2.
Memento Mori, or an early standin for the beauty of the world, these are the Renaissance thematics on the fly’s shoulders. But I see a thematic from the classical period that Arasse may not have attended to – at least in the detail book.
Early on, in Klaus Oehler’s definitive essay, Der Consensus Ominium als Kriterium der Wahrheit in der antiken Philosophie (1963), there is a quotation from Hesiod. The line quoted comes from the section of the poem devoted to “Days”, with its sometimes obscure reference to work, luck, gods and the seasons. The line, 760, goes: … and avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but it is hard to undo it. Talk is never completely lost, which has been in the mouths of the many. For talk is itself a God.” Talk, here, is not logos, but pheme – which, as Jenny Strauss Clay points out in Hesiod’s Cosmos, is the antithesis of kleos, that is to say, fame: kleos is to be heard about, pheme is to be talked about.’ This enduring couple still presides, in all their debased divinity, over the newspaper and the news and entertainment channels. They are structured by what is likely, or plausible.
The mouths of the many. The signifying fly. This is an archaic, Eastern Mediterranean couple.
If in one direction, pheme/kleos moves towards the universal knowledge vested within the people – towards common sense – in another direction, it moves towards rumor, the “angel of ruin”, the fama of Virgil’s Aeneid, the beast perched on the gates of the city. A bird, a flying thing, but with attributes that are fatally fly-like.
“Furth she quicklye gallons, with wingflight swallolyke hastning,
A foule fog pack paunch: what feathers plumye she heareth,
so manye squint eyeballs shee keeps (a relation uncoth)
So manye tongues clapper, with her ears and lip labor eevened.
In the dead of nighttime to the skyes shee flickereth, howling
Through the earth shade skipping, her sight from slumber amooving.
Whilst the sun is shying the baggage close lodgeth in housroofs,
or tops of turrets, with feare towns loftye she frighteth,
As readye forged fittons, as true tales vayneley toe twattle.”
Such an image – the squinty, many eyed, flying creature - could as well be recognized in the “rumor panics” in Borneo in 1979, as reported by anthropologist Richard Allan Drake. In the longhouse of the village of Sungai Mulae, he was told that the government was building a bridge nearby, and that of course, they would send out kidnappers to snatch somebody and sacrifice them to the bridge. The village was, ostensibly, Christianized, yet rumors like these “flew” about often; in fact, Drake establishes that the form of this rumor was recurrent in Borneo. It was recorded on the North coast of Borneo as early as 1910; it was recorded in Sandong River region in 1949; and in 1981, it was recorded in the Meratus mountains. In fact, if we extend our search from Borneo to other regions of the world, we find that, for instance, in pre-Revolutionary France, there were rumors about the kidnapping of children and women by the government of King Louis XV; and there was the persistent rumor in Czarist Russia of Jews kidnapping Christian children to use their blood.
Although the circumstances and meanings of these rumors are different, their reappearence is typologically significant. L.A. Bysow, a Russian sociologist who wrote a seminal analysis of rumors that appeared in the twenties, based his morphological distinctions between three types of rumors by their manner of spreading. The darker, secretive, bad news announcing type, which have a “creeping and slow character”, the more hurrying rumors, which produce a social shock; and the ones that appear and disappear on the surface of public opinion, which Bysow compared to divers, going under the surface and coming up.
The late nineteenth century notion of contagion models rumors according to an epidemiology, thus continuing a very old analogy between logos and seed. But there is another analogy between a flying beast – a fly – and pheme. The invisible microbe that replaced the miasma model fit comfortably with the word as organic – and indeed, the word is the product of an organism. In fact, the analogy between sickness and rumor is encoded even in Virgil’s image, for this monstrous bird of ill or true fame conveys the word from mouth to ear in the city bears a visible likeness to the winged demons who shoot the arrows of sickness in the city. Both sickness and rumor “fly”. And both are mass phenomena, often leading to panic. And, in a quiet division between true fame and false, rumors have, over time, been associated exclusively with distortion. The rumor is often treated by the sociologist as though, by definition, it must be false. As often happens, the sociologist is simply following the cop, here – for the justification of using police action against rumor is precisely that it falsifies, as though there were some connection between hegemonic power and the truth
Rumor is the illegitimate sibling – at least mythopoetically – of public opinion. Drake connects rumor in Borneo is connected to the dominance of the “oral” in Borneo society. The logic of evidence here feeds on itself – unlike the written, which requires a process of mediation that engages the body as scriptor, the medium as the object inscribed, and the eye as reader, rumor, like the word itself, springs directly from the tongue and flies to the ear. Bysow speaks of its chain-like characteristic – depending on face to face communication, it creates a public of a sort out of haptic space – the kind of public that Gabriel Tarde, writing in the late nineteenth century, classified as essentially the primitive form of the public: the crowd.
In the early modern period in France, as Arlette Farge shows in Dire et Mal Dire, the word on the street was as much a vehicle of news as any official chronicle. Indeed, news was subdivided between the official histories, the private journals, and the gazetins of the police – police reports composed from the reports of the mouchards, the spies, that the police planted in the population. Louis XV enjoyed having these gazetins read to him. The relation of those in power to those underneath is mediated by a concern, on the part of both parties, with what is thought by the other – a concern in which the police can act as brokers. In World War II, there devolved upon some sub-officers the duty of filling out rumor reports – for officers and the upper management of the security apparatus were obsessed with the damage rumor could do. It was during the war that Allport and Postman studied rumors through a series of experiments, in which an image, seen by some subject, was then described by that subject to someone who couldn’t see the image. Then a chain of accounts is produced as the second person tells a third person (who also can’t see the image) about it, and so on. The sadistic element in the experiment (for psychology experiments almost always contain some element that displays the gratuitous power of the experimenter) is that these accounts are made in front of an audience that can see the slide on the screen, while those describing the image have to keep their backs turned to the screen.
Notice two things about Allport and Postman’s experiments. The first is the idea, which forms the whole basis of the experiment, that the story communicated by the rumor is – in contradiction to that reported by, say, the experimenter – essentially distorted. The distortion here is given to us in the frame of the report – although we who read the report cannot ourselves examine the slides, we are told, without any shadow of a doubt, what they depict by the researchers. In fact, of course, these descriptions often carry with them descriptors that are not “contained” in the images. In an experiment made in Britain following Allport’s line after the war, for instance, we are told that one slide is of “students throwing eggs” – which depends for its truth value on, among other things, describing the thrower as a student. But can true and false fama be so easily separated? Does distortion really mean untruth? Whose protocols are in play, here?
The second thing to notice about the Allport/Postman experiments is that they impose an identity on the group of subjects by giving them certain functions, in opposition to another group.
Allport and Postman were not concerned with the function of rumor in maintaining the group so much as they were concerned with the transmission of rumor, which meant studying how a distortion generates a story pattern. A distortion in a sociology paper on rumor that misspells L.A. Bysow’s name (and this has happened in the literature I’ve read) does not generate a story. But it leads, much like the mutation of a gene, to further misspellings in other papers.
This is a minor thing in the subset of sociology devoted to rumor; but assumes an altogether more significant place when it occurs in newspapers and print media. These “ripples” in events bring the researcher up against “soft” matters of fact, which in turn generates a rumor like proving mechanism – a famous instance being the events in Dallas on November 21, 1963 that we call, simplifyingly, the assassination of JFK.
It is worth asking, then, whether rumors can be, among other things, attempts to wrest away that identity power by those upon whom it has been imposed. It is one of the surprises of literature it is shown such respect by the powers that be that they are continually trying to police rumor, or in other words, stories, narratives. The history of the policing of rumor shows a surprising sensitivity by those in power to the view of the ordinary outcasts and non-entities over whom they rule.
Which seems to get us far from the signifying fly. Yet it is perched there, on the frame, I think.
3.
But lets get back to the mouchard.
Flies, as the people in ancient cultures notice, perch both on food and feces. They seem to cross over the boundaries that transgression, reverence, and health draw. There is no sacrifice without the fly.
The mouchards of the Ancien Regime lead us, etymologically – that science that tracks the rumor of sound and sense behind the current word – to this totemic animal, who presides over the contagion and the contagious rumor: the fly. According to an etymological dictionary of 1856 (Noel, Carpentier), the word mouchard “is not an old one in our language, [it] … derives from the word mouche [housefly], flies going out to search their food everywhere, changing places in the wink of an eye; and what appears to confirm this opinion is that one said and one says still moucher for spy, mouche for a spy.
However, there is another story about the word in question here – for the housefly is not, according to Greenburg and Kunich, at the root of musca. Musca derives from the Sanskrit, mukshika, which describes something more like a gnat – the eye fly, musca sorbens, which feeds on secretions of the eye. The fly is shown in lists kept in Mesopotamia, and the gods are compared to flies when they gather around a sacrifice, or fly through the streets. In Lucian’s Praise of the Fly, the connection between the fly and gossip is made part of an origin story:
“Legend tells how Myia (the fly's ancient name) was once a maiden, exceeding fair, but over-given to talk and chatter and song, Selene's rival for the love of Endymion. When the young man slept, she was for ever waking him with her gossip and tunes and merriment, till he lost patience, and Selene in wrath turned her to what she now is. And therefore it is that she still, in memory of Endymion, grudges all sleepers their rest, and most of all the young and tender. Her very bite and bloodthirst tell not of savagery, but of love and human kindness; she is but enjoying mankind as she may, and sipping beauty.”
In Steve Connor’s Fly, there is a wealth of associations culled from literature and life – the life, for instance, that is recorded in the trials of witches - between the fly and devils. The fly as a familiar possesses a number of qualities – its metamorphosis from the worm, its feeding on excrement, its omnipresence as a camp follower of human habitations, its quickness, its flight, its prominent eyes, its buzz – that go into the notion of Fama as well. Oddly, Connor doesn’t touch on the subject of the spy as fly, perhaps because the spy in English is free from the fly’s taint which pairs with the French expression.
4.
Is the signifying fly a theme, a motif? Or just a beast, just another human familiar as we make our way and lay our wastes, with its own multiplex way of seeing its opportunities.
Or does the mouth to feces connection point to some more libidinally primal, unconscious thing: a death drive, for instance?
There are some famous instances of flies in modernist literature. For instance, the essay by Robert Musil, Flypaper, which he wrote in 1913 and published in 1914 under a different title. This is a sort of emblematic essay among Robert Musil heads. Ben Marcus has posted the whole thing in English translation here:
https://benmarcus.com/smallwork/flypaper/“Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada. When a fly lands on it—not so eagerly, more out of convention, because so many others are already there—it gets stuck at first by only the outermost joints of all its legs. A very quiet, disconcerting sensation, as though while walking in the dark we were to step on something with our naked soles, nothing more than a soft, warm, unavoidable obstruction, and yet something into which little by little the awesome human essence flows, recognized as a hand that just happens to be lying there, and with five ever more decipherable fingers, holds us tight.”
Notice that Musil unashamedly anthropomorphizes the fly experience. But in as much as the signifying fly is a marker of flighty liminality, the on again off again presence of boundaries – for instance the one between “man” and “animal” – I find that confluence of the human essence and the fly’s footprint nightmarishly correct. Tanglefoot is, after all, devised precisely to hold the fly in place until it dies in place. A strangely insidious weapon against the fly’s essence, speaking to other inventions that might be turned against the human essence in human form – say, in concentration camps. In 1913, the British construction of concentration camps in the Boer war was the product of a past decade, which “liberal” Europe had supposedly left behind. But as 1914 showed, that liberal Europe was dead.
In the interwar period, another Austrian writer, Joseph Roth, wrote an article about visiting Astrakhan that was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926. This article becomes a curious poem about flies. It is evident that Roth has read Musil’s flypaper piece:
„But the people in Astrakhan are not bothered about them [flies]. They don’t feel the flies at all. They look on as these murderous insects gnaw on their meat, their bread, their fruits, and don’t raise a hand. Yes, even in their beards, up their noses, on their foreheads, while the flies walk around, they go on speaking with an even temper and laugh. In the Cafeteria-Café they have given up fighting against the flies, and they don’t even shut up the food in the glass containers: the flies nourish themselves grossly on sugar and chocolate, and we are all used to it. Flypaper is an American discovery that I usually hate more than all the other blessings of culture seems to me a work of the noblest humanity in Astrakhan. But there is not a single strip of this valuable yellow material in all of Astrakhan! I asked in the Café: why don’t you have any flypaper? People shrug and say, Alas, if you had only seen Astrakhan before the war, even two months before the revolution!” The restaurant owner says it, and the merchants. Out of passive resistance, they are supporting the reactionary flies. One day these small beasts will simply swallow great Astrakhan, and with it all the fish and the caviar.”
5.
Hop hop hop. Not the knight’s move, but the signifying fly’s zigzag. The political unconscious in the representation of flies brings us to it above ground, conscious moment in June, 1943, when the Theatre de la cite opened with a new play: Les Mouches, by Jean Paul Sartre. A play that quickly became part of the post-war repertoire, but is performed, first, in occupied Paris.
Because the french term mouchard is basically fink, in English, one doesn’t get the whole semiotic shiver in a play name Les Mouches in occupied Paris – which pairs with a film named Le Courbeau, released that same year and directed by Henri-George Clouzet. Corbeau is a slang term for an anonymous writer of poison letters, long a French custom. To inform, to fink, to stir up rumors, to slander – this concatenation of signifiers were being materially acted out in the city and countryside as the Nazi and Vichy malice disappeared resistors, Jews, Roma and other suspects.
A familiar situation.
The reactionary flies in Sartre’s play are overtly “symbolized” – as Jupiter points out. Leiris, in an essay on the play, remarks on Sartre’s concern with returning, by symbolic means, French “virility” – which was returned, a year later, by mobbing certain woman and shaving their heads and throwing crap on them. The tondues. However, Leiris’ lifelong concern with virility might not exactly be Sartre’s. The play was roasted in the collabo papers. In particular, Alain Labreaux, a French ultra-right anti-semite who was once publicly slapped by Robert Desnos (Labreaux got his revenge by having Desnos arrested by the Gestapo and by insisting they take him on the next convoy out of France – Desnos was murdered at Theresienstadt in 1944), called it a tired emission of the “arriere-garde”. A great compliment from such a collabo writer.
Nowadays, however, we forget what collabo writers could do in Occupied France, and worry about their freedom of speech. Because, well, the flies won.
The Flies was first put on in America in an off broadway production produced by Erwin Piscator in 1947. The NYT review was the usual gum of wisecracks and admissions that, well, the thing was pretty good: “Even to those who regard the Frenchman’s work as good cause to revive the old custom of feeding hemlock to philosophers, the staging of “The Flies” under Erwin Piscator’s supervision must offer an exciting change-of-pace from conventional productions.”
Thinking about flies, I went back and re-read the play. It still works, I think.
Jean Francois Louette has recounted an anecdote told by Piscator’s widow, which is – to return to our Arasse – about framing.
« When the curtain rose » - in Piscator’s 1947 version of the play – « the public which came to see a Greek tragedy saw firstly a documentary film showing the entry of the German army into Paris. It was like a revolver shot : the conquerors passed under the Arc of Triumph smiling, while the population suffered in silence. However, Piscator struck against a lot of opposition vis-Ã -vis the introduction of the documentary, which was supposed to underline the contemporary political nature of the tragedy. Some people were shocked. Sartre sent his emissary, Simone de Beauvoir, to New York a few days later. After long discussions, Piscator proposed to Simone de Beauvoir a solution. The play would be performed with her in the audience in two version, one with, one without the documentary. She could judge herself, as well as according to the reactions of the audience. The performance of Sartre’s play without the introductory film was an honorable success, but a modest one. The public came to see a play inspired by greek mythology, a classical play: they saw it. In the course of the second evening, the documentary was played showing the Germans entering Paris. The audience felt immediately that The Flies was not just telling the story of Orestes, and that the murder he enacted had another function. They understood that Sartre’s greek tragedy reflected the truth abouty actual events. The experience was so decisive that henceforce the play was represented with this prologue of Piscator’s to his satisfaction… and to Simone de Beauvoir’s.”
I think Piscator’s idea was rather brilliant. It would be nice to show, a la Fahrenheit 9/11, the Flies with a documentary showing Trump coming to D.C. this January, with a bit beginning with January 6, 2021. In B and W, and silent.
The signifying fly making his move.
Zig Zag.