Poetry and Economics

I have just returned from a talk with Morris Berman and Eleni Stecopoulos at The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, part of series on language and health. Morris was pessimistic about the future of the United States and about the possibilities for action. What is important is to enjoy yourself, he said, and not to divorce yourself from your body. I had not read his books, the earliest of which, at least, looked interesting. Here in California, somatics has become something of an institution. The local advertisements for it and related new age “modalities” are enough to completely support two local serial publications. Healers, hypnotists, Reiki practitioners, Alexander technique, it goes on and on, and becomes wearying. It’s hard to sort out the people providing value from charlatans, if you even get as far as determining which “modalities” are good for you. That’s the catch. It all costs money, and lots of it. If you run out of money and credit, out on the street you go. So, one would like to be rational in one’s spending, i.e. make sure it provides value. (Even Berman had complaints about what the healing industry has become, with asides to “Deep-Pockets Chopra” and “Oprah/Chopra.”) Ah, but isn’t that just the catch: being “rational” is the enemy. If you doubt the therapy will work, that will jinx it and it won’t work because, in the post-Heisenberg universe, the oberver affects the observation, see. You have to totally immerse yourself (and your bank account) in this stuff, or it won’t work. You can’t ask the question, “is this worth the cost?” Just do it, and the money will come. That thinking – rationality – does not belong in this framework. And if you get down to your last pennies doing it, well, it’s just the universe trying to tell you that you need a lifestyle adjustment. Lifestyle coaches are ready to help you in that area, too, but only if you can afford to pay.

This work has its political implications, as well. As Habermas wrote, you can’t engage politically if you are doing yoga (Towards a Rational Society). Marx was a rationalist – his case against capitalism was that it ultimately was not rational. Foucault points out, in The Care of the Self, this sort of intense care and interest in one’s wellbeing goes to the roots of Western civilization. And it also goes well with a good dose of cynicism about the world. Ah, it’s all going to hell in a handbasket. There’s no use trying to change anything, so we might as well just try to enjoy ourselves while Rome burns. At least, in the 1960’s, when many of the “new therapies” were first being invented, there was the idea that, if enough people became enlightened, a new consciousness would sweep the planet and save us from disaster. Now even that image, however illusory it may have been, is gone. Yes, Obama, hope is still audacious.

I always pick up a sense of wistful longing at these poetry events. There is the inevitable confrontation. I start talking about science or economics, and people say things like, “You’re being sarcastic…aren’t you?!?” I tend to be a bit rough with the sacred cows. I’m not an iconoclast, by a wide margin, but when people start to ask about things like, “What does it mean that the economy is good?” I tell them about GDP. When they complain that “GDP says nothing about how wealth is distributed in this country,” I refer them to the Nobel-winning work of Amartya Sen. I start talking about his ideas for a social welfare function, and they throw up their hands, as if to say, “What are you doing here?!?”

What am I doing, there? Where does the wistful longing come in? Certainly, anything that involves mathematics is frowned-upon, there. I really think that it is not so much economics that these people hate, but its mathematical basis. So, even math is taboo. That’s not a huge loss. It’s a Poetry Center, after all. But what interests me is the emotional baggage. Whenever people stop being even-handed about something, I can’t resist my urge to prod. Where’s the hurt? Where’s the pain? What does it come from?

I haven’t gotten far enough to write about these things, but it is what Mr. Berman criticizes when he rails against Cartesianism and “the disenchantment of the world.” It’s a profoundly poetic theme. I have written in here about the evils of “excess of signification.” Poetry is a bulwark against such excesses. Blanchot focuses on this theme explicitly in an essay on Bachelard, “Vast is the Night” (The Infinite Conversation, pp. 318-25). Against speech that is weighted down with meaning, with significance, with the kind of depth that makes reference to theory, stands a speech that is simple and light (of which Blanchot’s writing forms a wonderful example), the speech of images, of surface and illusion. This, by virtue of its lack of intellectual involvement, is often able to attain depth of another sort, human depth, and its own power to change consciousness, usually in far more profound and diverse ways. I get the feeling Berman shares and champions this view.

It seems that any sort of science, not least Economics, and perhaps even any sort of mathematics, with its implicit and absolute, lexicographic valuation of logical consistency, but certainly the psychoanalysis that Blanchot discusses, is based on analogy. That is its entire power. “Look, you can model it this way.” “You can model it as such.” These models only convince on the strength of their analogy. Provided that they have mathematical consistency, all that one can criticize about them is the assumptions on which they are based. Such criticism amounts to saying that the analogy is bad in some way. Usually such complaints can be either incorporated into the model, or it can be shown that the departures are without consequence to the results of the model. That’s what makes this form of thought so powerful, so adaptive, and thus universal.

What is criticized about this approach is that it all comes from the head. The assumptions may come from experience, but the results come entirely from the model, the logical consistency of which can be convincingly verified, i.e. proved. The model, of course, is entirely an intellectual construct. It only exists on paper (or silicon, magnetic media, etc.). This was a major shift in the way that people thought about the world. Prior to its invention, owed largely to Descartes, practical knowledge, knowledge that could reliably give a guide to action, was entirely based on experience. (This idea owes reference to the first essay in Gadamer’s The Enigma of Health, titled "Theory, Technology, Praxis.") Experience was handed down through tradition. And so you have things like the ten commandments, and other imperatives and cultural artifacts that sometimes kept a false validity when they outlived the conditions that gave rise to their formulation.

The results of models are not without a value that is too often called “intuitive” but which Blanchot rightly labels, after Bachelard, in Susan Hanson’s translation, “imaginary,” being based on images. In order for models to be truly effective, in order for them to provide “insight”, their results have to be translated back into the realm of images, or of poetry. It is not, in my experience, always the force of the analogy that convinces. One without a background in science or mathematics will have grave doubts about these analogies (usually unfounded). But the images will still get through. The model may alert the modeler to something that neither they nor the decisionmaker they seek to advise thought of in advance. A good model, according to Sam Savage, as well as his dad, does this. It “tells you something you didn’t tell it to tell you.” It tells you something you didn’t already know. But that something is not immediate. It requires careful and creative translation to reach the realm of images in all of its power to convince. But then it can convince even the most recalcitrant.

But this picture is all getting a bit too neat and happy. I’m becoming conscious of my own sacred cows. I’ve given the artist and the poet their own little alcoves in the hall of science, their own little houses in Plato’s republic, rehabilitating them two thousand years after Plato kicked them out. I am dissatisfied with this. I seek to break with the constraints of analogy altogether, to really let loose, to explore language in its own right, without always making reference to an idea or a referent, as Blanchot sought, with his ilk, his brethren I so adore or admire: Bataille, Heidegger, Derrida, et al. And so I sympathize with the poetic spirit. I read their books. I listen to their readings. I dutifully read my theory and can converse with undergraduates and graduate students in the literary arts as I can in my science. And my science suffers, in proportion that I do this. But I don’t learn any other languages, which is like not learning any math is to science. I don’t enroll in a matriculated program, or even a single class, or even a workshop. I don’t, in short, make a commitment, serious or otherwise. And when I listen to Mr. Berman, I find myself scoffing under my breath at his cynicism.

Maybe, it is because the economics of fear has been driven too deeply into me. I moved out of home at sixteen, in the mid-1980’s. The average person my age didn’t leave home until 25. I became financially independent, with hardly a dollar to my name, at age nineteen. I put myself through undergraduate school with almost no financial aid. I couldn’t even get a loan for two years because I had to prove my independence from my family. Then, when I became eligible for a loan, I didn’t take one. I put myself through a private graduate school the same way. And a good thing it was, for even without school debt, 34 years of age found me with no assets and $16,000 in credit card debt. About average. It took me five years of living hand-to-mouth to pay it off. And so, I feel a bit imprisoned by the need to constantly prove my economic value. It’s been so ingrained in me by hardship and the threat, sometimes very near, of hunger and homelessness. And so I studied subjects I did not so much like as through that they would be useful, either for accomplishing great works or merely for making a living (or for paying for accomplishing those great works).

So, the idea of living the life of a writer is something I secretly long for. To make one’s living this way, to live off of writing, to be able to afford to abandon everything else to its fate, seems fantastic. It feels profoundly uncomfortable to me, like I imagine it must be for someone to be in a body of water without knowing how to swim. And I notice a reverse effect as well, that the people who live this way feel uncomfortable with certain aspects of economic citizenship that are second nature to me. Their lack of faith in the structures of our society, evident and on display with Mr. Berman, is sometimes born of ignorance. “Because the stock market went up, does that mean that everybody's richer?” and artist asked me on the sidewalk. No, it means that the consensus estimate of how well businesses will do on average over time has just increased. And so, on it goes…