some remarks on Pascal

 I understand the relic-mania of the Middle Ages, for I like relics myself. Not that I collect them – I don’t really have that collecting vibe in my life. I’m a great thrower-outer, too great in fact. I have regretted certain trips to the dumpster. However, I do like the idea of seeing a great man or woman’s tomb, or seeing their handwriting, or the chair they sat in. I like to follow the footsteps of some figure from history, donning my psychogeographical mook’s outfit – or more simply, taking pictures with my cell phone – as I find their address and try to imagine, through archives of newspapers, what they saw on their street. I like having a destination. I especially like this in Paris, which is an infinite universe of destinations. The great metropolises contain their chronographic essence in ways that tickle the sensitives among us, the ones for whom the past is an ESP ambush. Who see and dicker with the ghosts.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Pascal. I have not really read Pascal in decades; he never became my life companion, like Montaigne. But Pascal was so obviously that rare thing, the mooncalf genius, the boy who at 6 or 7 went through Euclid and did the proofs himself, that he retains a very distinct freak sparkle for me.

One day this spring I was walking down Rue des Minimes and thought, this is where Pascal and Descartes met. They met and talked for almost three days at the Couvent des Minimes, a building that is now a private Catholic school. They argued about the vacuum, with Pascal maintaining that nature does not abhor a vacuum and Descartes holding the classical Aristotelian position, although borrowed to function in Descartes cosmological system of vortices.

In 1647, Pascal made a famous experiment to show that the air has a weight and that it has less weight higher up – which was an essential insight into the constitution of the atmosphere. He used 2 tubes of glass 40 feet high, which he had installed on Puy de Dome, and compared the level of the mercury in them to the level of mercury in tubes put in a place of lesser elevation. From the heights of the mercury Pascal not only deduced the weight of the atmosphere but, as well, a more general notion of a vacuum.

As he put it: “nature has no repugnance for the vacuum, that it makes no effort to avoid it, and admits it without pain or resistance.”

In that phrase one sees something much larger that was happening in the 17th century: the scientific discarding of nature as a recognized actor. Nature, unlike the elements, or fluids, or matter in its forms, has no scientific profile whatsoever. This was the conclusion, latter in the century, of Boyle, and science has gone on this way ever since. Nature is "law bound" - or in other words, corresponds to our formulation of forces. It is never supervenient on its "laws".

So when Descartes met Pascal on 24 September 1647, he was meeting, in a sense, the future. That was too much for Descartes. If nature didn’t abhor a vacuum, what good was it?

2. Psychogeography, and the random walk, perculate up in the interstices of ordinary life under the reign of deathdrive capitalism. I’d call them all adventures in oppositional nostalgia. We can walk about where natural philosophy started turning our cosmovision upside down – and in that walk, number 12, Rue de Minimes, has a privileged place.

3. Pascal’s vita, in the hands of his sister Gilberte and his comrades at Port Royal, became the story of a God infested man. There were scores of god infested men in the 17th century. Few, though, were also mathematicians, natural philosophers, and experimentalists. Pascal was a prototype, in these respects, of what later came to be that familiar enlightenment figure, the philosopher.

Take, for instance, what Pascal made of his experience of Paris. We do know that the year of his death, the year when the ecstatic state described in the Pensees was reaching its peak, he was also involved in a prescient attempt to provide Paris with a bus service.

We don’t have the dense tableaux of Paris from his time that we have in the Paris chroniclers of the 18th century, like Mercier. But we do have certain documents – for instance, the Lettre d’un sicilien a un de ses amis, which was probably written between 1681, when its writer, Giovanni Paolo Marena settled there, and 1693, when he died, which are devoted to describing aspects of the metropolis. Like Pascal, Marena took a carriage now and then. This is how he describes them: “there are an infinite number here, which are all worn out and mudsplattered and seem to be instruments to kill living things. The horses that pull them eat while they work, like those that pulled Seneca [in the Roman Empire] to the country, for they are boney and mangey. The coachmen are so brutal, they have such horrible harsh voices and clack their whips so much to augment the general noise level that it seems like the Furies are in movement to make Paris into a hell. These cruel vehicles are payed for by the hour, a custom surely invented to abbreviate our days in a time when life is short.”

Pascal and the company he formed addressed what they saw as a need, in the pedestrian and coach crowded streets, to create some order that would allow even the poorer inhabitants to travel throughout the city. Pascal’s proposal would have made certain spots on the street carriage stops, which would be regularized according to a schedule and would be parts of a line that would extend in this or that direction through Paris. The price was to be five sols. The company received a license from Parliament and then a brevet from King Louis XIV – with a codicil that effectively eliminated the potential pool of users, as the court forbade the use of such carriages to “soldiers, pages, servants, manual laborers, etc.” Interestingly, this interference by a hierarchical social order that seeks to maintain the privileges of those on top has gone on to infest every scheme to organize public transport to our day: the wealthier and more powerful are not only wary about according mobility to the lower classes, but are also determined to keep their transportation privileges in place even if that means undermining the speed and reliability of public transport.

4. Pascal’s body was a subject of debate in 1792.

Pascal was buried in Eglise Saint-Etienne-du-Mont on August 21, 1662. He’d died just up the street in the home of his sister, Gilberte. Fifty priests assisted at his funeral. The family donated 20 francs for the services.

And thus it lay for more than a century when, during the time of the French Revolution, the Eglise Saint-Etienne’s neighboring church, Saint Genevieve, was nationalized by the state and turned into the Pantheon. The Eglise Sainte Genevieve was recent, actually – it was finished in 1790, and had been inaugurated by Louis XV in 1744, to pay homage to the saint who he had prayed to in an illness. The Pantheon was conceived as a temple to the great men of the Revolution and the enlightened men who had led up to it – Mirabeau, Voltaire, Marat, Rousseau. As the anti-Catholic vogue became more intense in 1793, the Eglise Saint-Etienne was renamed the Temple of filial piety, and the two great men buried there, Pascal and Racine, were marked for removal to the Pantheon. This never happened – it was buried under the politics of the time. It may well have been the last time that Pascal’s resting place was still identifiable.

Now – and by now I mean last week, when I visited the Eglise Saint-Etienne – we have only an approximate idea of where Pascal’s ashes are stored (against his resurrection, of course). It is somewhere under a pillar in the chapel of the Virgin.

The cult of the virgin, in Pascal’s time, certainly had its fervent devotees, but it was in the 19th century that the cult became more fundamental to the Church. In 1854, the Pope issued a bull affirming the immaculate conception of Mary. This had an unusual afteraffect on the Eglise Saint-Etienne. The archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Sibour, was in the Church on January 3, 1857 when he was approached by an ex-priest, Jean-Louis Verger, who was a fanatic opponent of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Verger took out a knife and stabbed the archbishop to death while screaming: “no goddesses! Death to the goddesses!”

This might be the most patriarchal moment in all of history. Or, maybe not. In any case, I do wonder what the spirit of Pascal made of it all. Pascal did have strong Jansenist sympathies. But he was no prisoner of that creed.

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On sidewalks, cities, corruption and laterality

 

 

1. I drove in Ireland on the right side – instead of the American left – this summer. I drove down country roads that are so narrow that one is always confronting the situation of who concedes, the driver coming towards you or you yourself? It all depends on if there is a space carved out to let the other driver pass. Or vice versa.

 

When my brother drove, and I was in the passanger seat watching the hedges rush past us, like some nightmare of coming accident mixed in with a roller coaster thrill.

 

I read the Bureau while I was in Ireland, Eoin McNamee. The book is about a band of smugglers and crooks operating on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The book contains a lot of driving, obviously, often on dark narrow roads. Having seen with my own peepers the bright narrow roads of Sligo county, I had a lot more respect for the fictitious thugs. McNamee has learned to transpose Delillo dread (from the early period, Running Dog, the Names, etc.) to the farms, gambling shops, and gasoline trucks of Ulster. It is hard to do dread for too long. McNamee has mastered the half-finished joke, the camera shot flyby, and I do like it.

 

2. Paris sidewalks

 

The French philosophes made a cult out of all things English, from Newton (whose science was taught to Voltaire by his lover, the Marquise du Châtelet), Locke, the school of psychology founded by Hartley, and the threefold division of powers as envisioned by Montesquieu. So it is not surprising that D’alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopedie is full of Anglophilia, even in the farther corners. For instance, in the entry entitled Trottoir, or sidewalk (which may have been added when the Encyclopedie was re-edited in 1825), we read this: “The city of London has been the one that most commodiously instituted the use of sidewalks. It owes this advantage to the almost entire reconstruction of the old part of the city that was consumed in the great fire of 1666. All the streets were retraced on a vast plan, all aligned and cut at right angles.”

This of course is a fantasy, a fanta-fact, but it floated before these dreamers who longed to be the Great Fire themselves, purging the old and crooked from the City.

In the meantime, in 1787, the administration of Paris, which was at that time headed up by Baron de Breteuil (the unfortunate who was named prime minister of France by Louis XVI a week before the storming of the Bastille), sent a letter discussing a new street template. In 1783, the administration of Paris had ruled that all streets should be 30 feet wide; but this created dissatisfaction. In new proposal before the city administration was to make all new streets 36 feet wide, with 6 feet on either side being reserved for sidewalks. That would make the vehicular area 24 feet wide. At no point in the discussion that is reproduced in L’etat de Paris en 1789 is there a discussion of what these widths referred to: the width of the standard carriage? The width of two people standing side by side on the sidewalk? This is probably related to the fact that standardization came in after the 18th century, with the rise of factories – at which point the street scheme of centuries was already in place.

The effect of these obscure discussions are with us today. I can walk down Rue Charlot, which is next to our apartment, and see exactly what the Baron de Breteuil was talking about – streets with a with of 36 feet, with two sidewalks taking up twelve of those feet. Of course, the new street provision was amended, ignored, or forgotten in the next hundred years. In all the industrialized countries, the advent of the automobile brought a new and more dangerous element into the mix of pedestrians and riders. But at no point, to my knowledge, did this lead to experiments about what would be the safest mix – how much for instance per lane would lead to minimizing accidents? How about standardizing exits and pass-throughs? And what size is optimum for pedestrian traffic flow on sidewalks?
In Paris, at least, sidewalks are plentiful (much more so than in Los Angeles, for instance), but they are crowded, bumpy, and imperfectly protected from intrusion by motorcyclists and others. The sidewalks are a part of contemporary life that is sort of hidden – while any Paris mook will know about Haussman, that famous cityscape arranger, it is the rarer urbanite who knows about the father of the Parisian sidewalk, le Comte de Chabrol, who was appointed by Napoleon as the administrator of Paris and began wracking up the “dallage” – pouring sidewalks – as part of his remit. George Sand, latter, accused him of corruption for favoring rock from Volvic – quarried, that is, from his own home territory. Pierre Estienne, in a history of Volvic, sums it up as follows:

Thus we understand the program of Chabrol-Volvic, prefect of the Seine from 1812 to 1830, for discovering other outputs for the stone – in this case, a Parisian clientel: it needed his influence, his power, to impose a stone which had neither the robustness nor the clear and war colors of Paris’s subsoil limestone. “it would have been more economic to pave paris with five france lengths of stone than bringing in the Volvic volcanic stone,” notes a skeptical contemporary. What to make of this sad stone which possesses a darkness that accentuates with age, which decays quickly with use, and should not form paving, much less sidewalks? Chabrol required a rare stubbornness in order to have his friends and most likely associates, the Brosson who were in Pont-du-Chateu, bring in the Volvic stone, cut it, deposit it on ships in the Allier that was almost unnavigable, and finally to have it carried on the canal de Briare up to Paris, and with the price of the rejects that one can only imagine, fill orders. In fact, up to 1830, F. Brusson had obtained the monopoly for supplying lava stone for the sidewalks of the capital, thanks to Chabrol’s protectrion; he even had a permanent sales office on the banks of the Saint-Martin canal.”

A city, as Balzac knew, is not just branded with corruption – corruption often literally drives the creation of the street and the sidewalk. Which in turn has unexpected consequences for the pace of the city, and its politics.

 

3. I got curious, like, about this matter of left handed driving versus right handed driving. A list of the countries that embrace the LHD traffic flow – that is, those where the driver’s side is on the right – is provided by a dry as dust tome by a certain Nicolae Sfetcu – has a rundown. The fact that the Continent, in general, and the Americas are almost all RHD, while the UK, Ireland, and many of the former colonies are LHD is a curious testimony to colonialist laterality. A rather charming election was held in Sweden, which was at the time LHD, to decide on which side of the street to drive on. Overwhelmingly, Swedish drivers selected the pattern they were familiar with – LHD. The Swedish parliament went over the head of the popular will and on 5 a.m. Sunday, September 3, 1967, all traffic had to switch to the right hand side of the street. The NYT noted the change:

 

“Just before the change-over, severely reduced speed limits will be placed into effect, and all but emergency vehicles will be banned for four hours before and one hour after the change-over.”

 

In Sweden it was called H day – for Hoegertraffik, or right handed driving.

 

Chris McManus, in that wonderbook, Right Hand, Left Hand (which will, some day, rank up there with the Anatomy of Melancholy), took up the lateral driving norm and shows that the stories accruing to why one side or the other is preferred rely on various myths. In actuality, up  until the eighteenth century, in most areas of Europe driving was done on whatever side the driver happened to prefer. The code of the road caught the administrative eye only as road traffic started to become dense – in synchronicity with the industrialization of travel brought about by railroads.

 

To show how second nature feels like first nature, McManus quotes a bit from Lolita, where Humbert Humbert, after murdering Clare Quilty, writes: “So I crossed to the left hand side of the highway and checked the feeling. The feeling was good … nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws like driving on the wrong side of the road.”

 

The word wrong jumps out at me. Wrong as in error, wrong as in sin. The wires cross in “wrong”, the traffic goes haywire. McManus provides a helpful map of the countries mandating LHD, and a study of how Canada, a RHD country, was actually heterogenous at one time. British Columbia and the Maritime provinces were LHD countries until they were administratively steered right. There is, indeed, something about that administrative fiat that feels like even physical law is under the rule of the state.  In fact, Hitler’s government, after taking over Austria in the Anschluss, ordered Austrians to drive to the right – reversing their previous left handed norm.

 

McManus does not show the roots of the driving preference, but he does suggest that laterality is a bordercrossing thing – if neighboring countries are driving to the left, then there is a high likelihood that your country will drive to the left. We are all immigrants and so are the directions we drive in. The wrong side is the side the horde does not choose.  

Mr. Grice's progeny

 The automatic writing of the Surrealists was miles behind the true weirdness of certain crochets of the analytic philosophers in their prime, between the 50s and the 90s. A whole career, back in those glorious days of wine and Sputniks, could be spent pondering some aberrant sentence in English.

It is  this set of “suspect examples” that wash through the papers and (rare) books of Paul Grice.  In Studies in the Ways of Words, his magnum opus, he considers quite a few before getting to the gist of the book.

Among them are phrases involving the English verb try.  If I say, for example, that I tried to write that last sentence, I would score one hundred on the truth meter. I did try. I even succeeded. Which is the oddity of the case. As any parent knows raising any child in the primary school stage, the word trying is often used to denote – something not done. As in, I tried to do my homework! Hearing a child say, I tried to do my homework, one can be dead certain that said homework was not done. But that inference can’t be based on what we know, definitionally, about trying, which is neutral on the success of failure of the thing tried.

Or – to take a “suspect example” that I simply love: what about remember? If I sign a document, I am entirely entitled to say: I remembered my name. But if I did say so, it would make one immediately suspect that the ‘signing the document” scenario is a little off. Am I senile? Have I suffered from amnesia? Nothing in saying I remembered my name tells us, on a semantic level, that such suspicions could be raised. Every time I sign an email I can justly say that I remembered my name; but in saying it, I put into question some linguistic “instinct”. I am giving information that is, though true, inferentially overtrue, so to speak.

Grice, being English, calls this odd. And it isn’t just an anomaly. Rather, it points to a whole structure of inferences built into our discourse, or as he calls it our conversational use of language. These suspect cases are the entering wedge from separating language as the logician conceives it from the ordinary language studied by the socio-linguist: the pragmatics of language.

The key here is that language is used to imply. Grice devoted his philosophy of language to tease out the dimension of implying – of implicature – and to give it a canonical form. “Echoing Kant, I call these categories Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner.” All of which are utterly dependent on the big C – circumstances. Scenarios, stories, uses.

The rules that compose these categories are very Britishy, and one might phrase them differently – but they do a good job of making us feel implicature

Take for instance Quantity. “The category of Quantity relates to the quantity of information to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims:

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the

current purposes of the exchange).

2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required

 

This then takes care of the suspect example of remembering your name when you sign a document. The excess of information leads to other problems in the big C. It leads, I think, to literature.

I won’t go through Grice’s table. But a remark about implicature is relevant to my larger purpose – which is to link AI to its basis in computing. The table and its maxims are very much structuring principles – and not logical deductions. Implicature seems to resist the computerization that we can accord, say, sorting, or any conventional set based logic.

This gets us to the Large in Large Language Models. The way to force the computerization of implicature, it was seen in the eighties, by people working on Expert systems, was by sheer expansion of the corpus of data. That expansion is, of course, energetically costly. Even as, under the watchful eye of Moore’s law, chip size got smaller, the energy for creating a C large enough to accommodate implicature still seemed pragmatically difficult.

Well, of course, it turned out it is. Which is why we have this amazing energy suck that consists of building data centers to contain the universe of C – which consists of all human representations, audio, scriptorial, pictorial, etc. It is a matter of implicature without experience.

 Can experience be mimicked through recursion? My own feeling is that the universe of C can’t expand that much.  The apocalypse does not, to my mind, mean robot overlords – it means the exhaustion of planetary energy.

And so it goes in our odd faux-Gotterdammerung times.

Les Rita: mon amour

 

Back in the 00s, I needed a lot of cheering up. Coincidentally, Youtube appeared. This expanded the field – of my own musical appreciation, to say the least.

And it is through Youtube that I discovered Les Rita Mistouko. When I put a link up to one of their videos, the friend of my blog, Amie – the late great Amie, whose death was a shock to my system that stayed a shock – turned me on to other songs, and to some history of the group.

Catherine Ringer and Fred Chichin were the two elements of that molecule – which was not only music, but dance and spectacle. They fully embraced the cinematic side of the enterprise. Some of their songs were silly – especially when matched up to their video – until, upon repeated listening, the silliness became an initiation to a certain combative aesthetic joy.  Prisoners sing for many reasons; one of them is that the song is not imprisoned. That is combative joy.

Fred Chichin died of cancer. And now Catherine Ringer has died of cancer.

To the me me me writing this, Catherine Ringer represented, in a way, a certain French culture that I rather fetishize. It is the culture of the paysan de Paris – it is a culture of metis, practical jokes, and a tough view of morality, one that emphasizes respect and freedom as a synthesis rather than a hostile truce.

Oh Catherine!

This is a song Amie sent me a link to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUOYXlBEjGI

We the people

or... who is this we, kemosabe?

1. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, she makes the following shrewd hit at Burke:

There appears to be such a mixture of real sensibility and fondly cherished romance in your composition that the present crisis carries you out of yourself; and since you could not be one of the grand movers, the next best thing that dazzled your imagination was to be a conspicuous opposer.

Wollstonecraft was echoing the suspicion that dogged Burke throughout his career – that he was an Irishman who valued cleverness over sound thinking, celebrity over sense. Anyone who has ever heard an English person pronounce the word “clever” realizes that the entire feudal order struggles in that word.

One of Wollstonecraft’s polemical moves is to crucify Burke’s Reflections on his early essay on the Sublime – an essay that moves from paradox to paradox. Her strategy makes for a few strange paradoxes itself, since basically she portrays Burke as a fashionable sentimentalist – a man of a certain kind of womanly cast – while she herself represents manly reason.

The Burkean paradox in the essay on the sublime out of which his system springs is to separate pain and pleasure as distinct qualities unconnected by the continuum of sensation by which they were defined by people like Hartley – and, in general, in the sensationalist tradition:

“Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference … Suppose … a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.”

Although it is rare in the scholarship, or even non-existent, to pair Burke with Georges Bataille, there are distinct similarities between Burke’s argument here and Bataille’s in the Bad Part [La Part Maudite] against the notion of utility in political economics – and its leakage into our general consciousness as useful consumers in the social net.

Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to calculus – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.”

Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:

It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”

Burke was clever – but he was no dialectician. Thus, while expelling the theorizer from the social order founded in Delight, Burke does not figure as an opponent of capitalism. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. What interests me, here, is the tension between, on the one side, the advent of an economic system which would profit the upper class for which Burke stood as an advocate, and, on the other side, the gross attitudinal changes that would subvert the legitimacy of the ancien regime order.

Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims, even if they so appeared to Mary Wollstonecraft, but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systemeticity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defense of irreducible human and social qualities that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology. This was the great contradiction that tugged at European societies up until 1945 – and when I say tugged, I might add bombed, battled, battered, slaughtered, imprisoned, colonized, and exhausted itself.

2. If, in fact, the social order cannot be founded on utility maximization, then we must – following in Burke and Bataille’s footsteps, or rather leaps – question the notion of a “people”.

I’ve been thinking about the emergence of “we the people” and the nation-state since reading Simon During's thoughts from his Facebook post on the nation as being a sort of concept of the people. For During, the nation, however wooly and ambiguous that notion might be, is a kind of natural kind for the people – for an ethnic group. For what we call the Irish, the French, the Tutsi, the Huron, the Japanese, etc.

I have my doubts about this. Not that history has not shown that, given the right circs, the Czechs in the Austro-Hungarian empire wanted to be an independent nation. And so on. My doubt is that the people preceded the nation. The perhaps most innovative part of the U.S. constitution is its self-address: we the people. A righteous and world-shaking performative, that one!

There is a joke-non-joke in the movie, Little Big Man. The protagonist is adopted into the Cheyenne and learns to call the Cheyenne what they call themselves: human beings. The Tsistsistas. Now translation, as we all know, is freighted with the history of the language into which the terms of the other language are translated. Human beings is not people – although other translators would have used people. Thomas Berger claimed that the novel used a variety of testimonies about Plains Indian life. Among ethnologists the studies of the Northern Ojibwa by A. Irving Hallowell has exerted a lot of influence: Hallowell did not find a term corresponding exactly to “person” among the Ojibwa. He did find a number of terms centering around the vocabulary of powers. The Ojibwa, according to Hallowell, did not group together things outside the human in some macro-group that was conceived of as nature. As Hallowell writes, having no Western sense of “nature”, the Ojibwa gave no credence to what is called, in English, the supernatural. Of course, that a concept doesn’t find its lexical anchor doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist for the speaker. But it doesn’t mean, as well, that we can assume it exists just as it does for the English speaker.

And because the word exists in the English language doesn’t mean that we know what particular English speakers mean by it – and not the small sample who attended philosophy classes in college. If the Cheyenne and Ojibwa have different notions of the person than a sociologist at Harvard might have, we should not extend the notion from our Harvard man to our Spanish smallholder hunting game in 1990. I reference, here, Sergio Dalla Bernardina, a professor of anthropology in France, who perhaps I all too often reference when writing about these things – but his one essay about hunting and the personhood of animals is a landmark in my intellectual life. What Dalla Bernardina teased out of his informants was not that the animals were grouped with the machines, a la Descartes, or given some status as useful or non-useful – rather, they were conceived in terms of personhood. They were conceived as in a sense responsible for their deaths, just like people. In fact, the same logic applied that we see every day in human to human violence: the violent often blame their victims for a sentiment of rage that propels the violent act. I will just gesture here to Une Personne pas tout a fait comme les autres, published in 1991, and found here: https://www.persee.fr/doc/hom_0439-4216_1991_num_31_120_369443?q=dalla%20Bernardina%20 – an article that should be in the corpus of any philosophy class about personhood.

3. I see that my personage – I’ve become a garrulous old man, an ancient mariner slash blogger – has gone on too long. Which is one of the things wrapped up in personhood – going on too long. The age of chivalry is not dead, as long as geezers such as myself are there to mutter the tale.

Love of brooding: Cioran

In the lexicon of cognitive states, brooding has a distinctly low ranking. We meditate or reflect to achieve illumination; brooding, however, is the prelude to a tantrum. To think means trying to see the object of thought whole – but the brooder is peculiarly averse to letting go of the object of thought, and thus condemns himself to repetition and compulsion. Argument is meant to persuade us to let the personal go, to, in effect, accept the autonomy of discourse. In Socrates’ dialogues, the argument is often treated as though it were some live thing, a spirit, a genius that must be respected. As such, the argument is extra-personal. From this perspective, brooding is a failed, or at the very least, a pariah cognitive act.

Yet, the brooder does have one fierce insight on his side, for the ideology of cognition obscures the moment of surrender, or sacrifice, in the release of the object of thought to the drift of discourse – to “what everybody knows”. The brooder understands that argument’s aspiration to universality is founded on blooding the personal, and that universality operates under the rule of polemos, or war. To surrender a thought is, among other things, to surrender.

Cioran is one of the great brooders. His longer essays can seem wearying because his sentences are so highly worked that they seem not to be building an argument, but to be resisting one. The readerly flow of the essay is impeded by the brilliances of its individual moments. Cioran sometimes seems like one of those brilliant conversationalists who never, actually, converse – in as much as conversation is marked by listening, while the brilliance of the conversationalist seems impervious to hearing. It bears the mark of a certain deafness. And so it is, sometimes, with Cioran, especially in his first texts.

Cioran’s writerly development is that of a long, painful abdication of what seem to be the natural modes of his youth: the harangue and the monologue. To hear the other means, in a sense, letting your style – the verbal front Cioran is so careful to maintain – allow itself a certain vulnerability. Cioran begins to be readable, for just this reason, in The Temptation to Exist. It is here that he actually goes the distance, rather than contenting himself with the pure jab, the shadowboxing of the phrase.

It is here, too, that he takes as one of his objects of thought brooding itself – although he doesn’t label the negative space he opposes to reflection “brooding” as such. What he does is turn upon reflection, in its institutional forms (literature and philosophy) his suspicion that underneath the mask of liberality lurks the spirit of resentment, the eternal return of a grievance. This notion has a long history, and we know its avatars: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in particular. It is the reactionary road to enlightenment.

In Letter on some roadblocks (Lettre sur quelques impasses), Cioran uses a trick that he employs, as well, in later texts to detach himself from the brooder’s solipsism: the essay as a message to some correspondent. To write a letter is not the same as engaging in a conversation, because letters are not subject to the vital element in conversation – interruption. While conversations go by “turns”, the violent can bear them away simply by interrupting, and there is nothing in the rules that forbids this. But letters are, briefly, a space the producer controls. At the same time, the letter must, however grudgingly, acknowledge the addressee.

The impasses or roadblocks here collect around the hated figure of the writer. On the pretence that Cioran is warning his friend against publishing a book, he launches into an invective against the mere writer – the littérateur – which, of course, produces a performative “impass” - since Cioran is very much a writer. This allots him a paradoxical place in his argument. Cioran accepts the cynicism of the paradox – he even exploits it. It is as though he were not so much a writer as an anthropologist carrying out fieldwork on people like Cioran – other writers. And in this guise, he is reporting on their rituals.

What is it that Cioran hates about the writer? It is, I think, the writer’s tendency to be a moral entrepreneur – to wave about his sensitivity to right and wrong as though it were a superiority, a talent. Underneath the moral entrepreneur, Cioran spots the vacuity of the rhetorician:

‘Voltaire was the first litterateur to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method. Before him the writer, happy enough to be next to events, was more modest: doing his job in a limited sector, he followed his path and stuck to it. No journalist, he was most interested in the anecdotal aspect of certain solitudes: his indiscretion was inefficacious.

With our know it all (hableur) things changed. None of the subjects which intrigued his times escaped his sarcasm, his demi-science, his need for noise, his universal vulgarity.Everything was impure with him, except his style…”

Note a key term for Cioran: impurity. Impurity, for Cioran, is a hallmark of liberal enlightenment. To understand this, one has to understand Cioran’s dallying with fascism of the most violent sort in the 30s, and his brief stance as an admirer of Hitler. This, actually, is the center of what Cioran brooded upon his whole life long – his error, here, and his retraction. In the 30s, Cioran was very explicit about his hatred of the Jews, his desire for war, his faith in great and therapeutic violence that would stamp some hierarchy on the people for one thousand years.

Later, in the late thirties in France, he began to change his mind. He did not, as far as I am aware of, collaborate in the forties. Rather, he went over and over the logic of his position, starting from the idea that liberal Europe had suffocated itself under its own dead skin, exiled from the sources of life itself. And yet, he retreated to the liberal side and renounced violence: he renounced life-affirming war, and opted for death-affirming peace. Violence, in Cioran’s view, makes us gigantic, larger than life, and we renounce it at our peril. In History and Utopia he wrote:

“We employ our clearest vigils in taking apart our enemies limb from limb, pulling out their eyes and guts, popping and emptying their veins, crushing and pounding underfoot each of their organs, and leaving them, for charity’s sake, merely the enjoyment of their skeletons.” But, clearly, these are visions that Cioran now does not want to see realized on the streets of the cities (where, as he remarked somewhere else, he is always mildly astonished that everyone is not killing everyone else). However, that renunciation has a price. The price is paid in purity: “Not to venge oneself is to be enchained in the idea of forgiveness, it is to sink into it, get stuck in it, it is to render oneself impure by the hatred one strangles in oneself.”

Thus, the hidden dialectic between, on the one hand, the universal vulgarisers of liberal society, and, on the other hand, the stocking up of resentment and weakness. What distinguished the Fascist principle for Cioran was its recognition of the logic of purity: it advocated violence not for the sake of peace, but because violence was beautiful; bombing was beautiful because it smashed and hurt our enemies down to the last generation; mass murder was beautiful because you could see your true self in the pooled blood of the victims. Cioran, at last, recognized this to be madness, but he did not renounce the logic of purity – rather, he sought a catharsis through rehearsing extreme statements in the paradoxical mode. After getting off to a false start in life, he made false starts a hallmark of his style. And so brooding, in his work, takes the place of reflection, and reflects, pallidly, the dangerous fires that he had longed to light himself – and that then ran so out of control that he was condemned to live in a world that was singed by the destruction they wrought.

Sartre's round trip

  

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Every bike rider knows that moment when, pumping the pedals, there is a certain jerking, a certain skip that interrupts the smooth interaction of the teeth of the pedal wheel against the links of the chain. The skipping does not immediately lead to the chain coming off the bike – the teeth catch and disengage in a certain jumpy pattern.

The coordination and possible dis-coordination between the chain and the teeth of the wheel is a metaphor, in Sartre’s essay on Brice Parain, Aller et retour – Round trip. Parain’s magnum opus was published in 1942, Investigations on the Nature and Function of Language; when it was translated into English it was as a thing to fill out French intellectual history, and not to address Anglophile philosophers. But it did make a big impression on 40s intellectuals: both Sartre and Blanchot wrote essays on it, and it was generally part of the discourse in which Bataille, de Beauvoir, Paulhan and others took part. Parain latter became one of the mandarins behind Gallimard's Pleiade editions. He was a bit of a backdoor man, a bit of a celebrity.

The metaphor of the round trip points us to Parain’s uniquely existentialist take on language. While the Vienna school and the Analytics were trying to find the logic that would constitute a Language in which the truth function could be logically interior within propositions – the Tarskian dream of a self-contained language – Parain was fascinated, in Sartre’s phrase, by “the vertiginous sentiment of an inexactness of language.” Parain was a Hegelian, not a Heideggerian, but he too thought that philosophy begins with the way something doesn’t work – the broken tool opens up its “toolness” (“toolness” is so verbally ugly that it makes an aesthetic fit for the notion). Through that break, Parain saw into the problem with treating language monologically – via examples such as formulas and instructions. What pleased Sartre was that Parain saw the subject situated in language – in dialogue.

Sartre, notoriously, neglected the philosophy of language at a time when philosophers were making the linguistic turn like gangbusters. But in the Parain essay, he sketches certain questions that might introduce an existentialist theory of language. In particular, the decalage, the ungearing, between language and experience: “how to insert in language an experience that was made without it?” Of course, all experiences and their names are lifted out of themselves by the generalizing power of language. One can approach this calmly, speculatively, imagining experiments – or one can have this confrontation thrust upon one as the world changes around one. Sartre makes much of Parain as an interwar writer, originally from a peasant family, who was defined by the trenches on one side and the concentration camps and the other. Or, in a less lurid light, as one who saw the collapse of the old order in real time.

Sartre roots the philosophy of language, or the metaphysical need for one, not in science, but in social crisis. In doing so, he overdoes Parain’s peasant roots – as I have learned from other sources. But he puts his fingers on something that the language turn philosophers have ignored by turning to the “timeless” methodology of science: the language turn comes out of an existential social situation, one in which words and silences are undergoing a systematic connotative change. The word war itself, a defining word, becomes at the same time an ambiguous one: was the interwar period really a peace? In 1944, are the Allies really allied? In 1949, when the essay was included in Situations, what was war and what was peace in Europe, or Asia, or Africa?

There’s a bit of Round trip that is less about language’s failure in general than about the crisis and responses to the crisis in the interwar period. Parain’s choice was of a certain kind of silence, which Sartre calls infrasilence – a silence that surround the word with its occasion, with its painfulness, its cruelty. The kind of silence that is described, in a story, as “stunned”. Sartre is still placing Parain in the generation that came out of WWI looking for a solution – in Parain’s case, finding it in communism for a period of his life. There were also the surrealists and the “revolution in poetic language”, to borrow Kristeva’s phrase. Sartre was thinking of how the twenties and thirties could give us both Breton and the PCF, Bataille and the ultra-right – like other French intellectuals of the 1940s, chewing over the mystery of France’s defeat.

“All those destroyers that he had followed for an instant are possessed, in one way or another, by the demiurgic, Nietzschean pride in this one thing, that they all believed in the plasticity of human nature. If they burned the old man, it was to hasten the coming of a new man. There was the surrealist man, the gidean man, the Marxist man, who all wait for us on the horizon.It was a matter of both unmasking and fabricating at the same time. In one way the future is empty, and noone could prevision it; in another sense the future exists more than the present; the inebriation of all these smasher-uppers was about constructing a world which they wouldn’t know and wouldn’t recognize once it was built; the joy was in the risk, in not knowing what they were making, the bitter joy of telling oneself that we were to lead people to the threshold of the promised land when one would remain, on that threshold, and regard them all going away. These sentiments were completely foreign to Parain. He had no eyes for the future, he didn’t believe in it. If he spoke of it, it was to imagine a world which unmade itself; here was a man who had, when all is said and done, lost himself; his theory of language must lead him, had led him for a moment to the idea of the plasticity of man: change the words, change the person. But nothing was, in reality, more distant from his deepest reflexion. The image that was most deeply embedded in his memory was of the natural order. The return of the seasons and the birds, the growth of plants and children, the fixed order of the stars and the planets. This was the order he opposed in secret to the factitious order of discourse. To this order, the beasts submit; and also man, that beast who speaks.”

Sartre understood this, while at the same time developing a theory of liberty that involved the most radical plasticity. I like the contradiction, or rather, the stitching. The metaphysical stitching.