Alan Jacobs

Cory Doctorow:

Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them. […]

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

I like this post very much — and especially Doctorow’s idea of a blog as a place to make your commonplace book public. I hesitate to go all-in with this approach simply because I don’t want to overwhelm my readers with stuff.

I’m trying it out, but this is my fifth post today, which seems massively self-indulgent. On the other hand, it is rather odd for me to have two separate collections of notes, one on my computer and one on my blog.

Interesting convo at micro.blog about what people use to take notes. Me? 

• Handwriting in notebooks (usually Leuchtturm) 
• Marginal commentary and sticky notes in books 
• Voice notes in .mp3 format (the plain text of audio) 
• Plain text notes on the computer 

I want my notes to be future-proof and platform-agnostic. 

For what it may be worth: As the years go by my opinion of OK Computer ascends and my opinion of Kid A descends. 

More than twenty years ago Malcolm Gladwell published a fascinating essay about two different modes of failure in sports: panicking and choking. “Panic … is the opposite of choking. Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.” Over the past decade, Arsenal have become masters of both modes of failure. When a player flies into a late tackle or drags down an attacker, he’s panicking (hello Xhaka, hello Rob Holding), but what happened to the side yesterday was a unanimous collective choke: when they needed a solid performance, everyone became paralyzed. 

Arsenal are like the Ship of Theseus: All the players change, all the front office people change, nothing is what it was a decade ago … except the panicking and choking. Those endure. It’s a mystery to me, but if you’re going to be an Arsenal supporter you have to learn to live with it, because it’s hard to imagine it changing — it’s part of the DNA of the club now. 

I’d prefer to be a supporter of any other kind of club, but it’s difficult (I’m inclined to say impossible) to choose these things. You end up emotionally attached to a team for reasons unknown and probably unknowable. So I would drop Arsenal in a second if I could, and turn, not to a better club, but a less neurotic one. But I don’t think I can. 

Every morning — and I mean every single morning — when I awaken from slumbers, my brain serves up a song. A different song each day, as a rule. Never merely a chune, as the Scots fiddlers would say, but always a song with words, and usually a pop song from any time in the past fifty years. Rarely it's a hymn, and even more rarely a pre-Sixties pop song; but from within that fifty-year window it can be pretty much anything, including songs I haven’t thought of in years or even decades. A few times it’s been a theme song from an old TV show. 

The only exceptions to the Random Shuffle Rule come when I’ve had a song on heavy playing rotation. For instance, last year when I was obsessed with Big Red Machine’s gorgeous “Phoenix” it became my morning song on several occasions. But typically what turns up as I lift my head from the pillow is a surprise and I love that. 

This morning it was “Gates of the West” (a neglected little gem, that one); yesterday it was “Mykonos”; and that’s all I’m going to say. I’ve never actually written or (except to my family) spoken about this oddity of mine, and I’ve never made a record of the songs — I’m superstitiously afraid that any such documentation will put an end to the service. So this post is as far as I’m willing to go in self-revelation. 

But I mention it because I wonder how many other people have something like it — a central element of daily experience that no one else (or hardly anyone) knows about. Some quirk, some habit, whatever; but something that for you is a major feature of life even though no one would have any way of knowing it. 

Miguel Covarrubias, The Tree of Modern Art (1940) 

I’ve written occasionally here about what I call “metaphysical capitalism” — see the relevant tag at the bottom of this post — but one thing I have neglected to note is that one of the most powerful elements of the Marxist critique of capitalism has been the argument that it is the nature of modern capitalism to extend its understanding of the world into the personal, the emotional, the spiritual — in general the metaphysical realm. 

A key text here is George Lukács’s famous essay on “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” where he writes of “the split between the worker’s labour-power and his personality, its metamorphosis into a thing, an object that he sells on the market.” This happens in varying ways in the varying professions of the capitalism world; for instance, in any bureaucracy: 

The specific type of bureaucratic ‘conscientiousness’ and impartiality, the individual bureaucrat’s inevitable total subjection to a system of relations between the things to which he is exposed, the idea that it is precisely his ‘honour’ and his ‘sense of responsibility’ that exact this total submission all this points to the fact that the division of labour which in the case of Taylorism invaded the psyche, here invades the realm of ethics. 

And when Taylorism conquers both the psyche and ethics, we get self-Taylorizing — the complete internalization of metaphysical capitalism and the consequent redescription of a condition of enslavement as a condition of self-making. People come to believe that they’re expressing themselves on social media when in fact they’re doing Mark Zuckerberg’s bidding for free. They’re like Eloi thinking that they’re the masters of the Morlocks when in fact they’re merely food. 

What I found especially interesting in my re-read of Lukács (for the first time in many years) is his demonstration that this commodification of the human person goes back a long way, much longer than we might typically think. For instance, he notes that in the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) Kant defines sex and marriage in the most commodified way imaginable: “Sexual community is the reciprocal use made by one person of the sexual organs and faculties of another,” while marriage “is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other’s sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.” Lukács comments, “This rationalisation of the world appears to be complete, it seems to penetrate the very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature.” It’s capitalism all the way down. 

I am anything but a Marxist, but it’s important for me to realize (however belatedly) that some of my own recent arguments were anticipated by Marxist thinkers a hundred years ago. I should probably be making better use of that critique — if not of their suggestions for what should replace capitalism.