'who does not at times dream of the impossible ideal of being totally recorded?'

so asks john berger in his photo essay (with jean mohr) a fortunate man - which is, like everything horsemouth has ever read by john berger, stunning. a piece of ethnography on a doctor, (the fortunate man himself) and on his patients - the poor of the forest of dean. but it has true depth - a diagnosis of the whole culture. it sits comfortably with horsemouth's reading in we the cosmopolitans (we are all together) and with his thinking about empathy (the mental attitude that makes this possible).





one of the things that is interesting about berger and mohr's a fortunate man is the way it diagnoses a cultural deficit that results in an expressive deficit in the doctor's patients. in this it is like many late 60ies books, or the early works of john borman - it resembles a bbc documentary - horsemouth can practically smell the dampness as the voiceover buzzes in his ears. later (as it searches for an ending) it begins to worry about the process of writing and genre itself - we have biographies because 'X is the famous X' , there are few biographies of the humble because people are famous for what they did and what they did prior to that (or what was done to them) is held to explain what they did later. if they never did nothing there's nothing to explain the later absence of action (and nothing to explain).

in lucio colletti's reading of the problems of the left hegelians (from hegel to marcuse) there is something of this. hegel is taken to have a radical method that (due to historical circumstances maybe?) produced conservative conclusions - the left hegelians can now surpass him. but in doing so they supplant hegel's god/ worldspirit object and they change the realm of action of the theories to the political realm. colletti tells us however that marx does not buy it.

horsemouth also read lucio colletti's mandeville, rousseau, smith which tracks mandeville's fable of the bees: or private vices, publick benefits through rousseau's discourse on the origin of inequality, and adam smith's review and juxtaposition of them in the edinburgh review. in rousseau the desire to rise above other men, and the necessity of tricking them to do so, is the motor of development and this is a bad thing - and in mandeville also, but it is a good thing, as this development lifts up man out of abjection and want it is a publick good deriving from a private vice... and of course thence to marx 'the accumulation of capital is therefore the increase of the proletariat' .

of course when horsemouth has done with the cosmopolitans (who he finds agreeable) he has to engage with the transnationalisers of empathy.  kroker (one of them anyway) - talks about not cosmopolitanism but claustropolitanism - the peoples of the world are all together but we are fearful.