Elsewhere and Nowhere: Alibi and Utopia

Such is the strategic logic of the commodity which makes [use value] a satellite of and an alibi for [exchange value]. -- Jean Baudrillard, The Political Economy of the Sign.

As court and council gathered in the robing room after an acquittal... the judge said to the successful lawyer, "That was the most convincing alibi that I have ever had proved before me." 

"Thank you, sir", replied the lawyer. "it is particularly gratifying to hear you say that. I value your judgment most highly and I am pleased to find that in this case it coincides with mine. I chose that alibi as the best of three that the defendant had." -- "No Alibi," ABA Journal, March 1951.

...alongside the eighteenth-century emergence of the realistic, but fictional, narrative form later called the novel, the word alibi also entered into ordinary English discourse. Technically the legal plea of 'elsewhere,' culturally speaking, an alibi indicated the mounting of a realistic story narrated in a law court. (This initial, specific sense of alibi as a story told in court contrasts with its use since the beginning of the twentieth century, when it began also to refer to a story that keeps one out of court or to any form of excuse tale.) -- Jonathan Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel.

If the elasticity of substitution is not constant, what is crucial is what happens to the elasticity asymptotically as resource input goes to zero. In these cases the produced input is sufficiently substitutable for the natural resource that the decrease in supply of the natural resource can be compensated for by an increased supply of capital. Of the two cases, the Cobb-Douglas case is clearly the most interesting for there natural resources are essential in the sense that some input of the natural resource is required for production (the isoquants never do hit the axes). But a small input of natural resource can be compensated for by a sufficiently large input of capital, and whether that is feasible for the economy depends simply on the relative shares of the two. -- Joseph Stiglitz, "Neoclassical Analysis of Resource Economics." 

"...this is not the only force driving men to thievery. There is another that, as I see it, applies more specially to you Englishmen." 

"What is that?" said the Cardinal. 

"Your sheep", I said, "that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, as I hear, they have become so greedy and fierce that they devour human beings themselves. They devastate and depopulate fields, houses and towns. For in whatever parts of the land sheep yield the finest and thus the most expensive wool, there the nobility and gentry, yes, and even a good many abbots -- holy men -- are not content with the old rents that the land yielded to their predecessors. Living in idleness and luxury without doing society any good no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive harm." -- Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Book 1.

An escapist fiction, Book 2 allows the negotiator of wool contracts an alibi for being "elsewhere" just as it affords England the luxury of being purified as myth. As Richard Marius points out in his biography of More, there was a distinct need for the writer of Utopia to have available just such an alibi, so much are the circumstances of Utopia's composition at odds with its idealistic pretensions:

It has usually gone unnoticed that More's embassy on which he began writing Utopia was intended to increase commerce, especially in wool, and that while he penned these immortal lines, he was working hard to add to the wealth of those classes in English society whom Raphael castigates for their heartless greed.

At this stage in the composition of Utopia, the hedging off of the island from historical contingencies reflects More's own personal situation. -- John Freeman, "Discourse in More's Utopia: Alibi/Pretext/Postscript"

Another offender of this class [of overworked words] is "alibi." Alibi is a legal term, meaning a plea on the part of the accused that he was somewhere else when the alleged act was committed.. I imagine that somebody came out of a court house one day after hearing this term used, and since it was new to him, and he fancied the sound of it, he began making use of it himself in a pedantic sort of way whenever opportunity offered. Finally his friends and admirers took it up, and now eight people out of ten think it quite the thing to do, when denying any sort of innocent accusation, to say, "I can prove an alibi." But a mere denial is not an alibi. -- M. V. P. Yeaman, "Speech Degeneracy."

In a legal context to be elsewhere necessitates the supporting details and corroboration provided by a narrative account of being elsewhere. Here—reversing the cliché—it is deeds without words that are empty. Alibi is thus especially well suited for narrative, for there is always a story or relevant sequence of events that depicts being elsewhere. 

…narrative alibis draw on the special significance of an absence. Beyond the legal context, an alibi is thus something we can give whenever we are called to account for ourselves. When we speak of whether someone "has" an alibi or not, we implicitly allude to the importance that having a story, being able to tell the story of oneself, holds for modern identity (even if it is the possession of a kind of absence). 

An alibi is an unusual form of narrative precisely because it is generated by absence, and thus alibi is a small, well-defined instance of the philosophical concept of negativity. Though a negative concept, an alibi does real work; it functions in a system of legally binding processes and confers a status upon those who employ it rhetorically. An alibi is a speech act rendering the real act, the crime, impossible, at least for the accused. The narrative opposite of a confession, it exculpates rather than implicates. An alibi is an account of not being there. So, an alibi is a kind of anticonfessional narrative. -- Justin Weir, Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative.

Anatomically homologous to the two largest bones found in the human finger, the pastern was famously mis-defined by Samuel Johnson in his dictionary as "the knee of a horse". When a lady asked Johnson how he came to do so, he gave the much-quoted reply: "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance." -- Wikipedia, "Pastern."