Author: Jeff

Bread Labor

Jeff
Memphis, TN ©2006 Jeff Ward

I first came across the concept of “bread labor” in Helen & Scott Nearing. It was part of a time management strategy. They divided their time by self labor, community labor, and bread labor. A person should budget time to read and reflect, to think and work on themselves, to interact with others and maintain social bonds, and to work satisfying the more mundane needs of life– bread labor.

Changing social conditions during the twenty years that began in 1910 cost us our professional status and deprived us of all our means of livelihood. Whether we liked it or not we were compelled to adjust to the new situation which war, revolution and depression had forced upon the western world. (12)

The Nearings were in their 50s when they purchased several farmed-out Vermont farms in the Green Mountains for small sums in an attempt to find self-sufficiency outside the money economy. Their first thought was collective living, but no viable communal options were available. Land was about $3 per acre at that time, and they reasoned that they might sell timber for a small living, but they ended up turning to maple sugaring instead. They survived, not because they were lucky enough to find a productive enterprise but because they so totally altered their expectations of what “livelihood” really was.

The Nearings confess that they had a problem with the “social” part of the equation. They ate primarily raw nuts and fruits, excluded all domestic animals from their economy (no dependent dogs or cats, no dairy or meat products), no tea or coffee (for political reasons), and no alcohol. They also weren’t fond of dancing. Theirs was not a very lively hood. It’s little wonder that they had a problem bonding with the local social groups, preferring instead productive work and solitary reading and writing.

Living outside the circulation of money came at a price. Sugaring provided enough revenue to pay their taxes, and they mostly tried to use materials found on their farm to build with while trading the produce of their garden with neighbors to get the other necessaries. They called it “The Good Life” and it certainly was a considered life, though it’s hard to imagine it being attractive to most: crude bread or handfuls of grain, no milk, beer or cigarettes. Eventually, the beer and cigarettes crowd showed up when a ski resort opened up adjacent to their farm and they had to relocate to Maine.

Still, I am drawn to their leisure driven idea of the good life. They sought to have four hours to read and write each day with four hours dedicated to bread labor. Bread labor included the household routine of meals, washing and cleaning; organized homestead activities including capital improvements and gardening, wood cutting, and repairs, etc.; and work on the cash crop or crops. All these things constitute productive work, and curiously they also had strong feelings about labor saving machines: they were against them.

The Nearings felt that human labor alone was adequate to sustain things once all the politically questionable activities (stimulants, animal slavery, cooked foods, etc.) were removed from the domestic economy.The soup of ideas that the Nearings drew their program for the good life from is a complex one, filled with references to communist, anarchist, and capitalist sources.

Bread labor is lifted from Tolstoy, and it also factors heavily in the writings of Gandhi, although the asceticism seems distinctly New England. A few of their new neighbors in Maine, including Bill Copperthwaite and Eliot Coleman, share the same intellectual DNA. All of them, to varying degrees, thought that adjustments to our theory of value were necessary in order to attain “the good life.”

Though the Nearings would be loathe to admit it, in contrast to Marx, their value system is anti-social. The emphasis is on moving as far away as possible from exchange value by deepening the care taken to access use value in all aspects of human production, which largely places the emphasis on individuals doing the using. Tolstoy’s great political awakening in Tsarist Russia was that his comfort was built on the slavery of others. That’s why the Nearings swore off many products, like coffee and tea, because the foundation of their production and exchange was built on slavery.

The implication in these communal and individual movements “back to the land” at the turn of the 20th century was that only by staying in touch with the skills and technologies necessary to stay alive would we ever abolish slavery through better understanding the relations between production and consumption.

The Nearings sought, to their credit, to make it possible to support themselves through better labor management, matching their effort to local conditions and history, both in terms of their productive capabilities and reducing consumption whenever possible. Obviously, it’s not scalable as a solution and is reliant on an ableist view of the social contract, where all members of society can contribute equally to the production of food and shelter.

The argument that humans are not created with equal abilities— even if they may have equal rights, a separate issue— is easily mounted to answer this sort of Yankee idealism. Some division  (and segregation) of labor has historically been necessary to increase efficiency. The capitalist mode, reliant as it is on surplus production, a thing studiously avoided by the Nearings, is central to the foundation of city-states. In the same time period as the Nearings, another movement for technological management emerged, and assumed surpluses would be bureaucratically distributed.

Genetically related to Edward Bellamy’s popular utopian vision, Technocracy was heavily reliant on “scientific management” to envision a future without money, a future where machines would satisfy our needs in an equitable fashion. Rather than money, the proposal was “an energy system of value” where the potential to do work was currency. Bellamy and the technocrats had a political bent more aligned with fascism with its egalitarian authoritarianism.

Obviously, there are problems with integrating humans into these proposals, perhaps making Technocracy the most anti-social idea of all. It persisted in thinkers like R. Buckminster Fuller. The societal emphasis on alternative (and conventional) energy sources continues, as well as the multiplication of automation, which never seems to consider where humans fit into all these utopian plans. Machines have no need for bread.

 

Labor

Jeff
Fergus Falls, MN © 2007 Jeff Ward

I’m not sure I was aware that Fergus Falls was the childhood home of Mary MacLane when I passed through in 2007; I did know who she was, because I was teaching excerpts from The Story of Mary MacLane in classes in 2002. Her celebrity has faded these days.

She was a bit like a Phoebe Waller-Bridge for her day, with distinct similarities to Fleabag. Her movie performance has been lost to history. Both broke the fourth wall, speaking frankly to their audience. I remember that in the first decade I taught, I’d always try to find something that might connect with students. Mary MacLane had tremendous social value in her own time, with her scandalous books selling in large numbers; using it wasn’t that successful in the classroom.

I liked teaching best of all the jobs I’ve had because it was the least soul-destroying. If you’re doing it right, it makes you glad to be alive and appreciative of your students. I started out teaching an older population, primarily focused on getting jobs, when I started out in Arkansas. Teaching in Minnesota was different, because so many of my students were from an agriculture background and intended to return to farms and continue in the family business. Curiously, the class I taught most was writing for the workplace: the class I hated most as an undergraduate.

The stress of confronting a shrinking labor market wasn’t as much of a factor in the times before the big crash and recession of 2008. I must confess that I really didn’t care for working life, and when the opportunity came to shift to a more domestic role, I took it. Work was unsatisfying for me, for most of my life. I don’t think I fully realized that until I stopped doing it for money. I didn’t necessarily feel alienated as much as I felt that I had little value to the world at large.

One of the most controversial parts of Marxist theory is the law of value, or labor theory of value. The primary problem is that Marx (and other classical economists) placed human work as the determinant for the value of products. To be productive, according to Marx, involved the subject of labor (people) and the instruments of labor (capital), and the object of labor (raw material). Marx’s emphasis was on the social value of labor, where ultimately everyone loses.

The capitalist production of objects entails devaluing humans as instruments and overvaluing capital, which alienates those who possess capital as well. In his commentary on James Mill, he offers a succinct elaboration. We work to produce products in order to exchange them for other products, transforming ourselves into instruments.

Although in your eyes your product is an instrument, a means, for taking possession of my product and thus for satisfying your need; yet in my eyes it is the purpose of our exchange. For me, you are rather the means and instrument for producing this object that is my aim, just as conversely you stand in the same relationship to my object. But 1) each of us actually behaves in the way he is regarded by the other. You have actually made yourself the means, the instrument, the producer of your own object in order to gain possession of mine; 2) your own object is for you only the sensuously perceptible covering, the hidden shape, of my object; for its production signifies and seeks to express the acquisition of my object. In fact, therefore, you have become for yourself a means, an instrument of your object, of which your desire is the servant, and you have performed menial services in order that the object shall never again do a favour to your desire. If then our mutual thraldom to the object at the beginning of the process is now seen to be in reality the relationship between master and slave, that is merely the crude and frank expression of our essential relationship.

Our mutual value is for us the value of our mutual objects. Hence for us man himself is mutually of no value. (Marx)

Wage slavery, however, is only one aspect of labor. In the case of Mary MacLane, she created her own social value as a rebel, and sold her words and image to create a different sort of relationship, that of celebrity. But as that, she created a persona to be objectified, an object of exchange. The attempt to typify humans as productive instruments often presents a bleak view of human exchange, but Marx offers an alternative.

Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.

Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature. (Marx)

This, I think, describes the craft dream of labour. The labor theory of value is also central to Anarchism, so this makes sense, given the faction of contemporary workers interested in it. But,  it also describes the dream of celebrity, wherein we are loved for an essentially constructed nature. The problem with celebrity is one of scale; only so many people can be famous, even in this age of being famous for being famous. Exchange value, however, is only one way of assigning value to labor.

Love is a rose

Jeff


I hated the song “Love is a rose” when it dominated the radio waves. Later, when I discovered that Neil Young wrote it, it seemed to prove out the cliché that nobody’s perfect. From a formal standpoint, “love is a rose” is a metaphor, and one of many clichés circulating long before Shakespeare:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare (Sonnet 130)

At the most basic level, any metaphor is a “false compare” between two things that are not identical. It calls upon us to interpret, to actively try to constitute meaning from the information we’re given. At the word level, one is tempted to substitute a synonym but often this simply isn’t satisfactory. “Making an exposure” doesn’t have the impact of “taking a shot.”

As the ad copy here relates, the area of overlap between photography and shooting is broad and deep; it’s not simply a matter of using a simple substitution to make meaning out of the terminology. It’s a network of associations that are crowded around the word as connotations. But it isn’t a 1:1 comparison. A camera will never give someone a red badge of courage, a wound. Metaphors always entail a sort of tension between the expressed meaning, and its intended interpretation.

Exposure lacks the sort of immediacy, the flash of insight involved with taking a good shot. This is a major reason for the popularity of metaphor. Over time, photographic shots (or snapshots) have lost all associations with martial terminology. The camera is seldom assumed to be an instrument of violence.

Schemata derived from the networks of metaphoric comparisons seem to be foundational to our ability to acquire and deploy knowledge, particularly when new technologies are introduced. Metaphors, it seems, are one of the keys to framing knowledge. In short, we don’t know what makes a technology “good” or useful without some sort of frame of reference to slot it into. In fact, this idea of knowledge frames may hold a key to developing artificial intelligence.

What Shakespeare is poking with a stick is our conception of love as a mass of nonsensical metaphors. However, as a master of metaphor himself he knows full well that metaphor drives our intelligence forward on our journey to the undiscovered country. The riddle of it, or perhaps better still the joke, is that metaphoric knowledge almost always comes upon us quickly like a punch line, euphoria, followed by the satisfaction of having figured it out. Thank you Vicki Mikelonis.

The mechanism through which metaphor works its magic according to Paul Ricoeur is its distanciation. It renders the familiar unfamiliar, giving us a necessary distance to actively engage in the process of making sense. It is estrangement with the emphasis on strange.

In a weak sense, though, all language is metaphoric. When I see a chair, I can simultaneously apprehend a chair as an object of utility and hold its abstract word “chair” in my mind with neither being destroyed or altered by their apprehension although both are completely different with no overlapping characteristics. What is different about strong metaphors is that the tension between two terms creates a third, unnamable knowledge that once apprehended, is seldom forgotten. Eventually, though, the strangeness fades– as Nietzsche suggests, the face wears off the coin and it becomes useful only as metal.

In the late 19th century, there was an explosion of “new media” in the manufacture of stereographs. In 1873, the Kilburn Brothers of Littleton, NH were printing 3,000 stereographs per day and they weren’t alone. Stereographs work by means of an apparatus where two photographs taken from slightly different perspectives are fused in the mind of the viewer to create the illusion of a three dimensional image. The potential exists for great realism, but also for captivating illusions.

An ephemeral historical moment? Not necessarily. Stereograph publishers distributed actual photographs from just after the civil war (1865) in massive numbers until supplanted by halftone printing around the turn of the century. The cards were compiled and circulated like encyclopedias that could be purchased a single card at a time. With halftones, their currency was devalued until it was given away for free on cereal boxes in the early 20th century.

It wasn’t a bad run– perhaps comparable to broadcast television, which entered the scene with standards in 1961 before being supplanted by digital television at the turn of the 21st century. Stereographs lingered into the 1930s and 40s before transmuting into ViewMasters stripped of their 3d illusion.

Throughout, a process of estrangement dissolving into familiarity persists.

The Glad Game

Jeff
Littleton, NH © 2017 Jeff Ward

It’s been hard to see a bright side to alienation / estrangement / detachment as I write my way through theoretical issues mired in them: a slough of despond, indeed. When I passed through Littleton, NH in 2017, it was by choice. It had a bit of the character of a pilgrimage, for multiple reasons. I had no idea, however, that it was the birthplace of Eleanor Porter, creator of Pollyanna. 

Pollyanna was the instigator of “the glad game,” a game in which the player is tasked with finding the bright side of any situation. In the novel, it’s origin was a particular Christmas where Pollyanna had wished for a doll, but instead received a pair of crutches.

“Goosey! Why, just be glad because you don’t—NEED—’EM!” exulted Pollyanna, triumphantly. “You see it’s just as easy—when you know how!” (5)

I went to Littleton, NH, largely because it was the home of Benjamin W. Kilburn, one of the largest stereograph manufacturers of the late 19th century. There’s not really a trace of him there, that I saw– they are much more proud of Pollyanna. It’s just as well, at this stage I really wasn’t looking for anything.

But there was another reason: it was around ten years after Victoria Mikelonis, one of my favorite teachers at the University of Minnesota had passed away. I only took one class from her on theories of metaphor, and it was the most intense and rewarding experience that I had in grad school. On of my last memories of her was stopping by her office and talking, excitedly, about Kilburn and stereographs. She told me she had recently visited a granddaughter who lived in Littleton, and raved about what a nice place it was. Vicki was one of the few people who was always cheerful, always looking on the bright side, and above all always engaged with the world and the ideas around her.

Dr. Mikelonis was primarily engaged with working with women in Poland and the Ukraine, training them to be technical communicators using a wide variety of pedagogical strategies– cross cultural communication would be another way of labeling it. That’s where her research interest in metaphor, schemas and ontologies came from. How do we know things? How do we learn things? These are the questions that animated her.

She was living with cancer, and like Ian Dury, the man who gave us reasons to be cheerful, she also died from it. The class is burned on my memory; it was dense and rewarding. We began with short papers by Max Black and others in philosophy of language, and worked our way through Paul Ricoeur’s Rule of Metaphor. The basic plan began with a word level examination of metaphor, through sentences into larger schema in Hesse & Arbib’s The Construction of Reality. The capstone essay was Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies, with its oft quoted maxim regarding truth:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Pollyanna is a metonym for someone with irrepressible optimism, and as the 1913 novel and its Disney movie treatment fade, the word substitutes for an idea, a moment of illusion celebrated in a statue. In the mountains above Littleton, in Franconia another anthropomorphic image drew great excitement.

B.W. Kilburn and others did a brisk trade in stereographs of the old man of the mountain. The White Mountains are one of America’s oldest tourist destinations, and where there are tourists there is a market for souvenirs. A shared experience of a rock, a unique bit of sublime America, drew most of the great writers and statesmen to the the small towns scattered along the edge of wildness, to gather and be glad.

Postcard c.1955

Philosopher Patrick Maynard built a strong case that photographs are props in a game of make-believe, and like metaphors they allow for a form of transport to places we have or haven’t been. Thomas Southall’s essay “White Mountain Stereographs and the Development of a Collective Vision” further suggests that what was developing during Kilburn’s time was set of practices that contributed to a particular truth of shared experience. Photographers were encouraged to alter the landscape to reinforce the “glad game” of seeing awesome nature in a collective way. Southall cites Kentucky photographer James Mullen at the 1873 meeting of the National Photographic Association:

And let me advise you here to always have with you on your photographic trips a spade and a good axe, the latter particularly will often be found a ‘friend in need’ when it is desirable to cut a small tree or remove a branch that would otherwise obscure some important point of your view. (101-102)

Human intervention to stabilize an agreed upon truth operates in predictable ways. We chip away at the rough edges of truth, shaping it to fit what we need at the time. There’s a selective, arbitrary, and culturally driven need to reshape the world for our purposes. In the 1920s chains were brought in to hold the face of the old man of the mountain together, and later cement and other prosthetics.

The old man’s face collapsed in 2003: nature injects its own arbitrary elements. People still make the pilgrimage to the White Mountains above Littleton, NH, and the souvenir vendors still do a brisk business.

The truth is out there.

Medium of Exchange

Jeff


Every time I drive out of Syracuse on the NYS Thruway, I nearly always stop at a particular rest stop that features a common automated gypsy fortune teller machine, Zoltar. Cross his mechanism with pieces of silver, and he’ll dispense some random prognostic wisdom for you.

The true law of political economy is chance, from whose movement we, the scientific men, isolate certain factors arbitrarily in the form of laws. (Karl Marx)

Reflecting on the permutations of usage of the term instrument that I wrote myself through the other day, it occurred to me that I had neglected to think about financial instruments. The omission was a curious one, given the common thread I was attempting to pull was that instruments frequently are marked by their detached and arbitrary nature. Marx’s notes on John Stuart Mill are particularly helpful:

Mill very well expresses the essence of the matter in the form of a concept by characterising money as the medium of exchange. The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. (Marx)

The concept of financial instruments illustrates this this in an interesting way. There are two primary types of financial instruments— those directly tied to capital (stocks, loan agreements, etc.) and instruments that are derived from them (index funds and things whose values are based on things related to actual cash value indirectly). It was real-estate derivative markets, a dense and impenetrable miasma of complex modes of financing, that were the dominant factor in the crash that brought the world to its knees in 2008, an entity outside and above man. Other crashes can also be tracked to financial instruments. Tulip Mania was linked to inflated values in purchase contracts, or the crash of 1929 tied to margin loan contracts. The latest disaster was even more disconnected, more alien from real events— this was an abstract dehumanized problem.

Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. (Marx)

The common characteristic of instruments as inherently detached from commodity values (and human beings), has taken some turns, mostly negative. Writing this as  “prosperity gospel” preacher has become a White House advisor, and on the 30th anniversary of Pretty Hate Machine is its own dark twist. Hollywood’s favorite goth was prescient.

God money I’ll do anything for you.
God money just tell me what you want me to


Marx’s materialist philosophy, derived from his studies of political economics take a curiously spiritual turn in his notes on John Stuart Mill. He suggests that money behaves in a way analogous to the holy trinity. The reasoning for this is that because objects only have value in relation to their mediator (money), the initial relationship (i.e. money is exchanged for objects) is inverted. Money is the estranged essence of property: “it is the alienated species activity of man, the externalized mediation between man’s production and man’s production.” Economics, in a sense I think, is the attempt to attach laws to the arbitrary and chance facts that one thing has a greater value than another because the actual workings of how things are valued is mysterious. Why are diamonds are more valuable than rubies, or glass more valuable than sand?

Marx’s theological explanation is striking:

Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man.

Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society.

But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.

It sent chills up my spine when I began to really understand this passage. What Marx is suggesting is the equivalence in character between the father (property), the son of property (money), and the holy ghost– the spirit essence of property that drives society, mediating value between commodities and working in mysterious ways. I think it’s important to note that this isn’t simply a matter of identifying money as a “false god” (mammon) but rather a necessary condition of estrangement, and estrangement that begins any time property is exchanged between men. Marx also identifies estrangement as a characteristic of barter. There is no society without exchange, and no exchange without estrangement.

Where do these first principles take us? There are levels of estrangement. At the base there is the exchange of property for property. In the middle, the median, property is exchanged for money; and finally, in the superstructure, money is circulated in exchange for money. This is the operative level of financial instruments, moving at a distance and detached from reality, spirits moving on the face of earth.

Graduating Class

Jeff
Bakersfield, 1984 © Jeff Ward

One of the things I could never understand about my father was his complete blindness to the idea that there were classes in America. I pressed him on it numerous times over the years. Trying to survive in the 1980s, there were very few options for finding work in California. Most manufacturing was gone, and what was left was mostly backbreaking labor in the oilfields and farms. Or, there were the service type occupations– I ended up in retail management and sales.

It started in home improvement supplies, and ended up selling technology because it was a lot like teaching, or at least I told myself that. It wasn’t about exploiting people for profit, it was about getting people the things they wanted and needed to make their lives better. Making a profit along the way was okay. It was an eye-opener to watch people buying $2,000 cameras as easily as most people might buy a hamburger. One employer actually explained it that way– “When you look at it in terms of a percentage of their annual income, it’s probably about the same.”

My father couldn’t understand why I couldn’t find a good job, which for him was defined as a job with medical insurance and pension benefits. By the time I entered the workforce, these opportunities were mostly gone. I came to terms with a life that meant working at jobs that I could tolerate in order to have some time to do what I really liked, which was making photographs. I never had the drive to start a family that he had, largely because I felt as if it was nearly impossible to provide for myself, let alone anyone else. I became increasingly interested in what might be labeled as “social documentary” photography, which in turn increased my admiration of the Farm Security Administration photographers who were connected to the same vein mined by John Steinbeck, who my father had encouraged me to read.

My family had an interesting, although not unusual, background. They often self-identified as “okies” although they were barely of the Dust Bowl generation. My mother and father had both travelled (separately, they didn’t know each other yet) to work in the California during the Dust Bowl. My mother, as a teenager, cooked for relatives who were working on farms in the Central Valley– she couldn’t take the California sun on her fair skin, so they gave her indoor work. My father traveled with with his father, who found work as a longshoreman near the San Francisco bay.

But they both returned to Oklahoma, where they met about the time my mother graduated high school. The first president that my father voted for was FDR in his third and last term, and he always said he was glad that he could. During World War II, dad attempted to enlist only to find he had a perforated eardrum. My mother was working at a job she hated at a mental institution in Oklahoma City, so as a couple, they left attempting to find work in the north with his brother Kenneth and his girlfriend Nadine. Nadine had a mental breakdown and had to be institutionalized. Kenneth wrecked the car he and my father had bought together, stranding my father in a northern winter. Kenneth joined the military, as did my father’s younger brother Wendell.

When Wendell got out after the war, he settled near Ventura California and wrote telling my dad of work in the oilfields there. So they went back, with my oldest brother David in tow. Mom got a job as a telephone operator, which she held until I was an infant. Dad built the house where my brothers and I grew up.

The street was named Ward Way, because my father was the first person to build a house there. My father liked the location because it was adjacent to a stream bed, and he hauled rocks to build stone walls on the edges of the property, and a large stone fireplace that ran the entire length of the living room. Looking at one of the few photographs I have of it, I can’t help but notice how modest it really was. In memory, these things always loom large.

But it almost wasn’t. My mother told me that it was very difficult for my father to get the owners of the land to sell to him, simply because he was an “okie.” The prejudice of the dust bowl days ran strong. But my father told me that he never really felt like a second-class citizen; he staunchly refused to identify himself as “working class” or to think in terms of high, middle, or lower class. For him, it was simply graduated levels of prosperity rather than any us vs. them class war. I pressed him hard on this, as we talked over the years, largely because I felt so trapped where I was with no real way out of my constant economic distress. Class consciousness as described by Marx, was of no value to my father.

Because he felt no attraction to consumer products, he had no sense of futility  at not being able to purchase them. What he wanted, most of the time he made out of things he found. Looking at that old photograph of my brother and I in front of that old house, I can’t help but notice details like the sheet metal welded to the lamp post, stenciled with the address. He didn’t buy that, he made it. He hauled the rocks that the lamp post is set in; if you look in the car port, there are boards leaning up everywhere. Knowing my father, I suspect that many of them were simply picked up from alongside the road and brought home to see if he could use them for something. He rarely bought things at all; he simply gathered them. When what you want is to make things (rather than buy them) your view of the world is substantially different. You’d have to start the revolution without him.

When he retired, he lucked into some money ($6,000 or so, I think) sewed into a mattress and tucked into the pockets of old clothes at my mother’s eldest sister’s house when she died. She was a woman who had spent most of her life on public assistance, due to taking care of a daughter with Down Syndrome adopted from another sister (another story). She worked ironing clothes and mending things for small change on the side, hiding it from the government lest she be disqualified. Dad didn’t really need the money, so he decided to invest it in the stock market for fun. He thought of the stock market like a slot machine, and hoped he might get lucky. He claims it was luck, but he invested in the stocks of companies similar to the ones he worked for his whole life, so I suspect there was some skill to it.

He did all right. He did well enough to help me go back to school, just before he died. I had just graduated with a master’s degree when he passed, and he left me to manage the money. I took care of my mother after he died; that’s what he wanted me to do. I bought a new home for my brother Steven and a gravestone for his brother Kenneth, which he wouldn’t have wanted. I went on to get through Ph.D. coursework  as he would have wanted me to.

I had a short productive span as a teacher, which I wanted. I managed his legacy pretty well through the crash of 2008, until the great oil crash of 2014 when most of it slipped away. By that time I had come to believe, like my father, that money just didn’t matter that much. “It’s only play money,” he would have said, and in fact did say, as the $6,000 turned into six figures.

What made my father happiest, I think, in the end was helping people as he could and growing good tomatoes. He tended his garden until the end, with little care about what “class” anything was, what money might actually be good for. His biggest splurge was getting several varieties of breakfast cereal from the big box store, and jars of mixed nuts. That’s all he could think of that he wanted.

My father, in his big garden in Summerfield Oklahoma

Instruments

Jeff
Bakersfield, 1983 © Jeff Ward

Instrument has a variety of usages reaching back to the middle ages. I’ve been encountering it in Hannah Arendt and Frederick Engels as the compound “instruments of violence” and in Karl Marx as “instruments of production.” Other uses include “musical instruments” and “legal instruments” –the term has been around seemingly forever. Another somewhat unique usage was by Chaucer in the Wife of Bath’s tale where he called the penis a “holy instrument” of generation. With a nod to John S. Hall, it seems to me that the overriding characteristic of most usages of instrument is that it is detachable from the human who employs it.

Musical instruments are of course one of the oldest types. The connotations are vast; these instruments are used to generate sounds, sounds that are within the grasp of human beings but always just outside of our control. There’s always the possibility of arbitrary accidents, slippages, wanted and unwanted resonances that simply can’t be completely predicted or controlled. When they work, whether in skilled or amateur hands, they produce sounds that can easily be identified as fundamentally productive, and yet through dissonance (intentional or unintentional) they provide a force that can disrupt and overthrow the status quo. The link between music and aggression is summoned at critical cultural moments, and besides its power to sooth and cajole, music also incites violence.

Frank Zappa once suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that in countries where beer consumption was high, nations were often warlike because they were susceptible to marching music.

I have a theory about beer: Consumption of it leads to pseudo-military behavior. Think about it — winos don’t march. Whiskey guys don’t march, either (sometimes they write poetry, which is often more horrible, though). . . .

Maybe there’s a chemical in beer that stimulates the [male] brain to do violence while moving in the same direction as other guys who smell like them [marching] — “We, as a group of MEN, will drink this refreshing liquid, after which we will get together and beat the snot out of that guy over there.”

(Real Frank Zappa Book)

Wine drinking countries are more associated with love songs. It’s not really a stretch to say that popular music is almost always tied to, as Chaucer might put it, “the holy instruments of generation.”

The detachable nature of instruments is perhaps best illustrated by the usage of legal instruments, which  are just as old as musical ones. A writ, or a warrant carries with it the force of authority granted by law, codes which have been separated from individual human judgement. It amounts to an order, and can be directed by nobody, as evident in a building code. Laws, of course, can be arbitrary and have unintended as well as intended consequences. They can promote productivity, of course, but they can also incite violence. It’s worth noting that the production of the instruments of violence (guns, bombs, etc) is referred to manufacturing ordinance. Ordinance, of course, shares its root with ordain, that is, to issue a ruling.

The point I’m getting at is that all instruments have the potential for generative or destructive usage, and all instruments have an arbitrary and uncontrollable quality which always seem just outside of human control. That may be because they are by definition detachable from humans, and as John S. Hall, referenced earlier, suggests– they can be lost.

But there is one usage of the term “instrument” which doesn’t fit the detachable thesis. Also in use since the Middle Ages: a person may be described as an instrument of destruction; initially, this appears when writing about a murder or killing, but in contemporary usage this usage is probably best labeled as metaphorical rather than actual. People, knowingly or unknowingly, enter into causal chains (generally involving other, detachable instruments) that bring about destruction.

In What Are People For Wendell Berry writes forcefully in an essay called “Damage” of his attempt to put a pond on his property. He sought advice, and hired a bulldozer to dig one in a plateau nestled in a hillside. Everything went well at first, but then after an extremely wet fall and winter a slice of the forest above his pond broke free and slid into it. He had destabilized the hillside, despite the best advice and intentions, and was now forced to live with the scar on the land he had created. He invokes the proverbs of hell from William Blake:

“You can never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” I used to think of Blake’s sentence as a justification of youthful excess. By now I know that it describes the peculiar condemnation of our species. When the road of excess has reached the palace of wisdom it is a healed wound, a long scar.

Culture preserves the map and the records of past journeys so that no generation can permanently destroy the route.

The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert.

Blake gives the just proportion in another proverb: “No man soars too high if he soars with his own wings.” Only when our acts are empowered with more than bodily strength do we need to think of limits.

No thought or word called culture into being, but a tool or a weapon. After the stone axe we needed song and story to remember innocence, to record effect– and so to describe the limits of what can be done without damage.

The use only of our bodies for work or for love or pleasure or even for combat, sets us free again in the wilderness, and we exult.

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture— such as I was when I made my pond— is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

Berry is in line with Engels in thinking that in order to do violence, man requires detachable instruments. There’s another discussion of pond construction that bears mentioning here, which involves instruments of a different category.

In a chapter of Cræft: an Inquiry into the Origins and Meanings of Traditional Crafts Alexander Langlands describes pond construction, both his own attempts and the archeological evidence regarding a particular pond the Oxna Mere. It is situated within a series neolithic clay ponds in Wessex, along well worn migratory routes. the consensus is that these ponds were human made, using livestock. It’s short sighted to think that all extensions of human strength are recent developments in the construction of mechanisms, or that instruments began in the industrial age.

Langlands attempted to work backward from the ethnography of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century pond practices to determine how these ponds were built and maintained. Clay is a porous material, and in order to make them hold water it was longstanding practice to drive herds of animals across the area to compact the clay to make it hold water. Obviously, there’s a lot of technique/craft involved. Why does this matter? As Langlands argues:

The implications of using puddled chalk were important to me in the context of the Oxna Mere. Ultimately, its significance lay in the simple revelation that if you had the knowledge and the skill to puddle chalk, you could create a watering hole using materials sourced entirely from the hilltop. In turn, this facility would make an important contribution to the methods of husbandry used by valley community in that it enabled them to exploit valuable resources of summer grazing in a more effective manner. This is the kind of thing I get excited about: resourcefulness on a level almost inconceivable to the post-industrial pond maker whose favored materials were concrete and asphalt. (250)

What seems to be at work here is the use of animals as instruments in a way inconceivable to us now; we think of them solely as raw material.  They fit the parameters I was looking at earlier. They are arbitrary and frequently outside human control, capable of both generative and destructive aspects. And yet they have been successfully operating in concert with human beings assuring our mutual survival; without herd animals we wouldn’t survive, and with our coordination in the construction of ponds in the neolithic period, they also thrived and multiplied.

If we admit the possibility of a living instrument, there’s another aspect consider. Marx offers another paradigm for instruments. His class theory (and theory of alienation) presumes that man himself can be transformed into an instrument.

Theory of Alienation

Jeff


My father was a roughneck in the 1950s. He worked “graveyard shift” — known as morning tour (pronounced as “tower”) in the oilfields. He actually chose that shift so that he could use the daylight hours to build our house in Ventura. He had apprenticed as a carpenter in Oklahoma, before working in series of wartime factories and finally ending up in the oilfields. The real draw of the oilfields was the pension. He grew up in the great depression, so for him the main use of money was security.

As a kid growing up in the 60s/70s, it was always hard for me to understand that my father never seemed to want anything. Money was often synonymous with power, for everyone except my dad. We didn’t understand each other very well, although we both tried. He dropped out of the sixth grade to go to work, his father was a drunk and his stepfather, the carpenter, he just didn’t get along with at all. I suspect he simply hated being “bossed.” In his entire career in the oilfields, he always avoided any position where he had to tell other people what to do. He wouldn’t do it. That doesn’t mean he didn’t want responsibility– he was active in the union and believed in collective action to improve the lot of everyone. But he was also a staunch capitalist and individualist.

His work was dirty, and not particularly interesting. As he grew in seniority, he mainly settled into tending machines, in particular the complex steam injection systems (a precursor to fracking) currently being used to heat crude oil in the ground so that it could be pumped out. The field in Ventura started to play out, and he was forced to take a transfer to Bakersfield to monitor the first steam injection plant there. When he came home, he had a different sort of work in mind.

We had a basic tract house, rather than the elaborate stone and lumber house he built in Ventura. It broke my mother’s heart to leave it. Dad set to work tilling the back yard, putting in berries and fruit trees, and an expansive vegetable garden. Eventually, there was a used camper shell for the pickup that was parked behind this house; he loved to go fishing in the Sierra mountains nearby. It didn’t look this bleak by the time we sold the house moved to the other side of town around 1970.

He was trying to transfer back to Oklahoma to be near his mother, but that didn’t work out. Eventually, he gave up and bought a five acre farmstead to try to figure out how to be happy in California. He was miserable at work, continually bitching about the “college boys” and automated systems that were changing the oilfields. As time wore on, he hated his job so much he could hardly face it.

He drank, a lot, as I turned into a teenager. He was never cruel to me, he just suffered in quiet ways. He brushed me off telling me that I should read more books when I tried to talk to him; he suggested that I read those big thick books by the Russian authors, Shakespeare, as well as Steinbeck and Hemingway if I wanted to understand how the world was. He was the smartest man I knew, even though his education mostly came from the public library. I wanted to learn from him. He thought I should go to school, and look for answers there.

On the farmstead we moved into, dad followed his usual strategy of moving a trailer onto the property while we remodeled the turn of the century farm house to make it livable. It had knob and spool wiring, and a big hole in the living room floor where transients had once started a fire to keep warm. Dad handed me a copy of the Uniform Electrical Code so that I could figure out what we needed to bring the place up to code. I was a bit of a nut about electronics.

I had been studying algebra at the Junior High I attended while we were waiting for his transfer to Oklahoma that never came, but there I was enrolled into a school where students worked every day to add up large columns of figures and do long division by hand. There was a shop class, but rather than build a house (like I did when I got home) the main project was making shaped wall hangings with rasps and hand tools. I was bored out of my mind at that school. I got into fights. Thankfully, this only lasted one semester.

When I got to high school, one of the first classes was “social studies” which was a combination of government and world history. My primary memory from that class was the section of the textbook that dealt with Marx’s Theory of the Alienation of the Worker. Yes, they taught that sort of thing in a dumbed down form to 9th graders. The cold war textbook was targeted at selling the idea that the capitalist market system and democracy was the best of all possible worlds. Therefore, it sought to demonstrate how in a capitalist system, workers would never be unhappy because they were free to work to better themselves.

Even in its stripped down form, I saw that their refutation of Marx was completely ludicrous. I watched it play out every day in my father’s face. Workers, engaged in the earning of money, always operate at a distance– alienated from the thing they are producing. I got in a heated argument with the instructor over it, that resulted in me being ejected from the class.

Sometimes, I think my two main projects in life have been understanding my father, and understanding what it means to be an American. Confronting these things takes time and space; I hope I have a lot more to go. When my father retired, on a tiny pension, he moved back to Oklahoma and built one more house. It was a long way from the main road, which in turn was a long way from any town. He planted his long driveway with tiny seedlings he got for free from the US Forest Service. He lived long enough to see them grow.

Nobody Rules

Jeff
Indiana Evening Gazette, Feb 21, 1940

It’s always frustrating to show up and vote here in CNY, because although the vast majority of voters are registered Democrats, without fail Republicans secure all the major offices. One of the reasons for that is poor voter turnout, but this year even with record turn out in an off-year election, Republicans still swept the ballots. But every year I show up, and vote against them. It would be great if anybody else were to win. Frequently, the Republicans run unopposed, but that was not the case this year. Ultimately, nobody wins when local politicians are primarily focused on maintaining the status quo. I was reminded of the first election I voted in, back in 1976. Nobody ran, but I voted for Jimmy Carter.

The last presidential election prompted the  resurrection of an antiquated term to describe our present form of government: kakistocracy (government by the worst). What reading Hannah Arendt lately has done for me is point out that there is, indeed, such a thing as rule by nobody. No, it isn’t anarchy or libertarianism (anarchy for rich people). Most people who like conveniences like roads and indoor plumbing (and have thought about it) recognize that some form of the modern state is not only necessary, but desirable.

Power, strength, force, authority, and violence are the core political definitions that Arendt begins from, the modes of rule.

In terms of our traditions of political thought, these definitions have much to recommend them. Not only do they derive from the old notion of absolute power that accompanied the rise of the sovereign European nation-state, whose earliest and still greatest spokesmen were Jean Bodin, in sixteenth-century France, and Thomas Hobbes, in seventeenth-century England; they also coincide with terms used since Greek antiquity to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man- of the one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, and of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy.

After this review, the key concept leaps of the page:

Today we ought to add the latest and most formidable form of such domination: bureaucracy or the rule by an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could properly be called rule by Nobody. (If, in accord with traditional political thought, we identify tyranny as government that is not held to give account for itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. (137)

Arendt identifies this as the primary reason for the political unrest sweeping the globe in the 1960s. It hardly matters if the bureaucracy is communist, capitalist, or socialist. If there is no responsibility taken, it is tyranny. The “Nobody for President” campaigns were primarily tongue in cheek, meant to drive voter registration and involvement in saying “no” to the status quo. The platform centers on having a “none of the above” option when choosing our leaders. But choosing tyranny seems the stupidest choice of all. Curtis Spangler, Nobody’s campaign manager, states it well:

There is one story I would like to share with you about the media and our 1976 arrival in Washington, D.C. They told us “if we wanted more or better coverage” _then_ “we would have to become more political”. We decided Nobody was an AKA (also known as) for “None of the Above” and should be included on the ballot. We figured if a majority of people voted for ‘None of the Above’ rather than “voting for the lesser of two evils”, it might force a situation where Americans would have to find someone competent to lead them. The media said, “Nobody could argue with that logic”.

Finally, to reiterate, the Campaign was not an endorsement of mass apathy. It was a humorous approach to the elections designed to encourage people to register and vote. (history)

I was happy to see so many Democratic candidates this year. However, without fail the campaigns centered on “vote against the Republicans,” and that simply wasn’t enough. I look forward to voting for somebody again next election.

Force

Jeff


Hannah Arendt’s discussion of force, when defining vocabulary in “On Violence” is specific.

Force, which we often use in daily speech as a synonym for violence, especially if violence serves as a means of coercion, should be reserved, in terminological language, for the “forces of nature” or the “force of circumstances” (la force des choses), that is, to indicate the energy released by physical or social movements. (143-4)

This sentence packs a lot of complexity in a tight space. Forces of nature are elemental and arbitrary, but in a way different than violence, once energy is released. It occurs to me that one thing that these energies have in common is that they are frequently beyond human understanding and control. But the alternative defining energy, “force of circumstances,” deserves deeper consideration. Citing it in French alludes to a 1963 autobiography by Simone de Beauvoir, with the additional suggestion that the energy released by physical or social movements are potentially beyond understanding and control. I think this reading is fair, given Arendt’s implication that power (also released by social movements/moments) is intelligible and not particularly arbitrary.

Taking the first alternate definition, forces of nature there is the implication of individuated forces (i.e. earth, air, water, fire) making the term potentially singular in nature. The second, force of circumstances  seems more like a plural term although it is expressed as singular. Power is a plural term (humans acting in concert) while strength is individuated as a potential energy of a single human. Such distinctions are difficult to make with force.

If, as we say in Star Wars terms, the force is strong in a Jedi, then in that universe we are speaking of a sort of power similar to that defined by Arendt, but a power that is not human. Recall that Dagobah is a planet of murky swamps teeming with life which Yoda draws upon to perform acts of will. The force, in Star Wars, is a force of life generally beyond understanding and control, except by Jedi masters As such, it is plural without any discernible singular forms.

While I initially found it tempting to argue that force was demarcated by being inhuman in nature, it isn’t possible to embrace that with a Star Wars example. After all, humans are alive too. Looking closer at the Arendt, it seems clear that she sought to include the social aspects of force as well– and if we can concede that there are social forces beyond human control, then accepting this seemingly overlapping definition is still possible.

There are no Jedi here. Force, as a term, represents energy outside human understanding and control, even if it is derived from human instruments (productive forces) or social interaction (political forces). For Arendt, violence is derived from human instruments and ultimately beyond human control due to its arbitrary and often unintelligible results.

Defining power to be of a different category from violence is crucial to the understanding of political states, particularly when most theorists have tended to conflate them. In her lead-in to her definition of these concepts, Arendt cites The Notion of the State by Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves as one of the few who suggests  a separation, though she feels he does not adequately address it:

If the essence of power is the effectiveness of command then there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun, and it would be difficult to say “which way the order given by a policeman is different from that  given by a gunman.” . . .”We have to decide whether  and in what sense ‘power’ can be distinguished from ‘force’, to ascertain how the fact of using force itself presents us with an entirely different picture of human relations,” since “force, by the very fact of being qualified, ceases to be force.” But even this distinction, by far the most sophisticated and thoughtful one in the literature, does not go to the root of the matter. (“On Violence” 136-7)

Suddenly, I am getting flashbacks to all those years of reading Foucault, all those circular discussions of power that never brought me closer to understanding it. Somehow, this makes more sense to me now. It’s couched in a notion of states as the nexus of power (violence, deployed by the state, becomes institutional force, better defined as power) Arendt’s argument is that violence justified in this manner destroys power rather than demonstrates it.

Short version: “Please don’t use the force.”

Who is it deploying the force? Just where is this force/power coming from? People, obviously, but organized as states. That’s a matter for another day.