Author: Ariel

Review of "The Lost Steps"

After having deeply enjoyed Alejo Capentier’s novel Explosion in a Cathedral, I decided to pick up his other renowned novel The Lost Steps. Though the setting and plot are vastly divergent from the other work, his style is similar. The at times rambling poetic descriptions with flourishes of erudition, the variegated display of characters attitudes which leave and return in a mutated form like the evolving rhythms of Latin music, as well as the abiding concern over the interpenetration of personal and political engagement are just some of the qualities that brought me back to his writing. For it is these traits combined with many others that is able to transform a story into an artfully executed, moving novel about disillusionment and the possibilities for finding truth.

The novel follows the life of a composer who has grown up and lived in various countries. He is ambivalent to if not downright antagonistic to the American culture he now lives in, and is additionally alienated from his actress wife, his career, his friends and his mistress. Compounding this with the problems of “intellectualism” and a career which provides money but not the possibilities of self-edification overdetermine him into agreeing to leave for the jungle of an unnamed Latin American country to find a certain set of instruments desired for the collection of a museum. Unable to find meaning anywhere else in his life and seeking to please his former mentor that asked him to accomplish this task, the composer leaves. But not before the composer’s mistress Mouche decides to invite herself along.

Mouche is familiar with all of the “isms” of the time and self-identifies with the “cultural left”. She is not a socialist, as to be so would be to submit to authority over her, which she resists at every turn and to find a profession that was not involved in the continuing obfuscation of the mind – astrology. Instead she is engaged in petty rebellions against the bourgeoisie, of which she is a part, and bases all of her valuations upon the thoughts of the great Europeans aesthetes. This eventually leads to a conflict between her and the composer, as he increasingly looks down upon her inability to understand what she encounters based upon the object itself and as she makes a purchase of an art object there that she could obtain anywhere rather than the special, one of a kind objects d’art that she could only obtain there. We see the stirring of such animosity in the references to the bliss which the composer gets when speaking his mother tongue regularly. As he remember not only scenes from his childhood memories but also his “racial memory,” he feels more connected in this world.

A coup in their city of arrival causes them to delay their trip into the jungle. Time slows but due to the new regime the amount of money he was given is now worth much more. The couple escapes the city and a Canadian artist that the composer rightly fears would draw them back into the milieu he sought to avoid by taking a bus to the edge of the jungle to begin their trek to the place where it’s suspected that the instrument is located. While moving from van to boat to boat, there are several beautiful images and many interesting frontier town characters. Rosario, the Greek, the Adelanto and Fray Pedro are the main persons whose life-stories contribute along with the change of scenery to the dissolving effect on the composers habits and personality.

The composer’s growing respect for the atavistic once there leaves him to break with his Mouche once she’s come down with malaria and to then take up with Rosario. Rosario is a woman who is constantly described as unable to even be conceptualized by those that have not lived in the jungle and truly understood the adaptive requirements to live there. The linguistic signifier which she uses to describe herself once they are involved, “your woman,” implies that she is somehow property and in a disempowered state but as the other shows this is only the case if her choice in the matter is discounted. Rosario’s powerful emotions leads her to acts of service and affection toward the one that she has chosen, the composer, but this is shown to stem from a recognition of mutuality rather than expectation. The composers ability to genuinely change and stay this person, however, is tested and he fails. Following a return of the impulse to create a new musical arrangement, the composer suddenly needs paper and pen desperately. Their distance from civilization and the weather make it hard to do this. Following the arrival of a rescue party, the composer leaves despite his resolution to stay. He will just get some paper to take back with him and divorce his wife so he can be honestly married with Rosario and then he will return. Things, however, are not so simple.

When the composer finally returns to the area near where he was taken, he discovers that the woman that he wants to return to is no longer possible. It is directly alluded to by the Greek Miner that the world they live in is not that of Odysseus and that Rosario that she is no Penelope. The living conditions are such there that it is not possible to hold on to anything but the present.

Review of "Choice Theory"

Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom is William Glasser’s presentation of a mode for everyday human interaction that doesn’t rely upon coercion and force to compel people to act in a specific manner. Why is this desirable? Glasser holds that these power dynamics and compulsions to act limit the individual, leads to personal disempowerment, dissatisfaction with life and human relationships and an undue focus upon material possession rather than positive, high-quality social interactions. The manner in which Glassner seeks to evade such exertions of power is by promoting personal autonomy and demanding that we reflect deeply upon the choices available to people. By realizing how it is that we often form our own behaviors by choices we make, Glassner holds that we gain power over our emotions and our repertoire of responses – even if we can’t do so over the conditions in which we live. There are many examples given of how this actually works, some more compelling than others, as well as methods for obtaining positive results from a currently bad situation.

This can include avoiding two of the purely negative types of individuals that he cites as well as one of the methods for obtaining peace, contentment and happiness in a permanent relationship. This latter mechanism involves the conscious creation of “circles of belonging”. While the examples primarily relate to marriage, Glasser claims that this also applied to family and even work dynamics. Focusing on this can help counteract people’s choice to depress, exhibit deleterious psychosomatic functions and help build stronger social ties. On the point of generalized therapeutic practices, Glasser writes passionately that it is not that childhood or previous experiences of the patient that truly matters but whatever problematic relationship they are now in. Glasser states that normally he forgoes this typical Freudian tactic to instead analyze the problem and reorient them to proper behavior that recognizes their choice in disfunction. While, nominally, I agree with this, I think it also important for the therapist to provide the client with tools to better understand their former choices in such a manner as they can see how their choices, empowering or disempowering, creative or destructive, helped bring them to that point. Such a tract will of course depend on the desires of the client, but I thought it worth mentioning.

One of the larger sections which Glasser shows his choice theory in action is in his exposition on it’s functionality in public schools both ideally and in case studies. After having had his ideas adopted by a number of principles and even getting involved with them, he shows how the model explicated in Choice Theory in the Classroom works. This section, while interesting, has the same failings as several other points in the book. Simply it makes very broad claims without documentation. This is not to say that there are not some very worthy points to be made. Glasser agrees with Freud’s position that much of the self-repression which occurs isn’t, qua repression, bad – for if one was to unleash the many aggressive feelings one has when one’s desires are delayed or negated the world would be much more violent. However Glasser does claim that the world’s level of violence is increasing, a point that Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined refutes as well as current statistics on gun and knife violence. I point this out only as I find the foray of psychologists into social science to be understandable but also specious at times, for as in this case not only does the actual evidence go against him but it’s not needed for his argument that Choice Theory is a practice that should reach a wider audience. Another point that I find somewhat disconcerting is the author’s apparent claim that he has developed choice theory himself, without the influence of other theories, when much of the components of it were outlined by the Greek stoics thousands of years ago. While he did adapt aspects of it to fit modern needs and devise therapeutic approaches to it, I find this silent disavowal problematic.

One of the traits of this and several other of the FICAM readings that I’ve been doing that I look forward to writing on in the future is that manner in which many of these psychological texts posit that the application of the paradigm propounded within the books is claimed to create an ideal living situation for all in contradistinction to the terrible world administered by government. Additionally this type of power is claimed as pre-eminent by its exponents and in a way it becomes a force for universalist, humanist personal power. Those familiar with Foucault’s writing on psychology and biopower who haven’t had alarm bells ringing in the above paragraphs should have them going off now. As is mentioned in passing in the above, the psychological conception of autonomy that Glassner has is one that is radically separated from history and is in many ways concerned with reconciling the self to the needs of society. Such a direction, outlined in more detail with other psychologists in Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power, has obvious issues both in it’s hermeneutic and therapeutic approach. If I seem to be overtly critical in the end of Glasser, I do not mean to be so. The framework he has employed clearly has genuinely positive effects on unwanted neurotic symptoms that should not be minimized, however I think it’s worth restricting it’s application to certain areas of living rather than propounding it as a panacea.

"How does the Subaltern Speak?"

In order to help promote his new book, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital my former professor Vivek Chibber has an insightful article up at Jacobin Magazine that explores some of the themes found in his new publication.

While I’ve yet to read it, the reviews of the book are overwhelmingly positive and his other major publication, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India, is exceptionally insightful in it’s comparative analysis of developmental models of India and Korea.

New York City Radical History Tour

The content that I made for GPS-My-City is now available for download. It is an 18-stop GPS tour map with a history of each location in text and audio recordings. It’s almost like having me give you a guided tour of the sites!

In order to purchase it, first download the GPS-My-City App from the iTunes AppStore. Then search for the New York City Radical History tour from the in-app catalog.

Review of “Redemption”

In need of some pleasure reading, I decided upon Tariq Ali’s novel Redemption. The novel is a fabulous satire on the crisis of “existing socialism” following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the public murder of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the rise of Solidarity in Poland and the reforms of Gorbachev for various Trotskyist sects. Even if one was unawares of the characters that lead their predominantly eponymous tendencies (Ezra Einstein = Ernest Mandel, Jim Noble = Jack Barnes, Jed Burroughs = Ted Grant, Alex Mango = Alec Callenicos, Frank Hood = Gerry Healy), one could still find the book to be quite humorous.

The book’s main character is the aged Ezra Einstein who, witnessing the above political events calls a congress, seemingly against his will as he had sat down to write an article and his hands took over and out came this invitation, of the myriad international sects that claim descendancy from Trotsky as well as a few former fellow travelers. Ezra’s number two man, the Cuckoo, then begins the process of helping get the groups interested and funded in going. The Cuckoo, a conspiratorial would-be-Stalin to Ezra’s Lenin is counterposed with Ezra’s young and beautiful wife

The groups, however, are highly antagonistic to each other and Ali begins to describe their every humorous detail and a number of conspiratorial circumstances must transpire before they will agree to go. In this and the depictions of their operations they are shown to be clownish sects of little to no good for the working-people they claim to represent, and may perhaps even be bringing disrepute onto their cause. It is not just their small size which Ali pokes fun at, but their leader’s bizarre habits and sexual proclivities, the provincialism and ossification of their thought and their at times undue valorizing of the ability to mobilize violence.

When he has finally assembled as many as he could, the impetus of this meeting is finally revealed. He outlines the historic role that religion has played in the new anti-Soviet demonstrations and revolutions, states that at times they have been progressive than suggests that as good socialists: “We must move into the churches, the mosques, the synagogues, the temples, and provide leadership. Our training is impeccable. Within ten years I can predict we would have at least three or four cardinals, two ayatollahs, dozens of rabbis, and some of the smaller Churches like the Methodists in parts of Britain could be totally under our control.”

Already decided before a vote can take place is the agreement by groupings within antagonistic to Ezra’s intellectual leadership to postpone the vote to discuss the next step. Rather than follow this “trend” perhaps best illustrated by liberation theologists, PISPAW, the Burrowers and the Rockers decide to form their own syncretic religion, Chrislamasonism. Once they have decided upon this, they give a short presentation of one of the new “rituals” that they’d just invented and decide to call the vote. The resultant split between the sects, won by Einstein’s group in the congress by one vote as someone claims their first vote wasn’t counted, results in half of the groups leaving to practice Chrislamasonism while the others seek to burrow into the religions and “Trotskyize” from within them.

Ali writes about all of this as only someone who has once been involved in the Trotskyist world can. This well-crafted book had me continuously laughing, especially as so much of what he writes is not fiction but the true habits of small groups so openly marginalized. Think the idea of an encyclopedia of minor Trotsky groups, their relations to the master and their reason for splitting is absurd? Then check this out.
Besides the political commentary of the book, there is an additional fun making at the behest of Wilhem Reich‘s writings. I find this particularly amusing as the book that I just linked to is part of my FICAM reading.

Review of "Emotional Intelligence"

The research in Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence brought together the current body of scientific literature to derive a holistic picture of how modern science explains the manner in which biochemical interactions in the brain and body effect and are effected by our daily existence. Recognizing that it is impossible for sheer rationality to guide our daily lives as the emotional system flavors every aspect of our existence – Goleman provides a model for understanding how it is that the emotions work, gives numerous examples of their potential to help or harm in specific situations and offers a series of guidelines which, if applied by the conscientious reader or the school teacher, can greatly increase the quality of one’s life.

In the opening chapter we learn the components and order of the neurochemical phenomenology of brain functions. The instinctual, associative area of the brain is the first to receive the neurotransmitter sent from the sense organs while the neocortex, the emotional center, is the second site that receives it and is the one that is able to bring to bear whatever rational responses one has developed over time to the stimulus. One of the popular conceptions of this divide of potential reactive outcomes is “nature vs. nurture”, though a better manner for describing it would be genetic inheritance versus cognitive development.

Emotional intelligence includes empathy, self-control, persistence, the ability to motivate oneself, zeal and the proper mobilization of interpersonal skills. It’s by analyzing these traits that it becomes possible to see that the traditional markers of intelligence may make one an ideal candidate for a position as a lecturing professor however the lack of emotional intelligence trait means that one will be poorly suited to manage their relations and selves in periods of crises imagined or real. Goleman is not an essentialist his valuation of all emotions. Sometimes “positive” qualities, due to the vicissitudes of circumstance can a normally positive emotion for successful activity a maladaption the face of reality. Not all emotions however are capable of being beneficial to the experience given the right context. Worrying, for instance, is not a manner for dealing with potential problems but a form of paralysis as new solutions to issues doesn’t come from worrying nor does it affect the feared outcome.

Bringing this emotional intelligence to our awareness alters the manner in which us as the observer assesses the situation and can thus lead to an increased number of potential responses to it based upon which outcomes are considered to be most appropriate, desirable, etc. Those with interpersonal, emotional intelligences are better able to organize and co-ordinate groups, negotiate solutions to issues that flare up, make personal connections and have insight into others feelings, concerns and motives. Goleman moves from these observation to a series of anecdotes where people aren’t able to gain control of emotions that are “affecting them” like as if they were foreign spirits inhabiting their bodies rather than “being affected” by people in a particularly trying set of circumstances. The results of those that can’t control them are the opposite of the self-mastery, both as in such circumstance the individual is not controlling the self and as such abdication of agency typically leads to negative outcomes – be it depression, anxiety, etc. Such emotions can be specific and feel as if they are “flooding” in at times or can be generalized. These temperaments, however, are not destiny and can be changed by various practices.

In contradistinction to this flooding of emotions deleterious to human happiness is the possibility of reaching a state of “flow”. In Goleman’s terms this is “…a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture. Because flow feels so good, it it intrinsically rewarding. It is a state in which people become interlay absorbed in what they are doing, paying undivided attention to the task, their awareness merged with their actions” (91). To describe the process on more poetic terms, specifically that of Yeats, we could say that flow is when “the dancer becomes the dance” and is an ideal manner of existence that is described in various contemplative religious traditions.

Following these wide strokes on the impact of the emotions of one’s romantic and work life, Goleman delves into the social and physical aspects of emotions. Interpersonally the arts of emotional intelligence apply to the manner in which people display their emotions – where they minimize shows of emotion, exaggerate it or substitute. Emotions are transmittable and indeed those which we describe are charismatic are those that can elicit in others their attitudes. Indeed, emotions also have a significant impact on human health with those that are positive having a not just having a happier but healthier existence.

A final note worth mentioning is the author’s multiple positive references to Aristotle, specifically Nicomachean Ethics, which two-thousand plus years ago came to many of the same conclusions as Goleman. I mention this both for it’s general noteworthiness, and as a part of my FICAM training I’m returning to much of my previous philosophical training as a means of supplementing it by bringing problematics which which I think are worth tarrying. Put briefly, I specifically plan to bring together the FICAM reading with modern developmentalist perspectives in the Hegelian vein, such as Gillian Rose’s social model and Catherine Malabou’s individualistic approach and her concern with various form of brain plasticity (developmental, modulational and reparative). This will be something further worked on in abloom post, but thought it worth mentioning.

Review of "Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street"

Karen Ho initiated the fieldwork for Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street by obtaining employment at Bankers Trust NY Corporation, a Manhattan investment-banking firm, for 6-months before she was eventually “restructured” out of employment there. Ho utilized kinship bonds via colleagues she’d met during her undergrad and graduate degrees at Stanford and Princeton and the aura of “smartness” attached to those institutions much in the same manner that the majority of young investment bankers did to obtain their position. She than expanded the scope from her own experiences to include those that she interviewed via contacts she made over a three-year period.

Ho connects this portrait of embryonic and low-level finance culture illustrated to traditional historical writing that limns the development of the American corporations divergence from stakeholder models of business to the prioritization of shareholder value. As Ho shows, in sections that would make good companions to excerpts from Balogh’s A Government Out of Sight, this perspective emerged first as a result of legal rulings contesting the nature of who the modern corporation was meant to serve – the public interest or the private shareholders. What develops is a judicial imperative to serve the former no matter the cost to the latter and the adoption of a financial model that concerns itself solely with the bottom line shown in quarterly reports rather than the long-term prosperity of the corporation, its employees or anyone else otherwise connected to them. The implications of these rulings have huge social and economic effects, ones leading to increased “liquidity” justified, at its base, by the need for increased capital return. Shareholder value, however, is not just a business practice but, like that of Christian free enterprise, has a moral tenor to it. It “…meant more than raiding the stock price of a corporation, it also signified a mission statement, a declaration of purpose, even a call to action. Creating or reclaiming shareholder value was morally and economically the right thing to do, it was the yardstick to measure individual as well as corporate practices, values, and achievements” (Ho 125).

Using the language and conceptual framework of the dismal science, economics, this rhetoric encouraged illogical corporate mergers and hasty leveraged buyouts that served to temporarily boost stock prices, while simultaneously rendering thousands unemployed, millions of dollars of corporate assets stripped, and driving the longevity of hundreds of corporations straight into the ground. This viewpoint additionally glossed over the inescapable interconnectivity between financial actors, neglects numerous other stakeholders and glossed over the “smartness” of those running the business about to be purchased by a conglomerate with that of the fresh faced newly grads incentivized to continuously be breaking apart and putting together new combinations.

Ho discusses this shift away from the stable corporation dominated market of the 1950’s and 60’s with an almost nostalgic tone, mourning the marginalization of the perspective that the combination of government regulation and corporation as social bodies offering its citizens/employees certain forms of stability and protection from the market forces. With the increasing emphasis placed upon the individual to guard against all possible outcomes, this is understandable. Freedom is not just that ability to do as one pleases but to be free from imposition, be it levies or need to engage in increased attention to myriad economic indicators due to the deinstitutionalization of financial security within the private and public sector.

In this vaguely concerned as to the state of business affairs vein, Liquidated is akin to To Serve God and Wal-Mart and Liar’s Poker, where we see an insider account of the business practices constituting the markets and culture of neoliberalism. Ho, however, differentiates itself by delving further into the abstract rhetorical practices used within the industry to obfuscate the social and material realities that conceptualize businesses as “too big to fail” and individuals are “too small to be cared about.”

Review of "To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise"

Bethany Moreton’s book To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise historicizes the Ozarks region, showing how the growth of Wal-Mart was related to the yeoman ideal and a feeling of resentment towards Northern bankers. Legal mobilizations occurred in these regions against northern owned chains coming in during the 1920’s as a means of “preserving competition by denying the combinations their unfair advantages” (Moreton 17). During a period of economic hardships mandating thrift and with the development of a “home-grown” chain that is able to produce a quasi-Christian image reflecting the values of the community – Wal-Mart is able to become successful. These two developments are intimately related. As U.S. manufacturing jobs moved abroad (a process dealt with in more detail in Judith Stein’s A Pivotal Decade) it created shifts in economic subjectivity, largely by creating the need for households to have multiple income earners. This occupational/economic context was addressed by Wal-Mart’s low prices and employment opportunities. Management positions are prioritized for men emerging from Christian colleges while service labor positions were offered to unskilled women, not as a means of obtaining economic self-reliance but as a means for supplementing the primary income of their husband. With the both adult members of the family working, childcare was now often delegated (externalized) to immediate family and community members, a situation that was celebrated as it encouraged the values of the hearth rather than the market. Moreton’s focus on description rather than valuation can lead the reader to believe either that those believing the servant-leadership model proselytized by Wal-Mart aren’t dupes operating within the confines of false consciousness but adherents to a new “Christian” system, or that they are. It is this ambiguity, I believe, that made the book so popular by readers that weren’t strictly speaking academic (it’s the only academic book that I’ve ever seen at an airport book store).

That ambiguity of the text laid out, I think it’s important to note that Moreton’s description of servant-leadership seeks to supplant previously existing populist ideologies that were antagonistic to “the feminization of labor”. Lower wages are here naturalized, supplemented with notions of personal benevolence on the behalf of the employer and social conservatism. The concept of the servant leader is an alibi within a structurally static hierarchy that reinforces gender norms of men as leaders and women as subservient. Moreton also shows how such an operational ideology helps create the strange alliance between evangelicals and military hawks, due to the valorization of obedience and the conflation of capitalism with Christian values.

Moreton doesn’t just rely upon the oral histories and available literature but also shows how as Wal-Mart expanded they sought to recreate the practices that originated in the Ozark region in their competitive quest to be the dominant chain retailer. Specifically, through their associations with groups such as the Business Round Table and financial donations to school’s M.B.A. programs, Wal-Mart sought to counter-act the anti-capitalist sentiments created by a higher level of education. Through a result of their combined efforts: “By 1981, graduating business majors already outnumbered their classmates in all languages and literatures, the arts, philosophy, religion, the social sciences and history combined” (Moreton 151). The emphasis of this education was of an explicit anti-leftist orientation and these courses promoted mythologies rather than material realities.

In a final note, I want to argue against claims that “Christian free enterprise” is not defined by Moreton. As I’ve tried to show in the above exegesis of the text, it seems to me that the word is a positively conceived code phrase for “neo-liberalism”. Whereas Liar’s Poker is an account of the pursuit of money as a religion, here we see an ideology in which it is more important to pursue religion and money is secondary to the social relationship in which it is made. In this way those that would say the phrase is an oxymoronic trope are correct – for it elides the sites of Wal-Mart’s production and numerous of Christianity’s generally accepted values – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t operative in the manner in which Moreton outlined.

Review of "Liar's Poker"

Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis is a first person account of his employment with Salomon Brothers during the time that a number of new financial instruments such as mortgage backed securities and junk bonds were created. In contradistinction to the books that we’ve read thus far this semester, with the exception of a section of Galambos, the book is unique in it’s insider insights into the culture and context of these developments as well its colorful character descriptions.

Lewis memoir is in a way a eulogy for Saloman, which was purchased by Citigroup in 1998. By recounting the many ways it was unable to properly manage its growth, diversify its offerings when new ones were created, create a stable, sustainable staff Lewis shows how the company analysts had trouble looking at themselves. The listing of the sophomoric pranks, culture of fatness, lack of seriousness on behalf of the trainees, inability for upper management to maintain talented employees, the internecine departmental conflicts leading to purges of talented people as well as the desire to project a grand image in new and emerging markets (London) that hadn’t yet wholeheartedly embraced the New York model reads like a litany of decadent symptoms that would have been cause for it’s buyout and dismantling by those such as Michael Milken, who did try to do just that.

In the tight focus on Saloman, it’s investors and the companies it interacts with the broader economic implications fall by the wayside. For instance, one of the topics which has been discussed extensively in class has been the government’s regulatory relationship to markets. We learn that Lewis Ranieri was instrumental in creating the framework for the national legality of mortgage bonds by transforming the state-to-state legal codes presiding over such issues into a national one.

While in accordance with mass-market consumers values, the book is light on it’s citation. It’s not just the foregoing of an annotated bibliography, but the stating of certain events and circumstances happening without giving much background. I think this a strength as it does not scare away the casual reader, but an annotated companion piece, preferable free and posted on the author’s website, would be a welcome addition to those interested in following at least some way down a path of further inquiry.