Deterritorializing High School

I’m neither a student nor a teacher in the educational system, so I don’t think about school as much as many people do. I’m writing now as an outside observer of the excellent American high school our daughter attends in this affluent and well-educated community. I have to say that I find the institution troublingly efficient and effective.

From a societal standpoint, the high school serves largely a preparatory economic function. It assigns tasks, equips individuals and groups to assume responsibility for completing these tasks according to the requirements, imposes external evaluation of outcomes, encourages both competition and cooperation in playing a game for which the rules and objectives have already been decided.

From the family’s perspective, the high school establishes the parameters of the sort of  task space in which one’s kid must learn how to function. Again, high school is a preparatory environment, simulating the workplace. If my kid is smart, she’s got a leg up on everyone else’s kid. If she can apply herself successfully to the tasks as they’re presented to her, earning high marks as evidence of success, then she can further exploit her natural talent in the competitive sphere. If she can package herself attractively, she can position herself for a big promotion: admission to an elite university, preferably a choice among several excellent options, with hopefully a financial scholarship offered as further incentive. It’s the parents who insist that the schools be tougher, assign more homework, achieve higher average scores on standardized tests. It’s also the parents who try to get their own kids an edge within this tough environment, pushing them to take the toughest course options, helping them with their homework, disciplining them if they underperform, sending them to SAT preparatory courses so they look smarter to the university admissions offices.

While I’m sure I’m not the only parent who questions this educational approach, I am, I’ve come to realize, one of the few. I don’t doubt that kids learn things in this sort of school. I also acknowledge that there are right and wrong answers, effective and ineffective ways of organizing ideas, good and bad art, foundational skills and knowledge on which to build more complex intellectual performances. I also recognize that many kids thrive in the high school environment, and that things tend to work out better for the high school thrivers at the next level.

Still, adolescence is more a cultural construct than a biological life phase. There’s empirical evidence that adolescent brains aren’t as hard-wired as they will be in a few years, making them both more malleable and more open to alternatives. Kids are also less risk-averse, which is certainly cultural at least in part, but it’s also probably neurological as well. Society expects nothing of adolescents other than staying out of trouble. And, let’s face it, most jobs can be performed competently with maybe six months of training. So you’d think that high school would be a perfect environment for taking intellectual risks, trying out unprecedented possibilities, following interests and passions wherever they might lead, cultivating standards and commitments.

I think about Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis applied at the high school level. The high school, and the high school student, seem like prime candidates for deterritorialization. The adolescent’s territorial channels would seem to be rather shallow and inchoate — which is part of the problem as far as many parents are concerned. Parents of primary schoolers exert discipline in order to get their kids to follow the rules. For high schoolers the parents and their adult allies shift tactics: now the main disciplinary objective is to get their kids to perform successfully in the socio-economic territorialization program laid down in high school. The territorial markings of lectures, homework, and grades have already been laid down in primary school; now you want your kids to internalize these markings. The disciplinary incentive shifts from present to future, from avoiding the displeasure of teacher and parents to earning a spot in a good university. And to a large extent these shifts succeed: the high school peer group seems hell-bent on reinforcing the standard objectives among one other. Kids who aren’t making it are either stupid or troubled. The kid who thinks the whole high school experience is stupid might well have caught on to something important, but the usual response of parents and school personnel is to treat the symptom rather than listening to it. Find a tutor, find a therapist, find a coach. Kids with a passion or special talent are admired by their peers and their peers’ parents — these kids will have an edge in applying to Dartmouth and Stanford. The talented kid who isn’t getting the grades? It’s inspiring: there’s room for all of us in this democracy of ours. And it’s encouraging: this talented kid has eliminated herself from the competition, possibly opening up a spot for my own kid at the next level.

What about deterritorializing the high school itself? There are some excellent schools that encourage self-study and customized curriculum-building. Generally these are private schools, available only to well-heeled families who can afford the tuition. Some public charter schools adopt this flexible approach, but they’re typically regarded by parents as sort of hippie schools, best suited for the free spirits (kids and parents), artsy/techie, not particularly challenging academically. The smart kids (and their parents) tend to self-select out of these schools. As a consequence, aggregate results on standardized tests tend to suffer, and so these free-spirit schools are regarded with some suspicion by the university recruiters.

So I’m wondering whether it’s possible to slice through the overly-territorializing high school machine at an oblique angle, a “schiz” that enhances experimentation both individually and societally. Most kids accumulate more than enough course credits to graduate and to satisfy the minimum requirements for university acceptance. Some kids do the bare minimum; most (at least around here) tend to fill up their schedules with elective courses selected from the high school menu, or from the local university for the more advanced students. What about self-study instead of electives? Encourage the curious kid to delve into some interest or cause in depth, pursuing lines of flight as they open up rather than following a prescribed curriculum, cutting across traditional disciplinary boundaries in the pursuit of some bit of truth or beauty or justice. Figure out a way for the kid to get academic credit for the project. Build some sort of collaborative component for kids whose individual interests converge. Help the kids make connections with experts and fellow enthusiasts in the larger world.

Hey, it’ll look great in the Dartmouth application portfolio.

Are You Serious?

Why do you suppose this strikes me as funny?

It’s finals week at our daughter’s high school. Yesterday was the math test — “IB Elementary Functions” is the official name of the course. Our daughter thinks she did okay on the exam, but the girl sitting next to her apparently didn’t, attempting to answer only about half the problems. While the kid — call her Alice — was disappointed, it seems that she has reconciled herself to mediocrity in this particular class. So have her parents. Things were tougher earlier in the semester, when Alice’s parents grounded her for an extended interval after she received some bad scores on math tests. So Alice wasn’t allowed to socialize outside of school, right? No, that wasn’t it. She could only hang around with other Asian kids. In the opinion of Alice’s parents, Anglo kids aren’t “serious” enough.

Alice thought it was funny too.

I’m On A Boat!

“Vous êtes embarqué.” Pascal

Following this evocative frontispiece quotation, Hans Blumenberg begins his extended essay Shipwreck and Spectator (1979) — recommended to me by Alexei — thusly:

“Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dry land. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of their existence above all through a metaphorics of a perilous sea voyage.” (p. 7)

Blumenberg then marshals plenty of great examples, dating back to the Greeks, in support of his thesis. As someone who never saw the sea until I was ten years old, I wonder what metaphor spoke to the landlocked peoples of the world down through history. Probably the road. But a road is there because others have already gone before. Biblically it’s the wilderness: that’s probably the canonical terranean analog to the sea.

“In this field of representation, shipwreck is something like the ‘legitimate’ result of seafaring, and a happily reached harbor or serene calm on the sea is only the deceptive face of something that is deeply problematic.” (p. 10)

Why is the safe harbor problematic? Because it’s too comfortable. Those who stay ashore remain uninvolved and dispassionate spectators of life. The embarked find themselves too involved in sheer survival to reflect on the experience. Only the shipwrecked, temporarily stranded in the midst of the perilous voyage, can speak from experience about what seafaring is really like.

“The next metaphorical step is that not only are we always already embarked and on the high seas butalso, as if this were inevitable, we are shipwrecked… It is the almost ‘natural’ permanent condition of life.” (p. 19)

Each of us is by turns at sea and shipwrecked, living and reflecting on life, simultaneously a member of the cast and a member of the audience (to invoke a related metaphor that Blumenberg also elucidates). Back to the landlocked: if wilderness corresponds to sea, then what corresponds to shipwreck? Turning again to the Biblical archetype, I’d say it’s captivity: the captive, forced to stay for an indefinite interval in a heterotopia, reflects on the voyage. Denizens of veld and prairie, of forest and mountains, of steppe and tundra: we are always wandering through the wilderness and always held captive.

“In the reception histories of metaphors, the more sharply defined and differentiated the imaginative stock becomes, the sooner the point is reached where there seems to be an extreme inducement to veer around, with the existing model, in the most decisive way and to try out the unsurpassable procedure of reversing it… A reversal in the strict sense would be present only if the helpless man borne along on his plank at sea were the initial situation, that is, if the construction of a ship were only the result of self-assertion proceeding from this situation.” (p. 75)

Is such a metaphoric reversal possible, where the always-already of both embarkation and shipwreck no longer serve as the starting point? Science and technology and commerce have continually made the ship more seaworthy, more comfortable for the privileged voyager — almost as if the ship were itself the safe harbor. But somebody must have made a start of it, at least once in history. Blumenberg cites Paul Lorenzen:

“‘If there is no attainable solid ground, then the ship must already have been built on the high seas; not by us, but by our ancestors. Our ancestors, then, were able to swim, and no doubt — using the scraps of wood floating around — they somehow initially put together a raft, and then continually improved it, until today it has become such a comfortable ship that we do not have the courage any more to jump into the water and start all over again from the beginning.’” (p. 77-78)

To make a fresh start — abandon ship, jump into the sea, grab hold of a plank — seems increasingly foolhardy. Even those who do plunge in keep the ship within hailing distance, waiting to be hauled back aboard when the seas get rough. Blumenberg concludes:

“Thus to think the beginning means, in the context of the comparison, to imagine the situation without the mother ship of natural language and, apart from its buoyancy, to ‘reperform,’ in a thought experiment, ‘the actions by means of which we — swimming in the middle of the sea of life — could build ourselves a raft or even a ship.’… But the sea evidently contains material other than what has already been used. Where can it come from, in order to give courage to the ones who are beginning anew? Perhaps from earlier shipwrecks?” (pp. 78-79)

[Tomorrow or the next day I'll indulge myself in some self-quotation relevant to Blumenberg's book, as I try to psych myself up for NaNoWRiMo.]

Civility

I’m finished with discussing people’s personal shortcomings on this blog. I’d sworn off it long ago but then, for what may have been good reasons or bad, I encouraged and jumped back into the return of the repressed rage. Maybe it really was a good idea at the time, served some useful function. But I’m done with that now.

I don’t deny the rage. If someone wants to talk about what an asshole someone is, or what an asshole I am for that matter, send me an email (portalic@gmail.com). I’ll be happy to listen, to gossip, to commiserate, to argue, to offer my opinion, maybe even to lend personal support for whatever that’s worth. I’ll probably even agree with you, inasmuch as these days I find myself routinely disappointed by and pissed off at practically everyone. But I’m done with the public airing of private grievances here, regardless of how justified or who started it. You say I’m standing in the way of freedom of speech, that I’m repressing the expression of the unconscious, that I’m schizzing the flows of creativity? Yes, I’m aware of that.

Disagreement, debate, argumentation? Not always my favorite sort of discussion, but it’s got a legitimate and honorable place in public discourse. And I’m still prepared to discuss publicly, and to write posts about, and to renounce, the dressing-up of private interpersonal disputes in abstract theoretical terms. But Dejan is right: there’s a lot of free-floating malevolence sluicing through the blogs. Civility might be a poor substitute for genuine love, but I prefer it to the direct or indirect public expression of genuine hatred, no matter how heartfelt.

A Hermeneutic of Sneerage

I don’t want to start no blog war or nothing, but the topic is psychologically interesting to me. Dr. Zamalek’s latest post on projects and energy suckage is entitled The Banality of the Troll. It seems that what I’ve been interpreting, per k-punk, as grey vampirism Dr. Z  has demoted all the way down to troll. (I wonder if we can infer that he’s been subjected to considerable negative criticism in his Belgrade presentations.) He says this:

“One thing to remember is that trolling is not just an unpleasant social phenomenon, but also an INTELLECTUAL ERROR. The sneer from nowhere is not just rude, it is also shallow and insufficiently aware of what it is doing. It lives in a world made solely of people, not of realities more generally. Sneering is not a project, it is an anti project. Projects are in touch with realities, not just with people…”

Dr. Z seems to contend here that the interpersonal sneer precedes and probably produces the intellectual critique. For many sneering critiquers this is no doubt the case: one hopes to gain relative status by publicly poking the needle at someone better known than oneself. But projects created by people are also often motivated at least in part by all-too-human egoistic considerations. Project producers tend to get pissed off when a “hermeneutic of suspicion” is applied to their work, suggesting that their project masks the creator’s “real” agenda of defending neoliberalism or paternalism or imperialism or whatever. I think the same goes for the recipient of intellectual critique: exposing unsavory psychological motivations for the sneer isn’t the same thing as dealing with the substance of the critique.

[A personal note: To find yourself subject to sneering critique is to have already achieved sufficient status that you've attracted the iconoclasts. Good on you. Most projects and their creators are ignored and would welcome the opportunity to discuss their work under practically any terms dictated by the discussant.]

Earlier in his post, though, Dr. Z depersonalizes trollish critique, embedding it in a broader intellectual culture:

“The troll, however, is extremely abundant, and is a direct byproduct of the model of critique that dominates most modern conceptions of what it means to be an intellectual. If we were to choose one global intellectual bias whose overturning would do the most good, it would be the primacy of critique”

This is worth considering. Empirical psychology is constructed piecemeal from studies that pit themselves against the “anti-project,” or “the null hypothesis” as it’s known in the biz. The goal of the research project is clear: starting with the assumption that randomness prevails, demonstrate that the pattern in your observable evidence is very unlikely to result from chance. The method doesn’t pit one theory against an alternative theory; it pits one theory against non-theory — a “critique from nowhere,” if you will. Still, I know what Dr. Z means: research driven by a pre-emptive attempt to poke holes in the Nowhere often results in a lot of trivial and mundane “normal science.” Still, in the aggregate the scientific enterprise is effective in building fairly intricate structures across the Void.

Like Dr. Z, I’m a big, naive fan of expanding these void-spanning structures rather than either siding with the Void or engaging in zero-sum debates about nailing down Plank A versus Plank Not-A. This critique style isn’t limited to intellectual circles. The corporate environment might look attractive to the outsider who believes that the entre-/intrapreneurial spirit actively cultivates creative risk-taking. Not so. Most new ideas don’t pan out; most risks fail, and workers have quite a bit to lose by actively promoting a risky new idea that will probably fail. But of course joining the chorus of nay-sayers makes failure all the more imminent. Conservatism is overdetermined. It’s amazing really that any new ventures succeed. Usually they’re championed not by the idea people but by the financiers and marketeers who’ve calculated the risks and conceived of the sales campaign. This is also why most new offerings in the marketplace aren’t all that new, and why the cineplex is filled with sequels and knockoffs.

Where Sacred Interpenetrates Secular

Here’s most of an email I sent to a guy last Friday: he’s an academic postmodern theologian who teaches at a nearby university. This is one of the directions I’m trying to take my practice.

I “work on work,” helping people reconnect the circuitry between passion and calling, between subjective agency and objective/intersubjective standards, between who they are and what they do. The ego is decentered in my praxis. Work isn’t all about what makes you happy or where you score on aptitude tests and interest inventories. Work contributes to culture, and hopefully work motivated by something like Truth, Beauty, and Justice can contribute to the construction of a better culture.

As you know, many evangelicals interpret the idea of “in the world but not of the world” in a way that dichotomizes church and human culture. Evangelicals can go into “the ministry” or conduct prayer breakfasts before work and so on, but the secular job itself? It’s a place to work out their individual salvation maybe, but not an arena where God is actively engaged. Emerging types can lament the worldliness of consumerism and pollution and neoliberal globalization, but they’re often more intent on building the church as a countercultural alternative to secular culture than on taking individual and collective stands for “good works” at the secular workplace.

As I’m sure you know, the TV show The Wire has prompted a lot of discussion in theory circles. Some dismiss it as just another racist indictment of inner-city drug-and-violence culture or a crypto-fascist valorization of vigilante justice. I’m more in the camp that regard the show as inspirational. Is it possible for some subset of people to be moved, as individuals and collectively, to Fight the Powers and take an active stand for justice? Are there rhizomatic movements of Spirit that, irrupting in particular places and times and situations, set the preconditions for a just event to break through? Can individual and collective agency amplify and concentrate this movement of Spirit in an intentional act of de/reterritorialization? Even if the world eventually absorbs the event and carries on as usual, such events embody and prefigure an alternate reality in which highers standards prevail.

This is already a long email, so I’ll get to the specific agenda. I’d like to make a push into the church world, looking for people who might see the Spirit at work in the workplace but whose subjective agency is hampered both by the marketplace ethos and by the Christian ethos of ecclesial hermeticism. Can individuals hear and heed the rhizomatic movement of Spirit? Can collective Wire-like initiatives in the workplace be assembled through some kind of Spirit-led biopower? I’m not talking about self-consciously church-branded programs, but emergent efforts where the sacred interpenetrates the secular.

I sent a somewhat shorter and less abstract version of this email to a local pastor. No response from either so far.

History is Whose Story?

Yesterday on the steps of the US Capitol the evangelical leader Rick Warren stirred a bit of controversy by concluding his inaugural invocation with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer — a distinctly Christian prayer of course. I was surprised more by how he began:

Almighty God, our father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone. It all comes from you, it all belongs to you. It all exists for your glory. History is your story. The Scripture tells us “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our god; the Lord is one.”

“Hear, oh Israel” — this is the beginning of the Shema from Deuteronomy 6. Having wandered through the wilderness for forty years after fleeing Egypt, the Jewish people stand on the east bank of the Jordan, ready to cross over into the land of Canaan, also called Palestine. Moses has just delivered the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5, and now he’s giving the people a set of final instructions and warnings before they surge across the river to take what God says is rightfully theirs. It’s at the beginning of the very next chapter that we read Moses’ instructions regarding what should be done with the current occupants of the land:

“when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them.” (Deuteronomy 7:2)

Is it mere coincidence that Warren chose of all things the Shema as the opening theme for his invocation at this particular juncture in history? I don’t think so.

Eclipse as Object

Graham Harman has burst onto the scene, first on Nick’s blog and now on his own. I’ve been reading his most recent (I think) book Guerrilla Metaphysics, and something I encountered early in Part Two captured my attention. And so, in testing out my new mini-camcorder, I focus my attention on a small nuance in Harman’s contribution to “speculative realism”:

I find Harman’s book stimulating, innovative, and fun to read. As I read further Harman will doubtless offer further insights into the question I pose in my little video. Hopefully when I get a memory card I can focus my attention on the subject at hand for longer than 30-second sound bites.

Return of the Ktismatically Repressed

I originally started writing this blog with the intention of promoting a book I’d just written about the Genesis 1 creation narrative. Subsequently I’ve come to realize that, while the central exegetical premise remains strong, the book itself is kind of lame. But I can do better, and now I’m ready to get on with it. Here’s a tentative outline for the rewritten nonfiction, working title 7 Creations Redux.

* * *

The book would begin by putting forward two basic and seemingly incompatible commitments. One, evolutionary and cosmological theories are right: the gods had absolutely nothing to do with creating the material universe. Two, the Genesis 1 creation narrative is literally true. This sets the stage for the paradoxical reading of Genesis 1; namely, that it’s the story of two guys having a week-long conversation about the universe. What gets created isn’t the material stuff of the universe but the conceptual-linguistic structure by which the idea of a universe came into being. It’s the archetypal story of that first singularity when prehumanity became fully human.

By looking closely at this reading of the ancient text the reader witnesses a sevenfold creation.

1. The creation of science: the first attempt to match observation with thought.
2. The creation of hermeneutics: the first attempt to understand one another through language.
3. The creation of creation: the recognition that, even in a pre-existing universe, it’s possible consciously to create something unprecedented.
4. The creation of history: the first time something recognizably new happens in human experience.
5. The creation of culture: the beginning of a cumulative and communicable result of human invention.
6. The creation of man: the emergence of that which most distinguishes humanity from the other animals.
7. The creation of god: man’s amazement in witnessing his own seeming transcendence of nature.

This “original” version of the creation story preserves the words of the Biblical text as written. It also is surely a true story. At some point prehistory turned to history: early humans developed language; they began to arrive at an understanding of the world they live in; they started progressively reshaping the world; they arrived at self-awareness. Even if we don’t remember the details, each of us has personally lived through this true story of achieving sentience.

With the creation of god the original narrative undergoes a mystifying transformation. The basic story remains recognizable, but the meaning of the story is completely inverted:

1. Creating the idea and structural concept of a thing gets conflated with creating the thing itself. This mystification leads to the reification of the social order.
2. The mutual give-and-take of conversation gets replaced with revelation and reception, making belief more important than understanding and agreement.
3. Instead of marking the beginning of human history, the sixth day marks the beginning of the end, when man starts falling away from God’s created order.
4. God is the only creator, with man demoted to the position of maintenance engineer.
5. Instead of arising as a cumulative “second nature” built on and complementing the first, human culture is regarded as the degenerate product of human arrogance.
6. Man, rather than ratcheting himself up on these earliest experiences of invention and self-awareness, immediately descends into decadence.
7. God, instead of being indistinguishable from man, becomes wholly other and above.

Despite updated theologizing, or perhaps because of it, the contemporary Christian church maintains its commitment the creator-god of its scriptures and traditions.

• By adopting the postmodern rejection of the scientific “metanarrative,” the church is able to discount the massive empirical support for a creatorless cosmogeny.
• By adopting a postmodern reader-centered hermeneutic, the church is able to discount the factuality of the Genesis 1 narrative while upholding its “truth.”
• By upholding a postmodern skepticism regarding progress, the church is able to discount human cultural advances.

Even in limiting God’s role to that of designer, first cause, or immanent force of creativity driving the evolutionary process, the church retains its belief in God as ultimate creator of the universe, with humanity still relegated to an infinitely lower status in the cosmic hierarchy. Suppose this belief in a creator were completely excised from the Bible: what would a creatorless Judeo-Christianity look like?

• By abandoning the idea of the Creator’s ultimate power over the world, the theological justification for holy warfare is nullified.
• By abandoning the idea of a created natural order, moral rationales justifying institutionalized homophobia and misogyny are nullified.
• By abandoning the idea of humanity’s fall from an original created purity, the notion that human culture is intrinsically corrupt is set aside. In addition, there remains no justification for perpetuating the belief that Christians are magically restored to the original pure human state, which supposedly bestows on Christians an ontologically superior essence relative to non-Christians. This sense of superiority has been used to discount the significance of violence and persecution perpetrated by Christians on non-Christians.
• That God is creator is seen by New Testament writers as the reason why God can restore humans to life after death. Without a creator the notion of the immortal soul would be jeopardized.
• Similarly, abandoning the idea that the creator can decide to destroy his creation and start over would presumably reduce Christians’ belief in unlimited abundance of natural resources and their tacit zeal for bringing on the apocalypse.

The proposed book concludes with an exercise in speculative theology. Would Christianity survive if it lost the creator? Would people continue to worship the Christian God, seek his counsel, pray to him, etc. if he no longer claimed to control the universe? Is it possible to reconfigure the basic job description for the Christian God if his creatorly credentials and functions are eliminated? Would God have to be radically redesigned? Or does the whole point of God slide down the slippery slope into irrelevance? Does the Apostle Paul’s concept of a “new creation” render the old creational underpinnings of the religion obsolete?

* * *

One good thing about this proposed book is that I’ve already done the background work on almost all of it. Portions of the old book I can cut-and-paste into the new one. I’ve also written a number of blog posts that could be adapted for the book. But perhaps the main thing I like about 7 Creations Redux is that it’s more irreverent and less conciliatory to the Christian tradition than was the old book. Plus the speculative theology bits should be fun to play around with.

I’d given considerable thought to rolling this whole idea into a novel. I do think there are interesting fictional implications to be exploited. But separating out the detailed exegetical and theoretical components and gathering them inside a tightly constructed speculative nonfiction gives me greater freedom to loosen up the fiction-writing.

The Life of $

In yesterday’s discussion on the Navel Gazers’ post, passing reference was made to The Da Vinci Code as an example of financially successful commercial fiction. It brought back to mind a conversation Anne and I had with a commercial novelist, a friend of a friend, I guess it must have been about four years ago now. I’m not exactly sure what his genre is called — survival supernatural adventure thriller maybe. I’d regard him as a successful mid-list author, having had several books published with most of them still in print as paperbacks. I read one of his books and found that he writes very well, with snap and idiosyncrasy.

It wasn’t hard for us to identify him at the coffee shop, since he’s got the casual grizzled look characteristic of old-school Boulderites. He’s climbed Everest, lived in various exotic locales, been in jail at least once, and now he’s somewhat uncomfortably settled into the middle-class life with wife and kid. We had to enunciate very clearly and face-on, since he’d lost most of his hearing to the cold in some climbing debacle. Throughout the conversation he continually looked over his shoulder, as if he suspected that someone was spying on us.

He told us about his six-figure settlement with a major Hollywood studio that had put together a screenplay based at least partly on one of his novels but without paying or crediting him. His sense was that the studios do this sort of thing regularly, figuring it’s cheaper to pay off the lawsuits than actually to pay the authors what they’re worth. The studios can afford the high-priced lawyers, the writers can’t.

He said he wished that he wrote books his young daughter could read, but he had to spice up his work with the usual “adult” elements of sex and violence. He said he wished he’d written The Life of Pi, which is a survival adventure story that’s both more literary and more kid-friendly than his own books. He felt locked into his authorial persona and style: the readers expect a certain kind of book from an established author, preventing him from experimenting and growing as a writer. What about creating a new pen name, we suggested: then you could write what you really want to write. I don’t have the time or energy to do that and still keep up with the demand for my usual stuff, he replied.

He talked about the disaster that was his most recent book. Previously he had written a first installment of a possible trilogy and, because it proved to be his biggest-selling book ever, the publisher gave him a big advance for the second volume. While he was writing this second installment his editor left the publishing house and signed on with a competitor. This editor was working on the manuscripts of two writers at the time, and he managed to take one of them with him to the new job. That writer was Dan Brown, and the book was The Da Vinci Code. Our new friend’s book, having been left behind, found itself orphaned, without an internal champion to move it forward. The new editor apparently resented being assigned this book in mid-edit and decided to bad-mouth it to the head of the publishing house. The publisher sent our new writerly acquaintance an extremely critical letter which included a list of ten things a new writer should do in order to write a good book. The writer was ordered to come to a meeting in New York to discuss the book, which he would have to pay for himself. Eventually the book came out, but the publisher did nothing to publicize it and effectively let it die on the shelves. At the time of our coffee shop discussion our co-conversant was working with his agent to find a new publisher for his next book.

Dan Brown still writes promo blurbs for the back covers of every one of this guy’s new novels.

Navel Gazers’ Club

I’m glad I didn’t have to drive off into the snowstorm last night to attend my writers’ group meeting, since earlier in the day we sent rejection letters to each other.

Remember the short story I presented at the public reading sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers group? Remember my subsequent email exchange with Dave, the MC for the public reading event? Well the RMFW sponsors a number of writers’ groups, and it turns out there’s one centered in Boulder where I live. Last Monday was the first meeting I attended, and I must admit I had an inkling it might also be the last. Though my wife has subjected herself to this sort of discipline before and generally found it more discouraging and irritating than helpful, I wanted to see for myself. I arrived late, having spent a quarter hour trying to zero in on the hotel where the group convenes its weekly critique sessions. Two of the regular members arrived after I did though, bringing the total attendance to six.

We went around the table introducing ourselves and describing the type of fiction we write. When it came to my turn I handled the first question well enough but found myself stumped on the second. The leader asked if I could at least give a two-sentence description of my novels. The first I characterized as the tale of a reluctant messianic figure, a leader of pilgrimages whose mentor has been asked to track him down and find out why he had dropped out of sight. It’s an adventure novel then, one member hazarded. No, I said: while the characters do eventually arrive at a destination they do tend to meander quite a bit. The second novel then: it’s about a guy trying to be a portalist, guiding people to alternate realities, but he keeps getting sidetracked by inconsequential mishaps. Does he find an alternate reality, asked one of the fantasy writers. Well, yes, but it’s not much different from this reality, and it’s never quite clear whether it’s real or in his head. Ah, magical realism, perhaps you would like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I nodded noncommittally, muttered a few half-conceived thoughts about Philip Dick and Borges, and started looking around the table for someone to rescue me. General fiction then, was the consensus. Yes, literary fiction, I asserted. Mutterings of disapproval all around: evidently that was the wrong answer too.

So now we get down to the main event: critique. One of the guys in the group, a fortyish high school English teacher, has brought with him a synopsis of his novel, which he plans to enter into some sort of competition. He hands around copies of the synopsis to all the attendees. As the leader reads it aloud everyone else is busy jotting notes in the margins of their copies. The oral reading concludes, and everyone flips back to the first page of the document, reading again silently, making more annotations. After awhile one of the members volunteers to go first. She commends a few turns of phrase and structural decisions made by the writer before leveling her main criticism: we don’t learn enough about the motivations driving the story. Cut out some of the back story and embed the plot details inside a more thematic context. I generally agreed: the synopsis was very heavy on plot details, and I found myself rereading again and again trying to keep the story straight. A more general overview would help frame the details. On to the next member: she wanted to know more about the main characters, mostly so that the reader would care about what happens to them in the story. I agreed with that too. She asked if there was a romantic interest in the story: was it the noble warrior-diplomat and the kidnapped princess, or the shadow warrior and the princess’ sister? Discussion revolved around how these romances were handled in Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, the intent clearly being to make this new book follow those successful precedents as closely as possible. Jungian archetypes entered the conversation. I said I thought the romance might be between the noble and the shadow warrior. No one found this remark either amusing or helpful. When it got to be my turn I said that I thought the whole synopsis ought to be longer: keep the detailed plot info, but add theme and character stuff as well. This proved to be the consensus recommendation to the writer. I felt a bit more comfortable, though I’m quite certain I wouldn’t want to read the book we’ve been discussing.

The next writer up for critique handed out 8 pages from near the end of a romance novel she’s writing. It turns out I know this woman: her daughter and mine used to attend the same primary school. At the time I’d regarded this woman as kind of a pain in the ass know-it-all. No matter: now we’re in a different context, I can overlook these things. The guy who wrote the synopsis is chosen to read this bit aloud, and he does a crackerjack job of it, even using a passable Irish accent for the dialogue. The story takes place in Dublin in the early 1800s, and it deals with the foibles and romances of a young country girl who was raped by her father and is trying to make a life for herself in the big dirty city. In the excerpt we’re considering, the girl and one of the big affable young Irishmen who are protecting her from some previously-described threat are being lured into a trap. Critique centers on a few details in the narrative: a motivational incongruity, an odd POV shift, improbable positioning of the entrapped characters. That all sounded fine to me, though again I had a sense that I would find it a chore to read through this book in such detail for week after week. As the discussion continued I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into my chair, bored and anxious. My own motivation was waning; my POV was starting to recede; I longed to fast-forward to the scene where I’m driving home.

* * *

The next day I received a brief and cordial email from the leader of the group welcoming me to come back the next week. I read about the audition process, whereby prospective new members who would like the group to read and critique their fiction must submit two short samples of their work for consideration. The email concluded: “we are for people wanting to write and sell commercial fiction.” Based on my experience in the group I interpreted this as meaning “not literary fiction,” and probably also “not the kind of fiction you write.” So I let it rest, figuring I would either return or not the following week as the mood struck, but not feeling particularly hopeful about the possible value I might derive from participating long-term in this process.

A week passed and, as Monday rolled around again, I began to feel like I ought to do something proactive about the writers’ group. So I finally responded to the group leader’s email, thanking her for the note, saying I found the group interesting, etc. I mentioned that I was thinking about writing a set of interconnected short stories and would regard the group as an external stimulus to getting the stories written. I speculated about whether I might stand on the other side of the commercial/literary divide:

“I would like people to read what I write, and I would be happy if they paid me for doing me that honor. However, I don’t try to craft what I write in order that an audience will like it. My hope is that I can write what I see and hope that people will find themselves liking it. Also, if I came to realize that my writing conformed to some convention of a genre I would probably go out of my way to change what I’d written. I’m concerned that my orientation might put me at odds with the rest of the group, in terms both of what I offer in critique and in what I might receive. I understand that the group isn’t a debating forum and that each writer finally decides what recommendations s/he will adopt. But you get my point I’m sure.”

To this email I attached a copy of the story I’d written for the RMFW-organized public reading event, mentioning that Dave the MC had announced after my reading, perhaps jokingly, that my story was “too deep” for him. I understood that I wasn’t presenting a formal audition, but I wondered if, by giving it a quick once-over, she could picture herself and the rest of the group offering useful critique for my kind of writing. She responded within an hour or so:

“We are a commercial fiction group and we are crafting specifically to be marketable. That is the goal for our group but there are other groups around that don’t have that as criteria. You may fit better elsewhere. And, by the way, successful writers know they have to go “out of their way” to “Change” what they’ve written, thus the critique group. It sounds like our purpose is not yours. I do get your point. I suspect you wouldn’t be there for the same reasons we are there – to make our work fit commercial needs…

“I’m pretty sure you are needing a different type of group. Especially in light of the idea that the work was “too deep” for the MC. If that means what I suspect, you are writing literary. Our group might even find it belly-button studying… all I was able to do was take a peek at the first couple of pages. This would not be the type of material we are looking at. It doesn’t get right into the action (which doesn’t have to mean physical action), it is what we call “belly button studying”…nothing wrong with that…it just doesn’t work for us.

“If at some point you find yourself writing commercial fiction (and having read many books on how to do that, gone to conferences, etc.) feel free to approach us again.”

So at least now I know what I’m looking for: a navel-gazers’ group. And I don’t have to subject myself to any more of that pulpy trash those people call “writing” — not that there’s anything wrong with pulpy trash…

A “Bold Plan”

I wake up Monday morning to discover that a “bold plan” has been announced. The US Treasury is pumping an additional $20 billion into Citigroup, and the Treasury and FDIC are guaranteeing $306 billion of risky loans in Citicorp’s portfolio. In exchange, the US government receives $7 billion in preferred stock and warrants for 254 million shares of Citigroup common at $10.61 per share.

We aren’t privy to all the information and my expertise is limited, but based on what’s been publicly revealed I’ll attempt to summarize the value of the deal for both the Citigroup Corporation and the U.S. government.

• The $20 billion cash injection is easy to understand.

• How much are the loan guarantees worth? All loans are “risky” in the sense that the lender faces some risk that the borrower won’t pay back the loan: that’s why the lender charges interest. That these loans have been specifically identified as “risky” means that there’s a greater-than-average likelihood that the borrowers will default. They aren’t all likely to default; rather, some higher-than-average percentage of them probably will. Ordinarily extra risk commands extra interest. But we presume that these are extraordinary loans: subprime, earning lower-than-average interest. So let’s say that the loan guarantees are worth the difference between the interest rate actually charged and the interest a high-risk loan ought to earn. How much is that? Let’s be conservative and say it’s 3%, meaning that if an additional 3% of these loans default the guarantor breaks even. So: $306 billion in guarantees × 3% risk premium = $9.2 billion is the value to Citigroup of these guarantees. In fact these guarantees could be worth a lot more if the property held as collateral by the bank securing these loans — presumably mostly houses and other buildings — turn out not to be worth in today’s real estate market what they’re valued at in Citigroup’s books. Because the government is only guaranteeing the loans and not acquiring them outright, Citigroup continues to hold the collateral. I presume this means that Citigroup can still decide when to sell these non-liquid assets and for how much. If they sell a house now, when its market value is down, then presumably this difference between book and sale value of the collateral will be written up as a loss on Citigroup’s loan. The government would then have to recoup Citigroup for the difference.

• Now the preferred Citigroup shares. The news releases say the shares are worth $7 billion. These aren’t shares currently in investors’ hands, traded on the stock exchange; they’re a new issue offered directly and exclusively to the U.S. government as part of this deal. The government is paying another $20 billion in cash to Citigroup to buy more of these preferred shares. How was the value for the preferred shares set? I don’t know, but let’s assume that they really are worth what the dealmakers say they’re worth. Why be skeptical? Well, there’s this…

• The warrants. The US government receives an assurance that it can buy Citigroup stock at $10.61 per share, whenever the government chooses to exercise its option to do so. At the time this deal was struck Citigroup shares were trading at $3.71 per share. That means the warrants are worthless. Potentially even worse, the government could decide to redeem their warrants at a loss in order to prop up the market for Citigroup stock.

To summarize: Citigroup gets $20 billion in cash, along with presumably uncollateralized loan guarantees in excess of $300 billion worth a minimum of $9.2 billion in risk premiums, for a total of $29.1 billion cash and equivalent. In exchange the U.S. government gets $7 billion in preferred Citigroup stock. That really is a bold plan. Put it this way: I’m not sure I’ve got all the facts at my disposal, but what’s been said leaves plenty of questions unanswered in my mind anyway.

Gut and Run

Bear with me on this one.

In March 2008 a bipartisan group of 22 senators, including Democrats John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, Patrick Leahy, and Carl Levin, introduced bill S. 2666, the Affordable Housing Investment Act of 2008. The stated purpose of this bill is “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to encourage investment in affordable housing, among other things.” Affordable housing is set aside by the government for low-income renters whose housing costs are reduced by government subsidies. To increase the availability of low-income housing stock, the government offers tax incentives to investors in affordable housing developments.

I direct the reader’s attention to TITLE III–FACILITATE PRIVATE INVESTMENT CAPITAL TO INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING INVESTMENT. Section 303 – REPEAL OF RECAPTURE BOND RULE proposes to modify Paragraph (6)(A) of Section 42(j) of the existing law to read as follows:

IN GENERAL- In the case of a disposition of a building or an interest therein, the taxpayer shall be discharged from liability for any additional tax under this subsection by reason of such disposition if it is reasonably expected that such building will continue to be operated as a qualified low-income building for the remaining compliance period with respect to such building.

Related to this bit of obscure rewriting you will also observe the even more cryptically impenetrable TITLE IV–HELP PRESERVE EXISTING AFFORDABLE HOUSING, SEC. 401. REPEAL OF 10-YEAR RULE FOR ACQUISITION HOUSING CREDITS:

(a) In General- Subparagraph (B) of section 42(d)(2) (relating to existing buildings) is amended by striking clause (ii) and by redesignating clauses (iii) and (iv) as clauses (ii) and (iii), respectively.

(b) Conforming Amendment- Section 42(d) is amended by striking paragraph (6) and by redesignating paragraph (7) as paragraph (6).

I would never have known about this piece of proposed legislation, let alone deciphered the pertinent passages, had it not been for an white paper submitted to the Senate by the Surety and Fidelity Association of America , or SFAA. (I used to work in the surety industry and have been renewing my familiarity with the Association’s activities lately.) The document begins:

The Internal Revenue Code in 26 USC 42(j) permits investors in low-income housing to take tax credits for 10 years on the condition the property continues as low-income housing for 15 years. These tax credits are subject to recapture if the investor changes the nature of the property during the compliance period and… fails to maintain the property as low income housing for the remainder of the 15-year term…

Legislation has been introduced in the last two sessions of Congress to repeal the long-term guarantee of future compliance with both the tax laws and the federal housing program and to substitute a notification to be made after a compliance default and the tax credit recapture event have already occurred. This increases the profits of a few investor-sellers at the expense of U.S. taxpayers and low-income tenants who will bear the cost of future non-compliance.

The SFAA is an association representing surety bond industry, a relatively small line of insurance business. A surety bond guarantees the performance of a contract; if the contractor fails to perform, the surety steps in and pays to have the work completed. The surety company charges a fee for its guarantee, which is in effect  a risk premium not unlike that charged by a lender protecting itself against the borrower’s default. The underwriter invests considerable effort to make sure that the contractor is technically and financially capable of fulfilling its obligations before issuing the guaranty bond on the contractor’s behalf.

Under current Federal tax law, the developer of a low-income housing project qualifies for significant tax breaks, so long as the property remains dedicated to its original purpose. The developer is allowed to capture its tax benefits up front, with the understanding that the unearned portion must be paid back if the developer converts the property to, say, luxury condominiums within 15 years. The surety bond guarantees that the unearned tax benefit will be repaid if the developer flips the property to another use. If the developer can’t pay then the government draws on the bond guaranty and the surety company has to pony up. The SFAA briefing continues:

The tax recapture bond is required for the benefit of U.S. taxpayers not the investors. The bond requirement was enacted in 1986 to prevent investor abuse of the government housing programs. The tax recapture bond prevents aggressive investors from taking the tax credits in the early years of the compliance period and then disposing of the property in the later years. These were so-called “Gut and Run” schemes, in which investors gutted tax credits from the property and then sold the properties to shell corporations with little assets for the IRS to pursue to recapture unearned tax credits.

With the SFAA explanation in mind, we return to the proposed legislation. Instead of requiring that the new development continue to be operated as affordable housing for 15 years in order to qualify for the tax credit, the proposed revision permits any change of ownership or management “if it reasonably expected” that the property will continue as affordable housing. The surety bond, which guaranteed developers’ compliance with the requirement, would no longer be required. And instead of recapturing up to 10 years of unearned tax breaks from the developer or the surety bond guarantor, the proposed legislation strikes out the recapture clause altogether. With the restrictions lifted and the financial penalties removed, investors in affordable housing developments would be given carte blanche to rip off the taxpayers while at the same time pulling the rug out from low-income tenants by selling or renting the properties to higher-paying customers.

The proposed Senate legislation and a similar bill introduced into the House of Representatives are both currently in committee and have not yet come up for a vote.

Election 2008: Presidency

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked. I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

- David Sedaris, “Undecided”

A few months ago I decided to vote Socialist Party USA, even though I keep forgetting the name of the candidate. I had a chat with my father yesterday and he’s voting for Nader again, just like he did eight years ago in Florida and four years later after he moved to South Carolina. My dad thinks there’s not much substantive difference between McCain and Obama, that Obama will say anything at all just to get elected. Of course my father might be right. Like a lot of people, I tend to think that Obama is really more left than he’s letting on, that he is shifting rightward in order to grab up what passes in the US for moderate voters. But maybe he’s been this way all along, invoking semi-left rhetoric mostly to hold onto that wing of the Party. Maybe Obama is being held hostage by a Party apparatus that won’t let him be the change agent he wants to be. All this psychologizing isn’t going to get me anywhere: after all, I’ve never even met the man.

I’m not sure I understand the objections to deciding among political candidates based on ideology, but I presume this is part of it: talk is cheap; people will say just anything. So then along with ideology I have to add morality to the decision matrix: is he a man of his word? I have judged the Democratic majority in Congress to be corrupt for not shutting off the Iraq war funding after ascending to power on the 2006 wave of antiwar sentiment. Even Obama, whose earliest claim of distinction in the primaries was his vote against the War Powers Act, has made peace with the pro-war faction of the Democratic Party. In making a case for himself as Commander in Chief Obama emphasizes his personal credentials as cool-headed decision-maker and competent manager — like an applicant for a CEO position. I keep wanting him to take a firm ideological stance against the wars, but then I remember that according to the Constitution the President is supposed to be an administrator rather than a leader, that the Congress is supposed to decide these things, that as elected officials the members of Congress are supposed to act on behalf of the electorate. As a Senator Obama has consistently voted to continue funding the wars rather than pulling the plug. It would seem that, other than the original vote to authorize Bush to invade, Obama’s war voting record hasn’t been substantively different from Hillary’s or from Biden’s, or even from McCain’s. Does that make Obama a liar? No: he’s consistently stated that, while he disagreed with the launching of the wars, once war was underway he felt it important that the military intervention be managed and funded adequately and that the American troops be supported. I’ve been prepared to discount Obama’s rationale, believing that he’s being a good Party player, making tactical concessions in order to achieve a larger strategic antiwar victory. Why would I have believed that when I had no evidence to support it? Because I wanted to believe it. On the other hand, why do I believe that if Nader had been in the Congress he’d have voted against the wars and their continued funding? Because that’s what he says he would do, and I perceive him as a man of his word. Rhetoric, ideology, personal morality.

I suspect that Nader would make at least as good a President as either McCain or Obama. As best I can recall, on every political position where Nader differs from Obama I agree with Nader. I was of the same mind about Nader vis-a-vis Kerry, and I felt like I’d betrayed my conscience voting for Kerry, a feeling that was certainly exacerbated by Kerry’s defeat. At the same time, I’m kind of like the guy who, when asked if he’d rather have the chicken or the pile of shit, says he’ll have the fish. Though Nader is on the menu, I understand that I can’t have my own personal Nader for president. I can insist on ordering the fish just to remain true to my own convictions, as well as to erect a tiny spectacle of dissent for others possibly to observe out of the corners of their eyes as they’re eating what the majority selected from the menu, a little reminder that we could all be eating fish right now if enough of us said we wanted it. But I have to face it: at the end of tomorrow I’m going to be served chicken or shit.

Comparing Nader with Obama point by point I’d pick Nader. But in comparing Nader with my own personal political ideas I’d find points of disagreement. Comparing Obama with McCain point by point? While they’re similar to one another in so many ways, there are differences. On every difference that I know of I agree with Obama. Can I operate within the pragmatic binary, deciding which of the only two possible winners I prefer? Or by occupying the larger political-ideological field do I choose the one I like best but who surely will lose? If I flip the binary toggle while still floating in the vaster space of all conceivable presidential politics, then I have to pick the lesser of two evils. But if I consciously constrain my electoral horizon to just these two candidates, Obama and McCain, maybe I can persuade myself that I’m actually picking the one I like better, whom I agree with more, whom I think will be a better President for the country. Voting for President is just one among any number of political acts I can take from within the larger space, each of which is constrained by the real circumstances in which it plays out.

I’ll have the chicken, thank you.

Election 2008: Boulder County Issue 1A

Here’s an intriguing proposition being put to the vote here in Boulder Colorado:

Shall Boulder County debt be increased by up to $40 million… with no increase in any county tax or tax rate, for the purpose of financing the costs of constructing, acquiring, and installing solar and other renewable energy systems or energy-efficient improvements for property owners… by the issuance of special assessment bonds payable from special assessments imposed against benefited properties…?

Say you own a home or business property in Boulder County. You want to retrofit your building for solar heating — install panels, cables, transformers, etc. If Issue 1A passes, you can finance this installation by borrowing money directly from the County government. These loans would be priced below market rates of interest, and for income tax purposes they would be treated like mortgages: the interest paid by the owner is deductible. The loans are attached to the property itself, so that if the current owner sells the building the new owner acquires the responsibility continuing the loan repayments.

The supporting documentation, mailed by the County to every resident, says this:

WHEREAS, coal and natural gas are the principle sources of generation of commercial quantities of electrical energy for the power grid in the Western United States, and home and business consumption accounts for 73% of the overall usage of electric energy; and…

WHEREAS, if the United States is serious about moving away from fossil fuels in order to limit the greenhouse gas effect leading to global warming, the existing occupied building stock must be retrofitted…; and…

WHEREAS, existing homeowners, and to a certain extent business property owners, are highly leveraged on their properties currently…

NOW, THEREFORE, etc. etc.

In addition to the arguments in favor of this bill, the County summarizes arguments submitted in opposition. Here the language gets a little more colorful:

This is another example of Boulder County’s excessive obsession with green initiatives regardless of the negative financial impacts… One of the problems with the current financial meltdown on Wall Street is predatory lending, lending by mortgage companies to people who could not possibly afford the loans. Yet this is exactly what 1A does… To commissioners want to lend money to people that the market has determined cannot repay additional loans, and saddle the poor homeowner with even more easy debt using the good credit of the citizens of Boulder County…

This is similar to mortgage companies who attempted to be so creative in creating debt instruments that we had a housing market collapse… The county is acting like a crackdealer for people hooked on money… Vote NO on this insane proposal by the County Commissioners.

I admire the creativity of a local government that’s prepared to take on the role of lender as a tangible way to encourage use of renewable energy. According to the documentation it will take 20 years before the building owner’s energy cost savings offset the price of the solar equipment installation. In backing these loans the citizenry doesn’t participate in these savings, but they are on the hook in the event of default. Then there’s this crackdealer angle to consider: instead of providing relief for already-distressed mortgagees, 1A would encourage homeowners to take on even more debt.

I wouldn’t be sorry if this bill passed: an innovative and tangible local effort to clean up the commons. However, I can’t get past the crackdealer argument. I’m going to vote NO.

Election 2008: Colorado Amendments

[The morning after: Colorado election results are in the comments.]

With the election just a few days away I guess it’s time for me to decide how I’m going to fill in my ballot. In addition to the presidential and senate races there are several issues being put to the vote in Colorado. Although ordinarily this blog doesn’t have many local readers, I thought it might be informative to show what kinds of things the local citizenry is being asked to decide. Here’s how I plan to vote on each of them, but I might be dissuadable if you’ve got a good counter-argument to offer. Here are the proposed amendments to the Constitution of the State of Colorado being decided by popular vote during this election:

Amendment 46 — Prohibit governments from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, or public contracting.

The U.S. Constitution already prohibits this sort of discrimination; the key phrase is “granting preferential treatment.” If this amendment passes, equal opportunity and diversity hiring policies, which attempt to rectify institutionalized biases and injustices in academe and the workplace, would be prohibited. I vote NO.

Amendment 47 — Prohibit requiring an employee to join and pay any dues or fees to a labor union as a condition for employment.

This is basic union busting — NO.

Amendment 48 — Define the term “person” to include any human being from the moment of fertilization.

A proven strategy for getting out the conservative vote is to put pro-life and anti-gay marriage any amendments on the state ballot. If this proposal wasn’t on the ballot I think Obama would win Colorado for sure. NO.

Amendment 49 — Prohibit any public employee paycheck deduction except for deductions required by federal law, tax withholdings, judicial liens and garnishments, health benefit and other insurance deductions, deductions for pension or retirement plans or systems or other savings or investment programs, and charitable deductions.

There seems no need for this legislation, except for making it illegal to deduct union dues from government employee paychecks. NO.

Amendment 50 — Allow residents of Central City, Black Hawk, and Cripple Creek to vote to extend casino hours, approve additional games, and increase the maximum single bet limit; give most of the gaming tax revenue that results from new gaming limits to Colorado community colleges and to the gaming cities and counties; exempt the revenue raised from new gaming limits from state and local revenue and spending limits.

I don’t know. I think gambling can be fun, and if you want to play big-stakes games why should the State prevent you? It’s not like second-hand smoke, where hanging around in the same casino with a compulsive gambler is going to rub off on you. I have no idea how the local citizenry of these three towns feel about having gambling joints in their neighborhoods, but this amendment, but I’ve got to believe it’s the casino owners rather than the townies who are pushing for this amendment. On the other hand, the local jurisdictions will get significant increases in tax revenues, so they might like it. But the biggest chunk of increased taxes would go to the community colleges located throughout the state. This sort of earmarking of state revenues I’m generally against, but giving it to schools isn’t so bad. State-run lotteries are a regressive mechanism for raising tax revenues. Still, this amendment isn’t proposing a sin tax imposed on the gamblers, but rather an income tax to be paid by the casinos. The Voter Guide distributed by the Boulder County Democrats says “no,” but they don’t say why — I suspect it’s worries about compulsive gambling and the seedy environment that seems to crop up in casino towns. Much as I think casino gambling is a stupid way to spend your money, I could say the same thing about luxury cars and crappy $6 coffee-flavored beverages. The amendment doesn’t require these 3 towns to accede to statewide results; if it passes the legislation just just gives them the right to decide for themselves. I’m going to vote YES.

Amendment 51 — Increase state sales tax from 2.9% to 3.1% over two years; direct the new money be used to pay for services for people with developmental disabilities.

Again, the earmarking is problematic. Also, sales tax is regressive. So after originally thinking yes I’m changing to NO for this one.

Amendment 52 — Require the state legislature to spend a portion of state severance tax collections on highway projects.

Severance tax is levied against mining companies based on the amount of nonrenewable natural resources they extract from the earth. So, e.g., an oil driller’s severance tax would be used to pay for highway projects that would… encourage more driving and thus more oil consumption. NO.

Amendment 53 — Hold a business executive criminally responsible for the business’s failure to perform a duty required by law if the official knew of the duty and the business’s failure to perform it.

YES.

Amendment 54 — Prohibit certain government contractors from contributing to a political party or candidate for the contract’s duration and two years thereafter; prohibit contributors to ballot issue campaigns from entering into certain government contracts relating to the ballot issue.

I’m sure the government contractors claim discrimination and excessive bureaucracy to monitor compliance, but I say YES to this one.

Amendment 55 — Prohibit private-sector employees from firing or suspending full-time employees except for specific reasons.

I understand that employers are going to regard this legislation as restricting their flexibility to respond to volatility in the economic climate. However, one of the “specific reasons” that’s acceptable for letting a worker go is “documented adverse economic circumstances that directly affect the employer.” YES.

Amendment 56 — Require private employers with 20 or more employees to either provide health insurance for both employees and their dependents or pay for insurance through a new state authority; limit the amount the employee must pay to 20% for employee-only coverage and to 30% for dependent coverage.

I favor single-payer health insurance that would eliminate employers as purchasers of health plans. This legislation will make it relatively harder on the smaller employers, providing competitive advantages to bigger companies. However, this law is designed to protect workers regardless of who they work for. YES.

Amendment 57 — Allow an injured employee to seek damages in court, beyond workers’ compensation benefits, if the employee believes that the employer failed to provide a safe and healthy workplace.

Certainly a company should be subject to punitive damages for creating or tolerating conditions that make it more likely for workers to be injured. As an aside, I’d like to see current and former employees of subprime lending institutions start suing their employers for PTSD and punitive damages caused by putting their workers in the untenable position of pushing toxic mortgages on their friends and neighbors. YES.

Amendment 58 — Increase the amount of state severance taxes paid by oil and natural gas companies, primarily by eliminating an existing state tax credit; allocate the increased severance tax revenue to college scholarships for state residents, wildlife habitat, renewable energy projects, transportation projects in energy-impacted areas, and water treatment grants.

I described severance taxes in Amendment 52. YES.

Amendment 59 — Eliminate rebates that taxpayers receive when the state collects more money than it is allowed, and spend the money for preschool through 12th grade public education.

I believe that current law requires the state to refund tax revenues that exceed expenditures within any given year, which seems stupid to me. This amendment eliminates that requirement. YES.

Referendum L — Lower the age requirements for serving in the state legislature from 25 to 21.

YES.

There are three more referenda on the ballot, but they’re mostly technicalities. If you think I should change my vote on any of these items, or if you want to reinforce my potentially wobbly support for any of them, pleas let me know. Tomorrow I’ll post on the city and county issues if they prove interesting (I haven’t read them yet).

Three Things

During the Big Game Saturday night between Fairview and Boulder High Schools, some kid streaked across the field brandishing a fake sword and wearing nothing but a pair of running shoes and a red hat. He was tackled by police officers and taken into custody. Now the authorities are threatening to charge this kid, whose name is Tom, with a felony sex crime. This would mean that, for the rest of his life, everywhere he lives Tom would have to register with the local police and have his name posted on a public list of sexual predators. Why pick on this particular streaker when Friday night everyone walking through the downtown Boulder mall, including trick-or-treating kiddies, will witness the tenth annual Naked Pumpkin Run? I’m sure you can imagine what this event is like — some guy who participated last year told a local reporter he found it to be “super liberating.” Kids at Fairview (the Knights, hence Tom’s fake sword) are now wearing homemade “Free Tom” t-shirts to school. I like the ironic touch of announcing the pro-streaker cause on an item of clothing.

Tomorrow night at the University of Colorado’s Mackey Auditorium, popular memoirist David Sedaris will give a public reading from his latest book. He got famous by reading his short humorous pieces aloud on National Public Radio. Ticket prices range from $42 to $65.

And if you needed any more reassurance that capitalism is here to stay, consider this guy. He’s apparently the most successful of the untold thousands of people who write and film advertisements for real commercial products, post them on Youtube, then solicit as many people as they can to go watch their ad. These are free marketeers in a literal sense: they aren’t paid for their work; instead they compete with each other for best ad. The winner is selected by popular acclaim, meaning that the top-rated ad must already have proven itself a viral marketing success in the marketplace. The winner gets a prize from the company being touted in the ad: sometimes the prize is cash, usually it’s a free product sold by the company. The losers get nothing other than the knowledge that every day somebody out there is watching the internet commercials they wrote, filmed, and posted for free.

The Creativity of the Multitude

The possibility of democracy is emerging for the very first time.

Always a bit slow on the uptake, I just read Hardt & Negri’s Multitude, their 2004 follow-up to Empire, a book on which I previously engaged in a series of tumultuous post-and-parry sessions. H&N argue that in late capitalism the knowledge worker has replaced the factory worker as the hegemonic form of labor, not through numerical domination but by signaling a change in how all work can “work.” Manual labor produces material goods, characterized by limitation and hence by scarcity. Knowledge work, by contrast, produces immaterial goods that can be distributed to everyone without natural limit, its spread restrained only artificially constructed barriers like intellectual property laws. Not only that, but through dissemination the products of knowledge work actually burgeon and multiply rather than being dissipated. This is the power of the “multitude” – the singular and collective ability of people, working individually and in collaboration with one another, to create an ever-expanding congeries of immaterial cultural products which collectively H&N call “the common.”

I skip to the last thirty pages of Multitude, where the authors present as close as they get to a proposal on how democracy is going to emerge as both a political and an economic force from within the existing world order. What restrains the expansion of the common, say H&N, is the sovereign power which capital exercises over the means of production. According to the tradition of sovereignty, as elaborated by fascist social theorist Carl Schmitt, only the One can rule, whether that One be the king, the aristocracy, or the people. Without the dominance of the One, society descends into chaos.

Schmitt insists that in all cases the sovereign stands above society, transcendent, and thus politics is always founded on theology: power is sacred. The sovereign is defined, in other words, positively as the one above whom there is no power and who is thus free to decide and, negatively, as the one potentially excepted from every social norm and rule. (pp. 330-1)

According to H&N, this theory of political sovereignty applies to economic management as well:

The capitalist is the one who brings the workers together in productive cooperation. The capitalist is a modern Lycurgus, sovereign over the private domain of the factory, but pressed always to go beyond the steady state and innovate… To sovereign exceptionalism corresponds economic innovation as the form of industrial government. A large number of workers are engaged in the material practices of production, but the capitalist is the one responsible for innovation. Just as only the one can decide in politics, we are told, only the one can innovate in economics. (p. 331)

For H&N, the unrestrained expansion of the common depends on the intrinsic creative force of the multitude being released from the ideology of sovereignty. It’s not that the knowledge workers must form themselves into a manifestation of the One, whereby they can then exert the sovereignty of Labor; rather, the multitude succeeds by remaining true to its multiplicity, its limitless burgeoning channeled only by mutual collaboration among its singular constituents. What’s needed to achieve this infinite expansion of the common isn’t a unitary executive chain of command driving down through the hierarchy but rather a flat organizational architecture fueled by “common resources, open access, and free interaction” (p. 337). H&N see in the growth of the internet and cybernetics industries exemplars of this sort of “open source” development of an electronic commons.

Perhaps we can understand the decision making of the multitude as a form of expression. Indeed the multitude is organized something like a language. All of the elements of a language are defined by their differences one from the other, and yet they all function together. A language is a flexible web of meanings that combine according to accepted rules in an infinite number of possible ways. A specific expression, then, is not only the combination of linguistic elements but the production of real meanings: expression gives a name to an event. Just as expression emerges from language, then, a decision emerges from the multitude in such a way as to give meaning to the whole and name an event. For linguistic expression, however, there must be a separate subject that employs the language in expression. This is the limit of our analogy because unlike language the multitude is itself an active subject – something like a language that can express itself. (p. 339)

It’s this ability of the multitude to arrive at emergent decisions that fuels both economic innovation and democracy. Sovereignty, based on the myth of the One Who Rules, has in fact always depended on the consent of the ruled. If the ruled withhold this consent they don’t descend into chaos; rather, they achieve the absolute democracy and self-rule of the multitude.

People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude… We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude. Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy. (p. 352)

I’m all for the multitude of knowledge workers being freed to control their own work and to generate their own innovations in love for one another and for the commons. But aren’t the limitations to H&N’s proposal fairly obvious? First, the workers suddenly becoming aware that the emperor has no clothes isn’t going to topple the reigning sovereign. Capital controls the work because capital pays the workers. It’s money, not ideology, that gives the owners their power over the workers.

Second, money isn’t just a controller of workers; it’s also a motivator. Knowledge workers may grind out the work through fear of losing their jobs, but most also attempt to excel in hopes of getting a raise in pay. The vaunted explosion of worker creativity in information systems and biotechnology was fueled by nerds who hope to get rich off of their cleverness, to invent their way into the plutocracy. There’s no question that the already-rich investors get more than their fair share from entrepreneurial ventures, but some knowledge workers really do make a lot of money from their ingenuity. The most visibly successful techie entrepreneurs are propelled less by the freedom to create something intrinsically excellent than by the possibility of accruing enormous financial rewards far exceeding what they could earn in decades working a regular job.

Third, the capitalists’ sovereignty over innovation doesn’t operate by executive fiat and exception. In the contemporary capitalist firm Innovation is a core corporate objective, part of the work at nearly every level of the organizational structure. For decades so-called intrapreneurship has been incorporated into business practice, providing even line-level ops workers with opportunities to collaborate and to put forward clever new ideas for consideration by management, ideas that might earn the innovative worker at least a small sliver of the pie if the idea goes into production and distribution. Certainly it’s capital that calls the shots: the financial projections attached to the proposed innovations, the expected reductions in costs or increases in revenues, the anticipated return on investment — these are the criteria by which management selects some ideas for development while rejecting others of equal or even superior intrinsic merit.

Fourth, I guess I’m just not persuaded about the incipient potential creativity of the multitude waiting to be unleashed. Certainly there are workers whose ingenuity is thwarted or diverted by the power of money. Productive and inventive workers often find themselves forced either to accede or to resist pressures from finance and marketing, pressures that would have them relax their standards in order to generate more revenue. Resistance to economic innovation often tends toward resistance to innovation generally and a guildlike protectionism among workers. Often the most innovative and energetic workers find themselves lured by jobs in management and marketing, jobs that offer both more control and more pay, jobs that drain creative passion away from innovations that benefit the common and toward those that benefit capital. However, management and marketing people aren’t particularly innovative either. If workers owned the means of production, if knowledge workers reaped the financial benefits of their innovations without having to pay off the investors, would passionate creativity begin to explode through the multitude? I doubt it, but I’d like to give it a try anyway.

It’s possible that H&N have gotten things backward, that instead of leeching away the creative energy of the multitude, capital is really the motivator, the engine, and the agent of innovation. That’s what neoliberalism asserts. Maybe without the propulsive force of capital, humanity would sink entirely into routine and repetitive contentment. The financial markets create money out of nothing through investment and lending; so too perhaps does the entrepreneur and the CEO create creativity out of nothing in order to make those investments and loans pay off for themselves and their companies as well as the capitalists. Only through a continually renewed stream of products does the economy keep growing, do share values go up among speculators, do existing loans get rewritten for ever bigger amounts. This sense that capital rather than biopower is the engine of innovation has been the subject of recent speculation among bloggers about accelerationism and capital unbound. Perhaps, instead of inhibiting the creativity of the multitude, capital is creating that very creativity, the current crisis actually hastening the move toward the singularity of a fully recursive, self-creative posthumanity.

In counterpoint, here’s an excerpt from an essay by Mario Tronti:

What’s missing? A political interpretation: serious, lucid, realistic, non-ideological, non-conventional, non-electoralist. The famous transformations of work are like the equally famous transformations of capitalism: when everything has been said, nothing has changed. The storytellers of the social come and describe the state of affairs: the liquid instead of the solid, what melts into air rather than what sediments on the ground, the whole that must become flexible, the production that becomes molecular, the power that is everywhere and nowhere like the holy spirit, because it is micro and no longer macro, and then the immaterial, the cognitive, the politics that is bios, made to measure for the asocial individual – forget about women and men of flesh and bone who organise themselves for the struggle. With limitless patience we read and listen, careful not to let what we don’t know slip through our fingers.

On Ops

Lately I’ve found myself toying with the possibility of making myself more useful to society. Fortunately I caught myself before doing anything drastic — this time. But the risk remains real.

There was a time when I evaluated empirical data and expert performance in order to specify so-called “best practices” in fields ranging from financial underwriting to medical care. This sort of work is vulnerable to critique on any number of grounds, but then so is all work. Skepticism is mostly what motivated me: to understand what passes for expertise, to subject its claims to careful scrutiny. By separating the real expertise from the hype it would be possible to make the former more widely accessible in society while relegating the latter to the shitpile. If certain aspects of expertise could be codified, then it could be taught to paraprofessionals or encoded in computer programs. The real experts, no longer having to spend so much of their time performing routine tasks, could devote more energy to thinking, imagining, experimenting, inventing, collaborating — pushing back the boundaries of their expertise.

But the experts always find themselves squeezed by the money guys. The codification of expertise becomes a means of saving operating costs through hiring cheaper labor or automation. Push the boundaries? Let somebody else invest in R&D; we’ll steal their demonstrated successes later. And then there are the marketing people who want to loosen the standards in order to crank up sales. When finance and marketing gang up — as was the case in the mortgage lending fiasco — the operations people don’t stand much of a chance. Businesses exist in order to generate profit for the investors. When push comes to shove the products and services are just “content” — useful for generating a revenue stream, but essentially interchangeable with other sorts of content. The experts are just content providers: ultimately their job is to lure money into the conduit. When every ops job is reducible to finance and marketing, it’s no wonder that operational expertise gets compromised.

So in light of the financial meltdown I’ve started thinking about getting back into the ops world. What would it take to sustain the practitioners of operational expertise when confronted by the persistent onslaught of finance and marketing? Wouldn’t some sort of intensive and collaborative effort among ops workers help shift the balance of power from capital to labor, at least a little bit? Even if most of these ops jobs aren’t particularly glamorous or personally fulfilling, they’d still need to be done even if the businesses they work for suddenly became owned not by investors but by the workers or the citizenry. As Dominic observes:

productive participation in the economy, even as part of a profit-making enterprise, nevertheless adds something to the common good – even if the profits made are subtracted, qua profit, from the commons.

I think I could make a case that supporting operational expertise would be a worthwhile contribution I could make to the common weal. I’d supplement my background in outcomes and best practices with my more recent work on passion and calling and agency. The main obstacle? I’m just not that into it any more.

The Return of the Socioeconomically Repressed

Recently k-punk wrote a post entitled Be Positive… Or Else, in which he points out the association between the positive-thinking ethos of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, and neoliberal capitalism. In his post k-punk links to this article by Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader. Since k-punk’s blog doesn’t support comments, I’m simultaneously emailing him my response and posting it here…

There’s empirical evidence supporting CBT’s effectiveness in reducing symptoms, but in most cases the results aren’t any better than for other therapeutic praxes. The same holds true for psychoanalysis: it achieves neither better nor worse symptom reduction on average than other therapies. Therapists with more training and experience don’t get any better results than novices. In fact, just having a sympathetic person to talk with on a regular basis is nearly as effective as going to a professional in achieving symptom relief. On the other hand, any treatment is better than no treatment: symptomatic individuals who are left on waiting lists typically show no improvement, whereas any treatment modality yields significant and fairly sizable symptom reduction. (See e.g. Creating Mental Illness by Horwitz for summaries of effectiveness studies.)

Darian Leader wants to listen to symptoms instead of just treating them, and that’s fine. But he expects the symptoms to tell him to look inside the self for clues about their causes and their possible resolution. In this respect psychoanalysis and CBT are allies: both modalities regard the self as the source of his or her own misery. So too does neoliberalism: if you suffer from economic symptoms like unemployment or poverty or alienation it’s your own fault. The cause may be a shallow one correctable by quality improvement techniques or coaching, or the individual may be hamstrung by deeply rooted flaws that will take a long time and a lot of money to correct through retraining or serious attitude adjustment. But make no mistake: it’s your individual problem.

That establishing a relationship with an untrained but sympathetic listener can help alleviate psychological symptoms provides evidence compatible with Leader’s observation about how therapy works:

[T]herapy is not like a plaster that can be applied to a wound, but is a property of a human relationship. Therapy is about the encounter of two people.

If establishing this sort of interpersonal relationship can be curative, might not the lack of relationship be causative? I believe it is. Individuals are the basic economic unit of neoliberal capitalism. While individuation seems to promise unfettered freedom to pursue one’s own version of the American dream (even if you’re not American), people find themselves increasingly isolated from one another. This of course offers a strategic advantage to capital: isolated workers don’t organize themselves; isolated consumers can exert no leverage in driving down costs or improving quality.

The economic threat posed by letting psychological symptoms speak is that the symptoms will direct people’s attention not deep inside themselves but outside, to socioeconomic conditions that provoke depression, anxiety, rage and alienation as natural reactions to sick situations. It turns out that the same psychotherapeutic techniques work equally for all these conditions. It also turns out that the same mood-enhancing medications are prescribed for all of them. Leader regards this convergence as evidence that diagnosis isn’t all that important, that the same underlying intrapsychic condition can manifest itself in a variety of symptoms. But couldn’t the same conclusion be drawn if you listen outside the self for causes? Workplace stress, alienation from coworkers and customers, exploitation by management and capital; the pressure to compete as worker and consumer; the nearly universal demand for presenting a facade of relentless optimism, as k-punk cogently observes; the expectation that you can buy your way into happiness; isolation from others in the community and even from one’s most intimate friends — aren’t these ongoing external sources of unhappiness at least as likely to cause symptoms as are traumata experienced long ago in infancy? If we let socioeconomic symptoms speak, if we experience a collective return of the repressed, what sorts of interventions are liable to suggest themselves?