On Boyle

 

Among the scholars who are doing the history of science outside of the Whiggish framework - the latter referring, of course, to Herbert Butterworth’s famous phase about the framework that sees the history of science as essentially a progress - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s The Leviathan and the Air Pump is one of the most cited texts. It focuses on the New Learning in 17th century England, which was in many ways an extension of the Baconian experimental impulse. Robert Boyle was not only the premier experimenter, but, more than Bacon, the natural philosopher who set the rules for experimentation.

One of Shapin and Schaffer’s ideas is that the experimental method, depending on witnesses for its veracity, evolves a prose style of witness. Shapin and Schaffer point to Thomas Sprat’s injunctions about the proper mode of representation in his history of the Royal Society – which was, in effect, also a polemic on behalf of the society. Sprat enumerates the inveterate injury done by rhetorical ornament, which was at first the “admirable instruments in the hands of Wise Men” but now have turned disgusting – “They make the Fancy disgust the best things, if they come sound and unadorn’d; they are in open defiance against Reason, professing not to hold much correspondence with that, but with its Slaves, the Passions; they give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching to consist with right practice.” In fact, as Sprat enumerates the faults of the ornate style, he himself falls into a Passion – “For now I am warmed with this just Anger” – but, apparently, this Slave is true to reason, rather than its betrayer. And although Sprat sees the ornaments of rhetoric as being almost beyond reform, he does make a very Protestant recommendation: “They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before that of Wits or Scholars.” [Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, II,117-118]

Shapin has written a biographical sketch of Boyle that picks at what he was like as a person – and how one would, at this distance, ever find out the facts of what William James might call acquaintance.

Acquaintance is, of course, the very nub of witness.

Born of a rich, rapacious pioneer of the land grab game in Ireland, an ennobled Elizabethan nabob who at one point might have been the richest man in the Kingdom, Boyle’s father despised Ireland – which was the source of his wealth – yet had his children taught Gaelic. Boyle himself certainly retained in his own voice the Irish English intonation, one that his tutors at Eton never could extinguish. More than that, Boyle he was a stutterer. According to his own account, Boyle picked up the stuttering habit when he was a boy from mocking the speech of others. Shapin imagines this might be Boyle mocking the Irish English of others.

While his elder brother was one of the great rakes at Charles II’s court, Boyle was an Anglican of a species now long extinct – an enthusiastic Anglican. Recent work on Boyle has emphasized this aspect of his intellectual character. While maintaining a corpuscular philosophy and advocating for the experimental method, Boyle wrapped these concerns in a general world view that allowed him to attack both Catholics and atheists for a wrongheaded view of God – both, in his opinion, being all too eager to pull God into his creation, and thus fumbling the very root of divinity: God’s exteriority to the world. It is that exteriority that allows God to be a supreme chooser – he can chose the way the world will be because he is not caught within it.

Boyle was an Anglican and directed his Free Enquiry, as well as his other philosophical and theological treatises, against both the Catholics and the ‘atheists” – the latter comprehending all who would make God immanent in nature, instead of standing outside it. But his brothers, as Shapin points out, were notorious Restoration rakes – the very type to be attracted to the libertine philosophy.

While the language of natural philosophy, for Sprat, is going to cast off the Wit’s devious metaphors and the disgusting fancies of the scholar in order to embrace the language of the artisan, Boyle, who was more noble than Merchant, had his own problems with taking the language of the vulgar for the instrument of the wisdom. For where, after all, are the vulgar getting their notions? Are they educated witnesses? Is there any way to escape ambiguity – which is, in its way, as disgusting as metaphor, insofar as it is not the plain way to truth:

“I have often look’d upon it as an unhappy thing, and prejudicial both to philosophy and physic, that the word nature hath been so frequently, and yet so unskillfully employ’d, by all sorts of men. For the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use made of it, without sufficiently attending to its different significations, render many of the expressions wherein ‘tis employed, either unintelligible, improper or false. I, therefore, heartily wish, that philosophers,m and other leading me, would, by common consent, introduce some more significant, and less ambiguous terms and expressions, in the room of the licentious word nature; and the forms of speech that depend on it: or at least decline the use of it, as much as conveniently they can…”

Boyle’s observations are of course still current. The weight of the false opposition between the “organic” and the “chemical” moves both the vulgar and the high income crunchy folks. Whenever I encounter this weird notion, I like to point out that the organic is as chemical as the synthetic. I win so many friends this way!

Boyle does a rather wonderful thing about the word “nature”, which makes him the founder, as it were, of the linguistic turn in philosophy – for he gives 8 rules for avoiding the word: 1. Use the word God for natura naturans; 2. use the word essence, or quiddity (tho a barbarous term); 3 “If what is meant by the word nature” is what ‘belongs to a living creature at its nativity” – say, “the animal is born so” – or say that a thing has been generated such. 4. for internal motion – say that the body moves spontaneously; 5. use – “the settled course of things”; 6 for the “aggregate of powers belonging to a body” use constitution, temper, mechanism or complex of the essential properties or qualities; 7. when used for universe, use the word world, or universe; and 8. “If, instead of using the word nature, taken for either a goddess, or a kind of semi-deity; we wholly reject, or very seldom employ it.”

This is a text worth going back to.

ON FREE LUNCHES

 

I am  culling  this from  page 2 of Greg Mankiw’s popular Essentials of Economics – used by hundreds of Econ 101 classes, tucked under the arms of thousands of students, who paid a hefty price for it:

You may have heard the old saying, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Grammar aside, there is much truth to this adage. To get something we like, we usually have to give up something else that we also like.

I like to think of them, those thousands of scions of upper class households, products all of them of years of free lunches, nodding to this crackerbarrel truism. One of the great principles of education is to blind yourself to the self-evident. It is part of one’s self-fashioning, and it is especially useful as these scions go on to get positions in the upper ranks of management, investment, etc., and can look about them and say: I earned this.

By their truisms you shall catch them –  the rhetorical ratcatcher’s faith. My faith, really. The crack in the neo-classical economics façade – the underpinning of that big neo-other, Neoliberalism – leaps off the page at the beginning of the enterprise.  If one looks deeply enough, many of the ideological decisions that go into the neoclassical model congregate around the idea that there is no free lunch – or as Mankiw translates it, there are almost always trade-offs. Defined, of course, as preferences. What you like and what you like better – the Jack and Jill of the economics textbook.

The first and most important of those decisions that background this nursery rhyme story is that the local difference between the person who pays for and offers the lunch and the person who eats it, free, is of no concern to economics. Thus, all sociology is given the bum’s rush at this banquet. The economist’s truth stops at the fact that if there is a free lunch, someone is paying for it, and that in the end, we are all someone. And it is true that if x is paying for y’s lunch, if we just move a level upward we can treat them as variables, so that y paying for x’s lunch is the same thing. But what if that move up the level is missing an essential fact – which is that there is always somebody paying for the lunch, and somebody eating it free? And what if there is a whole class of x’s who offer a whole class of y’s free lunch?

Of course, the neo-c’s have dealt in some vague way with this by calling it all “investment”. So when x is the parent and y is the child, the x is really not giving y a free lunch, but preparing for the distant future when y has to decide whether to pay for the medical bills of x or let x die in the street.

This, it seems to me, however clever it seems to Gary Becker and his followers, is humanly as dumb as possible. Spell it out this way and there will only be a few of the 18 year olds who will nod sagely. These we can safely assign to the libertarian camp.

However, we are certainly not done with the free lunch model. For there are, of course, less benign examples of the free lunch relationship. One could say – if one was a classical, rather than a neo-classical, economist – that the most obvious one comes in the ability of Capital (that devourer of free lunches) to get its free lunches from the performance of Labor (that provider of profit) through exploitation. And if we grant this model, then free lunches abound, and one of their systematic forms is called Capitalism.

It is here that the ideological decision to treat x and y and variables on either side of the free lunch situation shows its genius, and demonstrates the dialectical position of “individualism” in Capitalism. For both y and z, in this model, are individuals – and nothing else. There, individuality is without content, a pure placemarker,  which is all the better for founding a society based on individualism. Because content actually creates solidarity. Content would actually point to differences of all kinds between x and y. If x is the laborer and y is the corporation, for instance – but the corporation, per the Supreme Court, treated as a “person” – than we can ignore all power imbalances, and regard individuals as “earning their worth”, each and every one of them, as they cleverly engage in tradeoffs – for instance, allowing the free lunch set at the top to fire them all and relocate the factory to some other locale of x-s, because in the end that means the corporation can produce goods cheaper, and won’t those fired x-s, now working for Ubereats, be happy with the state of massive tat to which they will now have access? It is almost as if, hmm, it were the laborers living off the free lunches provided by the christ-like bosses!

This is an idea that has boldly occurred to many a neo-classical economist. Because while the billionaire – which in some, well, humanly truer model of the world, are living massively off free lunches piled one on top of the other until we can’t see the summit – is working and working, day and night, labor is inclined, sadly, to laze around, and will only be encouraged if we tax the billionaire to build a system of social insurance for the laborer. That is free world dystopia. During the Great downturn, in the years between 2009-2011, the NYT gave a column to a University of Chicago economists, Casey Mulligan, who invariably sounded this note. The worry expended by Casey Mulligan over some worker, somewhere, slacking because he or she didn’t need to worry about paying the monthly vig to the insurance company to get the terrible $10,000 deductible all fault health insurance policy was enough to make the angels on high weep – with laughter.

In heaven there is no giving or taking – it is free lunches for all. Jesus was the prophet of big rock candy mountain, make no mistake.

To wind this up: the free lunch is what civilization is built on, for good or ill. Limiting the free lunches of Capital is an excellent way to ensure better free lunches for the kids.  

 

We've been doing this forever: U.S., Israel and Iran, 2007

 Back in 2006 and 2007, Israel, with Bush’s blessing, was doing its usual razrez in Lebanon (as Alex in Clockwork Orange might put it), I wrote a bit about that affair in the long perspective of Israel’s’ malign policy of perpetual war.

This is still relevant today.

So here it is:

January 21, 2007:

… Exhibit no. 1, yesterday, was the astonishing Deborah Lipstadt op ed piece about ex President Carter’s rather mild plea for the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank and the end of the governance mess there and in the Gaza. About which Lipstadt had only to say that Carter has not genuflected with enough fervor to the holocaust, and thus is an anti-semite – but, being a just person in all things, Lipstadt was willing to concede that perhaps he is just an unconscious bigot. Lipstadt, you see, embraces the larger view.

This is almost spookily stupid – especially as you can tell that Lipstadt’s (non) argument is pretty close to the orthodoxy among the muscular liberal-neo con set that so rule the roost in the WAPO op ed pages, and probably does reflect the central bias of the policy set in D.C.

The Eichmann made me do it excuse for the West Bank land grab wouldn’t convince a first grader. Lipstadt, a historian, would do well to read a book of history – any book of history – about Israel’s post 67 West Bank policy.

However, I am not going to grapple with a piece that serves, really, only that old and hoary function of injecting a vague hint of anti-semitism into any criticism of Israel. Rather, I’d like to spotlight one of the mythemes in the piece, since it now travels about in the Press like as a convenient warmongering piece of DNA, a little transpone, bringing us visibly nearer to war with Iran. I find the idea that the U.S. is going to war with Iran anytime soon, the idea that Bush is always a week away from it, so prevalent among leftwingers – who have been saying we are a week away from attacking Iran since 2004 – extremely puzzling. Both the left and the right often participate in a shared illusion of American hyper-powerdom, but reality has always put strict limits to the extent and exercise of American power. It is exercised best when America has implanted, in a given country, an endogenous pro-consular class. But usually, America avoids the direct violence route.

Still, in the final instance, we are being run by an essentially criminal collective, which is obviously thinking of winding up its pathetic run by attacking Iran. If the wishes of the executive were obeyed as direct orders – the Fuhrer-prinzip that Cheney has tried to instill in the government over the last six years – than we would be attacking Iran. In lieu of that, the warmongering sockpuppets do try to inject, in any mention of Iran, the idea that the country is on the verge of attacking Israel. And one of the ways they do this is to infinitely fold spindle and mutilate a quote of President Ahmadinejad – in Lipstadt’s piece, that comes out as: “When an Ahmadinejad or Hamas threatens to destroy Israel, Jews have historical precedent to believe them.” I’m not even going into the facile identity between Israel and Jews, here, - an identity that is unrealistic and, in fact, symbolic of the kind of nationalism many of the greatest figures of Jewish culture in the 19th and 20th century fought against like mad – or the idea that the threat to a state, Israel, is of the same order and nature as the threat to the Jewish inhabitants of various countries in Europe. This is to spiral down into Ron Rosenbaum style madness. No, what concerns me is simply that quote. Not whether the quote has been mistranslated – I don’t know enough about Farsi to give you a donkey’s fart worth of wisdom on that issue. What isn’t undisputed is that Ahmadinejad is citing Khomeini. Now, if we are truly to take the quote as a military threat against Israel, then surely it was a military threat when Khomeini uttered it too. Logically, then, Israel should have received it as a threat from Khomeini and acted accordingly.

But if you look back at the 80s, you will notice right away that the quote wasn’t pulled out to justify some attack on Iran by Israel – rather it was ignored as the rightwing government in Israel helped arm Iran and support a closer relationship between the U.S. and Iran. Far from viewing themselves as partisans in the Polish woods, at that time, the Israeli government viewed themselves as maneuvering an alliance against Iraq. They viewed themselves, quite sensibly, as a state.

An article in the summer, 2005 issue of Iranian studies by Trita Parsi, “Israel-Iranian Relations Assessed: Strategic Competition from the Power Cycle Perspective,”

sums up the real history of the relationship between Iran and Israel quite well:

"Iran’s foreign policy is believed to have lost much of its ideological zeal after the death of Khomeini. One often cited exception to this general pattern is Iran’s relations with Israel. Tehran’s posture on Israel and the Middle East peace process is often explained as a remnant of its revolutionary and ideological past and contradictory to Iran’s national interest. However, this analysis neglects crucial systemic changes that occurred in the Middle East after 1991, as well as

Israel’s willingness to improve relations with Iran at the height of Iran’s revolutionary fervor in the 1980s and the Islamic regime’s refusal to allow ideological considerations to stand in its way to purchase arms from Israel. Furthermore, it reduces Israel’s role in the equation to that of a non-actor whose destiny is limited to mere reactions to Iran’s ideological designs."

Parsi hauls up a lot of inconvenient, old news from the memory hole:

"The two Israeli leaders that in the early 1990s initiated a very aggressive Iran policy pursued a diametrically opposite policy only a few years earlier. In 1987, Yitzhak Rabin argued that Iran remained an ally geo-politically.40 Shimon Peres, who sought a “broader strategic relationship with Iran,” urged President Reagan to seek a dialogue with Tehran."

It is an axiom of punditry that, in pursuing the usual quest to kill people on a large scale, one needs to forget that those same people, years earlier, were allies in another quest to kill another set of people on a large scale. For the Lipstadts of the world, of course, being pro-Iranian in 1987 was resisting the Nazis, and being for war against Iran in 2006 is still resisting the Nazis. We evermore resist the Nazis.

Well, enough of the various bogosities of this subject, and onto another piece of news about the Bush administration which is – in obedience to the law of news governing the way the press has reported the Global war on Terror – 3 years late.

“An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp.

The U.S. State Department was open to the offer, which came in an unsigned letter sent shortly after the American invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told BBC's Newsnight in a program broadcast Wednesday night. But, Wilkerson said, Cheney vetoed the deal.”

As faithful readers will remember – well, not really, but as this faithful writer remembers – my position before the invasion was that the U.S. could and should aim at having Saddam Hussein overthrown in Iraq. It could do this by a., establishing détente with Iran, Hussein’s number one enemy, and b., showering Northern Iraq, separated from Hussein’s Iraq for 5 years, with aid. Sanctions were stupid and killing so long as they were instituted in the framework of the double sanctions on both nations. The neo-cons were right to decry the sanction system as it was under Clinton, but wrong to promote the belligerent approach – and wrong to think that the U.S. policy should be aimed at maintaining American hegemony in the Middle East when the conditions for that hegemony had so dramatically changed in the post Cold War era.

Obviously, myidea was not only rational, but possible. Its rejection has led to the current debacle. Neither party is willing to de-structure the root cause of that debacle – American superpowerdom.

Let the empire turn up its little heels and die is our advice.

Assassination blues

 

1.The Headline in the New York Sun, April 15, 1865 was: HORRIBLE! THE PRESIDENT ASSASSINATED! MR. SEWARD’S THROAT CUT AND HIS SON ASSAULTED.

“The theatre was densely crowded, and everybody seemed delighted with the scene before them. During the third act and while there was a temporary pause for one of the actors to enter, a sharp report of a pistol was heard which merely attracted attention, but suggested nothing serious, until a man rushed to the front of the President’s box, waving a long dagger in his right hand, and exclaiming “sic semper tyrannis” and immediately leaped from the box, which was in the second tier, to the stage beneath, and ran across to the opposite side, making his escape amid the bewilderment of the audience, from the roar of the theatre, and mounting a horse, fled.”

The Sun’s reporter was in such a stupor that his report is a mess of confusions of both grammar and sense – where was the horse, anyway?

2. Some addresses:

Dealy Plaza, Dallas Texas

The Lorraine Hotel, Memphis Tennessee

146, rue Montmartre, Paris

11, rue de la Ferronerie, Paris

4, Rue Rollin, Paris

20, Rue de la Cordellerie, Paris.

3. I have been to Dealy Plaza and paid homage to Smiling Jack. Hell, when I was a 5 year old I saw it on tv, the black and white tv downstairs, in York, Pennsylvania. I’ve not been to the Ford’s theatre. I had a crush on Abe Lincoln when I was a schoolboy, and still wish he had not gone to see My American Cousin,  much as I respect the fact that he needed a break from stress.

My list of addresses is a list of assassinations. Do the places where the shot was fired, the knife was thrust, remember? The spirits of the place – Lares – kept a memory, it was once thought. Some trace, some mnemonic vibration. We have now moved those vibrations to other crossroads in the brain, crossroads of neurons. There, somehow, they exist. But we still retain, in popular culture, a certain dread of certain places. The haunted house. The slasher is killed and maniacally, in sequel after sequel, reassembles and reattacks. The spirit remains – or the box office and the laws of gender make their fated demands.

4. I did not go to the book depository in Dealy Plaza. All respect, though: JFK’s assassination continues its underground existence in the nether side of this country. A world within a world, Lee thinks in Don Delillo’s Libra.

I’ve never been to the Lorraine Hotel, never gone out of my way to go to Memphis, though I have been to the MLK memorial in Atlanta. Nor to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Bobbie Kennedy was, astonishingly, shot and killed. It is a rare thing that two rich and powerful men are gunned down in America. That is usually reserved for the mean and the lowly.

In French, assassination is often used to mean murder, but in the English speaking world, that term is usually reserved for high fliers. Myself, if I was so unfortunate as to meet a bullet, a knife, a hatchet, and so on, would be reported as murdered. Killed. But the president, or king, or leader of the revolution, or other highly placed individuals get assassinated when the projectile ends their dreamtime on this earth.

5. The French assassinations on my list: Jaures, on July 31, 1914; Henri IV, May 14, 1610; Henri Curiel, 4 Rue Rollin, May 4, 1978; and Jean-Paul Marat, July 13, 1793.

Paris is the capital city of assassinations. I have merely listed a small number from among the hosts of spies, White Russians, Presidents, Ambassadors, and others who have been put down in this beautiful city.

Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant !

6. Assassinations are the center of little worlds, and upset the standard intellectual belief in uniformian historiography, one that does away with “great men” and puts social forces or production or the progress of knowledge in its place. Ah, history as, essentially, a movement like the wind or water – all very interesting mathematically, but with no part essentially different than any other part.

And yet, who can believe that the ghost futures that die with the assassinated are not notable! One thinks of JFK serving two terms (which would have probably meant that his brother would never have been in the Ambassador Hotel that night); one thinks of Martin Luther King’s middle age – he died at 39 – and the danger he would have posed to the racist order; one thinks of Henry IV surviving, once again, and perhaps preventing Frondes to come, changing the entire culture of the l’age Classique.

Oddly, the burden of assassination is borne, especially, by the left. From Rosa Luxemberg to Fred Hampton, the list of the assassinated is heavy with promises arrested. The river is deep and the river is wide, and there are times when you need to nurse your drink, your wine or your gin and tonic, and weep a little bit. My idea is that to be a lefty is an enormously tiring thing anyway – there’s no clubs, no rich man’s money behind it all. And you are always facing a wall of cops. To go against the grain in societies where the grain is very very hard costs and costs. And thus, the cast of prophets unarmed or, like Che, badly armed, follows us all. It has followed me, at least in my thoughts, for a long long time. Lost time, indeed.

The pawned guillotine

 

It is said that the last of the “sombre dynastie” of Sansons to be the chief executioner in Paris, Henri-Clement, was a well known gambler and epicure, a great favorer of masked balls and card games. Now, in the 1840s, the chief executioner kept that great, terrible machine, the guillotine, in his home on Rue de Marais, which was approximately where Rue Faubourg San Martin in the 10th arrondissement is today. He would sometimes display the machine to guests, just as his father had – at the same house, his father had once eaten dinner with Balzac in which he discussed the chopping off of the King and Queens head in 1793 with the ever curious novelist.

As a gambler, Henri-Clement Sanson was sometimes plunged into debt. To raise money to pay his debts, he did an unusual thing: he put his guillotine in hock. One night, in 1847, he was called on by the messengers from the court to get everything ready for an execution of two prisoners. He confessed that he needed to go to the pawn shop to get his instrument. I don’t know if the messenger loaned him the money to do so. In any case, the court was not pleased, and demanded his resignation.
This is, to my mind, a kind of allegory of Critique, that activity infinitely perfected by Leftists (under which rubric I include myself). Like the pawned instrument of a supreme violence forever associated with Revolution, in time of crisis, when critique should turn into revolution, it finds it has lost its instrument, its connection to any real social force. It has been, as it were, put into hock.
I think a lot about that the instant in which critique fails to turn into revolution, because I often feel that it structures the 21st century Left - it normalizes disappointment. A Leftism of dis-appointment - that seems more of a hindrance than a help, doesn't it?

QUITTING: A VICTORY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

 Philosophy got its start in slave and serf societies, so it is no wonder that it is structured, systematically, around the master – slave (or serf) encounter. All of modernity is summed up in the simple phrase: I quit. The slave or serf can escape – which is at the root of adventure – but they cannot simply quit.

Modern philosophy should, then, be able to tell us something about quitting. Mostly, though, it doesn’t. It is most unhelpful about this simple fact of secular life. Heidegger in Being and Time can start a discourse about technology with some observations on a tool or instrument breaking – that is, no longer working. But the idea of no longer working as a voluntary act for someone, stopping doing this or that for pay, which is a small baseline for understanding one’s whole adult life in the "Free World", is part of the modernization project he rejects.

Myself, I’ve had, I reckon, at least thirty jobs in my life, from the time I was eleven and started bagging ice for my Pa’s ice company up until I had a part time job trying to sell over the phone a software designed for doctor’s offices. In the 00s, I’ve basically lived a hit and miss life on gigs, writing or editing, freelancing my way to the poorhouse.

I sort of miss quitting.

Quitting is a very context-specific kind of deal. It has inherited the slave’s escape, at least unconsciously, but the quitter is not pursued. Or, if pursued, only by the usual suspects – the landlord, the power company, the peep’s you owe five hundred more dollars to on the used jalopy you are tooling in. Sometimes, quitting is resigning, and has that sad little dignity, crowned by going out for drinks somewhere with your fellow workers. Sometimes, not. One inglorious job that sticks out in my mind was working as a laborer at a site where they were building warehouses, which I got via a highschool friend, Woody. We worked in the Atlanta summer heat – which was not great – and we did things like put down the asphalt for the parking lot, etc. I would have stuck it out except that somehow, I got assigned to follow around a spoiled son of one of the warehouse owners – or, perhaps, the son of some bigshot in the construction company that was erecting said warehouses. In any case, he was a rare combination of stupid, arrogant, and bully. Not my friend! I’m averse to the put on servility that is the mask demanded in such situations – I just can’t do it.

I remember little about that job, but I do remember the day I quit. I had no money nor prospects, and I was thus in a pickle – but that quitting was a high like unto some heroin user’s finest shot. It glows in my past. Sometimes, quitting is the best thing.

Other times, it isn’t. Quitting for instance a job I had as a searcher for a real estate insurance company in Santa Fe was a sad thing. I was leaving town. My supervisor said I was blowing my chance, and that was true – I probs could have stayed there and climbed the ladder of real estate insurance searching, such as it is. But I had wandering feet, at the time. Still, it was a big suppressed sob laden farewell.

As everybody knows now, the air of freedom is being sucked out of the Western neo-lib societies, and nowhere is that truer than in the way quitting has dropped out of our popular imaginations, except for those on the upper level – the top echelon can be seen to quit on tv shows and movies and in newspapers in the same way they take vacations to beach destinations in the far niente. Beyond our means, viewer.

You can dream a little dream, but can you afford it?

Bring back quitting.

It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway…

 

 

In Fathers and Sons, Bazarov, the nihilist hero and the son of an old army doctor, makes a remark to his friend and disciple, Arkhady, son of Nikolai Kursanov, an aristocrat and landowner, about the latter: “The day before yesterday I saw him reading Pushkin,” Bazarov continued… “Do explain to him that that will never do any good. After all, he’s not a boy: it’s time he threw that he threw aside that nonsense: wanting to be a romantic in these days!”

I recently re-read Fathers and Sons. It was in this remark, and others of that type, that I recognized something, that a grand thesis suddenly presented itself in my mind.

But I have to preface the grand thesis riff with a little autobiographical remark.

In 1970, I was 12. In 1980, I was 22. That decade marks me – though I have ranged pretty far to be sitting here in Paris, with a wife and a boy and my life, such as it is, entering the retirement twilight, it is most likely the case that I am of the 70s generation.

In Russian intellectual history, the members of the “1830” generation, like Herzen, self-identified as such. So did the “youth” – the generation of the 1860s, the shestidesiatniki. These identifications are, of course, fluid and non-binding – and yet they evoke something like different moods and modes that are actually experienced. In the 1830s, Herzen and Turgenev, among other intellectuals, took it as their task to propound, or to pound out, what it meant to be a member of the Russian civilization. An important word, for this cohort – to be a member of a civilization was, above all, an existential task. Were they to be real subjects, like the Europeans (the idea of a European subject, here, meant basically a thing composed of bits of the French Enlightenment, bits of Hegel, and bits of the English economists, but it meant, as well, to dress in a certain way, feel in a certain way, love in a certain way – above all it meant freeing the serfs), or were they condemned to be Russians under Nicholas – a sort of slough composed of Dead Souls, samovars and flies. And yet, wasn’t that slough a warm and live thing, unlike the mere surface of the Europeans?

For the sons, however, the shestidesiatniki: this generation of the 1830s, which rose up and were put down in 1848, was full of the most pathetic dreamers. Reading Pushkin! What rubbish.

The struggle between the heirs of these decades was fought out, most openly, in Russian literature – in poems and novels. Novels such as Fathers and Sons.

Now: here’s my grand thesis. If I think of the generation of the sixties, and the generation of the seventies, in America, and so on, it is striking to me that the terrain in which our generational mood, so to speak, was fought out – our Russian novel – was popular music. Instead of Herzen and Turgenev, instead of Chernyshensky and Pisarev, instead of Doestoevsky and Tolstoy, the terrain was the British invasion, Bob Dylan, Motown, R & B, Disco, and Punk.

This is not about the aesthetic quality of these cultural products, but rather their existential, identifying effects. What Bazarov says about poor Nikolai Kursanov and his affection for Pushkin could easily have been said by some late seventies punk about some aging hippie child’s affection for the Beatles. It is not just a comment about the Beatles as a group, it is a comment about the whole little world in which you would listen to the Beatles, you would know their songs, you would quote them occasionally, you would care for them in a certain way.

It is a sociological fact that I don’t quite understand about my own growing up that it was not novels, or movies, or television – which were all massively consumed, of course – but popular music, albums and concerts, that provided the terrain upon which was fought out a certain mood and a certain existential identification that gets harked back to, that still can suddenly start up in the brain. A sound, lyrics.

Myself, I read enormously between 12 and 22, and would not have thought of myself as a “fan” – but I know, now, that even though I did read the Russian novels then and thought I was Ivan Karamazov, my lodestar was really Bobby Dylan. Like everybody else I knew,  my little bit of this history was enacted more through music than anything else. This was true for the back of the class, the fans of Freebird and Southern Rock, as well as the front of the class, the fans of David Bowie and Patti Smith.

I don’t think that popular music plays this role for, say, my son’s generation. Rap is very important, but it doesn’t set the communal mood. I’m sure that mood is set by Internet genres that we don’t really have genre knowledge of – social media, for instance. What is Tik Tok or Instagram? I’m not sure they bear the burden of the Russian novel. Perhaps, in fact, the task of existential identification comes and goes – is there any need of it, or desire for it, at the moment?

In the creche, the nursery located behind our apartment, the three year olds are chasing each other around and screaming at the top of their lungs at this moment. I can’t tell you what their communal mood will be. Out of those screams, what art, what tragic love, what happy or sad life arrangements are to come I can’t divine. I can only look backwards, it seems.

But Fuck it. Lot’s wife has always seemed much saner to me than her husband, with his bizarre methods of childrearing. Three cheers for the backward’s glance.