Economics, talent of thinking

Renè Magritte (1899 Lessines / Belgio, 1966 Bruxelles) was one oft the leading characters of Surrealism, a movement founded by Andrè Breton who also was an avid collector of Magritte’s works. Original painting by Stefano Frassetto (6).

“Here is Popaul, my brother who is also a stupid as he doesn’t care of anyone, and Raymond who is even worst than him; this is my father and that woman - the housekeeper - is his lover, and this is a bastard son…“[2]

Magritte is nineteen when, with a friend comes for lunch to his father, addressing him with insolence : but was he the same Renè, but fourteen, when he wandered about the graveyard every afternoon, soon after his mother Regina’s suicide ? At November he would have enroled in the high school of Charleroi, but we have just a few news of those years about which Magritte didn’t like to speak about, as well as about his own works which he didn’t justify in public.

In 1916 he meets Georgette whom he’ll marry in 1921, after his military service and who will be his beloved partner for all the life : their home became the headquarters of Surrealist movement in Belgium and of those Saturdays dancing evenings in the masked parties now remain a few homely videos where Magritte is smiling, finally satisfied.[3]

In 1923, when already exposing his pictures, he is deeply impressioned by the “Love song“, painted in 1914 by Giorgio De Chirico whom Magritte saw at the MOMA in New York and that, only in 1938, he will comment in his “Ecrìts“ : “This exultant poem substituted the stereotyped effect of traditional painting. It’s a full break with the mental attitudes of artists who are prisoners of talent, of virtuosity and of all these little aesthetic specialties. It’s a new vision where the viewer finds his own loneliness and hears the silence oft he world.“

Of this innovation which doesn’t make him dependent on a specific ‘style‘ notwithstanding he is considered one the most representatives of Surrealism[4], the first picture by Magritte is “The window“ (1925) followed by : “The double secret“ (1927), “Impossible attempt“ (1928), “The unexpected answer“ (1933), just to say a few which pointed his own work.

However the complicated rules of Surrealists, which turned around a religious following the founder Brèton and which already caused schisms and divisions to the group, deterred Magritte and his wife who in 1929 came back in Belgium, for economical reasons too, from Paris where for some years they had lived.

In 1934 Brèton himself, maybe worried by the breaking with someone who was already successful, proposed to Magritte to prepare the cover for “Qu’est-ce que le Surrèalisme ?“ with a lecture made by Brèton. Magritte gave Brèton “Le viol“ (1934) with these words : “I hope that you like the project for this cover; I also believe it can be excellent from an advertising point of view.“

Ironic and distant as only the dreamlike can, even in the most ferocious complaint, in ‘Le viol‘ Magritte abruptly stops, falling into the part he hated of  a sadist. Through this grieved picture he gets, little by little, to rebuild an unsuspected responsibility of Règina and of her own suicide, of which since a so far 1912 Magritte absurdly held himself accused, around him the heavy and stubborn silence of those who didn’t wanted to come back, to speak, to untie that terrible act.

Magritte faces in this picture, which he will just once repeat and more clearly in 1945, a new topic for him, the defense of one‘s body : and, painfully, he will have to admit that Règina, just to maintain the naive candor of a ‘beautiful soul‘, chose to give up to defend herself and even, falling silent, to turn against herself the responsibilities of others.

The ‘non‘ innocence of Règina, and of every naive woman - but rigid at the same time - distances Magritte forever from the woman who had been his mother too.

To that topic, the defense of one‘s female body, Art devoted a lot of work : the Renaissance painter Giorgione relied, with a truly surreal ability, the defense of a woman to her male partner, in ‘The storm‘ (1502-1503) versus ‘The impossible attempt‘ (1928) by Magritte.

It’s the woman, according Magritte, who first of all gives up her own defense to offer instead, even if only virtually, a naive naked human who will be fatal to the right in flaunting her ‘beautiful‘ in-difference – i.e. ‘no-difference‘ - towards the other.

Magritte‘ criticism – individual, strong and socially acceptable to neurosis - becomes functional, from an absolutely new perspective – to giving up a relationship and a partnership with the other, when partnership only relies on a phallic functionality, abstract and imperative, and on a strenuous resistance to assume offenses.

A naive seduction, which in the following work of 1945 is emphasized by the softness of a femal body so superimposed on her unavailability of gazing, comes through – in Magritte‘s reconstruction -  the inexpressiveness of the object-which-imputes-nothing, just immediately consumable. It is also a topic - the ‘seducing unavailability‘ – which has in Art, even nowadays its audience of enthusiasts : think of the disturbing Muses of Pre-Raphaelites[5].

His ability, so frequent in Magritte to transform the grotesque of the ‘Whys‘ to which he couldn’t answer into a lightness of suspended that still makes possible to find solutions, is however completely, and comprehensibly, missing in ‘Le viol‘.

In this picture the vacuum has a specific place from which it does mark the viewer.

                                                  Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – January 9, 2020

[1] Renè Magritte (1898, Lessines (Belgio) – 1967, Bruxelles)

[2] “Renè Magritte. Catalogue raisonnè”, at care of D. Sylvester and S. Whitefield, 5voll.; “Magritte”, at care of D. Sylvester – Torino 1992; “R. Magritte. Ecrìts complets”, at care of A. Blavier – Parigi 1979.

[3] Videos offered during the exhibition at Lugano by MASI, September 16, 2018 – January 6, 2019 “La ligne de vie“, title of a rare lecture given by Magritte at the ‘Musèe Royal des Beaux-Arts d’Anverse’ (Belgio) tribute to the surrealists but so speaking of his own work.

[4] ‘Surrealism’ was born in France in ’20s as an avant-garde movement and inspired not only painting but also literature and cinema : however in Magritte there isn’t that ‘psychic automatism’ with which the surrealists pointed the unconsciousness.  

[5] Pre-Raphalites was a Confraternity of artists established in 1848 in Great Britain and there confined, with the aim to recreate the academic purity of the masterpieces made before Raffaello Sanzio.

(6) Stefano Frassetto is born in Turin in 1968. After his degree in Architecture at ‘Politecnico’ he begun as graphic novelist for local magazines. In the ‘90s he edited in France too, on ‘Le Réverbère’ and on ‘Libération’ : then he created ‘Ippo’ for ‘Il Giornalino’ and then the stripe ‘35MQ’ for the swiss magazine ‘20 Minuti’. In 2000 he came into ‘La Stampa’ as portraitist for cultural page and the insert ‘Tuttolibri’, then for the weekly ‘Origami’. Today he works also for the swiss magazine ‘Le Temps’.

<A ‘drop cap’ is the beginning consonant, or vocal of the first word in a written text and in the ancient medieval manuscripts the ‘drop cap’ was larger than the other letter, and opulently decorated>

I was reading a specialistic journal article (1) and happened thinking, with some pleasure, that ‘behaviourism’, leading the traditional but obsolete ‘Game theories’ is at last beginning to care of Political Economics decisions in one, of a group of Countries, as they are able to guide the public opinion and then the individual investment, saving and consumption decisions too.

Frailty in ‘behaviourism’, which - by means of the ‘Game theories’ - is un-ascribing any single man or woman and the whole society as far as economical decisions, from individual to aggregate, are concerned, is now evident in the present difficulty to forecast the behaviour of individuals who are more and more trained and competent.

The article I’m just reading points then a criticity in Central Banks of a Country, or group of Countries in orienting those behaviours which, even if collective, move from individual choices indeed on the base of available information : it seems convenient to emphasize here that, notwithstanding also the Central Bank of a Country, or Nation, is an Institute and then a body in favour of which different competences do work and cooperate in a specific required scope, it is the President of the Central Bank to be charged with a single political orientation – ‘monetary’ here – toward the whole national, and also supranational community. 

The authors, whom results in terms of mathematical formulations have been here named, consider a currency crisis in a Country, as mainly induced by the expectations of citizens - savers, consumers, investitors of a Country – able to read what the Central Bank, and its President, decides. 

A Nation then, where suddenly the stock of currency does shorten due to not enough profitable ‘domestic’ titles, can incur in more harmful consequencies when decide, by means of their Central Bank to open to a devaluation of their own currency.

The same outcome can obtain the decision to devaluate, when made by a Central Bank unable to afford economic and political costs connected to higher interest rates able, on another hand, to attract savers and investors.

In both these cases, what is crucial is the structure of national market not so simple indeed as able to ascribe specific and different values to the rate of interest, so that it is not easy to forecast the consequencies of a ‘technical’ devaluation. 

An individual competence about the fundamentals (2) of a Country can then vanify simplicistic and consequently abstract, because they don’t supply with reasons – both of concomitance and competition  of national and supranational conditions able to anticipate a currency crisis.   

Under conditions of competition, a minimum signal like a variation of national rate of interest can already contribute to increase conveniently the competence itself and maybe also a social and political sharing.

As a matter of facts, any individual thinking logically moves by reliability, thanks to which anyone can ascribe peacefully his own, or her own, satisfaction or, on the opposite, un-satisfaction. Nothing to do with any ingenuous and hazardous ‘behaviourism’ which dictates : ‘reaction action’.

Buti t is the freudian logic : a whole other world. 

Marina Bilotta Membretti - Cernusco sul Naviglio March 13, 2019

1'Self-fulfilling currency crises : the role of interest rates', di Christian Hellwig/Università Los Angeles-CA, Arijit Mukherji/Università del Minnesota, Aleh Tsyvinski/Università di Harvard, Cambridge-MA e 'National Bureau of Economic Research'. The article is the profit of the scientific debate in progress about the forecast of economic events in globalization, which for the first time saw participation of economists from Deutschland (Budapest, 'Society for Economic Dynamics', Annual meeting).

2 Fundamentals of a Nation are, for example : trade balance, aggregate public budget, investment growth rate.

Chasseur d’images.

What the eye had not yet caught, but that captures the image.

“I feel euphoric to observe… until I can no longer.”[1]

 “You arrive at a place, I like, there is something… there is a crucial moment when everything is in harmony, among all around… Then people come into the photo and click, it’s done!

It’s very stressful, when I snap the picture, because : will I lose it ? …no, it turned out well!”

Moved away at a very young age from his family and the suburbs which “…I hated to the point of wanting to destroy it…” Doisneau remembers, at twenty-two he meets Pierret and they decide to get married right away : Robert works taking his wife with him, and soon their two children, Annette e Francine as well as brothers-in-law, friends like a lively tribe from which he will never part.

Those are the years, between 1934 and 1938, of his job as a workman in ‘Renault’.

“Renault has not at all sense of humour – Robert comments about his employer – and is able to govern only striking terror into others…” But Monsieur Renault doesn’t like the photo reportages in his factory and, above all, the criticism of the ‘system’, the frequent absences to run to the photo lab to develop films, and so the dismissal comes. However Doisneau begins to take ‘photography’ seriously and from those occasional photo reportages he sold to newspapers, he is able now to get more permanent jobs.

It is already the time of Nazi propaganda, and then of what Doisneau calls “the fucking war…” He works together with a partner, Paul Baravet said Babà who goes touring Paris by bike to bring photos to clients and who, with his innocent air, is able to save many of them from deportation and from concentration camps. Robert always refused to photograph what cannot be said, also in his most toughest photos the light aspect of life prevails.

There is “…a lot of poverty everywhere and bitter life in Paris, but you can think that people know how to have fun”, he also comments coming back to photograph the suburbs, and he looks carefully at new dimensions, colours.

“In order to apologize, they coloured…”, he says never being caustic.

The eye doesn’t catch immediately what makes the ‘image capture’ : it is only later, when developing a film in one’s laboratory, that ‘one’ detail collected by the before recording it, finally becomes clear. And Robert realizes that only after comparing the result with what he didn’t remember to have seen.

Some time later, when ‘Humanist photography’[2] – which is already a concept of life and of everyday life - will born, Doisneau will name for the first time ‘the optical unconscious’ which can orientate towards the ‘catching’ by the eye that captures the image, and that is secondary as a matter of fact to the skin contact.

“People in the States dance keeping at a certain distance…”, Robert observes quite amused during his stay there in the ‘80s, when he already works for ‘Life’ magazine.

Those are the years when, right in the States, the photography market was born : Doisneau presents his own ‘portfolio’, curated by Monah Gettner, an actress featured in the documentary-film “Robert Doisneau, le rèvolte du merveilleux”.

Doisneau’ work will be unexpectedly collected by the greatest U.S.A. photographers who will also become excellent interpreters of the new Art.

“You snap a photo – Robert Doisneau said – and it’s already in the past.”

                                                 Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - November 29, 2019

[1] The quote, as the following ones in this article is taken from “Le rèvolte du merveilleux” (2016), documentary-film by Clementine Deroudille and, beyond Clementine Deroudille, with Eric Caravaca, Sabine Azèma, Quentin Bajac, Jean Claude Carriere.

[2] The ‘Humanist photography’ was born in ‘30s with Henry Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) : “the subject is ‘man’, man and his short, fragile, threatened life…” It becomes then a social and public phenomenon in 1950,  just finished the 2° World War with “Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville” by Robert Doisneau, published withou noise on the U.S.A. weekly “Life”, to which Doisneau already collaborates : this photograph indeed will become the Manifesto of a new trend. Doisneau will gain fame among the general public with the Exhibition created in New York in 1955, “The Family of Man” at care of Edward Steichen.

 …There is no marital union!” The assessment of king Creon¹

In the picture "La paix", by Pablo Picasso (1952).  His celebratory thinking is not convincing us, so compulsively repetitive and bored by an artist who however was already at the peak of success.

This short interview was born from a curiosity to explore some ideas offered by Dr. Roberto Zanni during a recent public conversation about ‘narcissism’.

Marina Bilotta – An eight year old boy, who watches in admiration an anti-hero – you said Renato Vallanzasca – then a real man, not a cartoon character, really accused of crimes and murders, and really sentenced to criminal penalties by state justice. However is a man that many talked about, he was written about on the newspapers, he himself was interviewed for television, saying : “Vallanzasca is Vallanzasca!” What would this man have more, maybe looked upon with fear by the people talking about him on the street, compared to the ‘classic’ hero who spends himself for Justice?

Roberto Zanni – I start from a personal memory : as a child, just when I was eight years old, I used to spend the summer afternoons together with a friend of mine : often we played with toy soldiers and much of the game consisted in preparing for confrontation, each one building his own village, his own fort, his own army; then followed the battle and the count of the dead and wounded to decide who won.

One day, maybe because strategies and game modes were out (but more likely our thinking was breaking through), we decided as mutually agreed to ‘play for peace’ : the play, however, didn’t start.

1 The peace which bores.

With ‘peace’ nothing happened : the red man went hunting for bison and heartily greeted the cowboy intent on tending his herd. It was flat calm.

When Heraclitus, in that famous fragment, says that “Polemos is the father of all the things, and of all the things is the king” is careful : a king, infact, rules by means of laws, and the law for Heraclitus is the conflict, the dialectic of opposites which, as dynamic, would explain the totality of things (‘father of all things’, as a matter of facts).

But, if everything is war what is peace ? As an adult I would have guessed that thinking of peace is as arduous as thinking of mental health. What do heroes, positive and negative, good and bad,                   have to do with all this ? Yet they do, because also the so-called ‘good’ heroes are violent, with the difference that they resort to force ‘for good’…

Sure, you can think of personalities like Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi : very different men but united by the repudiation of violence – I’m simplifying – but violence, perpetrated or suffered, there is always : if this is the perspective Manzoni is right when he writes in ‘Adelchi’ : “All that remains is to hurt or suffer it”. Violence, conflict, clash seem then unavoidable : the theme of peace comes up again; it’s difficult to think of it as if not lack of motion and enterprise, that is as ecstatic bliss.

The friend and aret critic Mario Cancelli pointed out to me that, for example, when Picasso painted ‘The peace’ he represented different characters on a lawn, and you don’t understand well how they do… Do they play ? Do they enjoy ? And about what ? They look like jerks to me… The alternative would seem then to be between destruction (war) and inertia (peace) : the bad guys would be the brawlers and the good ones are those who do nothing. However the bad guys, while staying evil, would give a jolt : if unfortunately this ‘jolt’ ends in pushing into a ravine, that opens to the question of violence as a product of impotence (on this subject I defer to the question that follows).

When I was a child, without being bad, I claim my ‘sym-pathy’ for the bad guys, for those ones who unmasked the hypocrisy of goodness : I felt, like all children, the ‘goodness’ as a ‘reaction-formation’, or that the good ones… are not good!

At the secondary school, for example, I was impressed by the biographical insight reported in my Histroy book, on Caesar Borgia : a ruthless man but whose I appreciated the brutal unveiling of religious embroideries from the balance of forces among men. Of course, I didn’t spend my childhood to worship evil heroes, but as a child I really appreciated the relationships, and I brightly remember my repulsion for the moralistic sermons.

I was looking for a solution which was not an act of violence of my ‘heroes’, I just needed to think through themselves. Giacomo Contri pointed out the solution : a peace not by mysticism, but by juridical way.

Peace infact is a product, not a landing : if we don’t think so we’ll go on to mimic the fight between good and bad ones. If war, as a matter of facts, is the only way for relationships and the peace is the absence of war… It follows that peace is absence of relationships.

But is it really so ?

While we think about it would be nice to find out what the good guys will do, once they defeated the bad ones.

Marina Bilotta – May we call ‘fascination’ this special and widespread admiration, not among youngest ? When did you realize that it was ‘fascination’, not ‘admiration’, why did you decide to drop it ?

2 One’s thinking or a fascination hobbyhorse.

Roberto Zanni – Your question open stoa distinction : mine was ‘fascination’, not ‘admiration’. Fascination dropped because it wasn’t a ‘hobbyhorse’ (ad-mirare in Latin language) : it was just a moment of my intellectual work to try to get over the question of ‘satisfaction’, whose even ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ – when it ends well – can be intermediate steps.

The problem is when ‘thinking’ does not hold, does not govern and, on the opposite, rushes into action and pushes into the ravine. Violence infact is only capable of destroying because it is rooted in impotence, whose the heroes ‘super powers’ are the back side; I say again Giacomo Contri’ statement : “Between impotence and overbearing there is a hole which has not yet been filled”.

3 Work or not.

Marina Bilotta – Narcissism, you said, doesn’t match ‘work’ : on the contrary, it would allow, while staying still, to bend the other because narcissism doesn’t need working with a partner, it’s just an original quality. “Je suis belle” is a famous and dramatic statue by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who imagines woman always repulsive towards her partner. Then, is it worth working or not ? When can we say that a child is working ?

Roberto Zanni – A healthy child always works, for him everything can be work. It is in any early psychopathology that a child stops working and begins to be a difficult child : and to think that everything was easy before…

About that, adults responsibilities are not to be forgiven : see the so-called ‘bullies’ into the schools : they are already into the narcissism, even we’ve stirred it up.

We tell to a child or a teenager when he commits vandalism that he ‘is’ a bully! Instead of sanction him we categorize him.

If ‘I am’ a bully I don’t need to work : “just the way I am!” At most he will be re-ducated : and the education often is sadism on sadism…

I looked at a banquet on the street for collecting signatures to reintroduce the hour of ‘Civic education’ in the school : wrong! Civic education is not to be taught, it applies!

Nobody charges  - then no one sanctions – but Projects are organized on lawfulness, while it is the Law itself to be disavowed infact! If I only could I would reduce the age of majority to 12 years old :  age : all criminally liable for their own actions !

5  Never-ending unsatisfaction.

Finally, the question of ‘work’ you introduce, make me think that a narcissist doesn’t know what to do with a partner : so he thinks about bending him, or her to an obedience without satisfaction. Then we can also say that a narcissist doesn’t know what do about the satisfaction itself.

A coarse but effective saying I sometimes heard is : ‘suck the nail’. That also will be the destiny of a  beauty who makes ‘the beauty’…!

I note in the margin that ‘destiny’ is an aftermath of narcissism².

                              A cura di Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – October 25, 2018

1 Tribute to ‘THINK !’ October 27-28, 2018, "Alleanza", by Giacomo B. Contri.

2 Roberto Zanni is a teacher in "Philosophy", also member of "Studium Cartello – Il lavoro psicoanalitico", and a psychoanalyst himself in Bologna.

‘Speed Book Date‘, edited by Alessandra Pagani.

Padoa - February 24, 2018 : I've told about ‘Il capitale nel XXI secolo’, by Thomas Piketty - Ed. du Seuil 2013.

"Thomas Piketty is 46, lives in Paris with his wife Julia and their three daughters. He's professor at the 'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales' and at the 'Ecole d'Economie de Paris'. With this essay he won in 2013 the Prix 'Yrjo Jahnsson' awarded by the 'European Economic Association'. 

It is a work ambitious indeed, however it is original and strict by which Piketty begins an analysis still unpublished, because it collected Balance sheets from 20 Countries in the world, with a very actual issue : what favours the speculation, leading to social inequalities and injustice, other than to capital investments ?

That made me curious, because his work pointed out an important connection between the good economics and the individual psyche, continuously tempted by a consumer pleasure, or by an immediate obtaining without any work rather than  investing one's own talents for a better profit. 

Piketty said that a speculative shifting has first of all be dealt with in any Nation, by means of a shared Culture, and in the same time he proposed a progressive taxation on capital – but the politics has not so much been aimed by Governments, because that would encourage a capital migration to Countries where instead the speculation is awarded.

I think it would be useful to be able to define the composition of the capital, as Piketty himself  does hope and his work goes on with further allied in further Countries, because when the percentage of income doesn't overcome the capital invested in productive activities, maybe a progressive taxation on the capital will not have depressing effects.“

                               Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – February 27, 2018

Any load, if you like, can move over.

Investment or debt is a ‘basic‘ of any company policy (and individual too), and fairly conveyed into Economics. Economic science, infact, since its quite recent birth, could time by time select the most profitable paths beginning from an individual thought getting to satisfaction.

 In other words, Economics became science thanks to any contribution of its best workers : a quite rare case of a cooperative with profit based on a preceeding fruitfulness, and not on scarcity. What still allows to the economic science to capitalize and, immediately after, to reinvest successfully the surplus into so different scientific fields and without unuseful dispersions. 

Freud himself collected in the last years of his very excellent both personal and professional career the promising wails of a newborn-baby science to cultivate as a whole.[1] 

 In his recent, interesting article on ‘Le Monde‘[2] Thomas Piketty, professor at ‘PSE - Paris School of Economics (o EEP - Ecole d'economie de Paris), faces the item of profitability in the difference of positions among partners which turns out to be winner, but which the Countries - European or extra European - have difficulty to acknowledge in their political decisions.

 Well supported by numerical and graphical amounts, Piketty authorizes himself to look at the ‘cost‘ which U.S.A. and Germany, though capable enough of a satisfactory index of productivity still rising them to the peak of the most developed Nations, have to correct downwards their internal wealths. 

In these Nations infact labor policy is technical more than economical, i.e. it disregards the ‘cultural‘ variables which influence any individual productivity restraining or favouring it, so that a greater number of work-hours for person is necessary to produce the same result. 

It is like saying that a person with a limited time available for himself, or herself, comes close to a mere performer though technically competent, but with a lower productivity nationwide too. 

Piketty specifically ascribes a weak economical growth to a scarce educational and cultural offer, or worse driven from outside, which ends up putting only into a political and social cost and doesn’t give rise to investments oriented, as we know, to a profit. I’ve found in what prof. Piketty exposed an interesting link with the difficulty of a normal child but crowded round by his, or her adults requests, without any time to work out his own, or her own capability to answer and consequently to work well, who risks indeed to go toward psychopathology… 

He then could think convenient to work in order to recover his own, or her own economical thought so precocious and productive which, from the fetal darkness and in that scarcity of nourishment, drove him, or her to the satisfaction of birth. 

                                                        Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – January 9, 2017

[1]S.Freud, "La questione economica del masochismo" 1924 – OSF Vol.10 B.Boringhieri

2 Thomas Piketty, "De la productivitè en France et en Allemagne", Le Monde 5 gennaio 2017, @pikettylemonde on Twitter.

3 Piketty indicates the ratio between  Gross Domestic Product and the number of total hours  worked in the Country, also referred to the number of workers employed, as a valid indicato of productivity of the Nation.

[2]