Greetings, Travelers:
For those of you in the academy, I hope the semester winds up nicely, and for all of you, I hope the holidays beckon.
Some of you may enjoy a very short piece, The Corporation, drafted for the forthcoming Elgar Encyclopedia of Financial Anthropology. It’s written for anthropologists and other critical social scientists, primarily as an introduction to the centrality of business associations (including not for profit corporations) to the contemporary. Secondarily, I am encouraging social science work in the area. Implicitly, I am suggesting that we should approach “critique” — political economy — differently.
I have written quite a lot about the transformations of the University. See, for example, From the Ivory Tower to the Football Stadium. Unhappiness with the contemporary University, where I have made much of my life, is now a matter of Congressional concern. Academic publishing takes forever, and the resulting texts are not read by many. But what alternatives are available?
One possibility is Substack. For me, Intermittent Signal has been an effort to develop intellectual community outside the University, and more simply, to promote my work, build audiences. You know, make a difference. Hah. Anyway, I’m reasonably happy with what started as a newsletter, but I’ve come to a sort of fork in the road. I want Intermittent Signal to keep its broad audience, to be seriously amateurish, personal but not intimate, accessible and thoughtful. I want a place to publish pictures and maybe the odd poem or text sent me, a place where I can talk about things, art or the changing of the seasons, in which I am no expert, certainly not credentialed, but which mean very much.
Much of my work, however, is not very accessible. Many readers simply may not have the time, bandwidth, or desire to struggle alongside. Much of my writing speaks to the adepts of this or that field, law, economics, technology, and so forth. Readers with backgrounds in other fields may not be interested. What to do with those writings? Draft texts to be folded, over a year or several, into an academic article, or even a book? Moreover, the way people read or listen seems to have changed, and I’m not sure how, or how to respond. Anyway, I am considering starting a second Substack, for longer or more difficult or specialized texts. Today’s essay might be a good candidate for this second substack, should I decide to go that route. But here it is; I hope you enjoy; apologies for the length.
Celebrity
For years now, I’ve been flirting with writing a magnum opus, Bureaucracy and Celebrity. Dangerous thoughts, and as Robert Maynard Hutchins advised with regard to exercise, I have tried to lie down until the feeling goes away. In weak moments, however, work has been committed. In particular, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern, with Mark Maguire, is largely an effort to respond to Weber and to begin a more capacious, and indeed sympathetic theory of bureaucracy, which we situate in the practices of security. (I think using anthropological accounts as a setting for philosophical speculation can be a very fruitful approach, and recommend it.) But the folks who read GTS seem to be distracted by the “kinetics”, i.e., violence.
I’ve not written as much about celebrity. I did write a book about popular country music, Welcome to New Country: Music for Today's America, which of course involved celebrities, “country music stars” as they say. But the book is about country music as a collective articulation of an American way of life at the present time, and so about the American project at this juncture, rather than about “celebrity” as such.
The basic idea for Bureaucracy and Celebrity is that the institutions and practices that we collectively identify as “bureaucracy” and “celebrity” are reciprocal ways large polities constitute themselves. In a big group, notably the nation, people cannot know one another. And yet they must be organized, or else the polity does not come into being at all. Even raw power must be exercised at a distance, hence writing, officials, mandarins. England subdued, William the Conqueror puts down the sword and conducts a census, Domesday Book. More generally, empires have always needed bureaucrats.
The bureaucratic requirements of the body politic are also psychological hardships. Bureacracies since Domesday are experienced as impositions, often insulting, at best a bother. So bureaucracies must be justified, by reference to the authority of the King (or We the People), by claims of expertise, by assertions of due and fair process, and most of all by claims of dire necessity. All of this is familiar and insufficient.
The underlying problem — recognized since Rousseau — is that it is profoundly disorienting, alienating, to be ruled by strangers, and even less natural to be asked to feel kinship to strangers, often unseen. Power without authority does not scale, not even among rulers or their militaries. Why should we act together, obey orders, risk our lives? Power without authority certainly does not scale among the ruled. Why should we obey you? Heaven is high and the emperor is far away. So politics requires myths, of course. In large and diverse modern polities, however, collective myths are hard to come by. Therefore myths must be manufactured, often out of everyday materials, games, songs and the like. (Rousseau said this, too, in Considerations on the Government of Poland.) Hence celebrity. Celebrity, then, creates fellow-feeling where shared meaning cannot otherwise be assumed. “Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk!”
Indeed, celebrity often works quite well in situations that may seem to have little meaning, little substance. Substance, however, is not the issue: deep understanding is not necessary to those who come together, create the social moment. What is necessary is a focal point. Consider major sports, popular music (especially concerts), movies based upon comic books, or accessible characters on television. There are political and psychological costs to believing that one’s own milieu is shallow, to having focal points that are rather pointless on their own account. I will leave that for another outing. For today, celebrity binds individuals, makes them “fans.” We speak of sports “nations” and even “mafias.” Communities, of a sort.
But what may we say about celebrity and the nation, or even the community of nations, as a whole?
Taylor Swift
Maybe it is fundamentally mistaken to try and understand particular fashions within some larger frame of explanation, beyond the general need to orient the social toward some lodestar. Yet perhaps there is something to the impulse. If celebrity is, like bureaucracy, an expression of the collective needs of a polity, then maybe we can rephrase the significance of this or that cultural artifact in terms of more abstract understandings of such needs, at least after the fact. This sort of thinking is familiar from socially minded art criticism, e.g., Dutch painting reflects the pride, joys and anxieties of a rising merchant class. Such analysis is easy to do badly. Be such things as they may, the desire to explain something like Taylor Swift’s sudden societal importance is almost irresistible, at least among a certain class of minds.
The story is just odd. Swift was a successful popular singer for many years, but no more than some others. For no obvious reason, she has recently slipped the bonds of her genre and even of music itself, and became an economic phenomenon, with an impact equivalent to the GDP of a small country. She is studied in universities. People call themselves after her, “Swifties.” When her fans stomp, the earth shakes. Literally — the vibrations can be measured by seismographs. What the hell happened? How did Taylor Swift, pop singer, become “Taylor Swift,” a central figure in US culture, with a global following?
I do not know, but I have recently read two essays that understand “Taylor Swift” as a somewhat inchoate response, less than awakening, to a widespread spiritual crisis. In The Dark Truth About Taylor Swift, the insightful and lucid Mary Harrington locates Swift against the Romantic tradition of unrequited love going back to the troubadours. More interestingly still, and drawing on the medievalist Denis de Rougemont, she locates this entire tradition as a covert version, or perhaps sublimation, of the Albigensian heresy, which led to the slaughter of the Cathars (“Kill them all, God will know his own”). The heresy: not only did God not become man in the person of Jesus, our incarnation, in-bodiedness, postpones our union with God. Where the Church taught that we might commune with God here on earth, and the saved would stand in his presence in the hereafter, the Cathars taught that we are God, but our divine nature is frustrated by our material existence. The troubadour’s theme, the knight who could not perfectly love his lady, except in the death of one or both, was a parable for the human soul who could not find God on this earth, but would become one with God in death.
What began as an esoteric way of describing the yearning to leave flesh behind and reunite with the divine becomes, in a world with no divine, something more like a longing for passionate self-annihilation. Taylor Swift, of course, has the toned-down, romantic version of self dissolved in the lover, in “willow“, singing: “I’m begging for you to take my hand / Wreck my plans / That’s my man.” But the longing for oblivion manifests in still darker, more intense, and destructive ways, too.
Maybe. But fascinating. Can we consider the Cathar horror at the material world as a precursor of digital culture’s aversion to real bodies, human contact, “meatspace” generally?
Taylor Swift Does Not Exist is crazy brilliant, at some points and on its own terms insane, not only as essay on Swift but as portrait of obsession and display of literary and theological erudition and just madness. Sam Kriss is Umberto Eco and Hunter S. Thompson arguing over female incels, the end of sexual desire and so commitment as the end of history, belly buttons and shame, Lillith and Eve, journalism, Beowulf of course and so much more on a coke fuelled rampage through London, mostly. It’s unclear even to Kris how much of this hallucination can possibly be true, but something is bad wrong with the accelerating disembodiment of the human condition, lots of people say that, including Harrington. How online can we be? How alone? How lacking in a sense of self, to say nothing of an engagement with other people, hell though they are? Has Swift somehow managed to sing the void that is so much of contemporary life, maybe especially young female life under digital capitalism, trolling each other on the social media that they take so seriously? Isn’t the decline of sex unnerving? I wish I’d written this essay, despite the probable revocation of my tenure and the certain embarassment of my family.
To my broader point, however, both Harrington and Kris suggest that Swift’s celebrity is a particularly powerful example of the fundamental dynamic of celebrity: Swift locates the individual vis-a-vis her similarly situated fellows, and thus both relieves loneliness, for a while at any rate, and constitutes a collective, the Swifties. Yet the speed and scale with which Swift’s fame increase is stunning, perhaps unprecedented. Her celebrity is viral, in the sense of half alive, parasitic, rapidly propagating through its host, the digital polity. Swift found her perfect host. Digital spaces are simultaneously profoundly isolating (increasing the appeal of the music) and allow for easy and instant, if generally superficial, communication (making distribution and hype generally so easy). Swift is no more imaginable without social media than Elvis would be without the radio.
Kissinger and Me
Henry Kissinger recently died. As surely as mushrooms follow the rain, formulaic essays, that one might naively consider obituaries, proliferated. The format was standard: Kissinger was (i) a great statesman who transposed the lessons of the Congress of Vienna and World War Two into the Cold War context; OR (ii) a war criminal responsible for subversions of democracy and millions of deaths. This is not another one of those essays. I want to talk about what writing such an essay means.
Kissinger was not active in the federal government all that long, a little less than 10 percent of his 100 year life. Most of his days were spent in the academy, or consulting, with notable service in the US Army. Despite the fetishization of power in Kissinger lore, not least in Kissenger’s own voluminous writings about himself, for much of the time “power” appears to be just that, a fetish. How much agency or influence or authority, intellectual or otherwise, Kissinger had at this or that juncture was contested then and is open to question now. But none of this matters very much, except maybe to real historians. And even for real historians, why should anyone care about how good or evil a dead man was? More to the point, why should you care whether I think Kissinger was a war criminal or an adroit statesman in a dangerous world? Whoever was how responsible, what was done in Laos or Chile or China or [LIST] was done, and we must live with the world as it is. Why all this attention to Kissinger? Why the need to judge?
Things make more sense if we understand Kissinger not as a historical figure, but as a celebrity. Hegel famously saw Napoleon as an idea on horseback. In the same vein, the obituary essays for Henry Kissinger are not really obituaries; they are only glancingly about Kissinger the man in his times and places. The real topic is “Kissinger,” the personification, and so symbol, of certain ways to look at international relations generally, and US policy during the Vietnam era in particular. In these assesments of “Kissinger,” our (anti)hero strides the earth like a colossus, moving armies, plotting coups, avoiding nuclear confrontation, what have you. Great man understandings of history may be more or less true in this or that case, but always give us someone to revile or celebrate, a way to see an idea, as Hegel and any number of filmmakers might have it.
“Kissinger” is interesting because he represents two antithetical ideas, two lodestars for public discourse. Under the first star, the US is embattled, compelled to use force to protect her interests, especially freedom writ very large, in a Hobessian world where diplomacy must be tried but can be expected to fail. This is generally understood as realism in the service of the American project. Under the second star, the US is an overlord, pursuing its essentially imperial interests with violence when the rhetoric of freedom fails. This is at least normatively understood as a betrayal of the ideals to which the nation should hold itself.
Choosing one or the other lodestar orients a discourse, declares allegiance, establishes membership and so a tribe. Realist or idealist, or right or left, for short. The point of the obituary essay, then, is not to render judgment on Kissinger, which would indeed be at best a parlor game (the man, again, is dead). Despite being written as historical analysis with a strong normative slant, the obituary essay is political action, the author’s taking of a side, and the rhetorical effort to recruit for the party of the good. Celebrity is about sharing, audience participation, in this case respect or hatred for the politics for which Kissenger stands, and so belonging to the tribe that thinks likewise.
Madison assumed that the citizenry would be divided from time to time. Regions and economic interests give men different interests, and so different political opinions can be expected. Indeed, a degree of “faction” can serve as a bulwark against what Tocqueville would soon thereafter call the “tyranny of the majority.” Madison further assumed that such citizens were autonomous, each no doubt shaped by his circumstances, but capable of thinking for himself, and freely deciding on the merits of this or that issue. To oversimplify, the Founders thought in terms of relatively rational if hardly disinterested debate over issues. Groups of relatively independent citizens would form in support or opposition to this or that on an ad hoc basis. As issues changed, the composition of supporters and opponents would change, according to the lights of individual citizens. What was not envisioned, but came to pass almost immediately after the Founding, was political groupings based on loyalty to a party. Loyalty, which one sees everywhere today, is a feudal, not a rational (Enlightened), virtue. The Founders may have naively thought loyalty rather passé among republicans.
In our day, however, political discourse is said to be “polarized,” that is, one’s position on this or that specific issue is largely determined by one’s prior political allegiances, loyalty, tribe. The fact that anybody who listens to Fox News or reads the NYT can confidently say “with regard to issue A, your kind of people almost invariably think X” indicates that contemporary political speech rarely expresses thought. Real thinking about issues of any complexity, especially looking forward, tends to be inconclusive. Reasonable minds may disagree; a single person is often “of two minds.” Such thoughtfulness, necessarily open-ended, hardly characterizes contemporary American political discourse. Instead, a strange post-Enlightenment pseudo-rationality informs our politics, as the Kissenger obituaries exemplify.
Reading “Kissinger” as we might “Taylor Swift” thus raises serious political problems, especially for an American. We are obliged by birth (!) to believe in the possibility of a politics founded on rational discourse, “from reflection and choice,” as the Federalist Papers have it. Our politics simply isn’t informed by rational discourse. This is not to say there is no logic to the sorts of rationalistic tribalization we see everywhere, but it is to say that tribal politics cannot be explained by recourse to the rationales proffered by the tribes themselves. The Kissinger obituaries require an essentially literary reading of political intentions, which is not nearly as rational as the language of the essays explicitly purport to be. It's all very strange, and difficult for those of us trained in rougly speaking "Enlightenment" presumptions that politics could be made explicit, more or less logical, etc. Of course reason has always been the slave of the passions, but for 250 years or so the claim that politics could be made reasonable seemed not only right but obvious. Now, however, we must resort to art history, and far more sensitive, and not particularly logical, forms of reasoning.
Trump
Suppose we consider Donald Trump not as a politician or business mogul, but as a celebrity, which happens to be the way he seems to see himself? What collective concerns does Trump embody?
Confronting Trump as social phenomenon, members of my cohort tend to place his supporters along a spectrum, from pitiable through various forms of irrational and ignorant to “deplorable” and even downright evil. Support for Trump, it is said, is an expression of rage felt by people who have been “left behind” by the new economy, or perhaps are worried about the rise of this or that minority (immigration), or who perhaps are outright racists, or maybe even wannabe Nazis. At the same time, my sort emphasizes how bad Trump is, and specifically the danger he would do to the Constitutional fabric. Although easily overdone, I do not think such criticisms are completely unfounded. One can certainly find such things, make such arguments cohere, although there is much, much else to say. I will not, however, attempt to sort these analyses out here, plow that field one more time, beyond noting that such arguments tend to be ad hominem. “You vote for Trump because you are _________.” Or, “Trump is __________,” which would be bad for the country.”
My cohort — professional elites — rarely considers the possibility that Trump suggests, however inchoately, an important critique of the society for which we bear considerable responsibility. Unsurprisingly, we mandarins are not by nature deeply critical, though we are even less surprisingly good at the usual pieties. But just maybe we should think through the possibility that “Make America Great Again” expresses a true intuition that at least some American greatness has been lost. By us. For starters, rising mortality rates and deaths of despair are rather embarassing. Does Trump inelegantly represents a trenchant critique of, and opposition to, the direction of the United States nowadays? More generally, maybe we should at least consider the possibility that the antagonism so easily dismissed as “populism” in countries around the world is in some important ways, well, right?
In The West's Anti-Colonialism Struggle Is Real, N.S. Lyons provides an abstract sketch of contemporary anti-colonial ideology, and by extension “progressive” variants and corrollaries. Mostly familiar stuff, at least for anybody who spends time in the academy, and elegantly summarized. But, Lyons argues, the colonizer here is not some foreign power. Modern societies colonize themselves. More specifically, a cosmopolitan technocratic managerial class (the class I, as a law professor, propagate) rules, civilizes, and ultimately destroys boundaries, cultures, meanings. We are left drinking alone in airport lounges.
Managerialism, being utterly utopian, technocratic, and universalist in nature (in other words: desiring to manage all things), fears and despises above all else any differentiation, particularism, boundaries, or decentralization. The idea that something, anything, could permanently stand beyond the reach of its homogenizing control is to it a prospect that is completely intolerable. So everything everywhere around the globe must be brought under its imperial control, broken down, flattened, homogenized, and opened up to everything else. It is not just any specific nation that this managerial “empire” seeks to undermine through its colonialism, but the very idea of a nation. It is not just a culture that it is trying to erase, but the very idea of a culture. Not just a people but the very idea of a people.
Lyons spends some time talking about the strange vision of this class which so successfully built what we recognize as “modern,” yet which ultimately seems to be both totalitarian and nihilistic.
I am very sympathetic, although I do not entirely agree. After all, my first big book was an apology for what people like me had done in the post-war era, and in a sense, for the way I live now. City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent. But the premise of City was that global capitalism does need an apology, in several senses of the word. “[Capitalism] has been very very good, to me,” but it is indeed alienating, destructive of meaning, as Marx well understood. And Getting Through Security, mentioned above, is an effort to humanize the bureaucratic class that must struggle with serious problems, not least of them security. Climate change springs to mind, as does war, as does technology. More on this on another outing.
What is vital for present purposes is the next step in Lyons’s argument. He articulates the collective anxiety that makes Trump a celebrity. Like other so-called populists, Trump stands in vocal opposition to the technocratic managerialism that threatens to eviscerate the world of meaning. Quite irrespective of any policy position, his own myriad flaws, and maybe even criminal procedures, Trump will almost certainly draw together enough votes to receive the Republican nomination for president. Celebrity is about belonging to the tribe that thinks likewise.
But, more and more frequently now, alarming rumblings reach even our imperial satraps, cloistered together in their metropolitan redoubts: the natives are reported to be restless; their frustration at the oppression, exploitation, and cultural imperialism they’ve been subjected to beginning to boil over. Uppity national “populist” movements seem to keep appearing and attempting to “take back control.” Bizarrely, this response to their predations seems to genuinely baffle the global elite and the comprador class. “What,” they wonder, “did we ever bring these barbaric blokes other than enlightenment, civilization, and opportunity to participate in a globalized economic marketplace?” Why do they not welcome the vibrant benefits of the unlimited free movement of human resources? Why, they ask with real confusion, is it now so often that some little incident – like that one time they tried to trans the peasants’ Bud Light – is the straw that breaks the back of the viceroy’s elephant?
Yeah. Who drinks Bud Light? I mean, Woodford Reserve is the well bourbon here.
Let me try to wrap these thoughts up and put a badly tied bow on the package. Aristotle was right: man is a political animal. Women too. We will come together, even if only to attend (worship) what we tellingly call an “iconic” figure, Taylor Swift or Donald Trump or some other golden calf.
As the story of the golden calf suggests, the inescapability of politics does not guarantee anything like rational or otherwise good politics, nor even the life of this or that political entity. Grass grows over many cities. Empires have beginnings, periods of dominion, and endings. Often, collective problems are not solved, but simply resolved, sometimes gruesomely. This is worrisome. One thinks of pandemics, climate change, wars.
And yet such matters are routinely framed by my cohort as problems to be solved through collective rationality. What is to be done about [Palestine and Israel, the death of coral reefs, LIST]? Surely we can give a conference. Managerial rationalists think they know what to do, even if it may be difficult.
Managerial rationalists tend to be too superficial to see the deeper issue, and the fundamental threat to their authority. The post war global order doesn’t do shared truth. When working well, it does the avoidance of major wars and the satisfaction of material desires, not the same thing. So the calves are banal, and hollow anyway, but it is all many of us have. One might see Swift fandom, the desire to judge Kissinger, and support for Trump as calls for Moses, who stubbornly refuses to come down from the mountain and tell us what God wants us to do in this (national, global, digital) wilderness in which we wander aimlessly.
This longing for Moses, what Weber called the charismatic leader, is dangerous, as every German should know. Someone will come, and politics may fail, even though other things may be “managed.” One unwillingly thinks of trains. On the other hand, without some shared truths, authority, would-be rulers may struggle for dominance, but they cannot govern, which requires cooperation. Of course there are always some shared truths, some authority abides, but will it be enough? Perhaps a civil war erupts, another sort of political failure.
It is difficult to know where a limit is before one has reached it. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, or I suppose an international order, and perhaps we are further from the limits than we worry. Perhaps we will simply continue to wander this wilderness, our rulers quasi-functional, without much respect, our people discontent, often alone. But we do not know that, not now. There are plenty of signs that our situation may be deteriorating. Perhaps we are heading off some cliff, falling into disaster. More positively, we may be able to do better than we are doing now. At any rate, we should try fundamentally new approaches to politics.
It is difficult to talk about the “fundamentally new” before it has emerged, but here is a place to start. Shared meanings, public truths, and hence political authority cannot be summoned at will. What one might do, however, is create spaces where meanings can be constructed and truths, with luck, discovered. Perhaps the world, or worlds, can be re-enchanted? Creating such spaces, however, would require many of the totalizing aspects of modernity, such as technological monopoly, the push toward economic and especially labor efficiency, the universality of values and even rights, especially the glorification of individual subjectivity, the matastasis of low grade culture, and the like to be curtailed. In short, the engines of “progress” that constitute what we think of as modern would have to be braked.
Not exercising power is a difficult proposition, one that I will leave for another day.
Happy Holidays and Safe Passages, Travellers.
— David A. Westbrook