Free Love and Alienation, or the Proverbs of Hell, rewarmed

  A long post for a hot day

1.

Free love is a phrase that is well and truly dead – dead of mockery, dead of the emotional exploitation of which it became the instrument, deniability raising the old ghost of guilt in the service of nubile bodies forever lined up at the porn shoot. Yet it had a long, long career, and it is still not so dead that the phoenix of some kind of program joining sex, liberty and utopia cannot leap from the ashes of lovers, factual and fictional, who took the principle of free love with deadly earnestness.

Free love was the politics of Bohemia, and Bohemias were political entities as well as artmaking contexts. A Bohemia that does not contrast love, as the central socially binding feeling, to the bourgeois compromise with desire – happiness – is no bohemia at all.

 

We must begin with alienation – when have we ever not?  Alienation, in the Cold War, found its advocates – the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen, the sort of house philosopher of Adenauerism in Germany, saw alienation as the great civilizing process. But more generally, throughout the 19^th and 20^th century, alienation was a negative. There were, by my count, three great separate interpretations of alienation:  the reactionary, the liberal and the radical – all in one way or another turned from happiness to love as the foundation of society. That perfect bourgeois conjunction of happiness and utility – consumerism – lead to alienation, which was akin to but causally different from the alienation resulting from the social conditions of the working class.

Yet in these traditions, it is the liberal that is most critical of love. I remember once talking with a Mexican Trotskyist friend of mine, who remarked that love was the most important thing in life. At that time, I found that an astonishing statement. I found it shockingly sentimental. Looking back today, I can’t say I disagree so much about the love part as about the ‘most important’ part – my perpetual inner émigré has a hard time believing that lives happen in such a way that there is a most important part to them. This might be either the wisdom of the Dhammapada, or cheap nihilism, or a little of both.

 

Still, love has been a pretty powerful legitimating force in face of alienation - it has provided the single biggest rival to the modernist cult of happiness. The idea that love is the foundation of the truly human community is perhaps central to the counter-traditions that emerge under capitalism.  The critical viewpoint on happiness is drawn back to love by the force of historical events, as the family is reconstituted around the love match, and the sovereign is reconstituted as either the state or the “people”.  Of course, from the liberal point of view, there is a strong critique of the notion that love is the foundation of community. The word for that is totalitarianism. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Hannah Arendt went from doing dissertation work on love to writing her massive opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism. When Calasso speaks of how the ancien regime sweetness of life turned sour – how Wormwood fell to earth and turned the waters bitter – he is touching on the fact that what volupte loaned the incipient happiness culture – a more and more simple tie between pleasure and happiness – produced, as it were, a cultural vacuum which the literature of sentiments, that quasi-institutionalisation of romantic love, filled. A dangerous void.

There is a dimension of the alienation from the happiness culture which seeks, in the mythic, to re-discover the human limit. At first, this might seem an entirely reactionary program. Yet it turns out not to be so simple.

The symbolic definitely does battle with the utilitarian. The two arise in a shared cultural space. And the fatal tendency of the utilitarian to take its claim to the concrete, its grasp of pleasure and pain, and turn them into abstractions – the decisive step of which is turning them into units, as if, like a stream of light in Newton’s sense, we were talking about corpuscles – means that utilitarianism has a secret need of symbols. On the side of myth, however, the tendency is to look for the secret histories of the great tradition – surely there is a minotaur of some kind at the center of the encyclopedia. This brings us, by sure steps that have been repeated over and over again, to conspiracy and chance. To which the gnostic historian must dedicate, finally, his narrative, these being his tropes for cause.

2.

Free love, then, might not be so silly after all. Or rather, it is so massively silly that it poses a question that eventually undermines all social arrangements that deny that the question has any validity. To deny, for one thing, that there is anything free save free enterprise. Against which, we can put Novalis’s manifesto-like remark: “Love is the end of ends of world history, the amen of the universe.”

Novalis is not a nobody in the history of free love, but a clue. Myself, I think of the “free love ideology” as a product not of the libertines of the 18^th century in France, but of the German romantics of the end of the 18^th century in various little burgs in Germany. Like Therese Huber.

3.

These are some facts about Therese Huber between 19 and 25.

 

She was born in Gottingen, the daughter of a wellknown professor, Christian Gottlob Heyne, and Therese Heyne, born Weiss, in May, 1764. She was thus a little older than the revolutionary generation, those born in the 1770s.

According to Therese Huber’s correspondence, her first memories were of her mother – of her mother being ill. This was when she was three. “I was never my Mother’s favorite, certainly not, I was ugly, bulky and probably never brilliant. Until my thirteenth year, I don’t remember anybody ever tell me I had a mind or that I was droll.” Of her mother she says, further, that she was “no housewife, we were raised in filth and disorder.” Her earliest memories were of her stained clothing. Moreover, her mother had “a lover until she died, almost in her forty fifth year.” Her lover lived in the house. He was a music student by the name of Forkel.

Therese always had the fantasy that she had been adopted.

Therese Huber later wrote about her first husband, Georg Forster: “He had the fortune of unpretty men, that women had to come to meet him half way, which, with his very soft heart, always vouchsafed the joy of a very intense friendship.”

At eighteen, Therese was mad to get out of her house and the town of Gottingen. By this time, she had a stepmother. Georg Forster, her father’s friend, though much older than her, promised to get her out of the house. So she accepted his proposal for marriage in early 1784.. He promptly took off for Vilnius, where he’d been promised a position. He was gone for eighteen months.

Therese promptly set out for Gotha to care for a sick friend, Auguste Schneider, the mistress of the Baron of Gotha. In a letter, Therese wrote a friend that “people’s image of me as a coquette, the girl in a novel, had begun to disappear, and one sees only the girl of reason, whose lively foolishness is forgiveable on account of her good heart.” But if she thought of herself, now, as calming down and assuming the dignity of the betrothed woman, she found, on her return to Gottingen, that things were difficult for a headstrong girl whose older, ugly fiance was in Vilnius. She was surrounded by admirers in her father’s house, while her father remained at his desk and her stepmother remained unconcerned – a situation that Henry James would have known what to do with. It was now that she encountered a man, FLM Meyer, who proved to be, as her biographer Geiger puts it, ‘fateful’ – misfortunate - to her. Later she wrote a friend that “Meyer led or ruled me, for he took my childish virginity in thought and deed.”

Meyer was a well known writer at this time. He was, according to Geiger, ‘shamelesslessly” egotistical. And he couldn’t do without women. He moved in that Enlightenment society under the motto that he couldn’t, ‘for the sake of one woman, be untrue to the whole sex.” The Casanova type. One of Sade’s fuckers.

At the same time there was a friend.

Henry James, too, would have given Therese the ambiguous friend.

This friend was the most ambiguous of the Romantic divas, Therese’s “evil spirit”, according to her biographer: Caroline Michaelis. “Sensuous and without morals already as a girl.” Over her lifetime, Caroline was married thrice, once to a man named Boehmer, then, when he died, to August Schlegel – this marriage was partly because she’d been banned for revolutionary activities in Gottingen when it was occupied by the French, and partly because she’d scandalized the town by having a child as the result of an affair with a French soldier, a situation Schlegel volunteered to remedy - and then finally, in Jena, marrying Schelling. According to Geiger, this woman urged Therese to marry Forster, who she – Karoline – knew Therese didn’t love – out of jealousy. When Karoline and Schelling were living together in Jena, Hegel came to stay with them for a year. He knew the two well. When she died, Hegel wrote a letter to a friend, expressing his relief and joy that she was gone. She had an effect on people.

In 1785, Forster came back from Vilnius. He then “committed out of weakness or goodness or blindness one of the unbelievable errors of his error strewn life: instead of standing apart from the third man [Meyer], coolly, peacefully, with the intention and the hope of driving the memory of his intruder gradually out of the heart of his bride … he entered into the intoxicated state of friendship, full of illusions, that filled both of them. Soon he was using the brotherly ‘du’ on the newcomer and the secret lover; Meyer became his “Assad”, he appeared as a member of the “trinity” in the letters to theological friends. “Forster was more enthusiastic than both of us,” Therese wrote 20 years later, “had us all swear eternal love, and never asked for a kiss from me that I should not also offer Meyer.”

4.

For this little circle, the French Revolution came as a revelation.

I don’t want to claim for Caroline and Therese the “invention” of free love: but rather, its modelling, its performance. This circle did not arise out of the 18^th century’s decaying patriarchy as eccentrics, since all around them people were devising stories about the happy social order, the order of the future. Against Sade, who had a very darker vision of happiness – Sade realized deeply that the happiness of some not insignificant few depends very much on the unhappiness of others, and not some unintentional neglect of the exploited but a very intentional enjoyment of that unhappiness – there stands Swedenborg, Henry James’s father’s master thinker.

Even though Swedenborgians proper disclaimed the free love ideas that grew out of certain Swedenborgian factions in the nineteenth century, it is certainly true that Swedenborg was a great promoter of the notion that liberty is love. As his biographer puts it:

 

“We must guard, however, against supposing that the spiritual is not real and bodily; for everything inward has its last resort in substantive organization. The bodies of angels are as ours in every part, but more expressive, plastic and perfect. Their conjugal union, which is true chastity and playful innocence, is bodily like our own; nay, far more intimate: its delights, immeasurably more blessed.”

And this, from Conjugal love:

“The Lord provides similitudes for those who desire love truly conjugal, and if they are not given in the earths, he provides them in the heavens. The Divine Providence of the Lord is most particular and most universal concerning marriages and in marriages, because all the enjoyments of heaven stream forth from the enjoyments of conjugial love, as sweet waters from the stream of a fountain; and that on this account it is provided that conjugial pairs be born, and that these are continually educated, under the auspices of the Lord, for their several marriages, both the boy and the girl being ignorant of it; and after the completed time, then that marriageable virgin, and then that young man fit for nuptials meet somewhere as if by fate, and see each other; and that then, as from a certain instinct, they know that they are partners, and, as if from a certain dictate within, think in themselves, the young man, that she is mine, and the virgin, that he is mine; and, after this has been seated for some time in the minds of both, they deliberately speak to each other, and betroth themselves.”

These words, abbreviated for conversation’s sake, could have issued from the mouth of Georg Forster.

5.

In 1792, Georg Forster had ended up in Mainz, a city in Hesse. The region had become a conflict zone between the French revolutionary armies and the various armies of the coalition formed under the terms of the Brunswick manifesto, to rescue the ancien regime, i.e. the house of Bourbon.

Forster was overworked as the head of the archive and library. At the beginning of 1792, he had not taken a public political stance, although in private letters he expressed a clear sympathy for the Jacobins. He was hiding from his wife Therese the exact extent of his indebtedness, which was crushing – Georg Forster was never a prudent man when it came to cash.

Therese seems to have been emotionally and intellectually of the left. Geiger, her biographer, in 1909, found this so scandalous that he tried to mitigate it by claiming that Therese was Forster’s ‘pupil’. It was far more likely she was his comrade. This marriage and its failure has attracted a host of commentators who have puzzled themselves over the fact that Therese left Georg for another man, and yet the two seemed to rely on each other even after the separation. The solution – that their sexual incompatibility did not hinder their affinity with each other on the basic level of friendship – seems too shocking to propose – especially for those who want to tell a story of betrayal. But Therese seems to have cared for Georg, although she didn’t love him.

The man she did love was Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, a Prussian official and intimate of Schiller. Therese met Huber through Forster, in 1788. In 1790, Huber was living with the married couple. Therese was moving in a direction taken by her mother – who lived with her lover in the house of her husband:

 

“We stood in a doubtful relationship one to another for 1 ½ years. In the beginning I pushed him away, everything now came together, he wanted to forget [his relationship to his fiancé, Dorothea Stock], and a miserable doctor pulled him away from the border of the grave. The noble, humane Forster saw a lot in the young man, drew him nearer, I became used to him, he saw me for a year and went through all the gradation of feeling, my unhappiness strengthened my love for him – although I though of none – finally circumstances offered a hand. I don’t know in which moment, before we could guess ourselves, he had exposed to me his relationship with that girl. I pondered the thing and found decisively the result: he must confess to her that he didn’t love her any more, that time had changed his feeling, that he had no more rights upon her heart. … “ As Therese says, it took 2 ½ years for Huber to come to this point.

Some biographers have said that Therese Huber used her status, when Forster was dead, to suppress much of the information about what was happening in Mainz in 1792.

If the scene was not loaded for an explosion yet – a disaffected couple, sickly children, an overworked world famous intellectual, the French revolutionary army in the area, the wife’s lover in the house – into this scene came the ambiguous friend: Caroline Michaelis.

Why Therese would invite her school friend Caroline, lately widowed, to stay with the household in Mainz is a puzzle. Or perhaps it isn’t – perhaps Therese, out of fairness, wanted Georg to have a lover too. Although Georg was not sexually faithful, apparently he had sex in the approved way, with lower class girls. The libertine solution.

Caroline was of course as strong willed as Therese. Caroline’s letters from Mainz give another account of the Forster-Huber household. It is a sign of how narrowly the circles intersect that he chief correspondent was Meyer, the writer who had been Therese’s admirer – who “took” her virginity from her, according to Therese in an ambiguous reference. Surely Caroline knew about that. Even before she went to Mainz,she had written to Meyer: “I have never depended on her friendship – among women, there can be none.”

Soon Caroline is writing in a more sympathetic way about Georg. In particular, she writes a letter linking the ugly men of the revolution – Mirabeau, ostensibly – with her own “beauteous” figure. Strikingly, Caroline “reads” herself into her situation – which has forever been the subject of speculation – with Georg by reading Mirabeau’s famous at the time letters to his lover, Sophie, of which she writes to Luise, her correspondent, that she should read them, except that she imagines Luisa won’t have time, and won’t read in bed, being more inclined to sleep, and is too “good” for a “ugly monster” [hassliche Bosewicht] as the extraordinary Mirabeau was, who had virtues and talents enough to supply a thousand normal people, and too much true intelligence to seriously be a monster, as one can conclude out of particular features. He may have been ugly, he says that often enough in the letters – but he loved Sophie, for women certainly don’t love the beauty of men – and yet the ugly man imposes himself through his exterior on the unruly masses…”

Caroline provides an interesting insight into a aesthetic dimension of the Revolution: the part played by ugly men. Mirabeau. Robespierre. Chamfort, the great pamphleteer of the revolution. Marat. It was a revolution of ugly men, diversified by a few beauties, who in the course of the revolution all had their heads chopped off.

6. According to no less an authority than Josiah Royce, to understand the philosophy of Schelling, one must understand Caroline Michaelis, his wife. In 1792, when she joined Therese Huber’s household, she was still Caroline Boehmer, recently widowed. Already August Wilhelm Schlegel was obsessed with her – and already she felt herself puzzingly superior to him, an intuition she was never to overcome. Later, after the occupation by the French and the counter-occupation by the forces of reaction, later, after Therese had fled to Strassburg (which is when, apparently, she wrote Georg that she was leaving him for Hubner), after Georg left for Paris and received the condemnation of almost the entire German intelligentsia (poor mistaken Forster, Wilhelm Humboldt signed), and that after Therese might have written Caroline a letter giving her a green light for Caroline’s own affair with Georg, after the pregnancy with the unknown father, probably a French office, after being released from Mainz and exiled from her native town of Gottingen as a danger to morals and public order, she would be ‘rescued’ by Schlegel and cozened, cozening herself, into an loveless marriage, which broke up on the rocks when she finally met the man she did love, the young philosopher, Schelling. Caroline, it seems, spread her own version of what happened between Therese and Georg.

This pattern of split ups, rumor, and leftist politics is going to fasten to free love from the revolutionary period onward. The great charge against free love is its fissility – just as the great charge made against bourgeois love, from the standpoint of free love, is its creeping dissolution of the amorous impulse, which decays in the acids of repetition and over-familiarity. They fuck you up, your Mom and Dad. Love loses its courage, that side of its character that is a perpetual test. The family withdraws into its comforts, loses its curiosity and generosity, becomes fasco-tropic. Or as Shelley puts it later in the Notes on Queen Mab:

7. The triangles of the Therese and Georg Forster household seem to pop up in bohemias, to become its romantic myth. Jules and Jim, again and again. In the ruins of the patriarchy, in that wreck, we see how difficult it is to get away from the Father and his arts of sublimation.

8.  The anonymous genius of the fairy tale is the genius of history as well, with that same penchant for the fatally ambiguous symbol, where, as though in a besieged city in an endless backlands war, love and death exchange sniper fire with each other among bombed out buildings and constantly shifting zones of engagement. This city could be the New Jerusalem. It could be Stalingrad. It could be the Republic of Mainz, where Georg Forster assumed a revolutionary role in 1792, as his household expanded to include his wife Therese's lover, Huber, and the ever present Caroline Boehmer. It was in December of 1792 that Therese took the kids and her lover and left. Forster went to Paris, as a delegate.

One has to be sensitive enough, then, to the way the fairy tale sticks in the historic fact to understand the depth of certain symbols.

8. It is to this fairy tale genius that I dedicate this jump-cut finale. From German towns in the 1790s to, for instance, this: on November 19, 1831, Prosper Enfantin, responding to the uproar in Saint Simonian circle that had greeted his proposals for free love, responded with a speech in which he outlined the details of his system, which echoed Fourier and Swedenborg in separating marriage from “true” marriage, the latter of which would rekindle the numbed feelings of conjugal couples by giving them the theoretical liberty to love. It was hard to tell how this theoretical liberty translated into physiological fact, although by this time, Enfantin had, like Swedenborg before him, lowered the barrier between the symbol and the thing.

The uproar continued, with certain leaders of the Saint Simonian family denouncing Enfantin’s plan, and the newspapers reporting on his immorality. So he lead a retreat to his home in Menilmontant of forty male apostles, who attempted to live a life of pure communism. As one of the signs of sublime fraternity, Enfantin had shirts made for the apostles that buttoned down the back - and thus could only be buttoned with the aid of a helper.

Enfantin’s shirts deserve a place with Aristophanes unsexed circular human, in the Symposium, and Magritte’s hooded lovers blindly kissing – symbols that overwhelm one’s ability to immediately interpret them. Enfantin’s shirts hangs in the great museum of love, high and low, pure and dirty,  – half a sign of mutual aid, without which there can be no freedom, and half a strait jacket.

Mamdani's speech

 I feel like the word "left" has moved in retrograde, the opposite of such words as phlogistan which eventually became oxygen. Phlogistan stood for a concept while oxygen became the name of a material. The Left once stood for a material, compounded out of an international working class, and now stands for a concept, dancing in millions of heads like mine, educated and full of opinions.

Well, I can't do anything about that. But I do rather wince when my lefty opinion peeps do nothing but bitch. Bitching is fine and good, bitching is the tongue set free, but it doesn't cover the spectrum. We must have praise in that spectrum, or you sink into gloomy shit., which doesn't help anybody.

Once, when the left was a material force, an intersectional union on the way to remaking the world, it understood, and developed, occassion and celebration. The last Americcan politician to really understand that was Jesse Jackson.

So I feel it is high praise to say that Mamdani's Fourth of July Speech echoed with Jackson, was in a call and response relationship with Jackson's 1988 speech, and his campaign speeches in 1984. The Democratic party, still panicked by McGovern, turned its back on Jackson, who even extended his hand to that weasel Mondale - one of the worst candidates ever thrown up by the party establishment - and we are payng the price.

Mamdani is my president.

What the gin and tonic sez

 Mostly, the politics of the U.S. is a measure of the public opinion of the upper 20 percent. For that cohort the U.S. has gone from strength to strength since Reagan's time. They live in a United States that we all recognize, since it is all we see. When we get a tv show about the 80 percent, it is usually cops or loveable comedies where the knockabout characters are just like us - played by millionaires.

Once upon a time, an actor playing a king or nobleman would have a status and assets much below that king or nobleman. Not now.

I would look with a less jaundiced eye at this history if I had been bathed in the waters of that prosperity, but alas, this was not my fate. Money has never blessed me. I attribute my money curse to a prank I played in the 9th grade, when before a group of friends I burned a couple of dollar bills to "prove" that money didn't really exist as a thing. The spirit of the bill took notice, and has since abundantly proved that money exists as more of a thing than I will ever be.

I mulled over these things in Felix's, a French cafe near the American embassy, yesterday. I am at present in Montpellier, but I had to visit our American embassy and prove who I am to the social security office there. Things went well. I even had pictures of myself, taken by authorized officials, showing I was who I said I was. It is a theology a bit more complex than that of the holy Trinity - I am my picture and my picture is me. There is something delightfully ancien regime about the social security card - there's no picture on it. For the state, though, there are only selfies, and no selves. So I nursed my gin and tonic, there, and thought of the life of my selfies.

In my retirement, I think I'll become an influencer. That was what the gin and tonic said.

Vico: "a world of men who are composed of lines, of numbers, and of algebraic signs."

 Vico and us

1. In the preface to his translation of Vico’s Le Méthode des études de notre temps, Alain Pons notices that Vico, in contrast to his opponent Descartes, recognizes the distinct cognitive and cultural and philosophical status of childhood and youth.

“. It is doubtlessly in their respective attitude to childhood that best reveals the depths that separate Vico from Descartes. Descartes could not console himself from the fact that “we have all been children before being men, from which it is almost impossible that our judgments are as pure and solid as they could have been, if we had had the entire use of our reason from the instant of our birth and had never been led but by it. The Research of the Truth is even more explicit: “One of the principle causes why we have so much pain in knowing” is that, with the child, “the best comes last, which is understanding”, and that before this, for years, we remain given to the senses, “which see nothing beyond the most vulgar and common of things,” to our natural inclination, which is “completely corrupted”, and to “impertinent nurses”. Vico, on the contrary, could be defined as the philosopher of childhood, of the world of the child as the childhood of the world. From his first inaugural discourse, he declares to the students, “Quivis vestrum puer maximo praelusit philosopho” – every child is the prelude to a great philosopher, because in him is spontaneously amassed a treasury of theoretical and practical wisdom that the speculative knowledge would have to “explain”, to deploy rationally. The child is not infans, he speaks, one must know how to listen to him. Vico reports, in the De Constantia philologiae, the phrase of one of his sons: My heart is always talking to me, and what a lot of things it tells me!” “

Pons is right to elevate the child – that evidence that maturity is, itself, but a phase – to the emblem of what Vico saw as the cultural decadence spread by the geometric spirit. He wrote his small tract on method at almost the same time Fontenelle was writing his on the utility of mathematics. It is a good contrast, since Fontenelle was resolutely on the side of the moderns, and Vico wanted to have his say about this quarrel. I see Vico as one of the primogenitive advocates of the imagination – leading the power of ingenium against a fundamental shift in the way we think of the human limit, that is, the restriction of what the human can do to the world. A shift that leads us, in the 19th century, into the building of the artificial paradises of metal and chemicals.

Pons quotes a letter Vico wrote to a friend concerning the education of the young man of his time: “It [Cartesianism] has filled their heads, Vico will say in a letter of 1729, “with such great words as ‘demonstrations’, ‘evidences’, ‘demonstrated truths’, thus preparing them to enter in a world of men who are composed of lines, of numbers, and of algebraic signs.”

That is our world now, of course, and we are ruled by those men.

2. Thanks to printing, books are published everywhere; this is why, with the moderns, those are so numerous who, not content to know one or two authors, have an erudition which depends upon abundant, varied, and almost infinite reading. And finally we have universities, which are institutions organized in view of the study of all kinds of sciences and arts, thanks to which intelligence, esprit and language are carried to their perfection. And in almost all these studies a single end is aimed at today: the truth. To the point that if I undertook to make a speech in praise of the truth, I would deserve the fact that one would respond to me, with stupor: But who has ever thought to dispraise it? - Vico.

Foucault revived Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the cultural causes and consequences of the Will to Truth in the sixties; the diagnosis has rapidly penetrated to every sphere of the discourses devoted to the social sciences, and to the humanities. One hundred fifty years before Nietzsche, Vico was expressing his own discomfort with truth as the ‘single end’ of study, for reasons that reappear in Nietzsche’s account. It is a protest, on Vico’s part, that is almost wholly prophetic – for though, as Fontenelle wrote, the new mechanical ingenuity was appearing under the very noses of the poets and philosophers, in trades and shops, without the poets and the philosophers being aware of it, certainly the great European metropoles – London, Paris, Naples – had not yet been wholly caught up in the great transformation that instituted monetized commodity markets and industry on a mass scale, the concomitants of the artificial paradise created in the twentieth century, the isle of Synthetica that we are still exploring. Fontenelle, as Nietzsche noted in a passage in The gay science (a Viconian book), ‘grew after death”: ‘Those small, bold words over moral things, that Fontenelle threw out in his immortal eloges, seemed to his time to be paradoxes and games of a not inoffensive wit; even the highest judges of taste and reason didn’t see anything else in them – yes, including Fontenelle himself, perhaps. Now something unbelievable has happened: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game becomes serious! And we read these dialogues with another feeling than that with which Voltaire and Helvetius read them, and lift their progenitor into another and highter rank of intellects, as these did – justly? Unjustly?”

Vico’s examination of the “method” of the ancients versus the moderns is, on its face, an examination of the most modern of methods, that of science- as we find it in Descartes – with the ancients. But there is another face of his essay. Perhaps the best way to approach it is to look at what Vico says about printing. Remember that Vico, in the smallest of parentheses in his autobiography, tells us that his father owned a bookshop. Remember that the great encounter in Vico’s life – with the Bishop of Ischia whose patronage made him – occurred in another bookshop (Michelet mistranslates this as a ‘library” in his rendering of Vico), where Vico seemed to charm the Bishop with his knowledge of canon law, and his latin. Vico’s autobiography mentions several incidences concerning finding books, which was of course the bookseller’s trade. Among all these books and their quarrels we will surely find something a bit Oedipal, then, in Vico’s remarks about printing, and the preference for the quill – for copying.

At the same time, it is important to note the conjunction of the intellectual and the material here. Vico sees that matter is, in the human world, always a matter of routine.

“In fact, when books were written by hand, the copyists, in order to make their labors worth the pain, only transcribed authors who had a well established reputation, and, as they sold their copies dearly, the amateurs were sometimes constrained to copy them with their own hand. What admirable profit one takes from this kind of exercise! We better meditate a text that we write, and chiefly that we write in calmness, without precipitation, peacefully, and in always following the order. Thus is established between us and the authors not a tie of superficial acquaintance, but a long habit by which we finish purely and simply by identifying with them. It is for this reason that the bad authors, when one copied them by hand, knew disfavor, and the good saw their works diffused for the great benefit of all. Bacon made proof of more cleverness than good sense when he remarked that, in the influx of barbarians, the authors with the most weight sank to the bottom, while the light ones swam on the surface. In all genres, the most important, the best authors have come down to us, thanks to writing, and if this or that author has disappeared, one must attribute it to chance. When I question my memory (I wrote this when I was still not an old man) I perceive that I have seen writers who enjoyed while alive such glory that their works had been printed twelve times or more, and who are now disdained and even held in contempt. Others, remaining too long in obscurity and indifference, now see their name celebrated by a change in circumstance by the greatest experts.”

3. This is an odder passage than it might at first appear. It is not a plea for some quaint utopia of the hand held. Consider – it sounds themes – notably, the warning that mechanization works against authenticity – which are distinctly post-revolutionary. Furthermore, the man writing this is the son of a bookstore owner, who – one can say, literally – owes his bodily being to the printing press. Furthermore, the chance to study came to him from a chance conversation in a bookstore with a Bishop, carefully recorded and placed in the autobiography.

The ancients versus the moderns was a battle of the books, as Swift puts it (at about the same time as Vico), but it is the making of books as well as their content that concern our man. While it may seem that the analysis of mechanization is far removed from Vico’s protest against the geometric method, in fact, it is part of the same problem of exteriority. Just as the deductive method, in philosophy and physics, is nothing more than a baroque ornament, expressing no intrinsic truth about philosophy or physics, the printing press is the extrinsic mechanism that gives us no information about the quality of the rhetoric and themes of the books it produces, as it deviates from the track of the word – the special art of Hermes. To put oneself, by copying, in the track of the writer is a form of ‘magical’ materialism, one that is hard – and perhaps impossible? – to entirely give up. I’m ever your man for tracks and paths, backwards and forwards, and as such would link Vico’s words about copying with a more famous Viconian theme that is given to us a year later in his essay, “The wisdom of the ancient Italians. This is a passage translated from Michelet’s French translation:

The words verum and facturm, the true and the fact, are put in a relation one for the other by the Latins as inter-convertible, as the schoolmen say. For the latins, intelligere, understand, is the same thing as to read clearly and to know with evidence. They call cogitare what, in Italian, is called pensare et andar raccogliendo (ratio reason) designating among them a collection of numeric elements, and this gift proper to the human, distinguishing him from the beasts and constituting his superiority, which is why they call man an animal who participates in reason - rationis particeps – and who, consequently, doesn’t possess it entirely. Just as words are the signs of ideas, ideas are the signs and representations of things. Thus, as to read, legere, is to gather together the elements of writing out of which words are formed, intelligence, intelligere, consists in assembling of all the elements of a thing from out of which emerges the perfect idea.

One is able thus to conjecture that the ancient Italians admitted the following doctrine on the true: the true is the fact (the made) itself, and by consequence God is the first truth because he is the first maker (factor), the infinite truth because he made all things and the absolute truth because he represents all the elements of things, external as well as internal, for he contains them. To know is to assemble the elements of things, from which it follows that the thought cogitatio is proper to the human spirit and intelligence to the divine spirit, for God unites all the elements of things, external as well as internal, since he contains them, and he disposes of them, while the human spirit is limited as it is, and outside of all of what is not of it can relate to the external points, but can never unite everything in such a way that it can think about things, but not understand them – this is why he participates in reason, but does not possess it.”

In the background, outside of the window of a bookstore in Naples, on the branch of a figtree, two birds have settled from the Rg Veda, “one of the twain eats the sweet Figtree’s fruitage; the other eating not regardeth only.”

from the ancien regime to hemingway

 In the Revue Critique of May 23, 1921, there was a brief notice about the death of Comte Greppi at Milan. He was more than one hundred years old. The writer of the notice, Andre M. de Poncheville, alluded to the fact that when Stendhal was the consul at Civita Vecchia, he must have run into Greppi, then a young man who was in the entourage of the ex-empress Marie-Louis. De Poncheville noted that Greppi was trained in the art of diplomacy by Metternich himself – or at least he saw how Metternich did things in the years before 1848. Although, in a small event that signaled the end of Metternich's world, Greppi resigned in 1849 and only resumed diplomacy under the government of an independent and unified Italy.

De Poncheville did not note, because he undoubtedly did not know, that Greppi had entered literature proper through another portal: Ernest Hemingway.

Here he is, under the name Greffi, in Farewell to Arms:
“Count Greffi was ninety-four years old. He had been a contemporary of Mettemich, and was an old man with white hair and moustache and beautiful manners. He had been in the diplomatic service of both Austria and Italy and his birthday parties were the great social event of Milan. He was living to be one hundred years old and played a smoothly fluent game of billiards that contrasted with his own ninety-foury ear-old brittleness. I had met him when I had been at Stresa once before out of season and while we played billiards we drank champagne. I thought it was a splendid custom and he gave me fifteen points in a hundred and beat me.”
There are few people, perhaps no other people, who are accorded this accolade by Hemingway: “and beat me.”
Hemingway’s character doesn’t mention Stendhal. Sciascia, in one of his little fait divers essays, Poor Rosetta, notices the connection. It is a human thread across a literary history in which Stendhal emerged, just as he predicted he would, in the twentieth century to be a literary force. It is a coincidence that evokes a revery, this sense of a connected world. Sciascia doesn’t mention Greppi’s typically at ease mention in Garibaldi’s memoirs. It was Greppi who introduced the rough and ready revolutionary into the higher echelons of the Milanese aristocracy.
A lovely ancien regime life.

The adventures of the psychosomatic

 The psychosomatic has fallen out of favour, or, more complexly, has become in the popular imagination a way of detracting from the reality of a malady or uncomfortable situation. Partly this is the result of a good thing - a feminist demand that the medical profession treat the ailments of women with respect, rather than dismissing them as "mental" things women do. Since this happened and happens, that critique still has bite. However, I think the bite is in the dismissal of female testimony. And it does not tell us, fundamentally, about the psychosomatic.

There’s an obvious antinomy in the argument that psychosomatic conditions aren’t real. The ground of that objection is based in a sort of common folk psychological positivism, a naïve materialism. The argument goes that an illness or something with sickness like symptoms is real if you can trace the cause back to some alien presence in the body – a virus, a bacteria – or some genetic or natal cause. Otherwise, the symptom or disease like condition is not real, in as much as its cause is some idea. It is, instead, feigned. However, how would feigning be possible if ideas in some sense had no effect on the physiological condition of the body? Once we grant that the effect can occur, we have granted another causal route for bodily conditions. We don’t really have to go too far afield in our folk interpretations of our actions to see the most commonplace instances of this. I have an idea that I want to run, so I run. Running causes my heart to beat faster and my breathing to quicken. Nobody would say that the heart beating faster and the breathing wasn’t real. One might say, however, that I was proximately responsible for this by my decision to run. We can change our example and make the responsibility charge (which, I should point out, is a term that is overdetermined – it is not just a way of talking about a cause, but a way of talking about the morality of an act) a little fuzzier. I’m afraid of heights. When, for instance, I went up with my wife years ago to to have drinks on top of a swank L.A. hotel in a balcony that looks out from forty stories, I experienced some slight physiological Wilfred Changes and a great deal of a sort of proprioceptive mental discomfort that I cannot trace back to a decision I made, as in the running case. Instead, the phobia has a subconscious status. I am aware of it, but I can’t turn it off and on in the way I can the decision to run. Even in dreams, when I go high up I get afraid. Even those peope who are resistant to the idea of a subconscious would probably try to persuade me to treat it like running or other actions I turn off and on, implicitly acknowledging that it has another footing. In habit, say.

The point is, whether a condition comes from chemicals or a virus or something unconscious, it is real in as much as it is felt. A therapist might speak of an unconscious decision to feel in a certain way, using the model of decision-making that would put the idea on the same plane as the decision to run, but this is a simplification and distortion of the unconscious idea. Eventually, Freud, needing “deciders”, came up with a topography of the self that included the ego, the id, and the superego. It is not clear, however, that decision actually describes the effect of an idea on the unconscious level. We need, as Freud knew, to get rid of our authoritarian illusion that there are deciders all the way down. There isn’t. The rock does not decide to be a rock, the tree the tree, the sky the sky.

The unconscious is back in style, scientifically, although neurologists try to make clear that they are not talking about the yucky Freudian unconscious, with all that sex going on. This unconscious is sexless and data driven. It has become obvious that we take in far more sense data than we can consciously process. It has to go somewhere. The popular model for this is the User illusion – taken from computers. Users downloading a file will look at the little graph showing the file being downloaded as if it is connected to the activity, instead of being a mere icon pointing to the activity going on, and thus unconnected to it in a real sense – in the same way that the blinking light warning you to get oil for your car is not the thing you pour the oil over when you get the oil. The user illusion idea is that mostly we deal with icons in our consciousness instead of the real processes going on in our unconscious.

This view of the unconscious dovetails with Freudian theory much more than the neurologists and pop scientists think. That is because most of them have never read Freud at all, but have read magazine articles about what a kook Freud was. Oh well.

The violent resistance to the suggestion that a symptom or condition can have its ultimate cause in the unconscious is another symptom of the flatheadedness of our time. On the other hand, the original Freudian therapeutic impulse, which was about understanding our unconscious idea and thus ‘curing’ the condition or syndrome, seems to have been way too optimistic, way too premised on a conversion motif . What changes the body necessarily operates through the bodies tools, and corporal tendencies can reinforce themselves in different ways once a condition is established. It is likely that if a person were really suffering from some psychosomatic condition, he would really need certain physical treatments. Just as I would need, say, treatment if my panic over heights caused me to have a heart attack or something.

My point is that the rejection of the psychosomatic is something encouraged by the positivist trend in medical science that is ultimately therapeutically unsound.

The unconscious – can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Backrooms

 Went to see Backrooms yesterday with my son – who is an ardent fan of horror movies – and I began sceptical and came away impressed. Our first anti-AI allegory! It makes sense that AI is best attacked from the horror angle – it rather comes out of horror gothic, out of Frankenstein. The movie, I feared, would be boring, but the director, a twenty year old youtuber, Kane Parsons, is pretty expert at playing the dozens with the scary story/scary film genre. The jump scares are all, or almost all, built from implication, from noises and shadows.

I think I have detected, from the Descent and As Above, So Below to Barbarian a subgenre, aptly named on Reddit as Underground horror, in which the primal memory of going down the birth canal (okay, perhaps there is none back there in the cortex, but still) is twisted into the adventure of being chased through ever narrower corridors, from which one must escape the monster.

But to return to the Anti-AI motif – AI slop really is monstrous, so why not draw the obvious conclusion? We always turn to some gothic motif to make our liberal political points – to dystopia or allegory in Animal Farm and 1984 (and as a piece of art, incidentally, Backrooms is far superior to 1984) – and now it is the turn of the evil empires churning out AI. It is apt that a Youtuber feels the danger here – it is not a fake Luddite sense of all technology being bad, but a real sense that this technology is debasing the internet technology we have, in the same way cryptocurrency debases money by creating fake money.

So, I was wrong to irritate my son by making the Dad joke of calling it Bathrooms consistently when we were discussing going to see it. My bad.