Everything that rises gets flushed down the toilet: Hondurus in the news

 It would be interesting and very depressing to trace the road to the pardon of Honduran ex-president Hernández back and back into the wilds of American foreign policy vis-a-vis Hondurus. Back to that time the Obama administration, with Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State, decided that the democratically elected president, Mel Zelaya., was way too lefty and dangerous. The U.S. did not plot the coup in which Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and put on a plane out of the country (unless secret docs emerge confirming the negative), but by Clinton's own account, she worked in the post coup situation to render the "question of Zelaya" moot.

When you help render a country helpless before its most ruthless and vile people - as the U.S. has done time after time in the Caribbean and Central America and Latin America - people will flee.

And where do they flee? Well, in the American sphere, they flee North.

After the coup, with the Military in charge and the Honduran murder rate doubling - from the highest in the world already - thousands of Honduran children came illegally to the U.S.

"In 2014 Clinton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “It may be safer [for the children to remain in the U.S.],” but “they should be sent back.”

"During the Feb. 11 Democratic debate in Milwaukee, Clinton said that sending the children back would “send a message.” In answer to a question by debate moderator Judy Woodruff of PBS, she said, “Those children needed to be processed appropriately, but we also had to send a message to families and communities in Central America not to send their children on this dangerous journey in the hands of smugglers.”

Sanders retorted, “Who are you sending a message to? These are children who are leaving countries and neighborhoods where their lives are at stake. That was the fact. I don’t think we use them to send a message. I think we welcome them into this country and do the best we can to help them get their lives together.”

Well, we know who lost that debate - Sanders. And a decade later, Trump pardoning one of the products of the rightwing coup, the drug dealing ex-Honduran president, helps locate precisely the problem - created by American foreign policy under a far right dictate since 1959, when Castro overthrew Batista.

the mafia bourgeoisie

 In the late 19th century, the nascent science of criminology had settled on two principles. One was that criminals, by definition, were degenerates – people from the margins with inherited vices. The other principle was that civil society was upheld by the bourgeois virtues. If you have degenerates, you must have a norm. The bourgeoisie was it. What Max Weber would later call the protestant ethic was theorized, by the classic liberal, as the material product of capitalism. Honesty, hard work, savings, were not simply norms, but functioned as the basis for a market-based economy.

This set of ideas were in the minds of the two young Italian sociologists who went out from Northern Italy, in 1876, to visit Southern Italy. Specifically Sicily, Italy’s “orient”. There was already a genre of stories about Sicily’s crimeridden society. The word mafia began to be used. And surely this was a form of banditism that had escaped from a neo-feudal society – a revolt by those below. The peasants.

The sociologists – Leopardo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino – have been aptly compared to Tocqueville and Beaumont by the French writer Jacques de Saint Victor in his study of “mafias” and democratic society. Sonnino is the lesser known of the duo – although he did go on to become president of Italy. Franchetti’s career, for a long time, was associated with his attempts to organize the colonization of Eritrea. But his part of the book they wrote - Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia – came into notice in the late 1980s, when Falcone, the judge who was at the center of the maxi-trials of the Mafia in 1986 and 1987, told people that Franchetti understood the mafia much better than anyone else since.

Franchetti came to a realization in Sicily that inverted the assumptions of classical liberalism. The role of the bourgeoisie in civil society, it turned out, was not integral to the formation of the bourgeoisie. In Sicily, the mafia, far from being a symptom of the revolt of the peasantry, was a tool of the Sicilian bourgeoisie. The had a thoroughly utilitarian attitude towards violence. The “industrialization of violence” and the systematic violation of civil society norms was upheld not by the degenerates and the marginals, but by those at the center, the richest and most powerful. And those richest and most powerful were not isolated – instead, they were plugged in to the system of worldwide trade in the most advanced and exemplary fashion.

In an article in Droit (2019), Saint Victor condensed his conclusions, a la Franchetti, about the “dark face” of globalization.

Since the end of the 1990s, and especially since the crisis of 2008, laws have followed laws that attempt to trace dirty money from all the trafficing (drugs, arms, human beings, etc.) and the most powerful mafias have seemed to prefer « licit affairs » (BTP, the health system, the ecological sector etc.) at least on paper (mafia pulita)… The historian of the Camorra, Francesco Barbagallo, has stated that the mafia question is passing into the stage where it becomes « an essential part of the history of power» ; and it is under this title that it should retain the attention of legal historians. In a recent essay, the general commissioner Jean-François Gayraud, a specialist of financial crime, confirmed that evolution, noting that organized crime can no longer be analyzed in terms of social marginality, but as a central element of the black facet of globalisation, with the sociology of contemporary elites being found to be amply transformed. We see, in France as elsewhere, the establishment of real bourgeois criminality. Thus, from this meeting of scrupulous elites and mafias becoming normalized, there appears, little by little, the new figure of the ambiguous actor of globalization, which Italian criminologist call the « mafia-esque bourgeoisie ».

Myself, I think one of the side effects – of, from a sociological perspective, the main effect – of the release of Epstein materials is to clarify the extent and temper of the mafia-esque bourgeoisie. We’ve all been spectators of the open corruption of the Trump regime. We were all spectators, under Biden, of the open corruption of the system of justice, which held back from what would formerly be judicially organized investigations and prosecutions, notably of Trump and of the Supreme Court Justices found taking bribes. Biden’s clan-like pardons that ended his regime were of a piece with what went before. And of course this built on the refusal, under Obama, to prosecute torturers, banksters, and in the massive system of mortgage fraud. It is not surprising that the same engineers of impunity under Obama were very much friends of Jeffrey Epstein. That friendliness and its tone, in email after email, shows how the culture of the criminal bourgeoisie regards itself. Gone, gone is the Protestant ethic – except for the hard work part. That hard work, however, is in service to the dark side of Globalisation. Work and perks – a recipe that is far from the formulas of Horatio Alger or the various business self help books that still find a massive readership.

The seven habits of highly corrupt people. This is where we are.

all that is old is new again: on Guy Davenport's The symbol of the archaic

 

One of the great essays in my life is Guy Davenport’s The Symbol of the Archaic, which appeared in the Georgia Review in 1974. I’m not sure when I read it – perhaps back in my high school days.

Essays are not given enough credit. We think of them as lesser creatures, where the great beasts are poems and novels. Myself, I grant the utility of these categories without taking them too seriously. Although The Symbol of the Archaic is not one of Pound’s Cantos, it definitely takes from the Cantos the traveling technique, that of a movie camera thrust among personal and cultural bric-a-brac, whose speed – the movie camera’s – is adjusted to a personal sensibility recognizing in the very instant of demonstration the connections that may or may not be in operation in some real history, some real slice of multitudinous life. And isn’t this what we all dream of?

The content of Davenport’s essay, a theme to which he returns again and again, is the overlap of the modern (which encompasses a certain 18^th century and goes right up to the non-sequitorial magisterial which came out of Olson’s typewriter at the end of his life) and the archaic, that which is lost in deep time. The inscrutable rubbish and signs left by paleolithic hominids.

This is how Davenport begins:

"Four years ago there was discovered near Sarlat in the Dordogne the rib of an ox on which some hunter had engraved with a flint burin seventy lines depicting we know not what: some god, some animal schematically drawn, a map, the turning of the seasons, the mensurations of the moon."

The ox rib and its inscrutable scribble helps Davenport move on to the whole ephemeral nature of civilization (and, indeed, the ephemeral nature of its discontents), and the way the poets have taken it up, and the impossible nostalgia for what was lost. Davenport was, politically, a standard American liberal, but culturally, he was a conservative of the Hugh Kenner variety.  Thus, the wrecks of what was lost imply the wreckers, and we among them. It is a strain of political impossibilism hymned by John Ruskin in the great proto-Canto, Fors Clavigera, and it leads to a certain melancholy which is ultimately foreign to the American writer, who are the spawn of discovery – that adventurer’s justification, eventually, for every bushwacking and seizure.

Modernism, when Davenport wrote this essay, was still exciting. For me, an awkward sixteen year old in Clarkston, Georgia, modernism looked like a way out of suburban flatheadedness. I little knew that it had given up the ghost to – whatever eclectic thing we have had since. I am rather happy that, at the moment in all the arts, there is a return to modernism – from the margins, from the black dada of Adam Pendleton.

I think Davenport captures something that was silently programmatic in modernism, which was its invention of the pre-historic, the archaic:

“If we say, as we can, that the archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century, we mean that as the first European renaissance  looked back to Hellenistic Rome for a range of models and symbols, the twentieth century has looked back to a deeper past in which it has imagined it sees the very beginnings of tion. The Laocoon was Michaelangelo's touchstone; the red-stone kourus from Sounion was Picasso’s.”

Here – as I was dreaming up this little essayistic ditty – I want to jump to a little remarked, but remarkable, piece of reportage by the Communist Egon Erwin Kisch that is included in his Gesammelte Werke 5: Das Kriminalkabinett von Lyon (The criminological cabinet of curiosities in Lyon). Which contains, surprisingly enough, a superposition of the archaic (stones with markings, rather like those of the ox-bone) and the most modern (fingerprints). And which I think is just a beautiful essay. Yesterday I put up an image from that piece. It shows a burglar with a jimmy in one hand and a revolver in the other. The burglar, through some complicated heist slapstick, fell into a pile of sand, leaving this impression, which was latter captured by pouring plaster of paris in the indentation in the sand, which was later used in the court case against the burglar.

But I think I’ll do  this later.

Cheney's death march

 Fred Licht begins his essay on Goya’s Charles IV and his Family with this exemplary paragraph:

“Ever since Theophile Gautier described Goya's Charles IV and His Family (Fig. 1) as "the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery," scholars, amateurs, and casual visitors to the Prado have asked themselves how it was possible for Goya's royal patrons to accept so degrading a portrait.1 Even if one takes into consideration the fact that Spanish portraiture is often realistic to the point of eccentricity, Goya's portrait still remains unique in its drastic description of human bankruptcy.”

I was reminded of Goya by the photograph of the bipartisan ghouls sitting in attendance at Cheney’s funeral. From Bush to Biden to Pence, it was a panorama of the essential, sublime silliness of the American empire as it flops, all of them mourning the man who helped blow a hole in the ship of state and has left us all worse off than we would ever have been if he had not been born – and how often can you say that about someone?

Truly, Dick Cheney was a ghoul who would have satisfied Goya’s painterly criteria: the obliterating self-satisfaction of his face, the faux-studliness of his attitude, even the habit of hunting (which he did famously badly, injuring a man in his hunting party and infamously extracting an apology for the injury from the injured party) - which surely would have reminded Goya of the string of unfit Bourbon hunters. Yet the photograph was not of Cheney, whose image I can, unfortunately, conjure up from the dark 00s. It was a portrait of an incompetent and murderous political and corporate elite, whose faces are set in what I suppose they suppose is a solemn look, fit for a patriotic occasion. These people are, in truth, the undertakers of patriotic occasions, in as much as patriotism is some kind of reverence for republican virtu – not a single player here has a drop of it. Like a batting average to a baseball player, one feels the casualty average should hover over these geriatric heads. Behold Biden, a man who helped bury under the rubble of Gaza at least 10,000 or more children! Behold Bush, the glad recipient of many a torture memo, an incompetent whose epitaph should be the words he uttered to the men from the CIA who came to warn him, in August 2001, of the upcoming terrorist act: “"All right. You've covered your ass" And is that our lady of losses, Katherine Harris, next to Biden? And Pence? Lusterless eminences, the Rosencranz and Guildenstern of the neo-fascist farce we are currently seeing enacted.

Death has a way of concentrating our minds, and this death – the death of a deadly and toxic figure – should remind us that the U.S. elite is a numbskull-ridden horror comedy, But at least they are bipartisanly turning out for the man who once claimed to be, as Vice President, neither executive nor legislative, but in his own branch of government, untouchable. The claim which serves as the root for the current Trump interregnum.

Denunciation cannot wither what nature and our social order has withered already, but I don’t denounce because it will do any good to others – it is just that if you don’t spit the poison out of your mouth, if you swallow it, you will find yourself swimming among cancers sooner or later.

As Goya knew well, the master of the secret sketchpad, the painter of those black paintings in his final atelier outside of Bordeaux.

In the Golden Egg: Letter from Lord Chandos

 1. Hugo Hofmannsthal published The Letter (which is almost always translated into English as The Letter from Lord Chandos) in 1903. In turn of the century Vienna, Hofmannsthal, as a young lyric poet, had become the object of a more numerous and public cult than the one (more famous now) surrounding Stefan Georg. And, unlike Georg or Rilke, he was politically and religiously orthodox – a good Catholic, a supporter of the Habsburg order. Herman Broch, in his essay on Hofmannsthal, says that “on the triad of life, dream and death rests the symphonic structure of Hofmannsthal’s complete opus” – which should remind us of Klimt, and the whole Jugendstyl aesthetic of fin de siecle Vienna. It is a mistake to assume that these aesthetes, with their intense interest in hedonism, were somehow opposed to the sexual ‘repression’ of bourgeois Habsburg society, since, in fact, the latter never operated as a machine for repression. And so it was with Hofmannsthal – as his enemy Kraus liked to observe, he was certainly a man of the status quo.

However, he was also certainly a language man. Hofmannsthal seemed preternaturally gifted with phrases in his early poetry.

This is why the Letter created quite a shock.

The Letter is presented as a reply to a letter written by Francis Bacon to Philip Lord Chandos. Bacon is concerned that Philip Lord Chandos, a promising young maker of poems and masques, had fallen silent. Lord Chandos writes that such have been the changes he has undergone that “he hardly knows if I am the same person to whom you have directed your precious letter”. He goes on to ask if he was the same person as the twenty three year old who, in Venice, under the stony boughs of the grand piazza, lived half in a dream of the books to come – for instance, sketches of the realm of Henry the Eighth, or a mythography of the ancient myths, or a collection of apothegmata as Julius Caesar would have written them, a sort of jumble of dialogues, curious knowledge and sayings not unlike Bacon’s own Natural History or New Organon.

“To be brief: all of being appeared as one great unity to me, who existed in a sort of continuous intoxication: the mental and physical world seemed to image no opposites to me, just as little as the world of court and the world of animals, art and un-art, loneliness and society; in all I felt Nature, in the confusions of madness as much as in the extremest refinements of a Spanish ceremonial, in the boorishness of a young peasant not less than in the sweetest allegory; and in all nature I felt myself; when I in my hunting cap absorbed the foaming, warm milk that an unkept person milked out of a beautiful, soft eyed cow’s udder into a wooden bucket, it was the same to me as I was sitting in the built in window cove of my studio, sucking out of folios the sweet and foaming nurture of the mind. The one was as the other; one did not yield to the other, neither in terms of dreamy, super-earthly nature nor in physical force, and so it continued through the whole breadth of life, right hand, left hand. Everywhere I was in the middle, never was I conscious of a mere semblance. Or it seemed to me that everything was an allegory and every creature a key to another, and I felt myself to be the man who was able to seize their heads one after the other and unlock with them as much of the other as could be unlocked.”

Well, now, - if you have been a philosophy student or a lyric poet and not had this feeling, than you are highly in need of an ego. Having a full sense of what you possess when you are young gives you these buttery, milky moments of feeling, as though the crosspatch world has been waiting those dark dark eons just to encounter the revelatory moment of the tearing of the seals which has happened in your head. You are the angel of the Lord. Or you are Krishna, a god man who was pretty conversant, himself, with the ways of milkmaids. At least, so it was with me at twenty one, a fuckin’ mooncalf if there ever was one, but a common enough exhibit of the syndromes of the hyperborean consciousness. Lord Chandos is a recognizable type, the child of the century – his avatars are in Balzac, in Lermontov, in Tolstoy. The modernist moment is marked by the struggle to be impersonal – to deliver oneself from the milky moment – and that struggle requires some terrible sacrifices of ego for an uncertain outcome. One outcome is the Flaubertian artist. Another outcome is… well, as it is described in the Letter.

2. All eggs – Prajapati’s, Humpty Dumpty’s – crack. Far from being the kind of thing all the king’s horses and all the king’s men should deplore, cracking is the perfection of the egg, its designed endpoint.

The milkfed days of Philip Lord Chandos , were apparently – or so his account would make us believe – appointed to lead him from glorious estate to glorious estate as he became a grandee of great learning. And thus he’d put one foot and then the other out of the egg.

But it is a fact that some eggs fail. And it is a fact that promising minds are easily culled and spoiled, that entrance into real life is entrance into a bureaucratic labyrinth in which the many branches are all equally tedious, that energy is delight only as long as the divide between promise and attainment seems eminently surmountable. Hands, necks, cheeks wither. The great work, the grand instauration, the New Atlantis becomes a great mill, to which one finds oneself chained, one day, much like any other slave.
Or… perhaps in a horrible moment, all mental energies collapse, and the egg dies within.
“But, my honorable friend, even earthly concepts escape me in the same manner. How am I supposed to try to describe these rare mental pains to you, this elevation of the fruited branch above my outstretched hand, this retraction of the murmuring water before my thirsty lips?
In brief, my case is like this: the ability to think or speak consecutively over an object, something, has been completely lost to me.”

3. Who among us does not know these imbecile gaps? Brain farts, tongue ties, the cat not only getting your tongue but gobbling it up before your horrified eyes? I used to be a ready speaker in my twenties and thirties, always prompt to take out my mental case of knives, so to speak, and throw them at the target, thwack thwack thwack. I can still tap mechanically into the old flow, but how easily the references, the memories, the names will suddenly fly out of my head at unbidden moments! The cool web of language, as Robert Graves has it, tears (the homunculus spider in my head weaving, over the seemingly endless time I’ve been alive, its complex, dreadfully dusty webs). Forgetting a word, in my salad days, was not my constant sidekick, but a stutter in the machine, and I had merely to knock it once to put it all on track. Ah, blind habit, friend of human kind! Now, of course, it is a regular event that the web is torn, and I’ll be caught in the midst of my babble. I’ll have that magic, frightening aphasic moment, when the name-world become unfamiliar. A spell in reverse, you might say.
In the aphasic moment, what spreads out irresistibly is an existential embarrassment. If memory does anything, it keeps us steady on this earth. It might even give us, if the mystics are right, eternity in a grain of sand, properly remembered. The Letter from Lord Chandos is one of the few texts that touch on this inversely spelled moment. And the need to keep running in spite of the phasic drip. The need to keep the diligent, unsteady spider weaving. It is as if at the center of the whole project was some covered up glitch. I can taste the poisonous, acrid flavour of this moment on my tongue.
Although I’m not going to exaggerate – this isn’t the kind of thing that makes you slit your wrist with a butter knife in the intervals. It is the kind of thing you don’t talk about with anyone. So why not launch it out there on the Internet and watch it float?

Nemesis precedes Justicia: the impunity point in the American 21st century

One of the reasons, I think, that the Epstein affair has sort of haunted the American 21st century is that it is emblematic of the rise of impunity for the rich and the powerful. The rich and the powerful always possess a certain large impunity – this is one of the great incentives to wealth. Popular wisdom has long known this, but it is undiscussed in our schools and colleges and magazines in general. It would stick out, a bit. I got rich so I could do criminal shit -why, say it aint so, great entrepreneur!  

Our legal system, for instance, is built on two conflicting principles, one of which is egality before the law, the other of which is a very strong hierarchy of lawyers, organized by marketplace principles, which makes egality before the law a joke. One man kills his neighbor and cuts off his head and is put in jail and even executed; another man, possessor of a fortune running into the hundreds of millions, kills his neighbor, cuts off his head, is arrested and escapes and flees and is recaptured, and he simply purchases lawpower and gets off scot-free – I’m of course referring to the case of Robert Durst.

The tug between the punishability of all citizens and the impunity of the top few is a theme in all republics. I would venture that there is something like an impunity point beyond which the republic loses its form of stability – its traditional organizations and support structures. That beyond-punishment space opens up real possibilities. We have always, in the American republic, lived with a certain impunity space, but when it broadens, things get very tricky. For the last twenty-five years, I think, elites have enjoyed a very strong moment of impunity, of which we have all seen the evidences. The whole bearing of the court system as well as the executive and legislative branches have been to grant this space to an array of activities (which is given the anodyne name of “de-regulation” in political economics), highlighted by the array of increasingly severe punishment for an array of activities among those who cannot afford great or even moderately good lawyers. I’d say that there is a reason that the macro-effect of this is greatest on the African-American population, which is uniquely rare among the elites – in contrast to women, or gays, etc. In the latter cases, it is all about breaking the glass ceiling – moving up in the elite cohort from a position in that cohort. In the case of those who are in the area outside the elite cohort, it is all a matter of the Great Jailing.

The impunity point was reached well before the Biden presidency, but in many ways it is an exemplar of gateway behavior. The deregulation of the economy achieved, during the Biden presidency, an absurd structure – the wealth of the wealthiest, measured mainly by financial instruments, went well past the level of ancien regime aristocracy. At the same time, the impunity of the political class, in the exemplary instance of Donald Trump, was paraded before us as, absurdly, a sort of pragmatism. The country club penitentiary combined with the Mar a Lago bathroom to show everyone that nothing, in the Republic, was serious anymore. No law was really non-negotiable for the elites, and no law was too onerous for the non-elite citizen – especially in the subset Republic created by private credit agencies and private equity firms.

This all sounds doomscrollingish, but I feel anything but. That the system is bursting in all directions could mean that we are transforming into an authoritarian gumball. But it could mean what it means – that the time is up on this state of impunity. That we’ve come to the point of the ultimate game, in which people will actually sacrifice largely in order to punish those they feel who have acted unfairly. Liberalism was, also, born out of revolt. Nemesis precedes Justicia. Amen.

Secrets - the movie

1.

 

Childhood – middle class childhood – is, among other things, an education in secrets. Secret making and breaking. A paper by Yves de la Taille on the development of  “the right to a secret” among children cites researchers in the Piagetian school claiming that children develop a conception of secrecy around four years of age. I wonder if that has changed as we’ve plugged our kids into youtube and other internety business. I vaguely remember an Oswald the Octopus episode about a secret, which amused Adam in his toddler days.

I don’t think the secret begins as a peer to peer, sibling to sibling or playmate to playmate toy. Parents take great pleasure in making secrets part of kidlife. What would a present be if it isn’t wrapped – if it isn’t the subject of hints – if it isn’t hidden, after it is bought, in the parental closet or workroom? The present needs to be presented in the wrapping because the wrapping is the charisma of the gift. You tear it off, and you guessed right or wrong.

Gifts and guessing, that long bourgeois couple. It will outlast the love marriage.

2.

Secrets and secret societies play an abnormally large role in Georg Simmel’s theory of socialization. Consciousness itself is under the law of the secret. Self-consciousness is not only consciousness that I think, it is consciousness that you don’t know what I think. The cogito comes out as a sly devil, a hider. Epistemology must first deal with secrets and their breaking before we get to the other stuff. I know what I think as I talk to some Other, even while I am talking, and the Other can project this on me since the Other does the same thing. I can, of course, say what I think, but the phrase, “can I be frank,” or “can I tell you what I think” derives its affective sense from the fact that I don’t always, and in fact almost never, tell you what I think entirely. I edit for you. And thank God you edit for me. I’m uniquely equipped to do this, beyond the lie detector’s reach – which of course depends on physiological signs, and doesn’t really measure what’s held back – because I know my secret self. Which is my self, the one I take to the toilet, the shower, the bed. The intimacy here is, formally, a secret, and it is within that secret that all the variables of memory and sense hide. This secret distinguishes me from the Other, and the Other has its secret, and we exist as secret sharers side by side, or in traffic, or as fan to celebrity, lover to love, aging parent to child. We live in secret and we die that way. Here, it really is a matter of until death do you part. Or as Simmel puts it, this is the “deeply grounded circle of mental life.

Yet, such is the power and attraction of exposing oneself that it is a rare individual who goes about making a mystery of himself. The escaped convict, the confidence man, the revolutionary, the knight of faith – all do trail mysteries, but all are out of the mainstream. When Simmel published his Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, the mystery man in literature was in fashion. Hamsun wrote Hunger in 1890 and Mysteries in 1892, which had a tremendous influence on German literature, at least. Dostoevski’s The Possessed, published as Die Dämonen, was published in German translation in 1906. Les Caves du Vatican, Gide’s novel with its scene of the l’acte gratuity – Lafcadio’s murder of his seatmate on the train – was an act that was a mystery even to its perpetrator.

In this atmosphere – the nervous crisis of the European intellectual – putting the secret and the secret sharer as a whole chapter of the large book on sociology made sense. For Simmel, the internal secrecy of the consciousness was anything but a logical choice – it was a choice forced upon the subject by natural history. The secret (which is and is not the unconscious) is distinct as a form from the logic and reason that may advantage a person who wants to keep a secret. Simmel, living before the wireless, compares what happens in the mind of the socialized subject to a treebranch that is entangled in a telegraph wire, causing it to send out messages every time the wind blows. It “leaves signs that give us a reasonable sense” – but that are ultimately caused by something other than the sense. “If one looks at ideas as they continually flow in a time series through our consciousness, this flickering, zigzagging collision of images and ideas … is far distant from reasonable normativity.”

We are idiots babe. It’s a wonder that we still know how to breathe. Which is the expressionist message.

3.

 

In one of his essays, Louis Marin speaks of a certain book of traps, written by a 16th century Venetian. What an evocative title that is! Traps, spies and secrets have always fascinated me.

The secret itself – which tends fatally to the scenario of the trap - has not, for some reason, been a large topic in philosophy since Simmel,  even though it is certainly a conceptually involuted trope. It has been replaced, I think, with the problem of the unconscious.

My approach to the secret takes it that there are two broad secret types. First order secrets are those in which the content of the secret is secret, while the form (that is, that there is a secret there) is not; this is the usual type that is treated in the literature, both fictional and factual. We have, for instance, an intelligence agency and we know that it has put under lock and key documents about X. In this case, we know that X is secret. It is our minimal knowledge, but it is in itself non-secret knowledge. As well, our knowledge that the secret is being kept is public knowledge.

Sometimes, an institution will insert an ambiguity in that knowledge by saying that they can neither confirm or deny X. This is a step towards the second order secret. These are secret in which both the content and the form are secret.

For instance, you have a friend who, it turns out, is a murderer. The secret here is both that he is a murderer and that you never suspected he had a secret. I’ve often thought that if, somewhere, there really was a man who shot at Kennedy from the grassy knoll, and he kept that a secret all his life, it would form an interesting novelistic problem. How would you portray that secret keeping as the interesting novelistic theme without violating the secret – that is, approaching the life with an unsourced knowledge that the man had this secret? This would be possible only if something after the man died indicated that this man was the shooter on the grassy knoll. But if you told the tale from this “leak” of information, you would be starting out from a desublimated place; and the whole sublimity of the story is the fact that such a non-secret murder was effected by a man who kept it secret his entire life.

Secrets have a sublimity. A paranoid sublimity.  To keep it secret that you have a secret is to be an agent within a paranoid narrative.

The rough division of secrets does not really give us the essence of secrets, but it is a start.

I once dreamed of a novel in which this second order of secrecy forms the core. Unfortunately, to tell the tale is to violate the core.

You might think this is a trivial distinction, but actually, it is the distinction that informs the relationship between secrecy and political power. We know, for instance, that the CIA holds back information from American citizens - we know that they have secrets. The peculiar status of the CIA depends on our knowing that they know what we dont know in much the same way that the Minister D., in the Purloined Letter, holds sway over the Queen because she knows that he possesses a letter that she doesn’t  want the king to know about. The queen’s secret, then, is a second order secret, while D’s is a first order secret. Second order secrets are often such as to make their possessor vulnerable, while first order secrets are often of the type to make their possessor powerful. This generalization obviously has some very important exceptions, but when it comes, at least, to Intelligence agencies in the U.S., it holds true.

In fact I once dreamed of writing a little spy novel- the notes for which are in some box or other in somebody’s closet- in which the premise was that the real US Intelligence agency was the asphalt testing division of the US Department of Highways and Transportation, while the CIA and the NSA were shells. That was a sort of joke. It is funny because, of course, we think of the CIA, etc., as powerful, and even romantic, because we know they operate in secret, whereas asphalt testing has no James Bond-ian resonance. The charisma of the wrapper is on one, but not on the other.

Parents little think of what they are teaching their child with that first wrapped present.