After long delay, some reports from San Francisco, where I attended the dreaded CCCC conference this year. I will say this: I did not see a single bad talk. I will be taking Thank You gifts from the field for my previous taxonomical snark, which apparently whipped everybody into shape. You’re welcome, 4C’s. But on to the real topic of this post, Bourbon & Branch. This little speakeasy-style cocktail bar is, as the title says, made of win. So I’ll offer a little review.
You can get into Bourbon & Branch one of two ways. You can make reservations for a two-hour slot ahead of time, in which case you’ll likely get a table (or really, a booth), or you can seek a kind of general admission, in which case you’ll be placed in the “library,” which you access through a secret panel in the wall of the main room. Am I corny as hell, or is that cool already. Hell with you: I was impressed. But Drinking Buddy (DB) and I went the reservation route, so we had a booth from 6-8. We rang the bell, whereupon a hostess asked us for the password, previously communicated when we confirmed the reservation. It’s all very hush hush.
Since it was still light out, B&B seemed remarkably dark, but really well done. You walk in to the main bar room, where piles of fresh lemons, limes, and oranges are arranged on the bar. Appearance: velvet red floral wall paper (see the web site for the design) under a shiny pressed tin roof, small yellow-lit lamps at each high-seated wooden booth, a snazzy pinstripe design on the booth padding, along with severe tapered mirrors on the walls that match the tapered wooden tables: they’re doing the 20′s posh thing, and doing it well. Sound: subdued jazz playing at just the right volume, and ranging from some 20′s songbirds and early Tommy Dorsey to as late as Astrud Gilberto doing some popular Bossanova numbers, with the heavier accent on the older, pre-war stuff. When you get to the booth, a waitress hands over one hefty cocktail menu that also includes the house rules: no photography, no cell phones, smoke out the backdoor (unlock it and relock it when you come in), and don’t even think of ordering a “cosmo.” They actually have it in quotations like that, as if the thing can hardly be said to exist. The waitress also brought over two glasses of water and a small drink for us while we looked over the menu; I think it was champagne with bitters.
The menu is itself impressive, with the whole back-end focusing on scotch and whiskey and such. I just don’t do the scotch thing (hell, I hardly do cocktails), so I focused on the first part, which was subdivided into house specialties and classics, with, again, the accent on a particular respect for cocktail history, pre-war. Each cocktail listing comes with both ingredients and an explanation, so cocktail know-nothings like me can feel comfortable. The waitress also advised us of a non-menu cocktail for the evening. I started with the non-menu cocktail, a “Kentucky Buck,” consisting of strawberry-infused Four Roses Bourbon, bitters, lemon, and ginger beer. It was yummy. DB started with an Old Fashion, also delicious. For my second drink, I went classic, with a White Lady. It was Tanqueray 10, Cointreau, lemon juice, and egg white. I have to tell you that I was a bit nervous about the egg white, since I’ve seen the foaming action go so often wrong, but this was really perfect. In fact, if pressed, I’d say that the White Lady I had at Bourbon & B ranch was the best cocktail I’d ever had, period. DB, who drinks more cocktails than I do, concurred, raving about it. For his part, he ordered a Blood and Sand, which was good, but maybe a little light on the orange juice. I was essentially done at two, because we still had beer drinking to do later at Toronado (on Haight). But DB went for one more, a Black Manhattan, which was the house version of a Manhattan with coffee bitters. I had a sip: yum yums.
And then we were done, but that was perfect for somebody like me. The atmosphere and the time limit make the usual shenanigans you see when people are drinking cocktails more or less structurally impossible, so you actually enjoy a few good cocktails like a good meal. It was a very pleasant experience. More on SF in the coming days. One thing that did strike me in Bourbon & Branch is that she would just love the place, and meanwhile, she’s home eight-months pregnant while I’m cavorting around drinking cocktails. I have to get her down to a Chicago version of this thing when she gets through all this baby-birthin’ business. She’s gonna be ready for a drink.
From the Former Crooked Employer files, the trustee appointed to investigate and disburse the remaining Madoff assets reported today that Madoff’s much vaunted fund does not show a record of investing in any securities whatsoever in the past – wait for it now – thirteen years. This revelation is both jaw-droppingly shocking and perversely hilarious. Let me translate: all that money that these people were putting into the Madoff fund? He never bought one single share of stock or one bond unit with it. In the last thirteen years! He was claiming consistent 10% returns on money that he never invested. We knew already, of course, that this fund was a Ponzi scheme, but this revelation really raises it to the level of a pure Ponzi scheme: he didn’t even try to make any legitimate investment returns with the money flowing into the fund. Zero securities. I’m literally giggling. It’s so brazen it’s funny.
More importantly for my narcissistic purposes, the thirteen year number is crucial. That would put the birth of the fraud at precisely the time when I worked in operations at Madoff. Sending out statements. Statements that listed the securities that were purportedly bought and sold with the fund’s money.* In other words, it must have been that all those statements we were sending out for client tax purposes were filled with false information, because they all indicated the revenue generated by a standard set of equity securities. I know this because I stared at them all day long. Here’s more on Madoff’s statement from a Reuters article:
Each month, Madoff sent out elaborate statements of trades conducted by his broker-dealer. Last November, for example, he issued a statement to one investor showing he bought shares of Merck & Co Inc, Microsoft Corp, Exxon Mobil Corp and Amgen Inc among others.
It also showed transactions in Fidelity Investments’ Spartan Fund. But Fidelity, the world’s biggest mutual fund company, has no record of Madoff or his company making any investments in its funds.
That is exactly what I remember of the statements we were sending out; that’s what they looked like. Maybe I really will get a federal subpoena! I’d be happy to speak with them about stapling technique. In any case, the notion that Madoff would be able to pull this fraud off alone becomes increasingly dubious with each new revelation. Are we to believe that Madoff, by himself, stayed up late at night fabricating the statements? I have my own ideas about how this might have worked, but I’ll keep them to myself.
* As a note, Madoff’s business was split into two sections, standard trading and the (Ponzi) fund. It may be that the statements I was sending out were for the standard trading side of the operation rather than the fund.
Some random thoughts on the Super Bowl. First, I should say that I haven’t watched football seriously in more than ten years. It’s getting to be like Easter for the semi-Catholic: I watch the Super Bowl, and maybe a playoff game or two. I have better things to do with my Sundays. OK, I don’t have better things to do, but the game bores me, which is strange, since I used to be really into it until just after college. In any case, watching the very exciting closing minutes of this year’s Super Bowl, it occurred to me – as it no doubt did to many others – that I’d seen this game before, like, last year. So I wondered, Descartes-style, whether there might be an evil genius who scripts these things, and, if so, how the script works. Because there does seem to be a formula. So, first, what are the problems that have to be overcome by the Super Bowl script. The obvious first problem is the blow-out. Nobody but the fans of the winning team keep watching a game that looks like a blow-out, and many of the Super Bowls of my youth were just that. If the advertisers are paying so much money, the second half slots have to pay off. So, you need a close game, or at least one in which the possibility of a come back remains very real until well into the fouth quarter. Second, you want to promote football itself, while also including the sports channels and shows, which would have to be in on the con. So, it should be exciting, with numerous back and forths and big plays, and it should have two or three really serious highlights for the sports shows, preferably dazzling catches or impossible runs. Not only can these be run on a loop as a “signifier” for the game, but they are also sought after by fans and others trying to relive the experience of having seen the event live. So the David Tyree helmet catch from the 2008 game or this year’s toe-tap game winner by Santonio Holmes will serve as little snippets of marketable code. The script, given this set of problems, becomes clear. The teams battle back and forth, but stay within two touchdowns for the first three quarters. Everything then loosens up in the fourth quarter. The then trailing team springs to life, just as we always knew they would, and suddenly takes the lead, preferably with a magnificent drive led by their legendary quarterback. The team that had been leading, that had sensed victory just minutes before, is crushed. They get the ball back with two to three minutes remaining. It all comes down to this! Everything seems doomed, but they claw back and push and push. The final drive – which ends in a dramatic touchdown with under a minute remaining – is either capped by or includes an amazing play that will be the pre-packaged “memory” for the viewer…I saw that catch live, sonny, etc. The team that had come back, but now trails again, gets the ball back with 30-50 seconds left, just enough to keep viewers watching and anxious until the final play of the game, and transitioning them into the post-game show. The last two Super Bowls followed this general script exactly. Diagnosis: sound stage in Burbank! (The innovation in this year’s script was the miraculous interception and run back to close the first half: why waste even a second of ad time, and why not give the viewers a treat to remember?)
Of course, I don’t really believe this. On average, if you watch a lot of football, I suspect many of the games play out in this way owing to the various forces at work through the rules, within the coaching tradition, and on the field itself. (Example: I’d still argue that a “prevent defense” is a terrible idea, though I’d bet that coaches have clear statitistics on how it works more than it fails.) But it is odd that the last two Super Bowls have operated according to what would seem a strict formula for maximizing viewership at all levels (current, future, and auxiliary programming such as ESPN and DVD sales).
On the commercials: meh. The first half featured the usual “Women are better naked” misogynistic crap. The Bob Dylan/will.i.am commercial was somewhat memorable (the graffiti evolution bit helped). But two struck a chord with me. First, the Denny’s “Serious Breakfast” commercial. The premise is that three mafiosi are sitting in a diner discussing a future hit on an informant. But just as the mob boss tries to order the hit, a waitress comes over and starts spraying a whipped cream happy face on his pancakes. The noise of the whipped cream container interrupts the serious discussion a few times, and then we cut to the catch phrase: Isn’t it time for a serious breakfast? Cue bacon close-up, etc. The commercial is funny in its own right, but it reminded of of a phenomenon I’ve been noticing on Facebook. Specifically, when I compare the friends I had growing up with the friends I’ve made since college, I notice the glaring imbalance of Italian names. When I was growing up in Queens, I just assumed that a prevalence of Italian names was common across the country. You had your Massimo’s and Vito’s and Angelo’s and Rocco’s, your Francesca’s and Concetta’s and Rosanna’s, and even where the first names were anglicized, they were anglicized in a certain way (no Dave’s or Gary’s, but all Mike’s and Joey’s and John’s), and you had the last names to get you through: the Mastaciola’s and DiPietro’s and Pallazzolo’s and Capparella’s. And when I look at my friends list, I see it, all those Italian names, and then I look at their friends and it’s even more so, with something like half of all names being Italian in origin. But not so much the friends from college and afterward. The names have all changed since I hung around, so to speak. And when I think about the people I grew up with, I notice that most – including me – had at least one parent who wasn’t born in the United States, who had an accent (Irish, Italian, Greek, Croatian), who arrived here in the late-1960′s or early 1970′s, or later. I thought this was normal. But, of course, it’s not. What I realized only later is that I grew up in what was essentially an “ethnic enclave,” a strange thing when you think on it, but not uncommon for big east coast cities. I’ve never really considered myself “Italian” or “Irish,” though my father is to this day an Italian national, and my grandmother emigrated from Ireland in the 1920′s, and kept her brogue until the day she died. I’m American, and I think I’ve always been a little embarrassed of the whole “claiming your cultural heritage” bit. I still am. I certainly don’t get all worked up about “images of Italians in the media” and other such issues, because I’ve never really thought of myself as Italian, and I always assumed that anti-Italian discrimination – in terms of actual life effects – was really an early-to-mid 20th century thing. But two incidents.
First, I was visiting a (midwestern) school while I was deciding on PhD programs, and one of the graduate students who was showing me around kept introducing me to people as “[insert stereotypical Italian first name here] from Brooklyn,” and he kept saying it with a really obnoxious Vinny Barbarino accent. He was thoroughly amused by this, and the fake New Yawkah accent grew thicker and more insulting as the day went on. He was a Southerner, from Alabama if I remember correctly, and he didn’t pull off the Barbarino bit particularly well, but the message was clear enough. I remember being annoyed, thinking it was disrespectful, though I just smiled along wanly, fuming. I was careful to eliminate any hint of a New York accent from my diction when I said “Hi, it’s nice to meet you” after his little performances. I bumped into the guy again at a conference in New Orleans last year, and one of my friends introduced me to him. He knew perfectly well who I was, but I used my full name, decidedly unanglicized, emphasizing its vowels. It was all I could do to keep from tagging the guy with a right hook on the fucking spot. Spread love: it’s the Brooklyn way. Second, I was at a job interview at another midwestern school, and I was on my last event, having breakfast with some graduate students. I don’t remember how the question came up, but one of the students asked, and I do remember it was out of the blue, whether my father was in the mafia. In the fucking mafia! In 2007! Needless to say, I replied “that’s right,” and kind of laughed it off. But on the plane back home, I grew increasingly agitated (I had da agita ovah dis fuckin’ bagiagaloop!) by the question. Like, what the fuck? In the mafia? Really? As an innocent question – playful or not – at a graduate student breakfast with the prospective professor? Ey, ya fuckin’ skootch, isn’t it time for a serious fuckin’ breakfast?
The second memorable ad was for Career Builder dot com. It starts with classical music playing in a lush office, obviously the well-appointed digs for some hotshot CEO. The camera then zooms in to the magnificent moosehead on the wall, an impressive trophy. Then, in a continuous shot, the viewer is led out of the executive’s office and around to another office directly adjacent, and here’s where we see the joke. The classical music transitions into the repetitive sound of a printer, and we find in the second office a man at work on the computer, trying valiantly to type away. It turns out the the stuffed moose’s head was not removed from the body, but merely stuck through the wall with the rest of the mooses body – to wit, the ass-end – residing in the poor man’s office, and, indeed, standing directly on his desk with the ass just above his head. He has to work with a moose ass in his face all day. He looks unpleased. The catch line is something like “Time for a new job?” Conceptually and technically brilliant ad, in my view. But, really, what a metaphor for class consciousness! The apparent splendor of the boss’ office mirrored on the back end by the misery of the working conditions, with the two intimately connected through the same device: the body of the moose. When you look “beneath” the luxury of moosehead (and a traditional signifier here), you get the cost of that luxury on the worker. If I wanted to start a propaganda outfit, I’d want the writer of this ad on my team. Just great.
So I taught my first classes in downtown Chicago (the Loop, for those of you who don’t know the town) this morning, and it was a weird feeling. It wasn’t strange being in the middle of a major financial district, since I worked almost exclusively in major financial districts (in New York, and in San Francisco) for all my non-academic jobs, with the exception of a stint in various places in Albany. But it was strange to have an academic job and walk out of your classroom into the middle of Jackson and Wabash, with the El running overhead and all the bustle. I guess I’ve attached a feeling of place to those two parts of my working life: the academic being associated with some isolated Giant University Town, and the financial being associated with the urban center. Up until this quarter, all my classes have been located at the slightly more urban campus, but that one is still somewhat divided from the city space simply through concentration; it’s still a campus, in other words. But in the Loop, you’re right in the middle of the city, and nothing divides you from any other worker in that city. (Needless to say, this mirrors the classic division of practical and theoretical knowledge that has reigned more or less since Aristotle, so it probably wasn’t too hard to simply transpose such a dominant set of categories on to geographical coordinates, even unconsciously). But these came crashing together in a strange and pleasant way today.
By the way, does anybody else out there get “First Day of Class Sore Throat?” I guess I don’t really project-talk so much in the off-season, and then two classes of syllabus/policies/assignments which involves mostly me yapping always leaves my throat sore. Ouchies.
“How are the mighty fallen! Collector of bad and doubtful debts. But that’s the most notorious bloody robber you’d meet in a day’s walk…” – James Joyce, Ulysses
Some of you may remember my pointless rant about the shittiest post-college job ever, in which I discovered the definition of genius. I was very squirrelly about the company at that time, noting only that it was located in the Lipstick Building at 53rd and 3rd. But, since events have intervened, I guess it’s fair enough to out the whole thing now: the job was at Bernard Madoff Investment Securities. I mention this now, because the Ultimate Boss, ole mister Bernard Madoff hisself, was yesterday arrested and charged with securities fraud after claiming that the whole operation was a – and I quote here – “Ponzi scheme.” To wit:
A criminal complaint signed by FBI Agent Theodore Cacioppi said Madoff told at least three senior employees at his Manhattan apartment Wednesday that the investment adviser business was a fraud and had been insolvent for years, losing at least $50 billion.
Madoff told the employees he was “finished,” that he had “absolutely nothing,” that “it’s all just one big lie” and it was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme,” according to the complaint filed in court.
The employees understood Madoff’s admission to mean that “he had for years been paying returns to certain investors out of the principal received from other, different, investors,” said the complaint, which did not identify the investors impacted by the scheme.
Yikes. This guy used to stroll through operations from time to time in his $6000 suits, checking with the Operations Manager on all manner of things. I should say that BMIS was not some small, fly-by-night chop shop: the guy was a leading member – in fact – of the NASD, and instrumental in founding NASDAQ. Oh well…
So it’s been a big month over at the Seven Red household, as may have been noticed by our two and a half readers based on virtual non-activity on this blog. So here’s the news from Seven Red Land:
1) topspun finally, finally, finally defended his dang dissertation. Now, most people say “Huh? I thought you already did that!” Well, no. I hadn’t. It was a long and painful slog, not helped by a variety of factors that I don’t feel much like going into like, ever again. Life got in the way. Other things. My own insistence on doing it right the way I wanted to. But that’s done now, and I’m not really in the mood to apologize for it taking so long, to myself or others. In the end, it came out better than if I had kept to the route (and the chapters) that I had in the Spring of 2007, and I can live with it. During this whole long and – wait, did I say “painful?” – process, the worst days were the last day of each month. I’d go to bed on the last day of each month saying “There’s another month that I told myself I would be finished by, and here we are.” That’s the gut check time: lights out and alone in the dark with that burden. But on the last day of last month, I had submitted what I was going to submit. And on the last day of this month I can go to sleep without that hanging question hovering there in the dark. I’m going to sleep like a baby. Well, maybe not like a baby, but you feel me.In any case, it’s now time to take up the projects that have had to go on the back burner while this thing was eating away at my soul. I also have a new motivation to guide me: vendetta. I’ll leave that a mystery for now.
2) Bigger and more importantly, Seven Red – as so many facebook messages have indicated – is expecting another baby in April. babygirldos or babyboy, we’ll know (for the most part) on Tuesday, when we get the big twenty week sonogram. Let the gendering begin! We are, of course, thrilled and scared and wondering how we’re going to manage it all, but mostly thrilled (and scared). More on Tuesday.
3) Despite the near collapse of on of the nation’s Giant Financial Institutions, she (who works for said Giant Financial Institution) has thus far managed to keep her job, and also successfully completed her First Graduate Class (thanks for the tuition, Employer Institution!). As our friends who we had over for Thanksgiving said, full time job in an industry in crisis, a two and a half year old at home, four months pregnant, and still manages to ace her first class in ten (or so…) years! Not effing bad. If I don’t say it enough: you rock, baby!
So, all-in-all a good month. Seven Red is all smiles. Oh, and there’s also that little thing called Barack Fucking Hussein Obama getting elected President of these United States. After an awful October, and an awful eight years, it is a sweet November.
I liked how Working Blue fessed up to a Not My Best Moment Moment (although, frankly, the other mother in the story strikes me as either a clueless idiot or plain vicious). I had a Not My Best Moment Moment myself today, and I thought I’d share.
I’m doing summer advising for Unnamed Employer Institution. It involves getting first-year and transfer students across the College lined up and registered for their fall courses, and generally informing them of the abundance of requirements they’ll have to fulfill to earn their degrees. By and large it’s mechanical work: when you talk to five eighteen or nineteen year-olds in a few hours about how they want to plan their next few years, you learn that most of them don’t want to. That’s not really a judgment; it may even be the better way to go about things. You also see the industrial side of higher ed pretty clearly. The repetitive nature of the advising hour is striking: their interests cluster just where you’d expect, you start to deploy the same little phrases and jokes to feign a deeper affective encounter, you nod and smile, they nod and smile, and at the end of the day, maybe 70% have near identical schedules, with some variations for time and stuff like that. Again, this is neither good nor bad. It should be no surprise that our institutions of higher learning operate in some ways like old style factories. More slippery, always, is what the actual product might be.
But today I had a real doozy. The transfer student sessions are supposed to take a complete hour, and the students are meant to leave registered for the fall classes. My last guy today went two hours, and we barely finished his registration. By the end of the session, I was literally fuming, and I will pat myself on the back a bit by saying that I have never lost my temper with a student (she knows this is no small claim, since I lose my temper about 8 times a day regularly). Students come up apologizing about a late paper. I usually just shrug. They know the policy. I’m really not that emotionally invested in late papers or plagiarism or other problems like that. I enforce the policies, but with a sort of bureaucratic detachment and – pat on the back part 2 – I think good humor. This is one of the great benefits of working in a university: you don’t even have to pretend to be angry about these sorts of things. Students often seem to take this absence of anger as a revelation, as if they are just now discovering that their high school teachers’ anger about this or that was just a feint, a sham. And what that says about our education system.
The student comes in Undeclared. Fine. We’ll spread around the required courses until he figures out a major, maybe in the Spring. No, he tells me. He wants to go into medicine. That’s fine, too. I retrieve the sheet that lays out a pre-med sequence. As you would expect, it is fairly rigorous, filled with bio, chem, organic chem, physics, and calculus calculus calculus. Mind you, this student had no science courses in his first year at another institution, so if he wants to finish on time, he really needs to get cracking on this. We start working out the schedule, and the conditions suddenly come out. No, he says, I can’t take classes on Friday. This was fair enough, since the obligation was religious, and he eventually acceded to Friday mornings. But not too early, because condition 2 was “No, I can’t take classes at 8:30.” That’s too early, see? Oh, and he also didn’t really think late afternoon/evening classes would work for him. Well, now.
To take biology, he would have three regular course meetings (MWF), a discussion meeting (Tuesday), and a three-hour lab. That’s just for ONE class. He had to register for four. Oh, and the calculus? That’s a two hour class twice a week that meets at 8:30, or three days a week at a “more reasonable” time with an additional hour and a half lab. Naw, that didn’t work for him, either. Too early. Or, too much. We go back and forth for an hour, looking at various permutations, while still trying to get his other classes in. My next session has to be moved to another advisor, because this one is going over, and then over again. Really? Why does the biology class meet that often, he says. Really, do I have to take calculus? That’s when I lost it. I look at the guy and say “Listen, do you want to be a doctor?” He nods apprehensively, perhaps sensing that I am unpleased with the progress of our session. Then I launch into it.
First some context. My roommate from college, and still my dear friend, is a board certified radiologist. This guy worked his ass off in college. I know this, because I would often be stumbling back to the room as he’d be arriving back from the library extended hours. Every. Goddamn. Weeknight. (Not really true: I double majored and had a minor, so I wasn’t exactly flush with free time either). He also managed to have a nice social life, and remain well-adjusted. But dammit, that boy worked. Up at seven, go to class and study all day, meet us for some dinner, then back to the library until midnight. He also took his other requirements and stayed in touch with cultural activities (I mean wine tastings, of course). And he’s a doctor, and I have no doubt a damn good one. But the guy worked constantly.
So I say to this kid, and my tone is not nurturing: “Listen, you can’t schedule for Friday afternoon, and you don’t want to take early or late classes. You don’t want multiple meetings of a biology class, and you don’t want a math lab, and you’re not really that interested in taking calculus. If you want to be a doctor, this is what being a doctor is. Yes, it’s a hard schedule. It’s supposed to be. If you want to be a doctor, you’re probably going to have to get up earlier.” Period. But he won’t do it, so we take the next whole hour reshuffling him into a bunch of liberal arts requirement classes, because he wants some “adjustment time” before he “really starts on the pre-med stuff.” I am, at this point, utterly disgusted, and it shows.
I have provided every other advisee with my email, even though my official duties really end with the session. It’s a courtesy, and several have taken me up on it with follow up questions, all of which I’ve answered. At the end of our (two) sessions, which have now dragged on past even the second hour, making me late for picking up babygirl from daycare, the future doctor asks if I will be his advisor in the future, or if he can contact me. I say – and this is curtness, not courtesy – “If you have questions, contact the advising office.” And I turned around and walked out.
I read with interest Booga Face’s analysis of The Pursuit of Happyness, a film I haven’t seen, and actually actively avoided. One of the themes that came up in the analysis was the strange placement of efficiency and innovation, and I want to comment on that a bit here. Specifically, BF demonstrates that TPOH expends considerable ideological effort to locate efficiency and innovation as qualities of the entrepreneur rather than complex social networks (on which any autonomy is built). This is certainly the neoliberal doxa, and it saturates the discourse even where it would seem least likely (such as, for example, in the discourse of micro-finance and the like). But I’m more interested in the transposition of efficiency into a quality of the multitude.
Efficiency has always occupied a strange position in Left theory, which is not surprising given that efficiency was usually encountered, concretely, as intensification of exploitative relationships. Even where efficiency became the watchword of the hilariously named “really existing socialism” (in the awful, if remarkably effective, five year plans and rapid industrialization schemes), it subsequently became precisely the point of attack for those identifying real socialism with its capitalist twin. When efficiency is grouped under the broader category of instrumental reason, it becomes the hinge that allows a whole range of mid-twentieth century thinkers to identify the two while also drawing both into a more general destiny of practice. When Ellul says technics, for example, he almost always means efficiency rather than any concrete technology; it is a mode of encountering the world shared by both capitalist and “real socialist” forms of production. And Ellul is only the most obvious case. You could run the gamut of thinkers who focused their energies on instrumental reason – you pick ‘em: Arendt, Adorno, Habermas – and see the horror of efficiency played out again and again, not, of course, efficiency in itself (as it operates in Ellul), but efficiency as the primary concern of praxis rather than one form of approach among others. One need not invoke Bataille’s fascination with productive excess and waste or Heidegger’s “creation of a standing reserve” to see how else this discourse plays out.
But I think that Booga Face is quite right that efficiency suddenly takes on a positive value in what I’ll repeat – tongue in cheek – as the Italian Ideology, or at least in Negri. Which is an interesting reversal. On the one hand, from the perspective of Marxist theory, it’s quite clear why the category of efficiency escapes the logic of exploitation within this discourse. In traditional Marxist theory, you find two primary forms of capital: constant capital and variable capital, where constant capital is (and this is a very simplified, blogified version) the “means of production,” such as factories and machines, while variable capital is (simplified again) living labor, or the potential of workers to produce. In a nutshell, barring innovation, you can’t squeeze any more “value” (which is to say, profit) out of constant capital: it actually degrades, of course, as Marx describes in some of his funnier passages. But you can squeeze more out of variable capital, it being, well, variable. Concretely, this is the horror of efficiency from the perspective of the worker: increased quotas, extension of the working day, maximum use of every available second of work time, etc. In terms of experience, this is the process through which capital attacks the body (or better, life) most viciously, as even a cursory reading of Taylor’s “experiments” would show you. It’s also the site around which class struggle organized itself from the industrial revolution onward (work slow downs, sabotage, agitation for the eight-hour day, etc.). If variable capital is the site of exploitation, then efficiency is nothing but the techniques of extruding ever more value from variable capital. That it also requires a particular subjectivity that forgets the Being of beings (or whatever) is only gravy for critique after that. So, this is an old story, and hardly worth this oversimplified retelling at this point.
But the story is necessary to grasp the reversal proposed by the notion of the General Intellect, a concept that serves as the real engine for Negri, Virno, and others. If production has become primarily “immaterial,” which is to say, cognitive, communicative, and affective, then – and this is the strong claim from Negri, as I take it – living labor is transposed with constant capital, because what is constant is the not a factory or a machine, but the totality of cognitive, communicative, and affective practice. It’s not a mistake, in this sense, that the very concept of the General Intellect is taken from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.” If, for Marx, the machine (that is, constant capital) was a concretized instance of general social knowledge for industrial production (in other words, any given technology is a materialization of the whole of technoscientific knowledge), the emergence of immaterial labor simply bypasses the “material” of the machine. But when it does so, nobody really owns the (non)machine of the General Intellect any more. In effect, capital, in its development, gives away the means of production - in that “constant capital” is no longer materialized in an “ownable” machine,” but distributed to the entirety of the social field. This is why capital, for Negri, becomes absolutely parasiticalwhen it comes to immaterial labor: it is not simply relatively parasitical anymore (Marx’s vampire), since it doesn’t even provide production with a set of means or organizational techniques.
Of course, this is a fiction to some extent; it’s a fiction that does a better job of explaining the frenetic insistence on intellectual property rights over the last 30 years than any liberal explanation I’ve seen. Even, however, if we grant that what immaterial labor really means is that capital overtakes the whole of social life (i.e., that real subsumption doesn’t structurally empower anybody, or that play becomes work rather than the reverse), Negri is still correct that work in such an arrangement is immeasurable from the perspective of surplus value, or that variable capital becomes an extremely troubled category, since production occupies a different “temporality.” The only time of innovation (or of comforting, caring for, and other affective labor) is the time of kairos, which lacks the quantitative dimension that would allow measure. And if variable capital no longer maintains a body-time consistency that can be worked on by the industrial engineer or the mid-level manager, then you need something else to ground value. How about a ridiculous “retreat” to pump up your subjective enthusiasm for the work process? It’s as reasonable and impotent a response as any other (and maybe as terrible as the Taylorist subdivision of the worker’s body). Better yet, how about an entire discipline devoted to teaching workers the subjective experience of kairos as a means of training for the (new) immaterial work process. Something else to measure value, see?
For Negri, this something else is the financial markets; he’s also correct that finance is a laughable substitute as a measuring device, as the recent confusion relating to the “sub-prime” or “credit crisis” amply demonstrates. Everytime Citigroup or some other bank writes down another $8 billion in CDO losses, they proclaim again that the financial markets have no idea how to measure value – they literally don’t know the value of the assets they even hold. But the other result is that efficiency, which was constituted concretely by techniques of extruding surplus value from variable capital, fails to hit the same object: the body and life of the worker. Certainly, there are no shortage of contemporary organizational theories that promote messy inefficiency as a management strategy; as Virno notes, the old factories used to say “Quiet! Men Working,” while today the mantra is “Network! Talk! You’re at Work!” (The worries that employees in information sectors waste too much time surfing the Internet and IM’ing always seem decidedly half-hearted). But this just indicates a slackening of efficiency as it is classically understood. What’s more interesting is whether efficiency itself is transformed in this process (in its operation and concept) to lose the character that actuated so much critique in modernity. To get to this, I want to work through why Hannah Arendt’s work becomes so central in the “Italian Ideology.” Maybe tomorrow…
The Atlanta-Athens-Atlanta-Seattle trip went off without a hitch. I have yet to be really annoyed by the airlines. I’m more amazed at the logistics of it all, quite frankly. On Friday my co-panelist and I woke up in Athens, Georgia, drove over to a parking garage at UGA, went to the student center, did our spiel, got back in the car, drove to Hartsfield-Jackson, had a few beers, got on a plane, and in six hours we were in a bar in Seattle. I guess other people are more used to this sort of thing, but I find it amazing.
In any case, I was going to post the Top 20 RSA Presentation Mistakes, until I realized that I don’t really see many bad presentations at RSA, and I really don’t remember one. Even the ones I disagree with are at least well presented; it’s usually a case of “That project would be so much more interesting if I was doing it,” as one of my buddies and I said a lot, but that means it’s interesting and smart enough to consider doing. I was pretty happy with the show, all told.
Probably the best one I saw was my co-panelist from C&W’s presentation at RSA. His stuff is always sharp, clever, funny, and smart, and I always learn a lot about my own work by speaking with him, especially because we fundamentally disagree on pretty important perspectives (production/consumption, etc.). Luckily, I had a chance to see two of his presentations this weekend, and we also had a good talk over beers at some college bar in Athens. I also had a chance to hang out with all the old cronies in Seattle, which was fun, as always.
Our watchwords for the weekend were as follows: fastpitch softball (mmm), eggroll (don’t ask, won’t tell); cheese-grinder (youch); beshat (which is to say, Biblically); DNA (as in, “The prosecutor will tell you, ladies and gentleman of the jury, that you can put blood in a magical machine that will tell you who committed a murder!”). You may find this confusing, but I can assure you that each of these terms was repeated on the order of 500 times, to much hilarity. Good times.
Anyway, while doing the flaneur thing in Teargas City, I came across these, probably a legal wall on 2nd and probably Lenora. These are just detail shots. I’ll probably post more on Friday. Enjoy.
Gas Mask Character, HEWS, Seattle (2nd and Lenora?)
That’s my itinerary for this coming weekend. I fly out of O’Hare (always an iffy proposition) Thursday, en route to Computers & Writing in Athens, GA. First, I’ll meet up with my C&W co-panelist and partner in crime at the Atlanta airport; we’ll drive to Athens, fervently hoping to avoid any My Cousin Vinny style situations on the way. We deliver our talks Friday morning, then back in the sub-compact, back to the airport, line up some drinks, and wait for our direct flight to Seattle for the Rhetoric Society of America conference. Co-panelist and I will be wearing Dockers and our most obnoxious golf shirts in order to pretend that we’re those consultants who go around the country firing people, like the guys in In the Company of Men, or younger and (at least for Co-panelist) hipper versions of The Bobs from Office Space. (Speaking of The Bobs, she reminded me the other day that there was actually a TV character named Bob Loblaw. I miss Bob Loblaw. You know you’re saying it out loud right now, listening to it: Bob Loblaw…Bob Loblaw…Bob Loblaw…)
In any case, I’m not as good a salesperson as some people (who actually know how to reveal just enough to virtually assure attendance!), so I’ll just offer the intro teaser for the RSA paper:
Since James Kinneavy’s efforts to resuscitate the concept in the early 1980’s, kairos has enjoyed a remarkable recuperation. Indeed, between the detailed histories of kairos in its classical sophistic tradition and its wide range of application to contemporary rhetorical phenomena, kairos has been transformed from the “neglected concept” that Kinneavy identified less than thirty years ago to one of the most important and frequently used concepts in rhetorical studies. While our understanding of the way kairos functioned in antiquity has been greatly enriched by the varied studies of its role in sophistic discourse, and while collections such as Philip Sipiora and James Baumlin’s have extended our understanding of the concept through Renaissance and Twentieth century thought, little analysis has sought to explain kairos’ historical reemergence in our own era. Put more plainly, we are told that kairos was neglected, and that it is back now; we learn about the origins of the concept, and the way it functioned in various historical periods; we apply it today for various analytic purposes. But we don’t particularly reflect on what has been a rapid return to prominence of the idea.
Our instincts as rhetoricians and historians should suggest a different direction. Our instincts should suggest that for a concept to attain such centrality in any historical period, it must solve a number of theoretical or practical problems; it must lend order, coherence, or shape to a broader table of concepts or discourse; or it must link up with material conditions in some relevant or useful way. Our instincts should cause us to ask, in other words, “Why kairos now?”
Want more? Huh? Do ya? Barn burner, yeah? Then I guess I’ll see you at 8 am Monday morning in Seattle! I told you I wasn’t that great a salesperson…
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