Epilogue: ‘No Country For Old Men’

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on” are the famous lines of Beckett’s absurdist characters who are at the end of their wit thanks to the relentless punishment they have taken.

The epitome of classical punishment in the West is the myth of Sisyphus, a king condemned by the gods to push a rock to the top of the mountain only to see it roll back, after which he had to start again.

That punishment is easy to understand. It was meted out through the exertion of intense labor without purpose and end. But labor somehow dignified the condemned. The story is a somber one and Sisyphus is no clown.

Modern Beckettian characters suffer a punishment of an altogether different kind. In terms of setting, they have complete freedom. They could come and go as they please. But they are idle, with whatever little movement there is being spontaneous and without purpose.

We do not know why they are in that situation. Nor do the characters themselves. Not that they seek answers or suspect that the situation demands an explanation. Apathy is all there is. (In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon do not bother to hang themselves).

In the continual idleness, words fail. They lose their connection with the material world. They become absurd. The characters uttering absurdities become the subject of ridicule. They appear as fools, crazies, clowns and tramps.

That is the nature of the modern man’s punishment, being ‘free’, yet unable to act with purpose, acting with purpose being what separates him from the beast. (Beckett said that his Endgame was “more inhuman than Godot”.)

Even relating this situation is punishing, as Beckett no doubt knew. At the end, his style which had been evolving, hit a wall. Becket was describing situations that could not get worse; any further deterioration would dissolve their “plot” into nothingness. The language describing those situations likewise could not improve. Any “improvement” would sink it into incoherence. The critic Richard Seaver observed:

Is it possible for Mr.Beckett to progress further without succumbing to the complete incoherence of inarticulate sound, or to ... silence?"

Indeed Beckett produced little prose afterwards.

Replace the “situation” in Becket with “old age” and you will have the condition of old writers, composers, painters and directors in the West generally and the U.S. particularly. They can’t go on because they have nothing of value to say. “The talent has run out”. But they must go on because they need money. The result, when artistic works of no value must be commoditized and sold for money, is the absurdities, farce, drivel and incoherence that we see. But unlike Becket’s characters, the old artists in the West know, or at least feel, how much they have diminished, the way a senile ex-Olympian on a wheelchair would feel and know. Hence, the angst and the depression.

Life, you see, is dialectical. So is the evolution of thought which comprehends it. The driver of dialectics is progression from falsehood to truth: the mind perceives the worldly object, notices its contradiction (falsehood) and proceeds to resolve it at a higher plane of reason, higher in the sense that the previous contradiction is explained in the new phase and absorbed into it. The dialectical process is the process of evolution in which every advancing state is the necessary other of that which preceded it. This process reveals the universal truths.

Philosophers and artists both follow this process. Both groups search for truth, only philosophers describe their search; artists portray it.

Logically, the process does not depend on time. That is why the “classical” works of art and literature are said to stand the “test of time”. The universal truths they reveal are acknowledged by all men at all times.

But physically, because the mind resides in the body in the material world, the evolution from lower to higher phases of reasoning corresponds to the passage of time, i.e., aging. So, the work of a true philosopher or artist – the one who follows a constantly evolving dialectical path – improves with age. Think Picasso. Think Beethoven. John Berger. Chekhov. Hegel. Newton. Sartre. Godard. The list is legion. And I am only mentioning the Western names.

And if the dialectical path is not followed? Then one will have personal observations, reminiscences and the life’s tidbits, but not universal truth which is expressly not personal. Personal is contingent, accidental, transient and forgettable. It is the stuff of sitcoms. It is inherently limited.

The limit impedes the progress of literary/artistic work. As the writer/artist gets old, he runs out of things to say.

Some perceptive and intelligent artists like Jackson Pollock recognize the problem and build their works around it. In Keeping a Rendez Vous, John Berger explained Pollock’s style:

Painting throughout its history has served many purposes, has been flat and has used perspective, has been framed and has been left borderless, has been explicit and has been mysterious. But one act of faith has remained a constant.... The act of faith consisted in believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen in a glance.... Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times which nourished him, to refuse this act of faith: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us.

(Berger is mistaken in attributing the urge to go beyond the visible to an “act of faith”. What drives the going beyond the immediately visible is the compulsion of the mind that follows a dialectical path. Noting that Hegel uses immediate to mean mere fact (without contemplation), he begins his Doctrine of Essence thus:

Since the goal of knowledge is the truth ... knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there is still something other than being itself and that this background constitutes the truth of being. This cognition is mediated knowledge.)

Pollack was a Beckettian tramp if there ever was one.

And he was an exceptional. He saw the limit and made it the centerpiece of his work.

The great majority of old artists and writers are clueless. Of course, they, too, suffer from inability to produce but they think it is something in the air – or in old age. Recall Sondheim from Par I: “It’s age ... I have checked with other people."

So they go about trying to write and produce as before but what comes out, thanks to the peculiarity of art and literature, is a precise reflection of their lot. Art and literature are powerful stuff!

In What is Literature, Sartre explained the reason:

It is always unintentional contribution of the writer which has the chief importance … A work is never beautiful unless it in some way escapes its author. If he paints himself without planning to, if his characters escape his control and impose their whims upon him, if the words maintain a certain independence under his pen, then he does his best work.

This applies with equal force to artists.

Take a filmmaker like Woody Allen. They gave him an Oscar in 2011 for the screenplay of the Midnight in Paris. He called it a “personal view” of Paris. See now what his personal view reveals to two film critics of the Financial Times:

Peter Aspden:

Allen had form, once. But he lost it a long time ago. About 20 years ago, if you want to press me. Since then he has made films prolifically – but badly … Some of them are so bad – anyone out there seen Scoop? – that the next film cannot help but constitute some kind of return to form. If you constantly lower your bar, occasionally you will drag yourself over it. It is a novel form of creative evolution.

Antonia Quirke:

Midnight in Paris is essentially shallow, a nostalgia trip … [It]has grossed more than $107.6m worldwide and counting. In terms of box office revenue for Allen, this is easily a record … And yet the film is always crashingly sad too: All those brilliant, beautiful people in the past, it simply says, all dead after years of being drunk, made crazy and broke and increasingly careless of the company they kept, many of them ultimately sad, abandoned bores. And we are stuck with this god-awful present. A present that seems to Allen to be mantled in some massive, ineluctable disgrace – a hub of numbness.

Exactly.

The qualitative difference between old age and youth is experience. But merely being exposed to events and conditions does not by itself create a qualitative edge. The mind must process the experienced event and place it in the context of its proper universal.

Pursuit of money interferes with that ability. It deflects, however subtly and imperceptibly, the focus of the mind away from the search for truth and towards more money. The mind so affected produces “truths” which are not authentic but synthetic. Like the search results of Google, they are produced in response not to the subject of the search but the social factors which influence it. That is the destruction of artistic talent, artistic talent being nothing more or less than the ability to show and tell the truth in ways never before seen or heard.

Obstructing the mind's ability to process the events is the destruction of experience; we say exposure to events without the ability to process them does not count as experience. Since experience is the qualitative edge of old age over youth, its destruction turns the old men to children. Hence, the well-known child-like talk of the adults in the U.S., peppered with “gee” and “gosh” and the corresponding conduct to go with it. From Bill Gates to the State Department to Mitt Romney no one escapes its hold.

Agamben, as I pointed out earlier, noticed this phenomenon but could not elaborate on it. Nasser satisfactorily explained it.

Returning to old artists, can you think of a better specimen of a man-child than Woody Allen, a man passed the social security age who talks like an adolescent?

I can.

David Mamet was no Tolstoy. The stories and plays he wrote were always light and idealized but you could see the gem of a talent in them. Some of them like The Untouchables, The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice were turned into memorable movies.

His latest book? Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal?

Last year, John Gapper of Financial Times had a revealing lunch interview with him:

[Mamet's latest book] has had some hostile reviews, including one from John Lloyd in the FT, and Mamet stands accused of turning conservative as he has grown older and richer. When I mention this, he bristles. “People say, Oh, Dave just wrote this book because he made a couple of bucks or because he believes in the state of Israel and he cast his liberal beliefs aside, but what about the arguments?” Mamet who attends synagogue regularly, cites the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah.

I ask whether anything in particular prompted his change of heart and he cites the 2007-2008 film and television writers’ strike and The Unit, a TV show that Mamet created and produced. “All of a sudden, the show was off the air and everyone was thrown out of work – the stagehands, the grips, the custom designers, all the people who worked 16 hours a day … I realized I had been screwed by unions as much as I’d been helped by them.”

This peroration, delivered in a husky voice with traces of his native Chicago, is interrupted by the waitress. Mamet switches seamlessly to ordering his food in Hollywood manner – he now lives in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles... “Filet mignon rare, and no mashed potatoes please, and no sauce please. I’ll start off with the green salad with the balsamic vinegar on the side.”

As the waitress brings Mamet’s steak and a hamburger for me, he exclaims with relish: “Yum, yum, yum”.

The culture that produces child-like lottery winners who go bankrupt within a few years also produces talented young artists who become child-like old men within a few decades. As with money, so with the talent: both are wasted.

At a younger age, Cormac McCarthy would have realized these things.

The Man Who Knew All Along What the Shot in the EU Was

Of God knows how many thousands of articles written about the crisis in the EU, nothing approaches the sharpness and clarity of Nasser’s 6-part series on the subject. It is impossible to understand the goings on in the continent without reading it. In the very first post, he nailed the issue:

• The problem was the falling rate of profit in the advanced European countries. Profit generates the “wealth”. So, the problem was the decline of relative wealth in industrial Germany, France and Italy.

• (The overall wealth might fall but share of a particular group could rise if through socio-political means such as taxes, they could raid other groups' shares. So there is no contradiction in saying that the overall level of wealth has fallen but the absolute number of millionaires and billionaires has risen)

• The rate of profit could increase: i) if the labor produces more with the given level of wages; or ii) the wages are cut for the same level of production.

• The EU was created to lower the wages in all Europe by bringing the workers from the “periphery” low-wage countries such as Greece, Hungary, Portugal and Ireland into the pool.

• That was the main reason for the creation of the EU. All else is secondary.

• The plan is now unfolding, only that the crisis is used to lower the wages even in the industrial countries.

Financial Times, July 9, 2012, under the heading Call for French business boost

French business urgently requires shock treatment to cut labour costs and boost its flagging ability to compete on international markets, top economists and business leaders have warned François Hollande.

The “Economic Circle”, a non-partisan group whose members include those working in institutions such as the European Central Bank as well as advising the government itself, said France required a “supply shock”.

“The immediate difficulty is above all the weak profitability of the great majority of businesses which inhibits their capacity to innovate, to export, to invest and to create jobs,” the Economists’ Circle said. “[We must] improve this profitability by a massive transfer of social charges on to [tax].”

Pierre Moscovici, finance minister, told the weekend conference that tackling labour costs by reducing social charges was “not a taboo” and suggested that if a consensus was reached in the social partners’ discussions, some action might be taken.

You note that:

1. The “immediate difficulty is above all the weak profitability of the great majority of businesses”. The geniuses do not know it, but the root of that “difficulty” is the fall in the rate of profit.

2. Look at the agenda of the conference that the newly elected socialist president has set. It includes “the economic and social issue”, including labour costs, employment terms and pensions. This one tops the “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition by one. “Labor costs” means cutting the wages. “Employment terms” means throwing the workers out at will and without much of a severance. “Pensions” means cutting their retirement benefits and making them work longer.

3. The finance minister is being a tad disingenuous, not to say outright coy, when he says that “tackling the labour costs [is not] a taboo”. It is more than a not-a-taboo. It is the agenda.

That’s what’s coming in France, the path set by the donkey that is speculative capital. Whether its palan is called Sarkozy or Hollande matters not a bit.

‘No Country For Old Men’ - 5: The Secret of the Beauty of Music and Expendibility of Old Conductors

Conducting is the most vivid manifestation of leadership.

Canetti got the vivid part right, but he thought it pertained to power.  Consequently, he got everything wrong; chalk up another one for the victim of the cult of personality. In talking about leadership and power, you see, we are not talking about leaders and powerful men. We are talking about their followers.

Take a group of men who follow a man. They could do so on their own free will or under compulsion. The first case pertains to leadership; the second, to power.

Force comes in when men refuse to follow voluntarily. That happens when they recognize that the “leader” does not represent their collective interests or even opposes them.

With the rare exceptions, that is what we see in our daily lives: men pressured into submission, a condition that reaches its most degrading and inhuman form in the prison and military systems. That’s quality wise. Quantitatively, the sky is the limit for how many people could be compelled to act against their own interests. It could be in hundreds of millions, as Nasser showed here and in analyzing the EU crisis.

Leadership is a different category. It is about voluntary submission of men that comes from their respect for the leader. Respect is imbued from within. It cannot be imposed from without.

The West has only elected officials but no leaders.

Respect excludes fear. The idea of respecting someone and fearing him – say, a husband who is a “good provider” but becomes violent only when children act up, or the drill sergeant whose sadistic toughness will “save” you in war, or a brute in the executive suite who is the only one who can make the corporation succeed – is a lie spread by the ones with the whip and believed by the downtrodden who must cling to such beliefs so they can go on. Stanley Kubrick unraveled the myth in Full Metal Jacket. Like the three witches in the opening scene of Macbeth, this introductory scene from the movie sets the stage for what is to come:

The critical point is this. For the group to be subjugated, its members must exist in the condition of seriality. Yup, I bet that is an unfamiliar word. Jean Paul Sartre defined it in his famous example of people waiting in line for the bus: 

This man is isolated not only by his body as such, but also by the fact that he turns his back on his neighbor – who, moreover, has not even noticed him.

The unity of the collection of the commuters lies in bus they are waiting for; in fact it is the bus, as a simple possibility of transport (not for transporting all of us, for we do not act together, but for transporting each of us). However, their acts of waiting are not a communal fact, but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act.

The unity of the collection of the city commuters is the bus. The unity of the collection of the air travelers is the plane – and the body-scanning machines.  Each specific group, likewise, has its own unity of collection. But the common bond of all groups in the position of seriality is impotence. Such a group is the natural target of coercion and in fact invites it – from the boss, from the drill sergeant or from the agents of the transit authorities.

Against seriality, Sartre defines the fused group, “in which everyone, as a third party, becomes incapable of distinguishing his own interest from that of the Others”.

A fused group acts as one. It is incapable of being the subject of forced submission. But I want to draw your attention to the “everyone as a third party” phrase which Sartre explains thus:

“It is a common error of many sociologists ... to treat the group as a binary relation [between] individual and community, whereas, in reality, it is a ternary relation ... in that, the individual, as a third party, is connected with the [unity of the group], and with each of them as a third party, that is to say, through the mediation of the group.”

Whether knowingly or unknowingly, Sartre here reproduces one of the most critical conclusions of Hegel in his Logic, namely, that thought is necessarily related to the thing, the things are necessarily related to thought, and the manifold things, through their common relation to a combining thought, are themselves necessarily related to one another.

Did you get it? If not, then watch Karjan from 4:10 to 5:20 in the clip you have already seen. Only this time make sure to read the subtitles.

“Now it’s all one piece,” he says, having fused the flute and violins in the most convincing demonstration of the interplay between the “one” and “many”.

The function of the conductor is finally clear. He has to make his orchestra a fused group. He has to use the commonality of music that binds the players together to obliterate the qualitative distinction of members and turn them into one. If successful, he would have unlocked the mystery of appeal of the music to man, as one of the means – together with other branches of art and science – for searching for the truth. The harmony in music – all being one – is the proof of the righteousness of the path which is itself dialectical. Hence, the secret of the beauty of the music and its appeal to man. But to get there, a conductor must have the submission of his players. And for that, he must have their respect. There was a reason I compared conductors to ayatollahs.

Conducting is the most vivid example of leadership because an orchestra is the most lyrical example of a man having found his way.

One earns respect gradually, i.e., through the passage of time. Of course the technical skills must be there. So, too, a vision of music and conducting. Then, as a conductor ages, he sees more clearly. His “angle of vision” to life changes. He sees further and deeper. When such an inertia is present, the self-improvement is, like the dialectical evolution of thought, inevitable. The aging conductor becomes dignified.

It is precisely that aging with dignity, like so much workers’ pension, that is denied to the modern conductors.  Even if these conductors did have vision and interpretive skills originally – I can think of Maazel here – the conditions of the performance, defined by illiterate audiences and detached musicians, overtime undermine them. So by the time they are old, nothing is left of the old vision. They can offer nothing new. So they become expandable and redundant. The old age ceases to be the unwritten job requirement. In the perfect replay of what is taking place in the corporate world, a job exclusively reserved for old men is eliminated to make room for more “efficient” young conductors. Andrew Clark, the music critic Financial Times writing this past June:

The arrival of 26-year old Simon Rattle at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1990 – when it was still widely believed that “conductors begin at 60” – was the first sign that youth was pushing aside experience, a trend that culminated five years ago in Dudamel’s Los Angeles appointment, also at the age of 26.

A member of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House ... says: “The conductors coming through [the door] haven’t had the time and space to develop in the way their predecessors did. They want to be everywhere and quickly. 

You see the trade off: the conductors coming through the door haven’t had the time and space to develop. Heck, they cannot even articulate their own function, as you saw in the case of Gilbert. Thus, the vicious circle continues and classical music is destroyed.

But what is, ultimately, driving this dynamic? The answer is the province of Nasser. But the FT music critic provided us with the critical clue:

“A music director must identify with the whole endeavour, and work with the management towards a common goal,” says [an orchestra manager]. “It is to be a team effort. If the conductor wants to dominate the organisation, you have problems.” 

Note this modern orchestra manager’s idea of a “team effort” as it pertains to conductors: they must work with the management. Nary a word about the musicians. The “common goal” is of course increasing revenues, i.e., money, awkwardly hidden under the tortured word “endeavour”. Chalk up one more for another aspect of culture having fallen victim to capital.

Does an old timer like Lorin Maazel know all this? I think he does. He might not be able to articulate every point here, but he certainly feels every point. You  can almost hear his thoughts while at work:

Good, Lorin. Play another scene of excellent dissembling and let it look like perfect honor. Lord, what have I become, dispensing fake pearls before real swines. To think that I could have been a Karjan. A Furtwangler.

I can’t go on. 

I will go on.

And the music plays on.

Infantilism and Economic Analysis

In Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes on the subject of the infantilism of adults which he links to the absence of experience in the modern world. Experience is the knowledge of the outside world. Experience is what separates adults from children. Without experience, adults seem childlike.

Agamben does not convincingly explain why the modern man cannot have experience. Those “eternal moments of dumb promiscuity among strangers in lifts and buses” are not the only exposure of the modern man to the outside world. His thesis of defining adulthood with experience, at any rate, is incomplete. Nasser offers a more profound view in the upcoming Vol. 4 of Speculative Capital. He stays that ability to think abstractly is the true measure of adulthood and development. Abstract thinking is placing the individual in the context of its proper universal. That is the stuff judgments are made of: individual is universal -- this man is guilty, that rose is red -- is the general form of judgment.

Experience facilitates that ability but does not guarantee it. One can be a successful businessman and still look childlike precisely because of his inability to think abstractly. The flip side of this relation is the the deep-seated suspicion of intellectuals in the famously “pragmatic” and businessman oriented U.S. In yesterday’s Financial Times, the paper’s Lucy Kellaway was unknowingly hitting on the very same point:

It means I can chuck out half of my business books. Farewell Jack Welch. Farewell Sir Terry Leahy. Goodbye Lord Browne and Sir Richard Branson. I won’t miss you. I can’t think of a single thing I learnt from all you megastars, except a bit of shockingly poor counsel from Steve Jobs. One of his most trusty principles was “don’t settle” – possibly the worst tip ever. Just now I popped out for an egg sandwich, only to find that the shop had run out so I settled for ham and cheese instead. As a result, I didn’t starve and the sandwich turned out to be rather tasty.

In saying “don’t settle”, the late Apple CEO was no doubt remembering a particular situation in which not settling had helped him. But unable or unwilling to think the matter further through, he did not recognize that out of context his advice would look banal and even idiotic.

I remembered all this reading the latest column of Paul Krugman in the New York Times. The subject was economic/financial crisis in the EU zone.

Advisers warned politicians not to re-enact 1937 — the year F.D.R. shifted, far too soon, from fiscal stimulus to austerity, plunging the recovering economy back into recession.

[The crisis in Europe in 1931] started with a banking crisis in a small European country (Austria). Austria tried to step in with a bank rescue — but the spiraling cost of the rescue put the government’s own solvency in doubt.

The really crucial lesson of 1931, however, was about the dangers of policy abdication. Stronger European governments could have helped Austria manage its problems. But nobody with the power to contain the crisis stepped up to the plate.

It seems obvious that European creditor nations need ... to assume some of the financial risks facing Spanish banks. [Instead, their] “solution” was to lend money to the Spanish government, and tell that government to bail out its own banks. [So] the European crisis is now deeper than ever.

You see what I mean by the childish form and content: There was this guy, FDR, who shifted too soon to austerity and then there was this small country in Europe which could not pay its debt which created a panic that spread around the world because nobody with the power stepped up to the plate. And now it is obvious that European creditor nations must assume some of the financial risks facing Spanish banks. And then there was this dog walking down the street …

The 50-something economist explains the crisis in Europe in the same spirit that a 5-year old would tell a story she had just made up. He thinks Angela Merkel’s advisers do not know what is at stake; if only they had read Paul Krugman. Such are the fools who toss around expressions like “the international community”.

You want an adult writing on the crisis in Europe? Check out Nasser’s 6-part series on the subject starting here. His definition of ”Europe” is one the most original pieces on the Continent that I have seen anywhere. And look the Epilogue which explains what drives the decisions in Europe and why things are the way they are.

‘No Country For Old Men’ - 4: Music, Ideas and Leadership

In a comment on an earlier post of this series, a reader asked if I knew of Elias Canetti’s writing on conductors and the role of power.

I did not. I googled the name and found the writing in question. Below is an excerpt. Read it. There is no better example of a pretentious ignoramus making an ass of himself:

There is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor. Every detail of his public behavior throws light on the nature of power. Someone who knew nothing about power could discover all its attributes, one after another, by careful observation of a conductor.

The conductor stands: ancient memories of what it meant when man first stood upright still play an important part in any representations of power. Then, he is the only person who stands. In front of him sits the orchestra and behind him the audience. He stands on a dais and can be seen both from in front and from behind. In front his movements act on the orchestra and behind on the audience. In giving his actual directions he uses only his hands, or his hands and a baton. Quite small movements are all he needs to wake this or that instrument to life or to silence it at will. He has the power of life and death over the voices of the instruments; one long silent will speak again at his command. Their diversity stands for the diversity of mankind; an orchestra is like an assemblage of different types of men. The willingness of its members to obey him makes it possible for the conductor to transform them into a unit, which he then embodies.

His eyes hold the whole orchestra. Every player feels that the conductor sees him personally, and still more, hears him ... At any given moment he knows precisely what each player should be doing.

And on and on.

Knaves and fools of Canetti’s ilk have long been a fixture of human societies by virtue of their symbiotic relation with the illiterate public. They appeal to the public’s immediate sense perceptions and, in doing so, confirm its prejudices; recall the folk story of the impostor who asked the illiterate villagers to “judge” whether the picture of the snake which he had drawn or the letters S-N-A-K-E represented the “true snake”?

Nasser is merciless with these characters and demolishes them whenever they drift into his ken, as he memorably did here and here. I want to do the same, now that Elias Canetti has drifted to my ken!

Look at what the man says:

The conductor stands!

He stands on a dais!

He looks!

He listens!

He knows!

He faces the orchestra!

His back is to the audience!

He moves his hand – sometimes his baton!

The players sit!

And my favorite:

He can be seen from in front and from behind!

After these observations, our man turns to pontification. But there, too, he stays in the comfort zone of readers’ expectations; he has to, as those ‘expectations’ – knowledge from daily experience or some dimly remembered factoid – are the commonalities that bind him to his social environment.

So, he implausibly links the fact of conductor standing to ancient memories of when “man first stood upright”, ignoring that in the past several thousand years, standing has everywhere been associated with the position of servitude. Slaves stand. Servants stand. Waiters stand.

As for the conductors’ power, he is reading into it the power structure in the business world where the boss has full control over his employees. To the extent that such relations apply to the modern orchestra, they pertain to the conductors’ administrative authorities, say, salary raises and hiring and firing.

But none of that has anything to do with music, which means that everything we are told so far is incidental.

By way of proof, let me introduce you to a conductor who does not stand, but sit;

who faces the audience;

who sits with his orchestra members and alongside them;

who has no baton;

who moves his hands, but only spontaneously and as part of his body’s reaction to music;

and who is not feared but respected.

The conductor is the legendary Pakistani singer, the late Nusrat Fatih Ali Khan, here leading his troupe in a memorable qawwali. There is no video and one can hardly speak of picture quality. But those are incidentals. Even with blurry pictures (and a junk text or two which appear in the beginning), you will have no trouble recognizing his leadership, which is what conducting is all about.

Listen:

The Orientalist will object:

This is Eastern music – spontaneous, improvised. The lead singer certainly sets the tone and leads. But the idea of conducting, as the word is understood, does not apply to him. A classical conductor controls the precision of the tightly structured form of the music which, coming from more than 10 different instruments and a hundred musicians, is infinitely more complex than the one-instrument music we just heard. The tight structure leaves little room for the discretion. The conductor might play a piece slower or faster or a passage more or less empathetically, but that is extent of his liberties. So, interpreting and leading does not even apply to what he does.

The shortest and most decisive answer to this make-believe critic is: Wilhelm Furtwängler. But to proceed, we first have to look back.

1942 was a pivotal year in the WWII. The Allied victories in 3 major battles in that year – in Al Alamein in Africa, Stalingrad in Europe and the Midway in Pacific – had turned the tide of war against Germany. By June 1943, it had become clear that the German defeat was a matter of time.

The music you are about to hear was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic on June 30, 1943 in Berlin’s Symphony Hall . (Here is a picture of the place 5 months after the event, in November 1943.)

The conductor is Wilhelm Furtwängler, the orchestra’s music director from 1923 until his death in 1954. (Herbert von Karajan succeeded him that year.)

The music is Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture. Beethoven tells the saga of the Roman general who is expelled from Rome and returns with an army to revenge the insult. Romans send his wife and mother to plead with him to turn back. He realizes that the initial insult cannot justify the bloodshed about to take place. But how could he withdraw? His army is already at the gates of the Rome. As a way out, he submits himself to the “judgment” of the Romans, thus committing suicide.

Listen to the unforgettable opening: (0 – 1:25);

to crescendo leading to the conflict: (1:25–2:20);

to the fury with which Furtwängler unleashes the timpanist. IT’S WAR! (2:20–2:45).

Then the incredible stretch from 2:45– 4:00, when Coriolan is at war with himself: Shall I do it? Should I? No! But I must. The army, all ready. It is set then. YES, WE WILL.

Should I?

People are not interested in classical music, they say? Because they do not hear classical music.

No one questions the importance of the technical skills in any field. Art is comprised of content and form: what you are saying and how you are saying it. The how part requires technical skills to bring out the beautiful. But technical skill must not overwhelm the content or the “message” of the art. Else we will have art for the art’s sake on one hand, and circus performance on the other.

Look at Furtwängler’s time management: 1:25, 2:20, 2:45, 4:00.

Controlling the speed of a philharmonic orchestra with this precision is like touching down the landing gear of a 747 on a newspaper. That’s virtuosity. But we are not conscious of it because the beauty of the music and the sense of tension and tragedy that it conveys absorbs us. Technical mastery is there to bring out that beauty. Conducting is creating that synergy without which music will degenerate to empty sound, of the kind one these days hears in the concert halls.

To elaborate this point further, let us go back from the finish product to the way it is prepared. We are going to see two conductors. One is Alan Gilbert, the current music director of the New York Philharmonic. He recently spoke to the New York Times about the role of conducting. This is how he began:

“There is no way to really put your finger on what makes conducting great, even what makes conducting work. Essentially what conducting is about is getting the players to play their best and to be able to use their energy and to access their point of view about the music.”

Mr. Canetti, meet Mr. Gilbert.

I could not upload the interactive program. Click here to watch it on the Times site . But before you proceed, you have a task. You must listen to the interview carefully and at the end sum up what you learned or heard. The 8 minute interview is in English.

Now, watch this 10-minute segment of Herbert von Karajan rehearing Schumann’s 4th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. The entire program is over 90 minutes and because of its length cannot be uploaded here, which is a pity, because it is in German and without English subtitles.

The segmented pieces, the first part of which I have produced here, are subtitled. Make sure to ignore them. The screen is visibly divided into top and bottom halves by a small print. Focus on the top half and on Von Karajan’s face and you will not see the subtitles.

Afterwards, you are to judge which one of the two men is a conductor, the one whose words you understand or the one whose words you do not. (Apologies to readers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.)

See what I mean?

(Here is the complete rehearsal in German with a subsequent performance.)

Gilbert is a music expert. He comes from a family of musicians. Except for the opening drivel about conducting being a mystery, everything he says is accurate. But precisely because he does not know what conducting is all about, everything he says is irrelevant. He dispenses bits of technical knowledge without any coherence. He describes conducting the way an auction house would describe a Rembrandt, focusing on brush strokes instead of what the paintings signify. (Critics say they reflect the pillage of the West Indies.) Gilbert knows music the way Mitt Romney knows finance. He can talk about it, make money from it, teach it and even become famous from it. But he knows nothing about it as a social and communal activity, just like Romney whose idea of finance is studying cash flows for the purpose of buyout and takeover but cannot read past the first page of Speculative Capital.

The result of a Romneyesque understanding of finance is the progressively worsening economic conditions in much of the West in the past 4 years whose severity and persistence has the most powerful central bankers, the most pretentious economists and the most loquacious commentators at their wit’s end.

The result of a Gilbertesque understanding of music is seemingly more contained. Those immediately affected are the conductors themselves who lose their sense of value (but only if they know what is taking place), the musicians who are turned into human synthesizers with the Damocles Sword of layoffs always hanging over their heads because they can in fact be replaced by synthesizers, and finally the audiences who, however subconsciously or unconsciously, are turned off and so drop out.

But these inauspicious developments are far from local. They are the local manifestation of a much larger menace which has the Western societies in its grip, turning them into no places for old men.

I will return to elaborate.

The Only Man in the World Who Knows What Really Went Wrong at JPMorgan Chase

And he is too busy to bother!

But he saw it and said it almost 15 years ago in his ground breaking Speculative Capital.

- “So, what about that $2 billion – now $3 billion – loss at JPMorgan,” I ask Nasser. “Any comment on the torrent of comments from all sides?”

- “Do you know what was the most significant and critical word in the hoopla?,” he asks.

- “No, I can’t say I know.”

- “It was morph. Jamie Dimon used it.”

I found the quote:

But JPMorgan’s top executives have rallied around Mr Dimon, who told shareholders at the bank’s annual meeting in Tampa, Florida: “I can’t justify it. Unfortunately, these mistakes were self-inflicted.” Mr Dimon added: “What this hedge morphed into violates our own principles.”

-“So?”, I ask.

He shows me what he is reading from Hegel::

Language has compressed within it what man has made his own; and what he has fashioned and expressed in speech contains, either embeded or elaborated, a category: so natural does logic come to him, or rather it is his own very nature".

- “I take it this relates to morph”?

-“Yes, it does. How do you think a Sandy Weill protégé could think of using a complex word like morph? It is impossible, unless he actually saw it. And he did see it – only in hindsight.”

- “I am getting confused. Explain, please.”

- “A few weeks before the $2 billion loss was announced, Dimon dismissed the rumors of trouble as the ‘tempest in the tea pot’.”

- “Right.”

- “Now, ask yourself: Why would he say that if he knew the trouble was brewing. Why would the CEO of a multi-trillion institution make a fool of himself, knowing the news will inevitably come out?”

- “A good question. Are you implying he did not know?”

- “Of course he didn’t. And the reason he didn’t is that there was nothing there – or very little – out the ordinary.”

- “And then the whole thing blew up.”

- “Correct.”

- “But how?”

- “Thanks to hedging. That safe action to ‘insulate oneself against the market turbulance’.”

- “And hedging became arbitrage. I know that part.”

- “Yup. That is the secret of speculative capital. In a dialectical process, which is what drives economics and finance, the phenomena produce their opposite from within. Remember some time ago I quoted Sartre that: ‘In the most adequate and satisfactory tool, there is a hidden violence which is the reverse of its docility.’ Conservative hedging shows its violent side, becomes its violent side, by turning into aggressive, self-destructive arbitrage. That is the central point of Vol. 1. You must remember it. I actually used the example of J.P. Morgan to develop the concept.”

I found the quote.

The purpose of hedging is to insulate the owners’ equity against the adverse changes in the markets. The owners’ equity is the difference between a firm’s assets and liabilities. (The same difference in the case of individuals is called “net worth.”) We can express this fundamental accounting relation through the following equation:

Owners’ Equity = Assets – Liabilities

The requirement and condition of hedging that the owners’ equity remain constant is the same as saying that it should not change. Or, its change must be zero.

For that condition to hold, the change in the right hand side of the accounting relation, above, must also be zero. That is:

change (Assets) – change (Liabilities) = 0

The equation above shows the requirement for a hedge: the change in the value of assets must be equal to the change in the value of liabilities. That is called “matching” assets and liabilities.

The purpose of hedging is preserving the owners’ equity. The hedger begins with an existing asset (liability) and seeks to find a liability (asset) which will offset its adverse price changes.

The purpose of arbitrage, by contrast, is profit. The arbitrageur has neither an asset nor a liability. To that end, he uses the final relation of the hedge to search for any two positions which will enable him to “lock in” a spread. The two acts are mathematically indistinguishable.

What logically separates them is the purpose of each act which translates itself to the sequence of execution of trades. When done sequentially, the act is defensive hedging. When done simultaneously, it is aggressive arbitrage. Otherwise, the transformation of one to the other is seamless.

-“So you are saying that conservative hedging in front of Jamie Dimon’s eyes turned into self destructive arbitrage.”

-“Exactly. And in looking back trying to find out what had gone wrong, he saw that 'turning into'; hence his use of ‘morph.’ Hegel is right about language embedding logic which is innate to man; see how a Queens native not known for his eloquence comes up with the mot juste as if he were Elliot! I wish I had used the word in Vol. 1! Only he had not read my book and naturally could not see the essence of the loss. Just like that Times music critic you quote in your blog: he is looking at it, seeing it and even saying it, but does not understand it because he is on a ‘lower' plane’, as you explained.”

-“Good connection! It is very ironic that the likes of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan who owe their rise to the rise of speculative capital are in the last take also its victims.

-“What do you suppose I mean when I repeatedly emphasize that speculative capital is self-destructive?”

-“Got it! But Nasser, hedging was around for the better part of the 20th century. All farmers hedge their positions in Chicago exchanges. Where was speculative capital then. How come no one noticed it?”

-“Some trace hedging even longer, to the 17th century Japan or the ancient Greece. But then, hedging was harmless. Hedging is merely a form. I explained this point in Vol. 2. You should be able to find it. But you are on your own if your readers start asking questions about options!”

I found the quote.

Derivative products, as many finance books are quick to remind us, have been around for many years. They can hardly be called innovative. There is certainly nothing new about the form of derivatives. What is new is the driving force of speculative capital behind them which makes them appear as resisting regulation. This force is infinitely more potent than what Japanese or Dutch peasants could  muster centuries ago. The use of options by the manager of a multi-billion dollar hedge fund has quite a different implications than the use of the same instrument by a 17^th century Japanese farmer. 

How speculative capital transforms derivatives and even makes their valuation possible becomes apparent if we transport them to a hypothetical 17^th century Japanese village and look at their use to a certain farmer Hiroki. 

Hiroki could certainly use the derivatives as an instrument of bet. He could, for example, sell wheat forward for 10 yens, even though he does not own any wheat. He is a rice farmer. Then, at contract delivery time, if wheat is above 10 yen, he will make money. Otherwise, he will lose. There is nothing new there. The time lag between inception of contract and delivery time in derivatives lends itself to betting. 

But derivatives also have a hedging function. Let us assume that Hiroki is concerned about the falling price of his rice, currently at 10 yen per unit. He could sell rice forwards, but we cannot speak of a “cost-of-carry.” Even if a village usurer is around to lend at 30 percent, farmer Hiroki must accept the forward price as set by the landlord. That is because speculative capital that could, through arbitrage, bring about the “equilibrium” price of 13 yen is as yet unknown. 

Options valuation is even more ludicrous. Just imagine farmer Hiroki constantly adjusting the composition of his rice and interest bearing “portfolio” to replicate the value of rice options! Without speculative capital, the option valuation, as suggested by Black, Scholes and Merton is not logical. That is, despite the model’s mathematical nature, its is not, like a mathematical operation, unconditionally true across space and time. It presupposes the existence of speculative capital and thus, cannot be derived in the environment of farmer Hiroki. 

That explains why the original paper by Black and Scholes was not accepted for publication for more than a year. Fischer Black mistakenly attributed the difficulty of publishing the paper to his “non-academic return address.” But more than a bias against non-academic authors or a high standard in publication was at work there. The fact is that in 1970, speculative capital had not been sufficiently developed to impress itself upon the conscious of academic scholars. That is why an option valuation formula had to await the emergence of a modern financial market in the first place.

‘No Country For Old Men’ - 3: When Virtuoso Are a Dime a Dozen

Last August (14, 2011, p. AR1), The New York Times ran an article about the profusion of piano virtuosos. Under the apt title Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen, it said:

The overall level of technical perfection in instrumental playing, especially on the piano, has increased steadily over time … And in the last decade of so the growth of technical proficiency has seemed exponential. Yes, [the 24-year old Chinese] Ms. Wang, who will make her New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall … can play anything. But in China alone, in recent years, there have been Lang Lang and Yundi Li…

After reciting these examples, the writer, one Anthony Tommasini, turned analytical:

What long-term effect this trend will have on the field is not clear. Classical music is facing its share of challenges, including declining appreciations of the art form among the general public, and not all segments of the audience are noticing the breakthrough in technical accomplishment that is apparent to insiders.

Almost 15 years ago, Nasser said that the rise of speculative capital is a rational phenomenon. Because of that rationality, every stage of speculative capital’s development on its march towards the inevitable crisis appears logical; the stages follow one another the way conclusions follow from antecedents. That is why none of the luminaries of business and academia could answer Queen Elizabeth’s famous question about the onset of the crisis: “Why did no one see it coming?” To see the crisis coming, one had to situate himself on a higher plane of consciousness, where alone the contradictions at the preceding, lower stage could be discerned and resolved. Read Nasser’s Speculative Capital, Vol. 1. written a full decade before the onset of the ongoing crisis to see what I mean.

Dialectic is at work everywhere, not only in finance. Hence, the prevalence the “inability to see”. Witness the Times’ music critic’s comments. Not in a million years would he suspect – let alone realize – that the long-term effect of virtuosos being a dime a dozen is already crystal clear. It is the declining “appreciation” of classical music among the general public. In fact, like a good virtuoso of the history of music, the man even provides the answer when he writes that: “The first several decades of the 20th century are considered a golden era by many piano buffs, a time when artistic imagination and musical richness were valued more than the technical perfection … But audiences and critics then tolerated a lot of playing that would be considered sloppy today.”

He writes that but does not understand what he is saying.

Let me begin by commenting first that per se, there is nothing wrong with virtuosity, playing all the notes correctly, in the same way that there is nothing per se wrong with knowing how to spell difficult words. But musical virtuosos and spelling bee virtuosos achieve their technical wizardry at the expense of the content of their discipline; virtuosos are folks who have gone astray. The sequence of their “development” is that first, they lose sight of what is important in their field – spelling bee champions lose sight of what the literacy is all about; piano virtuosos what music is all about – and then they become virtuosos. Both deviations are rooted in vanity. Both arise – seemingly ironically, but in fact quite logically – because the alternative is more difficult.

I explain.

If the technical skills in piano playing have continuously improved as per the Times article, one must assume that the trend will continue. It is implausible to take the position that the current players have reached the absolute level of technical perfection.

Yet, what form would the technical improvement in the future take? How could players who could play anything improve further?

Imagine a virtuoso who can play the Chopin etudes standing on his head. That could certainly be an accomplishment, as it is tremendously difficult to play an even short and simple piece standing on one’s head.

But we can top that. Imagine a virtuoso who can play Chopin etudes flawlessly while standing on his head and juggling two oranges with his feet.

How’s that for virtuosity?

We can go still further. Imagine a virtuoso who can play Appassionata and make piano obsolete by playing it on a single key. How, you ask?

Our virtuoso would be so devilishly fast that she could reach for the string attached to the key and increase or decrease its length by the exact amount that is needed for it to sound A, B, D, etc. She could do that in one millionth of a second, without compromising the sound or the interval between the notes.

Try topping that.

In the case you are wondering, this absurdity is already de rigueur in the stock market in the form of high-frequency trading, a subject which Nasser critiqued in a 9-part series.

Returning to the music and setting aside the implausibility of “high frequency playing”, ask yourself: in which way would such a superhuman performance enhance the joy of hearing Appassionata and understanding and appreciating it?

The answer is: in no way. In fact such an incredible performance will serve to overshadow and finally bury the purpose behind the Appassionata. As we approach performance that is closer to circus, we necessarily get further away from music.

The modern-day virtuosos stand midway between those two poles, their path having been blazed by the likes of Liberace.

The cause and effect relation is never one directional. Rise in virtuosity is also a response to declining interest by the public in classical music. So the technical wizardry, like the suggestive poses or clownish conduct, is used as a bait to lure audiences to the concert halls.

Why the public loses interest in classic music is a subject best left for Nasser in the upcoming volume of Speculative Capital. By way of anticipation, he shows that society’s condition of life makes its members atomized and divided, with the result that they are incapable of decoding the language of music which is about social spirit. For an excellent introduction, read his What Lies Behind the Descent of Man.

Conductors arise from amongst this confused and divided mass. So, they cannot understand and interpret the music either. Even if they could, the audience would not “get” them. In this way, the condition is set for the rise of virtuosos, technical wizardry to overcompensate for the lack of understanding.

In the concluding sentence of Part 2, I asked: How does a Chinese female virtuoso play Beethoven?

I answered: masterfully and uncomprehendingly. That answer must now be clear. She plays the notes with perfection, in the same way that she might read the words of The Phenomenology of Mind with perfection. But she does not understand what she is playing – or reading.

To understand Beethoven, one must know Beethoven, Hegel, Kant, German, Germany, The French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, Kant, Christianity, with hundreds of related topics – big and small – thrown in for good measure.

Do not read too much in to “know”. I am using it in the same vein that I would speak of a Shiite peasant in Afghanistan knowing the quality of a passion play about Ali’s martyrdom. He need not be a scholar to judge the quality of what he is seeing and hearing. But a 24-year Chinese girl, precisely because she is not German and would not know the culture innately, must strive to know him through education, with all the related areas which are listed above.

That’s a tall order, bordering on the impossible. Better to focus on the notes and get them right.

That is the stuff the virtuosos are made of.

If one truly knows music, it would not be of paramount importance to get all the notes right. What difference does it make if you understand T.S. Elliot poetry but mispronounce a few words?

The focus on the big theme or the grand narrative of the music, without paying much attention to the individual notes to the point of actually changing the notes according to the mood of the moment, is the idea behind the improvisation which has a long and honorable place in Eastern music.

In the West, too, improvisation is what makes jazz and blues what they are. Watch this scene from the 1950 Hollywood movie Young Man with a Horn starting Kirk Douglas.

(Youtube removed the video because of a copyright dispute, but it still has the entire movie here. Watch from 21:13 to 22: 55. Douglas's performance from 22:46 to 22:48, when he is playing the notes “correctly” as per the band leader’s direction, is memorable. You can stop after 22:55)

In classical music, you could not change the notes. But you could “skip” them. “Skipping” notes was a common practice by the master pianist of the early 20th century, the “golden era” of piano according to the Times critic. The incomparable contemporary pianist, the anti-circus performer par excellence, Krystian Zimmerman, explains the point. You must listen to the entire 2008 BBC interview with him. It offers an invaluable insight to music and what it is all about. In the beginning, below, Zimmerman notes that “music is not an audio experience”. He then goes on to refute “virtuosity” and explains, through an example of Alfred Cortot, the logic behind what the ignorant Times critic calls “sloppy playing”, a style than only an intelligent player who “dives under the distortion” could execute. Listen:

Here are the links to the rest of the interview: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5. “Music is not sound,” he says. “Music is organizing people’s emotions in time”. And leading them, I must add – organizing for composer, leading for the conductor, who can add his own way of “reading” to the piece. A Julliard graduate might conceivably know of these concepts but he or she can never put them into practice because the prerequisite which is the connection with the audience is not there. Let us once again return to the New York Philharmonic. Play the video and watch the body language of the performers.

The sound they produce is perfect, notewise. But it is empty. Look at their faces and body language, say, from 0:31-0:38 or 4:59-5:08. They play music with the same passion that prostitutes have sex. It is a job and pays the bills, so they go through the motions – and they are good at it. The only reason that they do not take a peek at their watches is because they know exactly how much time is elapsed and how much more is left to finish the piece, take a bow to the uncomprehending men and women in the audience who habitually give them a standing ovation – with the occasional shout of ‘bravo!’ from a few particularly egregious fools – and go home until next time. Any assembly-line worker would readily understand their sentiments! (The indifference bordering on disdain when they stop playing comes through at 0:36-0:38). Such musicians do not lend themselves to being conducted, being told, being led. They already know how to play. And what is that nonsense about being led? In this way, orchestras self-destruct. Who needs mechanical players when you’ve got synthesizers? And who needs conductors when you've got mechanical players? So, the conductor becomes a prop, a human metronome whose only function is to “keep the beat”. You can read some gems arguing that point here, here and here.

To conduct is to lead. The conditions have conspired to conceal that role from the public. But the evidence is out there.

I will return with the evidence.