Reviews

Liberal Arts: Lurching towards Obsolescence?

2010-05-01T23:33:08Z

Reviewed: Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas. New York: W.W. Norton & Co Ltd, 2010.

Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas offers suggestions for revamping liberal education at a time when the liberal arts seem increasingly irrelevant to incoming freshmen. ¹ Andrew Scull's notorious hatchet job "UCSD letter" and other imbroglios are signs of the hazardous times. ² Trained as a historian and working as an English professor, Menand digs up fascinating history and proffers bits of insider gossip. Nonetheless, he falls short with an "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude, arguing that market forces (one can infer, a hybrid corporate-university model) stimulate competition and innovation in an academic culture which he views as mostly stagnant and out of touch with "real" societal concerns. Indeed the first line of his book is: "Knowledge is our most important business." He notes that the "value-added" component of a college education is lost when "most of th[e] esoterica [of a professor's knowledge] is available instantly on Wikipedia" (19). He also seems to imply that women, minorities, and the 1980s "culture wars" instituted the decline in academic culture away from its mission of disinterested research and non-ideological, or apolitical, vetting and debate. ³

Menand spends the early part of his book historicizing the general education paradigm, and ultimately argues that "the problem with general education is that it is perceived as an attempt to impose on liberal education a mission--call it 'preparation for life'--whose rationale liberal education has traditionally defined itself in opposition to" (25). While differentiating between distributed and core models of general education, he posits that in the end a general education should be a "binding experience," for "in a meritocratic society, citizens need a common fund of knowledge, a kind of cultural lingua franca, to prevent politically dangerous divisions from developing" (41). One might pause to wonder what these dangerous divisions are, and it is here that Menand's own "apolitical" politics become apparent. He argues that the Harvard report on "General Education in a Free Society," a 1945 Cold War document, resolved problems such as socioeconomic resentment and intellectual relativism by familiarizing students with American "touchstones for contemporary culture and debate. . .[representing] a common heritage that bonds each citizen, whether a lawyer or cabdriver, to each" (42). What remains unexcavated in Menand's high appraisal of such a Cold War document is its easy and unselfconscious universality, ignoring the contradictory position of persons excluded from full and robust citizenship and representation in such courses and texts, or those persons marked as "other" and burdened with particularity. A series of such uncritical moves on Menand's part make portions of the book read as apologias for the current hegemonic ideology and neoliberal status quo.

He spends the middle portion of the book, "The Humanities Revolution," lauding the humanities for forever altering the way knowledge was produced and what it looked like. He then uses "Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety" to throw into doubt the "buzziness" of the term interdisciplinarity. In his view, "interdisciplinarity is simply disciplinarity raised to a higher power" (96-7). He believes it is the term's vagueness and evangelical overtones that create anxiety as to what it is that academics are really doing in the modern university.

In spite of some of the more uncritical portions of the book, Menand does offer some thoughtful, albeit counterintuitive, solutions to academic problems. Controversially, rather than lament the "cheapening" of Ph.D. candidates through their proliferation, he argues that there should be greater numbers of Ph.D.s awarded and that they should moreover be easier to obtain. This would make a Doctor of Philosophy an added texture for non-academic employees and workplaces. Imagine a society where many people were trained in ways to think about thinking. Additionally, he proposes limiting exploitative cheap ABD (All But Dissertation) labor by seriously reducing the time to degree, replacing the doctoral thesis with the publication of a peer-reviewed article (152). "If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of the doctoral motel, the disciplines would have a chance to get oxygenated by people. . .much less invested in [its] paradigms," he quips (153). By advocating oxygenation, he is referring to his other main intervention regarding what he calls "cloning" and the phenomenon of an academic "guild" system.

Menand emphatically believes that professors must be trained differently from their predecessors. In the section "Why Do Professors All Think Alike?" he notes that universities are surprisingly resistant to change. Quoting former UC Chancellor Clark Kerr, Menand relates, "few institutions are so conservative as the universities about their own affairs while their members are so liberal about the affairs of others . . . The faculty member who gets arrested as a 'freedom rider' in the South is a flaming supporter of unanimous prior faculty consent." ⁴ His biggest criticism is that "the professoriate is homogeneous," meaning predominantly center-left Democratic (140). This is problematic for Menand's dialectical approach to intellectual inquiry as "liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep it on its toes" (153). While this seems like an opportunity for Menand to appear as a reactionary wolf in sheep's (read liberal academic) clothing, his ideas and way of writing both irritate and inspire. I believe Menand is sincere when he attempts to deflect critiques that he is presentist or utilitarian, but I am not at all convinced that he is without an agenda.

This book is worth reading for its snappy prose and occasional gossipy bits, if not for Menand's overall plan of action. It is more interesting to ponder and debate the proposals of The Marketplace of Ideas than to ignore them, especially when liberal arts education seems to be lurching towards obsolescence.

Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh

2010-04-01T00:44:18Z

Reviewed:

Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009)

Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance: Art Documents, 1978-1999 (DVD-ROM); available for purchase at www.one-year-performance.com.

While the artist Tehching Hsieh has enjoyed some resurgent interest in his work through the Museum of Modern Art's "Performance" series and the Guggenheim's "Third Mind" exhibition, it is with the publication of Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh that a truly satisfactory and in-depth resource for engaging his art has emerged. Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American artist who carried out six major durational performances after immigrating to the United States in 1974, five of which lasted for one year and the final of which lasted thirteen. For each performance, Hsieh would develop a highly restrictive set of rules and a means of documenting his adherence to them, then release these as a statement of intent and invite audiences to view his work on select dates throughout the year. These performances were endurance acts of spatial and temporal constraint, all characterized by an astounding formal minimalism: the first confined him to his imagination as he sat inside a cell in his studio space; another bound him and the artist, Linda Montano, with an eight foot rope that remained their only source of contact. For an artist whose work has remained a touchstone for many students of performance and body art, it's surprising that Out of Now is the first sustained examination of Hsieh's durational works. The monograph itself is a formidable object that contains six essays by the art scholar (and book editor) Adrian Heathfield; an extensive and illuminating interview between Hsieh and Heathfield; several short letters addressed to Hsieh by fellow artists Marina AbramoviÄ‡, Santiago Sierra, and Tim Etchells, as well as the performance theorist Peggy Phelan; and, what is most exciting, extensive reproductions of the many ephemera that remain from each of the performances. Alongside his self-released DVD-ROM, which contains videos and timelines of his works, the two releases are by far the most comprehensive collection of the many legal, photographic, promotional, and evidentiary traces of the One Year Performances.

Adrian Heathfield's six essays are divided according to the different variations on the theme of time that Hsieh's works engage. Instead of ceding to the tendency - reflexive in performance criticism, he argues - to attribute the rupturing temporality of the "event" to time-based art, Heathfield instead focuses on the phenomena of duration in Hsieh's performances (13). Further, his exploration of duration as the slower temporality through which Hsieh's art unfolds provides the clue into what that hybridized term in the subtitle, "lifework," means. Though early in the monograph Heathfield claims that lifework indicates "that these artworks are made from the very material and experience of a life" (which artworks aren't? we might respond), by the end of his very nuanced set of essays I for one am more convinced by his argument that Hsieh's protracted durations re-work the conditions that produce and support the subject across time (12, 56-58). This fidelity to Hsieh's works accords well with his stated intention to challenge the traditional monograph form of writing about a subject by instead writing with one.

Continuing with the theme of duration, I find that while going through the documentation of Hsieh's performances in the monograph (62-317), as well as the videos on the DVD, I'm drawn by what the literary theorist Sianne Ngai calls "stuplimity" - a mix of astonishment and boredom that she detects in the massive taxonomic works of figures like Gertrude Stein, Ann Hamilton, and Samuel Beckett. As Ngai explains, stuplimity is "marked by extended cycles of exhaustion and recovery [...] rather than by an abrupt, instantaneous defeat of comprehension" (Ngai 277). In short, it is a feeling that manifests through the experience of a series more than through any individual moment contained within it. Further, I believe this feeling testifies, not only to how Hsieh's works affect a gravitational pull into the density of time's passing, but to how they transmit difference through repetition, as the strictures that are the works' conditions of production and reproduction prove unable to contain the amount of variation they would seem to delimit. Perhaps the best example of this is the film of One Year Performance 1980-81 (a.k.a. Time Clock Piece). For this work, Hsieh claimed that he would punch a time clock, every hour on the hour, for one year and document each punch with one still, taken with a 16mm film camera. The result is a 13-minute time-lapse film that features Hsieh, as a jittery figure with sprouting hair, alongside clock hands that spin wildly and a punch card that mechanically fills and depletes with the hours that pass. The stills, reproduced in the monograph (128-158), allow the reader to consider these internal variations at a reduced pace, but not with any more taxonomic ease. The same can be said for the reproduction of the maps that document Hsieh's travels around New York City in One Year Performance 1981-82 (a.k.a. Outdoor Piece): it can prove as mentally exhausting as shocking and exhilarating to trace the borders of Hsieh's daily travels around lower Manhattan, which he marked with a red pen on otherwise largely identical maps.

Finally, it bears mentioning that Heathfield is first and foremost an art historian, and that while I welcome the careful focus he gives to the place of Hsieh's work within art history, I do find that the word "life" does a lot of work in his analysis without much examination. If Hsieh's work complicates the identity of "art" as it drives toward life, couldn't we likewise say that his work complicates what we mean when we say "life?" These works after all are embedded within biopolitical durations: within technologies of surveillance and imprisonment; within the temporal rhythms and spatial constrictions that constitute the labor process; and within the discursive emergence of "quality of life" as a regulatory model for the aesthetic order of urban space, especially in New York City in the 1980s. In part, Heathfield refrains from this line of argument because, I believe, he wants to insist on the singularity of Hsieh's life (he refers throughout not to life in general but to art made from a life); it also helps that Hsieh himself refuses both contextual limits to his work and the designation of "political artist" (324 & 330). But these qualifications defer rather than resolve the question of how Hsieh's lifeworks agitate across the history and politics of life as well as art. All that said, though, this remains a minor quibble with Heathfield's otherwise excellent essays, and one that, if anything, indicates how far the conversation on and with Hsieh's works has yet to go.

Works Cited:

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Photo:

From One Year Performance 1980-81 (Time Clock Piece). Available on

One Year Performance: Art Documents, 1978-1999 (DVD-ROM).

Listening at the end of the Twentieth Century

2009-12-15T23:19:51Z

Reviewed:

Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

I began reading these two elegantly composed, deftly researched studies around the same time, with absolutely no sense that they might speak to one another. But despite the vast difference of their subjects, they form fascinating bookends to the history of American music in the 20th century. While most histories of sound recording have centered on technological "evolution," David Suisman's Selling Sounds shows how the music industry taught Americans to understand recorded music as a commodity. Concerned largely with the first three decades of the 20th century, he traces the emergence of standardized marketing and distribution strategies -- from the star system to the dÃ©cor of record stores -- that lasted long into the century, as well as the struggle of copyright law to keep up with new versions of the commodity form. Indeed, despite its focus on the early 20th century, the story Suisman is telling is that of the formation of the musical landscape in which most of today's adults grew up, a realm which has only recently been upended by the digitalization of music's consumption. His writing is theoretically astute, but it's the deep texture with which he presents formative chapters in this story that makes this book so enjoyable to read, whether the episode is the story of the "pluggers" who promoted records in live performances before the emergence of celebrity branding, or the transformation engineered around the figure of Enrico Caruso, the first major recording star.

Recognizing that the consolidation of the music business "was never static or homogenous, and [that] the growing concentration of power in the culture industry did not mean that it was experienced by everyone in the same way," Suisman also offers a fascinating chapter on the short-lived African-American label, Black Swan, founded by a Harry H. Pace, a protÃ©gÃ© of W. E. B. Du Bois. Black Swan struggled to establish itself in the early 1920s against the deep-seated racism in the industry and the popular music it was producing, and went under after just four years of existence. But it launched the careers of several major black recording artists (Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Fletcher Henderson) and demonstrated the profits to be made from a largely black listening audience to the white-owned major labels. Thus Black Swan, too, played a formative role in a period that "ensured that the way that most people thought about music and integrated it into their lives would be forever changed."

On the other side of the century, we have Arthur Russell, the composer and musician whose work and life are given deservedly serious, thoughtful treatment Tim Lawrence's excellent biography. Russell's career was remarkable for its indifference to the regimented qualities of the market Suisman's book historicizes. Originally a shy kid from Iowa, Russell lived and worked on the borderlines of numerous categories, musical and otherwise: he straddled musical genres such as "serious" experimental music, disco, pop, and country, and he lived a personal life in which the categories straight and gay applied obliquely at best. Russell grew up playing cello, and he remained closest to that instrument throughout his journies across genre. Initially he planned on becoming a composer of "serious" new music. After a brief stay among Buddhists in San Francisco, he moved to New York, where, buoyed by early supporters like Allen Ginsberg, he began looking for ways to channel his dissatisfaction with the sterility of post-Cagean minimalism. But rather than trying simply to turn new music in another direction, Russell turned to the most vibrant aspects of other, popular genres. Russell was 23 when composer Rhys Chatham offered to let him program a season of events at the now-legendary downtown performance space, the Kitchen; by inviting Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers to play alongside experimentalists like Alvin Curran and Phill Niblock, Russell opened up a form of "sonic democracy" that would become a hugely generative relationship between rock and the avant-garde in the 1970s.

Of all his generic experimentation, Russell probably brought the most passion to his work in disco, that long-degraded motive force in 1970s gay and black nightlife culture. His breakout song in that style, un-coyly titled "Is It All Over My Face?", filters a bass track reminiscent of the Rolling Stones' "Miss You" into the essence of funkiness. True to Russell's weirdness, it is also rife with unpredictable shifts in meter, and at least in its original version, sounds like it's being sung by three drunk dudes doing karaoke (it was later re-recorded with a female vocalist and re-mixed several times). Lawrence's book does a wonderful job of portraying this highly playful, queer sort of weirdness with which Russell infused his work, a quality very different from modernist machismo. I think these qualities are best embodied on his album World of Echo (1986), made up of songs that are mostly Russell accompanied by his cello, cast through a healthy portion of analog delay. The songs jumble beautifully composed melodies into weirdly repetitive structures, given an added layer of pathos by Russell's plain-spoken lyrics and his understated singing. His vocal style on this album is made up of elongated vowel sounds that often obscure the sense of the lyrics, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of early Michael Stipe. The pervasive echo makes it sound as though Russell is playing music with the accompaniment of his own ghost.

As Lawrence shows in great and sometimes heartrending detail, Russell's unwillingness to work within categories made available by the music industry came with many costs, including relative obscurity and its attendant financial woes. The book's interviews with former friends, lovers, and associates paint a picture of a genuine and generous soul who desperately wanted a significant following, but struggled with a crippling perfectionism that limited his output as a recording artist. Accordingly, he was unable to capitalize on a couple of opportunities (an audition with John Hammond, a failed collaboration with Robert Wilson) that might have landed him a major record deal. The story only gets worse, and more representative of this period in the New York arts scene, as Russell learns he is infected with HIV and after a couple of years of struggling to get another album out, dies of an AIDS related illness. But Lawrence's writing is up to the task of telling this narrative in a way that makes the pathos of Russell's life a deeply compelling window onto the "Downtown" music scene of the 1980s and 90s. Indeed, part of what makes the book so successful is Lawrence's insight into Russell's ongoing ambivalence toward this scene, especially its fascination with the machismo of grand modernist gestures.

Appeals to Americanness as a reference point are cheap, and Lawrence mercifully avoids them, but all things said and done it's hard not to think about Russell in relation to a line of queer American artists, from Walt Whitman to Gertrude Stein to Andy Warhol, whose journey to the avant-garde has involved a sustained, ineluctable engagement with the popular.

A Russell renaissance of sorts began in 2004, with the release of two CDs of previously unreleased work; more of these, along with some reissues, have followed. Matt Wolf's 2008 documentary film, Wild Combination is a great counterpart to this biography. In one of his many insightful observations in his epilogue, Lawrence points out that Russell's diversity is better suited to the contemporary moment -- the one following the decline of the institutional structures whose emergence David Suisman traces -- with the easy availability of so many genres 24/7 over one's home internet connection. One can't help but wonder about the ways Russell would have found to be queer in this world as well.

The Forensics of Capital

2009-11-11T15:50:54Z

A Review of "Capitalism: A Love Story," directed by Michael Moore

Crimes have been committed in this building. I am here to make a citizen's arrest.

In the final scene of "Capitalism: A Love Story," Michael Moore drags police tape around city blocks that house the corporate offices of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Wachovia, and J.P. Morgan Chase--all recipients of taxpayer money used by the federal government as part of a "bailout" package. Moore's stated purpose is to make a "citizen's arrest" of the criminals who, when faced with the ramifications of their own financial faux-pas, "backed an armored car up to the US treasury" only to leave with 700 billion dollars of "our money." Moore figures each corporate building as the scene of a crime, leaving us to ponder the implications of what William Pietz once called the "forensics of capital,"where "forensics" does not simply refer to police procedures and physical specimens, nor exclusively to legal judgments (like the fine or prison sentence dealt to a convicted criminal) but to a broader range of strategies for translating "physical causality into [the] social causation that establishes legal liability,"¹a set of techniques for charting the relationship between the social act that leads to injury, death, or wrongful termination and the forms of redress that ensue.

Moore's criminal inquiry explores the link between value and vitality across a series of related domains as a way to signal the duplicity that has eroded cherished features of US citizenship--home ownership, personal security, the right to a fair wage, and the opportunity to store savings for one's family in the case of death or injury. Moore indicts the US government with criminal negligence for relinquishing control of these pressing social issues to corporations who profit from popular demise. An early segment features an appearance by Peter Zalewski of Condo Vultures whose company, he confesses, helps clients with "no compassion, no sensitivity"--people who "are looking to slit any single seller's throat"--buy foreclosed homes they can later re-sell at a profit. "A vulture basically represents a bottom feeder that goes in there and cleans off a carcass," says Zalewski. "The vultures aren't actually killing, they are the ones doing the clean up," he elaborates, but acknowledges that "because they are dealing with so many germs and so many situations" vultures "will often vomit on themselves." "Chk-chk. Boom!" Zalewski cocks an imaginary shotgun to figure the fatal blow to the deceased he mines for sustenance, as he stares directly into the camera suggesting that the "difference" between his work and that of a "real vulture" is "simple": "I don't vomit on myself."

From the foreclosure "epidemic"--in which Zalewski had likened himself to "a drone that flies over the battlefield in Afghanistan"--Moore shifts his focus to Wilkes-Barr, Pennsylvania, a town that closed its juvenile detention facility in 2002 before ceding land to a private corporation who promised to perform the same tasks, though not before billing an $8 million dollar construction project to the state, and acquiring a $58 million lease from it. But it gets even more sinister, because although PA Child Care incarcerated thousands of offenders between 2003 and 2006, the two judges responsible for the convictions were later indicted themselves for taking millions of dollars in bribes to pack the facility. Moore closes this segment by interviewing a former "delinquent" who explores his new-found freedom by training as a pilot, before telling us that most US commercial airline pilots earn less income than a manager at Taco Bell.

Moore then explores the contradictions of corporate greed by showing that, even after it had received bailout money from the US government, Bank of America refused to pay factory workers at Republic Windows and Doors the salaries that were interrupted when their employer closed abruptly after defaulting on a loan it had acquired through the bank. Thanks to the sit-down strike that ensued--and no doubt due, in part, to support from President Barack Obama--the workers were ultimately paid what they were owed.

But, as in previous efforts, Moore maintains a vexed relationship to capitalism. In this film, he interviews several Catholic priests who equate capitalism with sin. He even visits a museum to read an original copy of the US Constitution, noting that although the words "we," "union," and "welfare" appear in the document, the term "capitalism" does not. Yet, when Moore chronicles corporations who enable their employees to be owners, offering them an opportunity to shape policy, one wonders whether he thinks "capitalism" is the culprit or whether he simply believes the true culprit is corporate greed, in the same way that it remains unclear whether his primary target in Fahrenheit 9/11 is US democracy or the Bush administration. In this regard, his expressed effort to promote a keener sense of democracy as a substitute for capitalism remains unclear in its implications because social critics typically consider these phenomena to be intricately intertwined.

Is Moore troubled by individual acts of corruption, the abuse of public office for personal gain, and fraud, the act of deceiving others to enrich oneself? Or does he believe that the problems he identifies are systemic to US democracy and capitalism? It often appears that he believes the latter but wants us to believe he believes the former.

After all, the most impressive--though most undeveloped segment--in Capitalism is Moore's discussion of "Dead Peasant" insurance, the phrase used to mark policies that corporations from Bank of America, Citibank, McDonnell Douglas, Hershey, Nestle, Wal-Mart, Proctor & Gamble, Ameritech, American Express, and others have taken out in the name of employees who had no knowledge of the coverage. When Daniel L. Johnson died of cancer, Amegy Bank made more than $5 million on policies it had take out in his name that were never shared with his dependents.

"There is a reason that it is illegal for me to take out a fire insurance policy on your house," Moore insists, incredulous that any life insurance agency could provide corporations with incentives to have employees "die in accordance with their policy projections."³ But his characteristic indignation works against him in this segment,for the logic of capital finds it clearest expression not in the pages of Superfreakonomics⁴ (a book expressly concerned with the way that "people respond to incentives" if "not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest") but in places like the insurance premium or settlement where the violence endemic to capitalism appears self-evident.

As it turns out, there is a precedent for wealthy people to benefit from the death of others. Well into the nineteenth century, life insurance was contested, in part, because it was reminiscent of "graveyard insurance," a form of gambling in which wealthy men would bet on the mortality of low-income populations, the aged and the infirm--demographics expected to die an early death.⁵ While fire insurance (especially for homes) and marine insurance (especially for shipped goods) were well enshrined in mundane forms of commerce by the eighteenth century, the human body was considered too sacred to be priced in legitimate market transactions until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. But if historians have puzzled over the reasons that the US life insurance industry did not take root until the 1840s, they have generally overlooked the fact that the business of insuring slaves was a robust domain of commercial traffic from the 1830s onward. As early as 1804, several life insurance companies had debated and dismissed the idea of insuring blacks: they believed that free blacks would put undue stress on premiums for their white clients and decided that, while enslaved Africans were sufficiently regulated by insurance on property (chattel), this particular class of commodity was not worth the risk.

But while some insurance companies decided not to bother with the messy business of insuring slaves, others decided to specialize in it. Already by the 1850s, there were as many enslaved Africans in the Upper South covered by life insurance policies as white men in the northeast. By the time the Civil War arrived, the Baltimore Life Insurance Company could boast that slaves accounted for 2/3 of its business.⁶ With the legal abolition of slavery in 1865, African Americans could finally qualify for life insurance. By 1870, the life insurance industry was enshrined as a central feature of capital exchange in the US. But the historical relationship between the business of insuring slaves and the history of insuring people in the US suggests that, far from being an anomaly, the notion that some people can take out insurance policies on others is a longstanding American tradition (meanwhile, nineteenth century mortality rates were so high for British planters traveling to Jamaica, that they found it easier to insure their slaves than to get policies for themselves).

This all begs a series of questions that Moore deserves credit for raising, even if he doesn't explore them: how do corporations decide who to cover with a Dead Peasant insurance policy? Do they have access to employee medical records? Is it based on physical exams they require employees to complete? If not, do they have their own forms of corporate espionage and reconnaissance, replete with methods for hacking into employee health records? What about forms of surveillance (apparatuses for recording and cataloging employee gossip about health care concerns)? Needless to say, this is a topic worthy of sustained attention in its own right. Because while the idea that some employees are worth more to their employers dead than alive is deeply troubling, it is even more disturbing that these policies remain pervasive and profitable regardless of the strong emotional reactions they provoke. It all makes me wonder whether some form of Dead Peasant insurance has been around since slavery was legal, or whether it is a recent innovation designed to build on a technology of capital from a bygone era.

And, I can't decide which is worse.