Limited, Inc.

1.

“A letter was published in the Scots Magazine dated Renfrew, February 1, 1753, and signed " C. M."” proposed a machine that would employ some electrical conductor to create “the striking of a bell by the attraction of a charged ball.”

Nobody in Smollett, or Sterne, or Fielding rings an electrical doorbell. Nobody hears a phone. Nobody hears a beep. Yet during this period of picaresque plenty, this C.M. was plotting to change the world into the mass of beeping that it is today.

In the year 1831, Edgar Allan Poe was failing at West Point and writing his first tales. Meanwhile, north of West Point, an American natural philosopher and inventor was about to change the world from his perch in a school in Albany, New York, like some mad Poe hero. Joseph Henry, being impressed by the experiments with magnets and electricity performed in Europe, decided to try it out on his own. Insulating a bunch of wires in silk, which meant that he could bind more than one metal wire together in a chord, he ran lengths of wire around a classroom in Albany, New York, put a battery at one end and an electromagnet at the other end of the wire, and in a moment of fiendish inspiration, placed a steel rod and a bell near the electromagnetic end. He then sent an electrical charge through the wire, thereby ringing the bell and causing billions of innocents, 175 years later, to suffer through bells, rings, buzzes and a variety of unpleasant noises from every implement that involves, even remotely, electricity.

O the innocents of that time, out plowing in the fields, hunting the game, making up hymns or getting royally drunk in inns! Little did they know.

2.

While all this business with electricity was going on in America, in Northern Britain, another affair was afoot. I take these facts from M.B. Emanuel’s Hay fever, a post industrial revolution epidemic: a history of its growth during the 19th century (1988).

Oddly, until the nineteenth century, there were vanishingly few references in the medical literature to anything resembling pollen-caused allergy. In the 8th century A.D., a Persian doctor, Muhammad ibn Zakariya' al-Razi, wrote about a illness that came from sniffing roses, causing headache and runny nose. “Leonhardus Botallus of Pavia in 1565 referred to persons who held the smell of roses in deadly hatred because it gave rise to headache, sneezing and troublesome itching of the nose.” And there was a dude in France who referenced the Rose disease in the 17th century.

But it was not really a disease on the map until John Bostock in 1818 reported a seasonal “catarrh”, which he attributed to the rays of the sun. In 1828 he returned to this seasonal illness, writing that he had seen more of it in the past ten years. It had acquired a name – hay asthma or hay fever. But the connection between hay and the illness was still uncertain. But it was becoming fashionable:

“There is evidence that the Hanoverian monarchy suffered from allergic disease. William IV was rumoured to suffer from hay fever [21] and his brother the Duke of Sussex was flogged for having asthma as child. It is now known that childhood asthma is almost invariably of allergic origin. It is documented that William himself suffered from occasional asthmatic attacks and his death in June 1837 followed a particularly severe episode.”

It was another doctor from North Britain, Charles Blackley, who showed, via experiment, that the pollen of certain plants brought on the attack of runny nose, headache and fever. Blackley noticed something strange, though: the farming class, who had the most physical contact with pollen, seemed to have the fewest cases of hay fever.

Blackley’s observation has led to an abundance of literature on the complex ecological conditions that favour a disease or a syndrome. If this case, those most liable to the disease were, 1, in sedentary professions, and 2., outside of farming communities. But, importantly, they were also in the midst of a change in the uses of land. For farm land was disappearing under the spread of urban and suburban housing. It was not simply exposure to pollen, but the situated isolation from pollen that was important to the incidence of the disease.

3.

On December 1, 2014, the NYT had a small article entitled: When Everyday Noise becomes Unbearable. The journalist Joyce Cohen, dug up an extreme case – a man who found the “humming noise” of a refrigerator unbearable. The doctors in the article called these cases hyeracusis. In the usual medical way, they blamed loud noises, like heavy metal, which damaged the ear for smaller noises.

Indoor noises – rings, buzzes and beeps – are features of design and structure. Among people who are bothered to a greater degree than “normal” by rings, buzzes and beeps, this is a problem. I noticed, last year, when we were out shopping for a new dishwasher, refrigerator and stove, that the descriptions of the products in Darty and the other emporiums we went to all included a reference to the level of noise made by the product, helpfully illustrated by a graph which produced that pleasing, pseudocomprehension in the shopper. A visual! I was surprised. This consumer and design information was evidently responding to a need, but I had not been aware that other people were feeling the same as we were: that the noise of machines in motion in the living space can be rather annoying

I happen to be reading, while thinking about beeps and buzzes, Edward Tenner’s Why Things bite Back. This is a very affordances-centered book about the unintended consequences of technological innovation: it was published in the late nineties, when the post-Cold war fad was to question central planning under the aegis of “unintended consequences” – the Soviet Union being exhibit one.

Tenner develops a neat vocabulary to taxonomize unintended effects – for instance, the idea of revenge effects:

“Revenge effects happen because new structures, devices, and organisms

react with real people in real situations in ways we could not

foresee. There are occasional reverse revenge effects: unexpected benefits

of technology adopted for another reason. (Like revenge effects

themselves, reverse revenge effects are a rough but useful metaphor:

in one case, for the way reality seems to strike back at our efforts, and

in the other, for the equally unexpected ways in which we benefit

from the complexity of the world's mechanisms.)”

This is an insight that goes back to the Greeks and Egyptians, and is part of the cultural vocabulary of Nemesis. Although, in the 1990s, they were all pretending that we had just discovered this.

Applied to allergies, or the human geography of agriculture and industry, it is easy to see the revenge of the immune system in operation here. The human body, which is easily abstracted away from in sociology, is still the key variable, as every murder story reminds us.

In the case of hypersensitivity to noise and to light, what is interesting is that the urban environment in the developed economies – the post-industrial economies – was in many ways much noisier at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Theodor Lessing wrote his classic essay against noise and founded the anti-noise league in 1909, he was responding to a real, increased level of noise in the urban environment. John Goodyear’s essay on Lessing’s anti-noise league contains some good quotes, both from the pro-noise side and Lessing’s own colorful vocabulary of Klavierpest (the plague of pianos) and Gesangseuche (the pestilence of singing) to the various traffic noises, in which the hooting of car horns already figures.

If we were to do a complete, one thousand page book on the rise of the Universal Beep, which will happen only in the afterlife, when I have time - the hooting of car horns would have pride of place. This hooting involves the designed production of ugly noise, the ideology of safety (horns being necessary as signals to other drivers), and the collective phenomenon resulting from this. So much, as WCW could have said, depends upon the car resting in the driveway! And its sound possibilities.

This being so, the great industrial period, in which cities actually hosted giant factories and mid-range workshops, has come to an end in many countries. France and the U.S., for instance. The city is now a service node, a consumer spot, a building investment opportunity – but not a place where the terrific noises of smelting and congealing are going on.

The engineered ugly noise is now everywhere, from car alarms to fire alarms. When, during the reign of Good King Obama, we moved to Santa Monica California for a couple of years, we encountered the Cali required and always faulty fire alarm, with all its hijinx: the squack of it at one in the morning, the maddening attempt to turn it off, the replacement of the batteries, the leaving out of the batteries, etc. Burned toast or old batteries were suddenly occasions for riot.

At the moment, our universal beep problem concerns the new induction stovetop, replacing our old gas jet stove top. The beep sounds for a variety of reasons – a pot boiling over, or a pot being partly out of the induction heat circle, etc. – and we try to understand it while pressing various buttons. Its use to us is mostly in disproportion to its irritation of us.

This isn’t to say that safety features are not important – especially to the liability lawyers retained by corporations – so much as that the total gestalt of one’s living area doesn’t really figure into all these designed ugly noises. They are all shrill noises. None of them are organic – the ring or the buzz is the farthest thing from, say, the fart or the burp. They combine with changes in artificial light and changes in the ambient temperature to affect our inner organism, and our moods, and our well-being.

They are here, each buzz, ring and beep, to remind us that the machine is here. When we humans go – from disease, nuclear war, or zombie apocalypse – we will leave these beeps behind.

Throughout the 19th and 20th century, one stumbles upon the lefthand heirs of Burke – Red Tories, as Orwell called them. Orwell’s instincts, at least, were close to theirs: Orwell, after all, wanted a law to make 20 mph the top speed limit in England, a pretty typical Red Tory gesture, gallantly futile. In England, the term would include Ruskin and Chesterton, and the spirit at least of William Morris. In France, you have Charles Peguy and Jacques Ellul. In German speaking countries, there are many more names to choose from – to mention four, Thomas Mann up to the late 20s, Karl Kraus, Georg Simmel and Max Weber.

The Red Tories, by inclination and conviction, were never systematizers. When Burke, in the Reflections, denounces “theorists and economists”, all the progressive planners, he spoke for the tribe. They form something more like a family resemblance than a party. They, too, are in revolt against capitalism, but not because it wounds their sense of equality – on the contrary, what it wounds is their sense of the just order, or the organic society. This comes out in their protest, all the way along the line, in honor something I’m going to call “integrity”. Against integrity, the sense of purposiveness and vocation in life, they saw arrayed two forces: capitalism, with its generation of alienation, its calculations that eat into the integrity of labor, seeing it only as another inter-substitutable commodity, and socialism. Socialism, from their perspective, is merely the bourgeois attitude for workers. The socialists basically want the workers to make more money – they don’t put in doubt the system of production that the workers are engaged in. Socialists are pro-industry.

From the economists viewpoint, whether a person works as a carpenter or sells bubble gum over the counter is a matter of indifference, the product of a labor “market”. Economists do recognize “human capital”, but like any capital, it is invested indifferently, and must be to be efficient. Maximizing profit on all fronts, such is the letter of the law for economists.

The Red Tories saw, as well as Marx, that this social maxim was in deathly struggle with the ethos of integrity. Integrity, the desire to do the best job possible because of the thing itself, its value in the doing, no doubt stems, as an ethical value, from the artisan class in the early modern period. Or even before, in the ancient urbs. It is significant that the first socialist organizations in France and Britain were composed of a largely artisanal membership – because these people instinctively felt that they were being symbolically degraded under capital. It is also significant that Marx decided, early on, that these were definitely not the people who would lead the advance guard against capitalism. Thus, the complex struggles against anarchists and other non-scientific socialists.

The programmatic example of the Red Tory exaltation of integrity is found in Charles Peguy’s Money (1913) Peguy never has had much of a following in the Anglophone world. He was an often disagreeable Catholic. Notoriously, his feud with Jaures resulted in some disciple of Peguy’s assassinating the great socialist leader. Peguy was all in for the war against Germany. He volunteered, even at his absurdly advanced age, and was ground up like so many others.

This is how Peguy, with some nostalgia (but also, with some insight), remembered the society of his youth – this would be around 1880.

We never thought about anything but working. We knew workers who in the morning only thought about working. They woke up in the morning, and so early, and they sang about the idea that they were going to work. At eleven o’clock they sang about going on lunchbreak. In all, it was always Hugo; and it is always to Hugo that we have to go back. “The went, they sang.” To work was their joy, even, and the deep root of their being. And the reason that they were who they were. There was an incredible honor in work, the most beautiful of honors, the most Christian, the only one perhaps that could still stand.

And, on the same subject, here:

"These workers didn’t serve. They worked. They had an honor, absolute, which is the real property of an honor. It was necessary that a chair leg was made well. It was understood. It was primary. It was not necessary to make it well because of the wages. It wasn’t necessary to make it well for the boss, nor for the connoisseurs, nor for the clients of the boss. It was necessary that it was well made in itself, for itself, in its being, even. A tradition, come, coming up from the deepest depths of the race, a history, an absolute, an honor willed that this chair leg be made well. Every part of the chair that couldn’t be seen was exactly as perfectly made as that which could be seen. It was the principle of the cathedrals."

This state of affairs was, without a doubt, not the bower of bliss that Peguy now remembers it to be – even he, in part, admits this. Certainly the singing is interesting. The French countryside, in a sense, learned French by singing – it was a standard part of the peasant’s laboring day. Factories, in the 1840s and 1850s, as Engels noticed, banned it. Singing was something that the factory supervisors came down on hard. And of course no group on earth cared so little for their pay packets. However, contra the capitalist mentality, this was not a complete truth, either then or now. The irrational hatred of Peguy for Jaures was poisonous, but I have to give Peguy some credit, here, for spotting the moment in which alienation drops out of the socialist attack on bourgeois society and assimilation becomes the goal. In this respect, Jaures was a great figure, which is one of the reasons that every goodsized town in France has a street named for him. Marx, on the wholly other side of Jaures, would perhaps have agreed with Peguy in his own dialectical way: as we know from his critique of the Gotha Program.

2.

Integrity is not really discussed in ethics classes. I taught them in a philosophy department a long long time ago, and I don’t recall any discussion of the integrity of labor for itself. America, one might think, is just the place where we cast off the principle of the cathedrals as a scandal to the pursuit of happy consumption. But I don’t think you’d hang around people who do things, or provide, horrible word, services very long before you’d run into this ethos. It has been attacked over and over, laughed at by neo-liberalism, disappeared utterly from the entertainment we feed ourselves and our kids on, yet there it is, every day. Every f-ing day, to write unlike Peguy, the principle of the cathedrals and goes to work in millions of offices, stores, and factories.

It is in many ways the contradiction that keeps capitalism moving, that bears up the almost unbearable stress of everyone becoming poorer in relation to the rich, atomized, more powerless. People in whatever field do not respect people who have no integrity in this crucial sense. They suspect that their bosses do not have this integrity, that the organizations they have built up are ultimately indifferent to them. To work is to see this sorting procedure. To work is to see the silent contempt that builds up for those who will do anything. Who work for pay, the boss, the clients of the boss, and not, on some level, for the thing itself that they are doing.

I’ll finish this riff on integrity with quite another story. This one comes from Nico Rost’s Goethe in Dachau.

3.

First a bit about Rost. Rost was a Dutch journalist who was stationed in Berlin in the Weimar era and became great friends with the most advanced artists and lefties. In 1933, to honor his work in making known Germany’s leftist culture, the Nazis sent him to the Orienberg KZ. He was released after a couple of months, and he saw enough, was beaten enough, that he bore no illusions about the Nazis. He translated exiled German authors in Dutch, and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940, he was stuck in Brussels. Rost made his thoughts known about that in a newspaper he founded. It was shut down and he was shuffled between KZs until the end of the war. His last stop was Dachau. When he published this “journal” from Dachau in 1947, it received some attention, especially from German leftists. Then it was largely forgotten. It was never translated into English, so I am gonna translate this bit myself. It is an anecdote that helps to envision integrity as an actual life-value.

“In a neighboring bed [in the infirmary] lies a new one. A kind of Michael Kohlhaas, yet more good natured and sentimental than his classical model out of Kleist’s novella.

He is by profession a baker. He lives in the Kopenick near Berlin, and is now here, he tells me, for the second time. For the same offense.

“I baked cakes made out of flour that is better than that officially allowed, and with eggs. Not in order to earn more, but because they were being sent to the Front, and I couldn’t allow them to send bad cakes. I got a year for it. Then they wanted to release me, but they wanted me to pledge, in advance, to adhere strictly to the rules in the future. I couldn’t go for that. On the contrary, I explained to the Gestapo that I would certainly use good flour and eggs in the cakes, because I would not turn out mud for the women who came to me to send something good to their men on the front.

After I said this, they beat me all over again, and sent me back here.

He told this story very clearly and with many details. Modestly, even a little humbly, but before everything else satisfied in the feeling that he had done his duty, and that he couldn’t have done otherwise.

We sealed our friendship with each other, and he invited me to visit him after the war. I promised to do so.

“You just have to ask for the fat baker and even a child will lead you to me.”

Poor devil. He completely forgot that, in between, he had become as skinny as a piece of thread.”

Cake for cake’s sake. It is a revolutionary act.

 The fascist tactic, classically, is the pounce. The fascist strategy is to see the fragility of the political establishment, which by its nature has nourished the most shortsighted and the most cowardly in its ranks.

 Thoughts at the Denfort-Rochereau Metro Stop