Unpublished Rhyme

Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is what might be called Low Theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project. Mainstream social science actually isn’t much help here, because normally in mainstream social science this sort of thing is generally classified as “policy issues,” and no self-respecting anarchist would have anything to do with these.

against policy (a tiny manifesto):

The notion of “policy” presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on others. “Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By partici- pating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.

And that’s only one risk Bank of America faces. The meteor-hitting-the-financial-system sort of lawsuit, which no one has dared to launch, would attack originators and packagers like Countrywide for failing to transfer mortgages properly to the mortgages securities in the first place, in violation of their own contract. This astonishing and apparently widespread “securitization fail” is leading to more and more underwater homeowners successfully challenging foreclosures in court. And it is also leading to banks undermining the rule of law. The robosigning scandal of last fall is only the tip of the iceberg. Both Schneiderman and Delaware’s attorney general Beau Biden are investigating conduct by mortgage securitizers on a broad basis. Schneiderman’s objection to the Bank of America settlement notes:

The ultimate failure of Countrywide to transfer complete mortgage loan documentation to the Trusts hampered the Trusts’ ability to foreclose on delinquent mortgages, thereby impairing the value of the notes secured by those mortgages. These circumstances apparently triggered widespread fraud, including BoA’s fabrication of missing documentation.

This language suggests that he may be considering legal action against Bank of America over this issue.

Despite the modesty of the losses incurred, many market participants and regulators found the flash crash deeply unnerving, and I think they were right to do so. What troubles me most about the episode is not something that happened, nor even something that was said, but something that was not said. Alison Crosthwait’s posting elicited only five comments from other TABB forum members, and none disagreed with her judgment that five seconds was ‘ample time for market participants to consider their positions’. She was certainly right to identify the triggering of the Stop Logic Functionality as the turning point, and the stabilisation of futures prices after the five-second pause shows that she was correct: five seconds was enough time. But bear in mind that she was talking about human beings coming to decisions and not computer systems recalibrating themselves: we don’t ordinarily talk of computers ‘considering’ things and ‘regaining confidence’. This is a situation that in the terminology of the organisational sociologist Charles Perrow is one of ‘tight coupling’: there is very little ‘slack’, ‘give’ or ‘buffer’, and decisions need to be taken in what is, on any ordinary human scale, a very limited period of time. It takes me five seconds to blow my nose.

Earlier this year John Mullan wrote an article proposing that the essential difference between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’ is that only ‘literary’ novels ‘ask us to attend to the manner of their telling’. The implication is that genre fiction with ambitions – that uses complex narrative structures such as multiple voices, twisted chronologies or stories within stories – seeks not to be genre fiction at all. Mullan’s two-tier hierarchy doesn’t hold up, however, when confronted with Miéville’s fiction, which has no intention of escaping genre. Embassytown is an SF novel through and through, unironically committed to its own narrative, and serious, like a no-nonsense B-movie, about providing the discerning genre fan with the monsters she’s paid to see. There’s no reason this should preclude an interest in the manner of a story’s telling. And the genre of ‘the weird’ is itself a sustained formal strategy. By asking us constantly to imagine surreal transformations, bizarre bodies and impossible architectures, Miéville confronts us, sentence by sentence, with the spectacle of language representing what can’t exist. Far from inviting the lazy genre reader to sink, unreflecting, into the tale, ‘the weird’ insists we pay attention to the unbridgeable distance between words and what they stand for….
Avice, who once wanted only to escape her hometown, finds herself entangled in its destiny. ‘Politics finds you,’ she says. Miéville, a leftist activist, seems both optimistic and cautious about the interactions between fiction and politics. He has written (in Historical Materialism) that it would be ‘ridiculous’ to suggest ‘that fantastic fiction gives a clear view of political possibilities or acts as a guide to political action,’ but insists nevertheless that weird fantasy has an inbuilt potential for radical political thinking, because it begins by throwing out standard definitions of what’s possible and what isn’t. Embassytown’s preoccupation with monsters and metaphors keeps reminding us not only that everyday reality is sustained by language, but that language is a kind of fantasy fiction, always confabulating a world that doesn’t otherwise exist. Not taking ‘the real’ for granted means noticing that the real is a story you’re being told.

But, to be honest, it’s different kinds of urban space that appeal to me. If you’re someone who can’t drive, like I can’t, you find a lot of American cities are not just difficult, but really quite strange. I spend a lot of time in Providence, Rhode Island, and it’s a nice town, but it just doesn’t operate like a British town. A lot of American towns don’t. The number of American cities where downtown is essentially dead after seven o’clock, or in which you have these strange little downtowns, and then these quite extensive, sprawling but not quite suburban surroundings that all call themselves separate cities, that segue into each other and often have their own laws—that sort of thing is a very, very strange urban political aesthetic to me.

BLDGBLOG: There’s a book that came out a few years ago called The Meadowlands, by Robert Sullivan. At one point, Sullivan tags along with a retired detective in New Jersey who reveals that, now that he’s retired, he no longer really knows what to do with all the information he’s accumulated about the city over the years. Being retired means he basically knows thousands of things about the region that no longer have any real use for him. He thus comes across as a very melancholy figure, almost as if all of it was supposed to lead up to some sort of narrative epiphany—where he would finally and absolutely understand the city—but then retirement came along and everything went back to being slightly pointless. It was an interpretive comedown, you might say.
Miéville: That kind of specialized knowledge, in any field, can be intoxicating. If you experience a space—say, a museum—with a plumber, you may well come out with a different sense of the strengths and weaknesses of that museum—considering the pipework, as well, of course, as the exhibits—than otherwise. This is one reason I love browsing specialist magazines in fields about which I know nothing. Obviously, then, with something that is explicitly concerned with uncovering and solving, it makes perfect sense that seeing the city through the eyes of a police detective would give you a very self-conscious view of what’s happening out there. In terms of fiction, though, I think, if anything, the drive is probably the opposite. Novelists have an endless drive to aestheticize and to complicate. I know there’s a very strong tradition—a tradition in which I write, myself—about the decoding of the city. Thomas de Quincey, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair—that type-thing. The idea that, if you draw the right lines across the city, you’ll find its Kabbalistic heart and so on. The thing about that is that it’s intoxicating—but it’s also bullshit. It’s bullshit and it’s paranoia—and it’s paranoia in a kind of literal sense, in that it’s a totalizing project. As long as you’re constantly aware of that, at an aesthetic level, then it’s not necessarily a problem; you’re part of a process of urban mythologization, just like James Joyce was, I suppose. But the sense that this notion of uncovering—of taking a scalpel to the city and uncovering the dark truth—is actually real, or that it actually solves anything, and is anything other than an aesthetic sleight of hand, can be quite misleading, and possibly even worse than that. To the extent that those texts do solve anything, they only solve mysteries that they created in the first place, which they scrawled over the map of a mucky contingent mess of history called the city. They scrawled a big question mark over it and then they solved it.

The main argument for releasing a photograph of the punctured scalp of our enemy is that it will provide proof that bin Laden really is dead. In other words, seeing is believing. But does anyone really believe that any more? Believing is believing. People who want, or need, to believe that bin Laden wasn’t shot dead will have no difficulty believing that a picture of his cadaver is a fake, a simple propaganda trick. The release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate didn’t put an end to birtherism, so why would the release of bin Laden’s autopsy video put an end to deatherism? And why does the White House care to appease the holders of such delusions?