From Krugman.

The answer lies in one of those paradoxes that plague our economy right now. We’re suffering from the paradox of thrift: saving is a virtue, but when everyone tries to sharply increase saving at the same time, the effect is a depressed economy. We’re suffering from the paradox of deleveraging: reducing debt and cleaning up balance sheets is good, but when everyone tries to sell off assets and pay down debt at the same time, the result is a financial crisis.

This makes me wonder: could we consider economic phenomena like those PK is describing here to be an effect of an information-saturated market? In other words, could it be that rather than stemming from some imperfection in an ideal market, our recent difficulties are a result of everyone having enough information, and therefore acting in a dangerous concert? Might it be that market inefficiencies defend us from our own hysteria?

I might be behind the curve on this, but this particular formulation just occurred to me.

Quoted without comment.

Although fourteen days of rioting after Wilkes’ imprisonment must have created the impression that the country was on the verge of proletarian revolution, a large sale of commemorative china indicates where Wilkes’ most effective support lay.

{John Ginger, The Notable Man: The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), p. 250}

Brilliant:

According to new data released by the Cook Political Report, only one congressional district in the country voted for John Kerry and John McCain: the Pennsylvania 12th, represented by John Murtha. Either that district just really likes people named “John,” or perhaps Western Pennsylvania isn’t as representative of the country as we were told last year during the Pennsylvania primary.

{from Chris Bowers at Open Left}

http://www.youshouldhaveseenthis.com/

thoughts to follow, when I’m done writing them..

{As prepared for delivery at Projections, a conference given by the CUNY Graduate Center, Friday, March 6, 2009.}

I. In which Hegel goes to a fancy dress party.

In one of the numerous anecdotes from the recent biography by Terry Pinkard, we learn that the young philosopher attended a New Year’s costume party at the house of an acquaintance in January of 1808. It was the conclusion of a trying year for Hegel. In 1807, he had finally completed the Phenomenology of Spirit after almost six years of hard work and numerous drafts, depression, and struggles with his publisher. He had left Jena for Bamberg in the wake of what amounted to the closure of the university during the French occupation, but also in the midst of a sexual scandal: Hegel had fathered an illegitimate son, Ludwig, by his landlord’s wife¹, a circumstance that would be a source of anxiety to him for several years. Not even able to secure an extraordinary (that is, adjunct) professorship like the one he had held in Jena,² even now with his first major book in print, Hegel found work in Bamberg editing a newspaper, the Bamberger Zeitung.

The New Year’s party seems to have been a success. In a letter to a friend, Hegel reports that

the majority of the seventy guests came in costume. No one knew the disguises of the others. We were treated to a procession of goddesses, Dr. Luther and Catherine, Saint Stephen, a doctor and pharmacist, bears and bear trainers, and so on. […] Against such idealization Idealität I opposed a note of realism Wirklichkeit by donning a valet’s uniform coat belonging to the Court doorman, along with his wig.³

How are we to interpret Hegel’s class drag, let alone his drollery? What is it that makes a young philosopher in the costume of a valet any more Wirklich, or less idealized, than a provincial administrator dressed up as Luther — or an attorney in a bear suit? It is hard to be sure; and of course, Hegel was joking. It is certainly interesting, however, to consider the opposition of one fanciful costume to any other under the heading of “realism”: it begs the question of what, exactly, “realism” in a costume might be said to consist.

Pinkard astutely notes that Hegel would write on valets in the Philosophy of History a few years later. He connects this costume choice (apparently made by barter; one imagines a valet at the party dressed as the young philosopher) to Hegel’s gloss of a famous, but variously-attributed, French aphorism.⁴ Here’s Hegel:

Man must eat and drink; he sustains relations to friends and acquaintances; he has passing impulses and ebullitions of temper. “No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre,” is a well-known proverb; I have added — and Goethe repeated it ten years later — “but not because the former is no hero, but because the latter is a valet.” He takes off the hero’s boots, assists him to bed, knows that he prefers champagne, &c.⁵

The valet, writes Hegel, is a particularist. Seeing in his master only a man who needs to be dressed, fed, and bathed, the valet adopts a kind of myopia that keeps him from recognizing in his employer any broader significance. Under the weight of these everyday particularities, even a Napoleon, one of unquestioned world-historical stature, must be found to stoop somewhat. As we say, he puts his pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else.

It is important to recognize that Hegel makes this analysis in the midst of a discussion of historical figuration, that is, of the proper method of depicting individuals in historiography. By filling out the historical figure with psychological depth and local motivation in a kind of novelistic gesture, Hegel warns that historians degrade themselves into mere “psychological valets.”⁶ And it is not the subordination of this position that bothers him: with dripping sarcasm, he complains that the product suffers, too. “Historical personages waited upon in historical literature by such psychological valets, come poorly off; they are brought down by these their attendants to a level with […] the morality of such exquisite discerners of spirits.”⁷ In this way, properly historical judgment is limited to only the historical acts of historical figures, a restriction to the spiritual amply policed by the philosophy of history. It is through this process, after all, that the Hegelian philosophy of history achieves its unmatched signal-to-noise ratio. Hegel would not approve, therefore, of my introduction to this discussion. To raise, as I did, his material circumstances in 1808 — his unemployment, his illegitimate son — is to wallow in the materialist, particularist muck. He’d ask me to stick to the books, please. Nor is this just a kind of Lutheran prudishness on his part: there is no purpose for a properly idealist historicism asking who was it who did these things? or what was he or she like?, for such a question would already be tautological. Napoleon is not, to Hegel, a short man motivated to greatness by his anxieties about his stature, or whichever cliché we choose to invoke. All of those accidental motivations and personal psychology are banished in the progress of an unrelenting pursuit of the ideal.

{This next paragraph was not really ever intended to be delivered so cheesily and awkwardly. Adlib your own transition paragraph…}

But how did Hegel’s contemporaries see themselves as historical actors? What was it that they deemed essential, and what accidental, about their mode of being who, where, and when they were? In the next few minutes, we’ll very quickly take a look at these questions, and draw a few quick hypotheses for what they say about historicism as a project.

II. Frock coats, or: a defense of radical chic

Hegel’s curt dismissal of the historical significance of everyday particularity fits into a long tradition of moralism, a tradition which indicted sartorial fashion.⁸ The indictment is typically made on the following two counts.

1. Clothing is not the body. Clothing is the customary metaphor for the superficial. One speaks of substance and style, content and form, depth and surface, essence and accident, ergon and parergon; in each case, the first term is valorized as significant or of interest, the second denigrated as mere presentation, gloss, or frippery.
2. Clothing is impermanent. The classical determination of the good as the changeless seems to conspire against clothing, that aspect of human material life most closely yoked to the vicissitudes of the market and to fashion.

These two criticisms sit uneasily together. It is as if clothing is condemned as at once too historical and not historical enough. Too historical in its excessive succession of changes, and yet by that very virtue a ready signifier of past epochs; not historical enough, in that it is said to be mere accident or frippery — what could it really tell us about the past? Clothing is, for the long eighteenth century, what the twentieth century would name l’histoire évenementielle. I propose, therefore, to set Hegel’s idealist historiography in the context of popular expressions of particularist participation in what Pocock would call ‘public time.’
As early as the 1750s, Arthur Murphy, an Englishman traveling in France (and dressing in French fashions, as one used to do when abroad) certainly saw the political significance of at least one garment: “I frequently sighed for my little loose frock,” he wrote in his memoirs, “Which I look upon as an Emblem of our happy Constitution; for it lays a Man under no uneasy Restraint, but leaves it in his Power to do as he pleases.”⁹ The frock, a simply constructed coat, with a high neck and floppy lapels, was not only a kind of liberal political economy unto itself, but also the crucial garment in the new neoclassical fashions of the late eighteenth century, a sartorial movement in a kind of anticipatory conversation with the idealist historiography represented by Hegel.

While the neoclassicism “for her,” as it were, more closely resembled the clothing worn by actual classical Greeks and Romans than did that worn by men, both shared a central premise: that the clothed figure should approximate the same basic shape as the naked body. This was best exemplified in women’s dress by revealing muslin gowns that offered what dress historian Geoffrey Squire has called the “first unaugmented female figure worn in England in five centuries.”¹⁰ There are even indications that some women took this to its logical conclusion by soaking their gowns in warm water before putting them on, allowing the fabric to dry on their bodies, to achieve a kind of wet t-shirt contest clingy look. Men’s neoclassicism also, if less dramatically, sought in tailoring the ideal of the unaltered human form. The frock coat, cut to the hip in front to allow greater freedom of movement, also displayed the close fit of the breeches across the hips, aiding this ‘clothed nude’ effect. It is important to recognize that late eighteenth-century neoclassicism saw itself as more than just another way to dress. It pretended to universality: it was supposed to be an unmasking, a stripping away of ornament, and a rejection of artifice. Such dress is not simply recorded for us in the fine arts: there is evidence that these styles actually came to the promenades from the painters’ studios, and to the theatre boxes from the stage itself. Readers of Terry Castle will recognize this motif: life was becoming theatrical.¹¹

By the 1780s, the frac, as it came to be called, had grown popular in France. Even among the French, the garment was associated with both England and Englishness, by which the French seemed to understand several things: a studied informality in manners, horse-racing and gambling thereon, but also a distinctive ‘country party’ form of political liberalism. Dress historian Aileen Ribeiro quotes an Italian traveling in France in the 1780s, who lamented the “propensity of the man of fashion, even in company, to wear ‘the most slovenly dress, for which he makes no apology, but a bow or caper, declaring that he is a warm admirer of English customs.’”¹² Still, by the middle 1780s, such coats could even be worn at court on some occasions, and in portraiture: when Thomas Jefferson, on his way to France, sat for his Mather Brown portrait in London in 1786, he wore a frock. The Comte de Ségur, an officer in the Napoleonic Wars, reflected decades later in his memoirs about how the turn towards English fashions in the 1780s had in fact foretold the events of the 1790s.

I have always been surprised that our Government and statesmen, instead of condemning as frivolous, stupid and un-French the sudden mania for English fashions in France, failed to perceive that it covered desire to imitate in other things, and contained the germs of a great revolution in people’s minds. They did not dream that in doing away with the narrow walks [and] symmetrical squares […] of our parks in order to transform them into English gardens, we were expressing our desire to get back to nature and reason on other points as well. They did not realise that the frock coats which replaced the ample and imposing dress of the old Court foretold a general inclination towards equality […].¹³

In all frankness, this sounds paranoid: first it’s frock coats, English gardens and gambling on horses, and before you know it, they’ve declared a parliament and executed the king. But to diagnose it as such masks the key issue: the moralist condemnation of dress as frivolity, to hear de Ségur tell it, is itself implicated in the historical process. de Ségur writes as though some intervention could have been made by those in power, if only they had recognized these sartorial symptoms as such. But we can say this: whatever the Bourbon Court did or did not recognize, the revolutionary state that succeeded it certainly took such signifiers seriously. The Committee for Public Safety regulated dress during the Terror, just for one example. But do not let this convince you that political dress was the sole province of the republican Left. Following the Terror, some young men with Royalist leanings sported a hairstyle in which the sides were grown long (this was the so-called “dog ears” style), while the back was trimmed short to expose the neck. This style was called cheveux à la victime in solidarity with those guillotined, the rather macabre suggestion being that the wearer had been prepared for decapitation. The British had a word for this kind of thing: they called it “party dress.” It’s less fun than it sounds: this is ‘party’ in the sense of partisanship. In one account, taken from Mackenzie’s Lounger number 10, we are told of female supporters of radical parliamentarian Charles Fox wearing fox-fur trim in their hair arrangements.¹⁴ Fox himself occasionally wore his own support of American independence by dressing in the colors of the American Continental Army. Most party dress, however, was less directly metonymic.¹⁵

From such a point of view, it becomes possible to describe clothing as a kind of historicist unconscious. Party dress is where you channel your politics when they are blocked, backed up, impractical — clothing is the drapery of opposition. Fox wears his blue coats and buff waistcoats because he does not possess the authority to simply end the war. His female supporters in the eighteenth century, denied formal representation, find less direct ways to make their point. If History with a capital H is to be reduced to the historical acts of historical figures, it must, necessarily exclude those whose acts remain suspended in narrative, rendered, for contingent reasons, purely virtual. In such a view, such expressions are robbed of their historical import by historicism itself, which, in its vampiric way, reduces all that is not Subject to substance, all that is not action to context.¹⁶ This is the same aesthetic of historical figuration that renders all popular political expressions as ambiance (rioting would be the eighteenth century version). For historicism, then, from Hegel up to the Annalistes, with Walter Benjamin as our most interesting case, what manifests itself as the ‘predictive’ capability of material culture must necessarily appear uncanny.

The first corollary, here, would be that clothing, and by extension material culture, is not and cannot be false consciousness, or any of its surrogates. But the second, and more suggestive corollary, which I can only hint at here, concerns how we conceive the relationship between materialism and idealism.

So I would like to close by pointing out that by the time he arrived at his first ordinary professorship at Heidelberg in 1816, a much more comfortable and well-fed Hegel (for he had married extremely well) was accustomed to wear modern English-style suits of grey wool, of the sort popularized by George Brummell, that famous dandy and intimate friend of George IV.¹⁷ From at least 1801 until the end of his life, Hegel wore one of the hairstyle fads of the day, the short-cropped ‘Titus’ hairstyle inspired by François-Joseph Talma, a radical Parisian stage actor of the 1790s — a hairstyle worn also by Napoleon, whom I would hazard was likely Hegel’s more proximate source. So, it is perhaps significant to note that while some of his colleagues at Heidelberg were likely still dressed more or less as they would have been twenty or thirty years before, in dark woolen breeches and light hose, white waistcoat and black jacket, a self-conscious modernist like Hegel had already adopted more or less the modern suit, with its trousers, neckties, and matched jackets of understated fabric.¹⁸

¹ Johanna Burkhardt

² i.e., an unsalaried post, paid only in student fees — and we think adjunct positions are bad.

³ Hegel, The Letters, Butler and Seiler, eds. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984). Letter from Hegel to Niethammer of January 22, 1808, p. 156

⁴ Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p. 248. Versions of the aphorism have been variously attributed to Montaigne, Nicolas Catinat, Madame de Sévigné, and a few others

⁵ Hegel, The Philosophy of History, J Sibree tr. (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), §34

⁶ ibid., §34

⁷ ibid., §34

⁸ Most of the moralists.

⁹ Quoted from Geoffrey Squire, Dress and Society, p. 125. It would be interesting to research when people stopped dressing in the fashions of places visited while traveling.

¹⁰ Squire, Dress and Society, p. 126

¹¹ Castle, Masquerade and Civilization.

¹² Quoted from Ribeiro, French Revolution, p. 39

¹³ The Memoirs and Anecdotes of the Count de Ségur, Gerard Shelley, tr. (New York: Scribners, 1928), p. 63. Originally French edition published in 1803. My understanding is that there is a new edition.

¹⁴ I am told that Kiera Knightly dons something similar in The Duchess, which I have not yet seen.

¹⁵ My favorite example is what were known as “party patches.” As you may know, women in the eighteenth century would decorate their faces with patches of dark felt, sometimes to cover a smallpox scar or other imperfection, but just as often as pure ornament. But some placements of these patches had partisan significance, although I have not been able to learn how this worked in practical terms.

¹⁶ This term would be ‘decadence’ for Gibbon, if that clarifies anything.

¹⁷ Pinkard, Hegel, p. 371. Also, Anne Hollander, in Sex and Suits (New York: Knopf, 1994) is more concerned with gender questions, but she has some interesting pages on Hegel.

¹⁸ The implicit and totally unjustified suggestion embedded in the form of this paper is that the passage from the messy, dangerous feeling Phenomenology (1807) to the much tidier and controlled Philosophy of History, maps implicitly onto Hegel’s biographical transition into respectability. Also, if anyone can discover what style of tie knot Hegel wore, I would be very interested to know.