RESPONSE TO A COMMENT

McCorrama asks the following question:

"Given your prior comments on science, and the importance of the Critique of Pure Reason can you offer any guidance in approaching the material which deals with the problems of contemporary physics/cosmology.

"Lee Smolin in 'The Life of the Cosmos': Kant claims to disprove Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, which is the basis of his relational philosophy of space and time...Kant's writings on space and time claim to establish the logical necessity of both Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry...I find Kant's presumption to define a domain of discourse in which final conclusions could be reached, which limits once and for all what we might perceive about the world highly implausible (even leaving out the fact that they led Kant to conclusions we now know are false)."

Needless to see, this is a very large question, and one about which I claim very little expertise.  Perhaps I can limit myself to the quoted remark about the views of Kant, which is a subject about which I know something.

When reading Kant [or any philosopher], it is always useful to draw a sharp distinction between what the philosopher's arguments actually prove, assuming they are sound, and what the philosopher says his or her arguments prove.  Just as novelists are often poor guides to the literary interpretation of their own works, so too philosophers cannot always be trusted as judges of what their arguments show.

For example, the arguments in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the CRITIQUE actually show, if they are correct, that there is a mathematics of space that is knowable a priori even though many of its propositions are synthetic.  This seems on the face of it impossible, and Kant's theory of forms of cognition lying a priori in the mind is intended to explain how it could be possible.  The kicker, of course, is that the propositions are true only of things as they appear to us, of phenomena, and not of things as they are in themselves, of noumena.  Now, Kant was familiar with Euclidean geometry, which was, in his day, the gold standard for mathematical knowledge.  So he naturally, and quite illegitimately, concluded that his arguments establish the knowability a priori of the propositions of Euclidean geometry.  But if you examine the text of the Aesthetic closely, you will find that there is not a word in it about the axioms and definitions of traditional geometry.

In much the same manner, Kant undertakes to establish the knowability a priori of the principle that everything that happens in space and time has a cause [the so-called Causal Maxim], but this claim, if indeed he is successful in establishing it, tells us nothing at all about Newtonian Mechanics.  Once again, Newtonian mechanics was in Kant's day the gold standard for scientific knowledge so he simply assumed that he was demonstrating the knowability a priori of Newton's theories.  In this case, Kant did in fact write a book claiming to establish the particular propositions of Newtonian physics [his Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft], but this is a decidedly inferior work that no one take seriously.

None of this, of course, answers the question, Do Kant's arguments establish anything at all?  That, as they say, is a subject for another day [and since this is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of my book on the Critique, I will simply nod majestically to that work and move on.]

I hope this helps.

RELIGIOUS REFLECTIONS ON THE OCCASION OF THE ELECTION OF A NEW POPE

All the fuss about the election now beginning in Vatican City for a new pope got me thinking about my treasured copy of the Index librorum prohibitorum, the official list, promulgated by the Church, of books the faithful are barred from reading.  Taking it down from the shelf, I find that my copy was issued in 1948, but by the time I acquired it, several more books had been added on an addendum sheet which came with it, including, among other things, the entire collected works of Jean-Paul Sartre. 

The Index is a curiously parochial work, in the common, not the religious, sense of that term.  Having been compiled by a collection of not very broadly educated Italian clerics, it is extremely heavy on the most obscure works of slightly deviant Italian language theology, but remarkably silent on even the most scandalous works in other languages.

For example, the only English work of fiction I could find in an admittedly quick scan of the 508 pages of the Index is Samuel Richardson's Pamela, widely [and incorrectly] considered the first English novel.  Apparently the Vatican apparatchiks took the elegantly recursive position that if one banned the first novel, all subsequent instances of the genre were banned by implication.  [The Index does forbid the faithful to read Defoe's The Political History of the Devil, but that is not a novel, so it doesn't fall under the Pamela proscription.]

Kant's Kritik der reinen vernunft is there, as indeed it should be.  I cannot believe that a serious student could survive a deep engagement with the Critique with his or her faith intact.

There is something naive and touching about a list of prohibited books put out in the middle of the twentieth century, when everything was already available in libraries and bookstores.  It makes one think of those pop psychology tests that consist of telling someone, "Now, whatever you do, don't think about elephants!"

My secret wish is that when next the Index is updated, In Defense of Anarchism gets included, but that is, I know, too much to hope for.

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

There is a lovely story in the NY TIMES today about this year's group of forty Intel Science Talent search finalists, who will compete in Washington for scholarships that rise to a first prize of $100,000.  Readers of the very first chapter of my Memoir will recall that the Intel, originally the Westinghouse, Science Talent Search is a competition for high school seniors, each of whom must take a general science exam and do an original science research project.  My faithful readers will also perhaps recall that in 1948, shortly after the competition was inaugurated, my big sister, Barbara, was the grand national girl winner [as they then were called] of the competition.

What catches the eye in the TIMES story is the size of the prizes.  Barbara, as top winner, was awarded a scholarship of $2400, which actually paid most of her bills for four years at Swarthmore College [from which she graduated with a summa in math, by the way.]  The CPI calculator I located online converts that into a tad less than $23,000 in today's depreciated currency, which shows that Intel has indeed upped the prizes dramatically.

But of course the real news is the brief description in the story of the projects the top forty presented to the judges.  They all seem to have done work that would have won Nobel prizes or the like half a century ago!  The speed with which especially the biological sciences have progressed in that period is truly astonishing.

I often reflect that deeply religious science deniers, who consider it a mark of their faith to insist that evolution is a hoax and the earth only ten thousand years old, completely miss the true wonder of what they consider God's creation.

EPILOGUE -- [UNSATISFACTORY] CONCLUSION

As I plod on through this obscure series of arguments I have launched, completely without any idea where they will end, it occurs to me that there is a portion of the exposition that I have omitted, perhaps because it is so familiar to me that I have a hard time remembering that the rest of the world does not inhabit my head.  Briefly, in Chapter I of Capital, Marx offers us an extended and quite obscure discourse about the "relative and equivalent forms of value," in the course of which he works his way from the simplest case of an exchange of linen for coats [quantities not even specified] to the full blown emergence of a list of prices of commodities in which each commodity is set equal to some amount of gold understood as money.  This part of Chapter I is so difficult to understand that some commentators, most notably Louis Althusser, actually recommend to readers that they skip all of Chapter I and come back to it only after they are adequately marinated in Marx's terminology and point of view.  I have fully explained this part of Chapter I in the third chapter of Moneybags Must be So Lucky, under the provocative title "Mrs. Feinschmeck's Blintzes, or Notes on the Crackpot Categories of Bourgeois Political Economy."  [I am, I do believe, the first person ever actually to make perfectly clear sense of Marx's argument, but as the immortal Rodney Dangerfield used to say, I don't get no respect.]

What I am attempting in this series of posts is to pick up Marx's argument where he left it, and carry the analysis forward from the concept of commodity money [i.e., gold as numeraire] to the full development of paper money, completely unhinged from any connection to gold or any other produced commodity.  Understanding the nature of money thus conceived is of course essential to any understanding of modern financial capitalism.  I am quite sure that I cannot offer a full account of that phenomenon, but I am cautiously hopeful that this series of posts will at least serve to clarify things in a preliminary way so that others more knowledgeable than I can pick up the analysis and carry it to completion.

Now let me return to my slow, careful exposition.  I have been struggling these past few days with the problem of typing into WORD my equations and formalizations, and it is so bloody time-consuming, even assuming it can be transferred to my blog, that it literally impedes my thought processes.  So I have made a decision.  I am going to expound what I have to say in words, not symbols.  Should I actually reach a point at which something is to be gained by symbolic representations of my arguments, I will deal with it then .

So, we are at the crucial point where something resembling money first enters the picture.  The discussions in classical political economy [and, I think, in modern economic theory as well] are ambiguous, because they fail to distinguish sharply between someone's legal holding, or ownership, of specific identifiable physical quantities of various commodities [this chair, that pair of boots, just this ounce of gold, etc.] and a person's right to take possession of a specified amount of some commodity [as identified by legally defined categories and measures.]  If a country is on the gold standard [as the United States once was], then a piece of legal tender with a face value of one hundred dollars gives its owner a legal right to present that one hundred dollar bill at a government mint or depository and receive a quantity of gold worth $100 at whatever is the legally defined rate for gold.  But even in this rather elementary case of a country on the gold standard, the possession of the one hundred dollar bill does not of course give its owner a legally enforceable right to any quantity of any commodity other than gold.  It does give the owner the right to settle debts with that hundred dollar bill -- other economic agents are required to accept it in payment of debts.  But only if the owner of the bill can find a commodity owner willing to sell some quantity of the commodity can the owner of the bill exchange it for the commodity.  As for the quantity of the commodity in that exchange, that is left to the "higgling and jiggling of the marketplace."  So it is entirely possible to be in legal possession of a goodly store of paper money backed by the government and exchangeable for gold and yet not at all be able to buy food or clothing or shelter.

What has happened here?

The first thing that has happened is that a distinction has been introduced between what we may call a person's holdings and what we may now call that person's possessions.  Reverting to the banking house that issues certificates of deposit, the issuing of the certificate has not altered the vector of outputs, and hence it has not altered any economic agent's holdings [if we may now use the term "holdings" to refer to the set of actual individual specified items that the legal person legally owns].  But the issuing of the certificate has created two new legal entities that must be included in the list of an economic agent's possessions.  Ownership of the gold passes from the depositor to the banking house.  The banking house, upon issuing the certificate of entitlement, incurs a debt;  and the depositor, upon receiving the certificate of entitlement, acquires a credit.  The debt is a legal obligation to turn over a specific quantity and quality of gold to the depositor on demand;  and the credit is a legal right to demand [and to obtain] that specified quantity and quality of gold from the banking house.

Debts and credits are not physical quantities of goods, as are all the items in any legal agent's holdings.  They are legal obligations and rights -- what today it is fashionable to call "social constructions."  They exist only within the context of a system of laws and regulations [or perhaps socially enforceable customs.] 

Let us suppose that the state arrogates to itself the right to create and enforce such legal rights and obligations, memorialized on bits of paper.  Obviously, traders of commodities in the market may now start to exchange their commodities for such bits of paper, rather than for other commodities.  Since we are assuming a society-wide consistent system of relative prices, including the ratios in which commodities exchange for gold, very quickly we will see developing a system of payment and exchange that looks very much like what we now call money.

Well, it should be clear where this is heading.  Traders may decide to hold their slips of paper beyond the period of exchange between the periods of production, confident that will be able to exchange them for commodities at some future time.   This will create certain imbalances in the supply of and demand for commodities.  If too many commodity producers decide to hold onto their chits instead of swapping them for commodities during the trading period, there will be a glut of commodities on the market.  This will trigger the characteristic cycle of booms and busts that Marx, and all other observers of the mid-nineteenth century economic scene, had come to know and fear [or embrace, if they were, like Marx, hoping for a crash followed by a revolution.]  All of this takes place while the economy is still on the gold standard, which is to say, when the chits of paper, now called money, can still be cashed in on demand for specified amounts of gold. 

I have gone in at such interminable length about elementary and obvious matters because I want to identify the precise point at which the analyses of both the classical political economists and of their neo-classical marginalist successors part company with reality.  The equations I put forward in my lengthy essay on Marx's economic theories had absolutely no place in them for what we are now calling money.  If you go back and look at them, you will see that there is no symbol in them that stands for a quantum of money.  There are prices, of course:  the price of corn, p_c, the price of iron, p_i, the price of theology books, p_b, and the money wage, w.  But these "prices" are simply ratios of the specified commodity to a standard quantity of the commodity chosen as numeraire, in the case of my equations corn.  The debts and credits that we introduced into our discussion above, and that we would have to include in the vector representing the possessions of the economic agents, do not appear in the equations.  In the sense that we understand the word "money," there is no money in classical political economy.

One might think that this failure is purely a consequence of the relative lack of sophistication of the classical political economists, who, after all, did not have the advantage of having studied the subject from Paul Samuelson's famous textbook.  But that would be a mistake, for money, properly understood, makes no appearance at all even in the supremely sophisticated, thoroughly mathematicized equations of the Microeconomic theorists who are the envy and pride of the modern Economics profession.  [When I had just begun my study of the dismal science, I observed with some puzzlement to a bright UMass Econ grad student that there did not seem to be any money in the Micro I was studying.  "Of course not," he replied, as though I had commented that the stable with the pile of manure in it did not seem to have a pony.  Radical critic of all things capitalist though he was, he did not seem to think this was a black mark against Micro.]

If we make it through the first semester of Introductory Economics, which is typically devoted to Microeconomics [intersecting supply and demand curves, elasticity of demand, and all that cool stuff], and stumble into the Spring semester course on Macroeconomics, all of a sudden money is everywhere.  The economy-wide quantity of money is a big topic in Macro, and it turns out that there are even different kinds of money -- M0, M1, M2, and M3 among others.  But no one ever troubles to explain how this money, which was so conspicuously absent from the Fall semester, managed to find its way into Economics over Christmas break.

This is as far as I have managed to get in my meditation on money.  It is clear to me that money is a social construction -- a mystification, in Marx's terms.  It is not a mere accounting convention, nor is it an arbitrary numeraire in a system of relative prices.  I cannot really imagine a complex economy functioning without money, even in a socialist system of social relations. 

Well, I leave it to others to ignore this or carry it forward.  I think perhaps I should return to commenting on the passing scene.

THE LIMITS OF COMMODITY FETISHISM

When Susie and I got married twenty-five years ago, one of the lesser items she brought to our new combined household was a big clunky ceramic ashtray.  Since neither of us smoked, she took to using it as a depository, by the side of her bed, for earrings, glasses, her watch, and such like things.  One day, as I was making the bed, I thought to look at the underside of the ashtray, and found inscribed there "Editions Picasso."  "Huh," I thought, "Do you suppose this ugly thing is worth something?"  So I took it along to an art shop in the mall and asked, in a studiedly neutral voice, "Can you tell me the market value of this ashtray?"  The owner of the shop turned it over, looked at it, went into the back room to consult some books, and came back.  "Well," he said, "at auction it should bring about five thousand dollars."

I am forced to admit that in this case the mystifications of capitalism failed me.  Try as I might, I could not feel the slightest tingle of divinity emanating from the ashtray.  To this day, it sits on Susie's bed table, holding earrings, glasses, her watch, and such like things.  There are limits.

LITTLE BY LITTLE

There are now three of my books digitized and available on Amazon.com for $9.99 each.  If anyone finds this too steep a price, just send me an email and I will send you a check for the amount.  The three books are The Poverty of Liberalism, Understanding Rawls, and Understanding Marx.  More to come.

ALICE WALKER'S THE COLOR PURPLE

Two Observations on the Structure and Voice of The Color Purple

 First Note:

Since its publication in 1982, Alice Walker's The Color Purple has attracted a good deal of critical commentary in addition to a wide general audience.  The MLA International Bibliography lists better than half a hundred journal articles and contributions to books, and there have, in addition, been a number of significant extended discussions in books devoted to Afro-American literature, among them The Afro-American Novel and its Traditions, by Bernard Bell, The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates, and Inspiriting Influences by Michael Awkward.

Commentators have focused on several themes, including, most notably, Walker's relation to Zora Neale Hurston in general and Their Eyes Were Watching God in particular, on Walker's use of vernacular speech, and on the themes of lesbianism, male violence toward females, and the refiguring of Christian religiosity.  But although several commentators have discussed Walker's use of the epistolary genre, almost no attention has been paid to the purely formal and structural aspects of The Color Purple.  The purpose of these brief observations is to call attention to certain striking formal or structural features of Walker's novel, in an effort to complicate somewhat our reading of it. 

The Color Purpleconsists of a single line of direct discourse, uttered, we assume, by the man whom the main character, Celie, knows as Pa, followed by a series of ninety-two letters, several of which are embedded within other letters, and five of which are somewhat ambiguously introduced by a comment from Celie, italicized.  Fifty-five of the letters are written by Celie to God [or "G-o-d" in one case];  twenty-two are written by Celie's sister, Nettie, to Celie;  fourteen are written by Celie to Nettie; and the last letter is addressed by Celie "Dear God.  Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples.  Dear Everything.  Dear God."

[The opening line of direct discourse, for those who do not recall or have not read the novel, is:  "You better not never tell nobody but God.  It'd kill your mammy.]

The first fifty-five of Celie's letters to God are unsigned.  Now, a letter to God is, in the Christian tradition in which Celie is situated, a prayer.  And the appropriate ending for a prayer is the expression of affirmation, "Amen."  So the absence of the word "amen" from these fifty-five letters can be taken by us, I think, as Walker's formal expression of Celie's inability to affirm or accept or consent to the God in whom she has been told by Pa to confide.  She writes the prayers, but she is unable to bring them to a satisfactory, and satisfied, closure.

In Celie's forty-ninth letter to God is embedded Nettie's first letter to her.  There follow fourteen more letters from Nettie to Celie, interspersed with Celie's letters to God, until, in her fifty-fifth letter, Celie packs it in with God.  "You must be sleep," she writes abruptly.  Now she turns her epistolary attentions to Nettie.  Her first letter to Nettie is unsigned, but Nettie's sixteenth letter to Celie, which comes next in the series, ends with the injunction "Pray for us."  Celie's very next letter, her second to Nettie, begins with the flat, dramatic announcement, "I don't write to God no more, I write to you."  And this letter, in which Celie reports an extended conversation with Shug in which her conception of God is radically called into question, is signed "Amen"!  Celie is finally able to utter this word, though only as an affirmation of her relationship with her sister, not as an affirmation of God's presence.

Celie now writes six more letters to Nettie signed "Amen," [including the fourth in the series, in which we get the characteristic call-and-response of the Black church, "Amen, say Shug.  Amen, amen."]  In the ninth letter to Nettie, Celie announces that Pa is dead, and this letter is not signed "Amen," nor are any of the subsequent letters to Nettie.

At the very end of the novel, after Celie has written herself into existence as a sexually, morally, and socially complete woman;  after she has gathered about her the whole extended family of players in her complex, self-assured psycho-drama; after her proper sister Nettie has returned from her brush with Spelman College, W. E. B. DuBois, President Tubman, Africa, missionary work, New York, and all the other icons and symbols of socially acceptable Negro upward mobility -- in short, after Walker has established dramatically that true self-discovery requires the courageous taking possession of an authentic authorial voice, and after Celie has successfully recreated God in a form suitable to be the object and recipient of prayer, NOW Celie can finally undertake and complete the act of prayer.  And so we get the final letter of the novel, which is indeed a prayer to God, concluded by the word "Amen."

A few words about this analysis before I move on to the second Note.  The Color Purple is an epistolary novel, which is to say a novel consisting of a series of letters.  Every doctoral student in any English Literature program learns that the epistolary form was the first form of the novel, exemplified by the classic eighteenth century novels of Samuel Richardson, Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison.  [I never studied English Literature, but I was married for twenty-three years to a distinguished scholar of the subject, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, whose doctoral dissertation was on Samuel Richardson, later published as Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth Century Puritan Character, so I absorbed all of this as pillow talk, as it were.]  Now, for as long as I can recall, scholars of literature have been alerted to the significance of the formal structural features of works of fiction or poetry, and they are forever explaining to naive readers that one cannot really understand what a novel is about unless one pays attention to narrative voice and all the rest of that stuff.  For a late twentieth century author to adopt the form of the epistolary novel is a clear signal to any sophisticated reader that something important is happening here to which attention must be paid.  It is simply astonishing that not one of the extremely sophisticated critics I have cited even so much as asks the question, "Why did Walker choose to write an epistolary novel?"  These critics would never make the mistake of failing to examine the form of Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake.  Indeed, they would not even make the mistake of failing to ask such questions about Invisible Man.  So why on earth did they not ask it about The Color Purple?

I really do think there is only one possible answer.  The Color Purple is a novel by a Black woman in which themes of lesbianism and abusive treatment of Black women by Black men come up.  It just never occurs to the critics, including such sophisticated writers as Henry Louis Gates, that Walker might actually be a thoughtful, self-aware, intelligent author whose authorial choices are made deliberately for some deliberate artistic purpose.

Second Note:

A number of commentators on The Color Purple have written critically or disparagingly about the contrast between the power and immediacy of Celie's narration and the stilted formality of Nettie's letters, with their implausibly proper English and lengthy, tedious, quasi-Ethnographic accounts of the African people in whose midst she spends so many years as a missionary.  Once again, in this day of super-sophistication about matters of literary voice, none of the commentators has thought to ask why Walker, who clearly has the authorial skill to create the compelling voice of Celie, chooses to conjure so unappealing a voice as that of Nettie.  Walker's choice may, of course, be a literary mistake, but it is manifestly impossible that it is a mere accident or oversight.

There are some clues in Nettie's letters to which we ought to pay attention in our attempt to discover Walker's aims.  Consider first of all the contrast in diction and grammar of the two sets of letters.  These are sisters, after all, raised in the same household and educated, such as may be, in the same school.  Yet one writes in a direct, forceful, compelling, semi-literate dialect, and the other writes in stilted, educated, boring correct English.  Later on, I will suggest that this is one of the clues to what the novel is about, what its message is, but for the moment, let us simply note that since Walker wrote both sets of letters, she could perfectly well have made Nettie's letters as compelling as Celie's, had she chosen to do so.

The letters written by Celie exhibit a subtle progressive development, whereas those written by Nettie might all have been written at the same time.  One example will suffice.  Celie always refers to the man to whom she has been married as "Mr. -----."  In the earlier letters, she consistently misuses the possessive case, writing "Mr. ----- children" on page 25 or "Mr. ---- daddy" on page 58.  Then, in the dramatic and pivotal letter to Nettie, in which she announces that she is not writing to God any longer, she uses it correctly. -- "Mr. ----'s evil" on page 179, thereby signifying linguistically a growth in self-command and assurance.  Nettie, on the other hand, uses the possessive correctly from the very beginning -- see her second letter, p. 119 -- "the Reverend Mr. ----'s place."

Nettie follows a path in the novel that is stereotypically the correct path -- what today we would call, in a different context, P.C.  She leaves the rural South, goes North, becomes involved with Christian missionaries off to do good works in Africa.  The couple she joins are virtually a caricature -- the woman, Corinne, went to Spelman Institute [later Spelman College];  her husband, Samuel, met the young W. E. B. DuBois.  The two of them met President Tubman in Liberia [which, as it happens, is historically impossible.  Tubman did not become president of Liberia until much later.]  Nettie's letters are filled with pseudo-anthropological accounts of African customs -- in which, incidentally, can be found striking parallels to Celie's life, marked by direct and unmistakable verbal echoes.  [One example:  Nettie says of the Olinka:  "There is a way that men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa.  They listen just long enough to issue instructions."  Celie, in one of her letters, says "I know white people never listen to coloured, period,  If they do, they only listen long enough to be able to tell you what to do."]

One would expect Nettie, who has escaped from the degradation of her childhood, to return and take Celie away to Harlem at the end of the novel.  Instead, Walker inverts the expected conclusion by having Celie gather Nettie and the rest of her extended "family" about her at the end of the novel.  It is Celie, not Nettie, who has actually taken the longest and most productive journey.  Surely, it seems to me, this central structural feature of the novel must signal Walker's rejection of [or, as they say in literary circles, revision of] the dominant literary tradition and dominant theses of the Harlem literary renaissance.  I am not simply calling attention to Walker's reversal or revision of the representation of male and female roles within the Afro-American literary tradition.  At stake here too is the role of the rural South versus the urban North, etc.  What is especially interesting is that Walker, the person, followed Nettie's path, but she has written a novel in which Celie is the compelling central figure.

In short, a great deal is going on in the Color Purple, as in any novel.  But it seems clear from these elementary facts about the formal structure of the work that Walker has chosen to write a story about the process by which a Black woman can achieve the possibility of successful prayer, and at the same time, to call into question standard evaluative assumptions within the Afro-American literary tradition about the centrality of the Southern rural experience and the Northern flowering of the Harlem Renaissance.  It is also possible that attention to these formal features of the novel will help readers to resist the temptation to construe it as a naive expression of Walker's unmediated attitudes toward Lesbianism or the mistreatment of Black women by Black men.