copyright law repress innovation.
“ACTA must not be passed. Let’s focus on reform to allow for the opportunities of the internet to bloom, instead of allowing outdated business models to limit the free market, and to criminalize audiences,” she wrote.
Today’s demonstrations (videos) show that there’s a massive opposition against ACTA, and that hundreds of thousands of people are willing to take to the streets to defend a free and open Internet.
Those who want to take action against ACTA but can’t join one of the demonstrations, can write their representatives through the Kill ACTA site.

Anti-ACTA protests in Lithuania

Source: Massive Street Protests Wage War On ACTA Anti-Piracy Treaty
torrentFreak.com 12.2.2011

The Brookings Institute’s Hamilton Project is out with a new study showing a strong correlation between income and marriage. While marriage rates have dropped as a whole over the last few decades, there’s been much a steeper decline in marriage among low-income Americans. Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney suggest that one reason for that drop is that labor-market changes that have altered marriage prospects for those trying to make ends meet, countering conservative claims that social norms and values are responsible for the trend.
Marriage rates among lower-income men and women have declined, but Greenstone and Looney offer different explanations for each gender. Among men, they say, those “that experienced the most adverse economic changes also experienced the largest declines in marriage” between 1970s and the present day.

(SOURCE: BROOKINGS INSTITUTE)

By contrast, women have made big gains in the labor market over the past few decades. But their greater participation in the workforce–combined with a low-income male population, increasing prison rates for men, high unemployment and diminished earning power–has also kept more women from marrying. As s result, there’s a similar, if less dramatic, correlation between income and marriage among women:

(SOURCE: BROOKINGS)

That said, the authors worry about the downside for lower-income Americans of both sexes, particularly for those with families. Among single-parent households of both men and women, “the combination of declines in marriage and declines in economic opportunity have contributed to worse outcomes for some people, and especially for some children,” they write. In other words, poorer Americans are even worse off, in socioeconomic terms, if they stay single.

washingtonpost.com
by SUZY KHIMM  •  FEB. 6, 2012

“Many people think of our times as being the last before the end of the world. The evidence of horror all around us makes this seem possible.
But isn’t that an idea of only minor importance? Doesn’t every human being, no matter which era he lives in, always have to reckon with being accountable to God at any moment? Can I know whether I’ll be alive tomorrow morning?
A bomb could destroy all of us tonight. And then my guilt would not be one bit less than if I perished together with the earth and the stars.”
Sophie Scholl

The White Rose
First Leaflet
Munich, 1942
We will not be silent.
Nothing is so unworthy of a civilised nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.
It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day?
If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in lawful order of history; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass – then, yes, they deserve their downfall.
Goethe speaks of the Germans as a tragic people, like the Jews and the Greeks, but today it would appear rather that they are a spineless, will-less herd of hangers-on, who now – the marrow sucked out of their bones, robbed of their centre of stability – are waiting to be hounded to their destruction.
So it seems – but it is not so. Rather, by means of gradual, treacherous, systematic abuse, the system has put every man into a spiritual prison. Only now, finding himself lying in fetters, has he become aware of his fate.
Only a few recognised the threat of ruin, and the reward for their heroic warning was death. We will have more to say about the fate of these persons. If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; then even the last victim will have been cast senselessly into the maw of the insatiable demon.
Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilisation, must defend himself as best he can at this late hour, he must work against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism.
Offer passive resistance – resistance – wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last cities, like Cologne, have been reduced to rubble, and before the nation’s last young man has given his blood on some battlefield for the hubris of a sub-human. Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure!
Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.
“I was satisfied that I wasn’t personally to blame and that I hadn’t known about those things. I wasn’t aware of the extent of the crimes. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.”
Traudl Junge, Im toten Winkel – Hitlers Sekretärin

by JESSE  •  FEB. 1, 2012

jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com.au 4.2.2012