Untitled by Karen Chamisso

 

Untitled

 

I, too, stumbled with Raskolnikov

hatted in the dusty street

the sun’s eternity hanging

like an accusation in my pupils

 

and cursed the oppressors of the people,

and cursed the people, oppressed.

Rapist drunks loll

In their vintages in the ditches.

 

The money lend who opened the door

- I was her, too

- as  the ax split open my head.

Last thought: don’t kill, mister

 

My crippled sister hiding in the closet

- my wounded eternity, my bled and fled identity

absorbed entirely in

this impotent flash.

 

- Karen Chamisso

A Cold War Trope

 

Sometimes, a phrase, an image, a reference, a term will catch one’s eye, revealing – not with the flag-like pomp of a theme, but like a firefly in the back yard as evening falls – some moment in history, some corner of the vast dark we call public opinion or the forces of history, which is not so much lit up as flickered up, unshadowed a bit. The master tracker of such firefly ideas is Carlo Ginzburg, who has shown how they can twist and turn – or be twisted and turned – over the longue duree, and how they can be connected, the historian’s construction being the promise that some living thing, some beat, is actually there. Parataxis promises continuity, our ellipsis waits for the pencil that draws the line between dot “a” and dot “b”, we feel the breathing of influence, but not, oh never, the palpable push of cause.

It is one of those ideas that I have been toying with ever since I caught it, again, in Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature. Specifically, this is what tugged at my eye, or perhaps I should say ear – since I seemed to confront an echo here. An echo of something I had heard before.

“ In the sixties and seventies [1860s and 1870s] famous critics, the idols of public opinion, called Pushkin a dunce, and emphatically proclaimed that a good pair of boots was far more important for the Russian people than all the Pushkins and Shakespeares in the world.”

Nabokov here is repeating in condensed form an argument he had put in the mouth, or rather in the book, written by his character Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift. The book, a mock biography of Chernyshevsky, stamps its way through Chapter 4 of the book. Although mock is the tone intended, the prose often descends into mere dismissal and scurillity – it would really be worth comparing, someday, Nabokov’s pillorying of Chernyshevksy in Berlin, 1937, where much of the book was written, with the Stalinist denunciation of bourgeois writers, since the choice of insults seem to converge, and there is the same microscopic skewing and vengeful hewing of the writer’s corpus – in both senses. At one point, Nabokov makes fun of Chernyshevsky’s physical awkwardness in the Tsarist labor camp he was condemned to – which even his admirers might blanche at, this being written at a time when physically maladroit intellectuals were being processed in labor camps both in Germany and the Soviet Union.

In the Lectures, he informs his poor students that Pushkin was condemned equally by Tsarist dunderheads and radical ones – which is an argument one could make, rather easily, about Nabokov’s own judgments (Thomas Mann was condemned both by the Nazis and by VN).Of course, my argument that there is something of the Stalinist purge in Nabokov's caricature of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s is also making a rather sinister parallelism – borrowing the moral opprobrium we devote to the one and applying it to the other.

However, in making the master Pushkin a scarecrow for radical dunderheads, Nabokov can’t really make the parallel lines meet - one being a matter of secret policemen, the other being a matter of newspaper articles. But such is the wonder of art: due to a trick of the eye, they can be made to seem to.

Here is the author in Nabokov's The Gift: “When Chernyshevski or Pisarev called Pushkin’s poetry “rubbish and luxury””..

Is that a quotation I spy?

It is. But that meticulous man, Nabokov, seems here to have been caught in his own dream, letting the quotation gently drift there, where it seems to be on the verge of emerging from the pen of Chernyshevsky or Pisarev but… ends up emerging from the hybridization of them.

In actual fact, a quotation is like a kite – it can’t get up into the air unless there is a solid figure at one end of it. Usually this figure runs around a bit, works up a sweat, and finally – the kite, or the quote, is aloft. But not here. For all Nabokov’s love for “divine details”, this quote, in quite a philistine way, is simply daubed in, and we will decide later who was on the other end of it. But the Lectures on Russian Literature shows that the plight of our quote has worsened, and now there is a host of shadows on the other end of the diminishing of poor Pushkin, who – we are to suppose – is much better for the Russian people than boots.

This unattached quotation – how it manages to fly through the literature on Russian writers during the Cold War era! What is interesting is not only how it varies in being attributed to this or that figure, but how the quote itself can’t decide between Pushkin and Shakespeare. In Marc Slonim’s An Outline of Russian Literature (which, coming out in 1959, may have been cribbed by some of Nabokov’s students before he quit Cornell), it is Pisarev who, in a parenthesis, writes “A pair of boots is more useful than a Shakespeare play.” Blok, in writing about the critic Gregoriev, states that he never “tended to the idea that “boots are higher than Shakespeare,” which is proclaimed (directly or indirectly) in Russian criticism from Belinkski and Chernyshevskj…” – which proclamation, one wants to ask, must be, if quotation marks count at all, directly – whereas indirectly breaks us out of quotation marks and into suspicion and deduction. Berdyaev’s The Origin of Russian communism (1937), also includes the boots and Shakespeare evaluation. We are told that “Pisarev’s nihilism announced that ‘boots are higher than Shakespeare’ – an oddly phrased quote that attributes a phrase not to an author, but to an author’s ideas, as though the ideas were also writing articles and announcing values and appraising boots – no doubt in the same manner as the nose in Gogol’s story dons a uniform.

Berdyaev is followed by Leszek Kolakowski, who attributes to Pisarev the remark that “a pair of boots is worth more than all the works of Shakespeare” – an expansion of Berdyaev’s sentence, making Marc Slonim’s quote look modest. Ronald Hingley, in the 1969 Nihilists: Russian radicals and revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II, 1855-81, dispenses with the whole problem of attribution by writing that “a good pair of boots was worth more than the whole works of Pushkin” was a common saying of the 1860s period. Common sayings, they pass from mouth to ear. From ear to mouth. Over the Samovar, in the carriage, or as one trudges with a friend over the summer dusty street in some Moscow city district. Thinking, perhaps, about one's own boots. The hole in the bottom. The nail that has come out and left the heel to flop. And one thinks of the copy of Shakespeare that one has bought at some shop. There it is, in the room, on the shelf, under the portrait. Raskolnikov waits.

I was washing myself in the courtyard that night

the firmament glowing with rough hewn stars.

On the hatchet, star light points like salt,

the water up to the top of the barrel, icy.

What we have here is a phenomenon that also occurs in currency trading in a de-regulated regime: equivalents tend to disequilibrium, as one of the parts inflates in value – which of course brings up the question if the whole works of Shakespeare are worth the whole works of Pushkin. But I will be brave and not pursue every question that jumps up in my head. Instead, I will finish this woefully incomplete collage of quotations with Isaiah Berlin in Russian Thinkers (1979) who grabs the kite by the tale, or the quote by the source, correctly attributing the phrase “a pair of boots is in every sense better than Pushkin” to Dostoevsky, and speculates that Dostoevsky might have been inspired by one of Pushkin’s letters, in which he wrote that he looked at his poems “as a cobbler looks at a pair of boots that he has made.”

What to make of this montage? Looking at this from our sad post-Cold War perspective, we notice, first, that the Soviet aesthetic was not Pushkin averse, but Pushkin idolatrous. Soviet school children had to memorize his verse, he was statueified and feted as a part of world civilization: no member of the Congress of Cultural Freedom could touch the Stalinist praises of that poet.

Pisarev, on the other hand, was not so feted. In fact, he was rather shirked, according to the Slavicists. This is because Pisarev was an ironist and a live wire. In an essay on Heine, Pisarev’s kind of poet, he quotes a passage from the Harzreise in which Heine writes that, on a fresh morning in the mountains, the “fragrance goes to my head and I no longer know where irony ends and heaven begins.” Pisarev recognized Heine in that phrase – perhaps because he recognized himself. He wrote that he heard a “hissing” in Pushkin’s poetry, and in Belinsky’s essays, and he was himself one of the hissers.

Alas, this hissing, this zone where irony and heaven meet each other (something that Nabokov, in his secret self, was well aware of) was stripped from Pisarev, he was compounded and pounded with Chernyshevsky, and we get a caricature of Soviet ideology that might well have been the reason none of the exiled Russians much liked Nabokov’s The Gift.

In any case, a quotation that is not a quotation can fill the space of a quotation: gaslighting is an ancient art, and not just one invented on social media.

What a lordly career the phrase has had! An honored place in the book of misquotations - that book which we can put on the balance against Mallarme's book, just as hell is on the scale against heaven.

Proudhon

 

1. On January 1865, Pierre Joseph Proudhon died in a house in the Passy neighborhood in Paris. At 10 Rue de Passy, to be exact, which is now 12 Rue de Passy.  His posterity outside of France was tied, for good and ill, to the pamphlet Marx wrote against him, The poverty of philosophy, which inversed Proudhon’s book, The philosophy of poverty (La philosophie de misere). Inside France, as well as inside the greater anarchist tradition, Proudhon holds a more elevated place, as a political philosopher, a sociologist, and a writer.

Proudhon met Marx in the winter of 1844. At this time, Proudhon was a celebrated journalist. He was also the writer of Qu'est-ce que la propriété?  In 1840.  Proudhon was the child of the obscure, of those who were never the focus of the metropolitain gaze: his father was a peasant small farmer, a grape grower on the outskirts of Besançon, who lost his shirt trying to make and sell beer.  When he was eleven, he entered the college at Besançon and became a star pupil, so that he was sent to Paris on a stipend raised by some of the notables of the town. In Paris, however, he was not recognized as a genius from the provinces: from 19 until 30, he worked as a typesetter for the Gauthier printers. It was as a typesetter that he had his first professional connection to letters. In the hours left to him after his ten hour shift, he read.

Marx, that university graduate, knew that Proudhon was sensitive about being an autodidact. The young Marx was filled with righteousness, but he had the cruelty of a coddled son and a doctor of Law. He used Proudhon’s autodidacticism against him in later polemics.

2. Although the Anglophone world knows Proudhon firstly through Marx, it was Sainte-Beuve, the literary critic, who tried to write Proudhon’s biography. Saint-Beuve was collecting materials for it when he died.

It might seem odd that the critic who flattered the grand dames of the salons by reviewing their memoires (which Proust, in his Contra-Sainte-Beuve, makes much of) spent his final years tracking down the correspondence of France’s greatest anarchist thinker. But Sainte-Beuve saw Proudhon as a writer, a philosophe in the 18^th century vein.

Proudhon himself laments, somewhere, that he wanted to write like Voltaire, but always ended up sounding like Rousseau.  

3. “If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery ? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question : What is property ? may I not likewise answer, It is theft without the certainty of being misunderstood ; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?”

This is the beginning of  a pamphlet that exploded like a bomb in 1840: What is Property? It is still his most famous work – and its opening paragraph credibly ranks up there with the beginning of Rousseau’s Social Contract. That high mercury pitch, that overture to the opera.

The rankers are always after the fulfilment and not the promise – the 100 greatest books, not the one hundred greatest introductory paragraphs. Myself, I’m a promise collector, and for me, Proudhon makes the list.

But what do I know about Proudhon?

2. Marx, in 1865, when Proudhon died, wrote a letter about him that was published in the Sozial-Demokrat. He reiterates a point he made in 1848: Proudhon was basically an economics ignoramus. A political economist, Marx thought, who tried to solve the problem of poverty through distribution did not understand that the real problem was the class control of production. Marx conceded the power of Proudhon’s pamphlet, and regarded the force of that pamphlet, the rhetoric of indignation, had its place in the history of the “left”.  “It is evident that even when he is reproducing old stuff, Proudhon discovers things in an independent way.” This included, of course, a certain logic of opposition. Marx sees this as a kind of orphan, or misfire of thought, which can only be at home once it is assimilated into dialectical materialism. Marx, in 1865, is a little distant from the young man who recognized alienation as the great byproduct and force of the capitalist system. He is distant from the Proudhon who once wrote: “Everything I know, I owe to despair.”

Proudhon used his despair. Although Marx takes it that Proudhon represented the eternal petit bourgeois attitude, he forgets that despair, its cognitive-affective place. Between an alienation from the happiness that justifies the whole system and the brute lessons of experience, the hard edge of other people’s happiness.

But this is not to diminish Marx’s insight. Marx’s grasp of the system is much greater than Proudhon’s. Marx’s problem, however, is that his grasp, which sees the whole system in a sort of historic present, resolves in the idea of revolution an evolution that could, and in fact has, long outlasted Marx’s understanding.

This is Marx:

“Proudhon’s discovery of “crédit gratuit” and the “people’s bank” (banque du peuple), based upon it, were his last economic “deeds.” My book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part I, Berlin, 1859 (pp. 59-64) contains the proof that the theoretical basis of his idea arises from a misunderstanding of the basic elements of bourgeois “political economy,” namely of the relation between commodities and money, while the practical superstructure was simply a reproduction of much older and far better developed schemes. That under certain economic and political conditions the credit system can be used to accelerate the emancipation of the working class, just as, for instance, at the beginning of the eighteenth, and again later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, it facilitated the transfer of wealth from one class to another, is quite unquestionable and self-evident. But to regard interest-bearing capital as the main form of capital and to try to make a particular form of the credit system comprising the alleged abolition of interest, the basis for a transformation of society is an out-and-out petty-bourgeois fantasy. This fantasy, further diluted, can therefore actually already be found among the economic spokesmen of the English petty bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century. Proudhon’s polemic with Bastiat (1850) about interest-bearing capital is on a far lower level than the Philosophie de la misère. He succeeds in getting himself beaten even by Bastiat and breaks into burlesque bluster when his opponent drives his blows home.”

Under certain economic and political conditions – that is the key, here. We still live under those conditions.

3. In a sense, every crisis turns on how we live under those conditions. Here I am, for instance, in 2026, looking at a period of six years in which our politics and our social imaginary, in France, in Europe, in North America, has been plunged into mourning. Mourning for the effects of COVID – buit even more, for the death of Cheap. The great moderation, the whole end of the Cold War, was predicated on doing away with welfare and substituting cheap. The great cheapness made life bearable: why go to the movies when you can download them cheaply, or even for free? Go to the fast food place and feel like you are eating in a restaurant, like the peeps in the media. If you can’t go to Harvard, you can get a Harvard tee shirt – and for so little! Buy a house for zero down, and pay through a mortgage that might go on for thirty years – but that you won’t have to worry about as you flip that house for another. Go to college and take out loans to pay for it. Cheap, cheap.

4. One of the best essays on Proudhon is by the literary critic, Albert Thibaudet. In « Proudhon, Sainte-Beuve et nous » ( NRF, juillet 1929) Thibaudet calls Proudhon a “worker of ideas”, specifying: “the ideas that are fhose of a worker, working ideas, I mean, which are made to work, to work in the mind, to work in posterity; ideas visibly and originally rooted in the faubourg du Bettant in Besançon… just as those of Rousseau’s are in the low streets of Geneva; the ideas of a hard worker, but also of a pretentious one.”

Thibaudet sees that Proudhon was a utopian who wanted to create utopia now, out of the existing details of the social.

5. It is obvious that property cannot, definitionally, be theft, if theft is, definitionally, the theft of property. It was obvious to Proudhon that both claims are true, and this led him to search for a method, a philosophical guide, to help him understand his insight. Marx led him to Hegel. Only latter did Proudhon stumble upon Leibnitz and the notion of the monad and compossibility. In this, Proudhon founds a line of thought in France that goes through Tarde’s sociology of opposition and the rejection of the dialectic by Deleuze and Guattari. A heady list of names.

I’d add to that list Pasolini. Proudhon was a good Victorian about sex. He was, as well, a traditional sexist. These are the dead ends in his work – some will rightly stop at those dead ends and throw him away. For myself, what is alive in Proudhon is the product of his despair, a despair that, for instance, saw that the anti-clerical jeering of the Enlightenment philosophes and their 19^th century descendents often cashed out as a way of destroying the system of holidays, of Sundays, and demanding that the worker’s whole week, whole life of weeks, be devoted to work. It is an insight into the way the Great Tradition, the metropolitan way of thinking (using James Scott’s distinction) attacks and dissolves the Litte Tradition – turning the little sweetness of life into something bitter. This was Pasolini’s insight as well: Proudhon was in the line of those who saw that the fireflies were disappearing.

6. And, as history “speeds up”, we see, hopefully not too late – we see that we are the fireflies.

What is laughter?

 

1. Imagine naming a child after its mother’s laugh.
2. The mother’s characteristic laugh. Which is not the same as the characteristic way we represent a laugh – a haha, a hoho. These onomatopeia are grossly AWOL from the real sound of laughter. Yet as signs of that natural sign (laughter, since Occam, being treated in the tradition as a natural sign of joy – as, for instance, in Descartes), ha ha and ho ho have fed back into the pool of laughs. In English, at least, they sound much like the forced laugh, and perhaps this is because the forced laugh sounds like them. The forced laugh, in that sense, is quoting a laugh, which is representing a sound that has become, through some process of selection, the convention for the laugh. The sign, briefly, stands for itself. The forced laugh is humiliating. It is a way of being, for whatever reason, servile. Every forced laugh I have ever uttered has been cancerous.
3. Such a name, the name of this child, would confront the brute nature of the laugh and our way of domesticating it into the registry of signs and symbols. We recognize the laugh as a vocal expression, but what kind of expression is it?
4. Call the child. Let the child write down her name.
5. It is an odd kind of expression, as all philosophers have noted. Beyond the natural sign, it is not exactly a gesture – especially as a gesture is explained by a previous intention. A laugh can’t be totally governed by an intention. On the other hand, it is not totally unpredictable. Like a blush.
6. Ha Ha. Jack the ripper, if the Ripperologist say true, was very fond of that phrase in the few authentic letters from him. Although they may not be authentic, either.
7. Traditionally, the opposition is laughter vs. tears. Both are involuntary in one sense, in that the closer they are to voluntary, the closer they are to false. Ha ha.

8. I’ve seen comedians in night clubs. I don’t envy the comedian. In the club, there is a desire to laugh. A hunger. Can one be hungry for the symbolic accompaniment of an emotional state? Or is it an emotional state? It is akin to happiness, and akin to orgasm. Like many foods one sits down to eat, hungry, the experience can be of merely fulfilling a physical duty, without that note of the unusual to diversify this from any other eating experience. My favorite food. My favorite joke.

 9. The medievalist, Jacques Le Goff, has written that that Church created a great system opposing tears to laughter. The spirit of Lent versus the Spirit of Carnival. The church was a great organizer of tears. Laughter, however, has always been in a somewhat strained relationship with the Church. As with most of the great religions – Islam, Buddhism.
10. Laughter, as Le Goff points out, takes on different senses and has borne different names. The is a different name for mocking (laag)as opposed to joyous laughter (sakhoq) in Old Testament Hebrew, for instance.
11. Jean-Michel Beaudet in Laughter: an example from Amazonia, finds four types of laughter among the Tupi: men’s, women’s, collective, and caricatural, which, I think, is false. Beaudet is interested in the variations in the sounds of these laughters.
12. Helmut Plessner, in Laughter and Crying, uses these as border phenomena, between the body and the expressive, to look at the doubleness of the human body, iwhich we are, and “in which” we are. To be in, to be of, the prisoner is the prison. It is to laugh. Ha Ha. Plessner is especially impressed by the words associated with laughter – burst, explode. For him, it is that moment when the discipline of the body dissolves – the sense body of experience encounters that problem to which it cannot find any answer. This is the nature of the natural sign – to be the nature that human nature must work with. And work.
13. We will. Or we won’t. This is the human switch. It is a great simplifier. Laughter, being expression that is interjection, almost unprocessed matter – it is as if called up by a spell. A spell reaches for that switch. On. Off. Perhaps this is why laughter, for the church, seemed far from God. And closer to the devil. God has the last judgment. The devil has the last laugh. Ha Ha. Ha Ha. Ha Ha.

State of the Apology, 2026

 The state of the apology, 2026

“I continue to be appalled by his crimes and remain deeply concerned for its many victims,” Mr. Ross wrote. – David Ross, who discussed pedo porn with Epstein.

"He is profoundly sorry that powerless and vulnerable women and girls were not given the protection they deserved." – Peter Mandelson, British ambassador to U.S., Starmer’s consigliere

Had I known any of the facts about Epstein's sickening and repulsive conduct, which I learned in late 2018, more than the year after I stopped working with him, I never would have had anything to do with him." – Leon Black

i apologize and regret putting myself in a position where emails, some of them embarrassing, tasteless, and indefensible, are now public, and that is on me. I accept that reality and the humiliation that comes with it.” – Peter Attia.

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognise the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein. – Larry Summers.

“I want you to know that in all of my interactions with Epstein, I was never involved in, never heard him talk about and never saw any evidence of the horrific acts that he was accused of.” – Joi Ito

“It was deeply disturbing for both of us to realize we had engaged with someone who presented as a helpful friend but led a hidden life of criminal, inhumane, and perverted acts.” – Valeria Chomsky

““I deeply regret my correspondence with Ghislaine Maxwell which took place over two decades ago, long before her horrific crimes came to light.” – Casey Wasserman, chairman, LA Olympic committee

“When I learned of Mr. Epstein’s arrest and subsequent conviction, I was deeply disturbed. (I should have been equally disturbed by his plea bargain. His crime was termed “soliciting prostitution.” Children are not prostitutes.) But upon reflection, I decided to visit Mr. Epstein during his prison term in Florida. I believed, at the time, that I was doing a good deed.” – Seth Lloyd, MIT

““My association with Jeffrey Epstein represents a serious lapse of judgment which I regret. I apologize to my friends, colleagues and students for the problems this unfortunate association has caused.” Richard Axel, Nobel prize winner, Columbia

“We had no idea, the public record had no indication, that he was anything more than an ordinary — if you could say such a thing — sex offender who had been convicted and went to jail.” – Leon Botstein, Bard College President

“In my 47 years working in the entertainment industry, I’ve encountered thousands of people,” he added. “My biggest regret, bar none, is that I foolishly believed his denials of wrongdoing. I was impressed by his circle of acquaintances from caried industries, and it blinded me. I apologize to all who were hurt by this clearly terrible and depraved individual.” – Barry Josephson, producer – man who sent Epstein an email describing a girl with an “insane rack”.

I haven’t put these apologies in chronological order, but I still think we can reverse engineer the P.R. of the apology to show patterns. For instance, at first, it is all about the very important self of the apologizer and the institution. The MIT guys were pioneers in that kind of thing. All very 2019.

However, PR is nothing if not environmentally adaptive. If you apologize now, you have to show “repulsion” over the “horrific crimes” - which at the same time you knew nothing about! The last of course is important. As social media has noticed that nobody gives a shit about the victims, and a certain indignation has emerged, the P.R. industry has accordingly added provisions about of course, it is all about the victims, here. But as these are the most important people in the world, one has to also see that the real victim is always – the apologizer. Jeffrey -the blessing, Uncle Jeffy, my good friend, my savior – was an evil trickster who didn’t destroy my emails to him!
Some apologies actually do mirror the personalities of the apologizer. For instance, Larry Summers, an all around pig whose “brilliance” was worshipped by the Dem party bigwigs for decades, put together a sort of identikit apology that shows he doesn’t give a shit and is sure this will all blow over as he and Kathy Ruemmler become advisors to the Newsom presidential campaign. In this, sadly, he’s probably right.
Seth Lloyd’s might be the most unique apology of the bunch. Who knew that somebody somewhere thought a good deed, in the case of a billionaire accused of raping – excuse me, soliciting – underage girls was --- to see the rapist! I would say this was a very unique worldview, but unfortunately, I think it is the template among the elite. As Ghislaine Maxwell explained once: the girls were “trash”. By which she meant trailer trash. And it is the general agreement among producers, college presidents, hedge funders, and politically connected peeps that the vast majority, the people whose incomes are a piddling 40, 50 thou a year, are deep trash, a manipulable and undistinguished heap who should thank their lucky stars they have some quality that their betters can exploit.
My biggest regret, bar none, is that people found out. This is the real noise, behind these fake statements.
So, now we know the character of who rules us. And maybe this means: we are woke?

On epistemologically deviant conditions

 I wrote this years ago in a philosophical mood. How I long for such moods!

I was reading a paper by a philosopher, Alexander Bird, which was a defense of the view that scientific progress is measured by the accumulation of knowledge – on the Baconian scheme – rather than measured by its generation of true statements, as the semantic philosophy of science would have it.
So far, so good. But then we came across this counterfactual:
“Imagine a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs. These true beliefs are believed solely because they are generated by M and they do not have independent confirmation. Now imagine that at time t an Archimedes-like scientist in this society realises and comes to know that M is weak. This scientist persuades (using different, reliable methods) her colleagues that M is unreliable. This may be that society’s first piece of scientific knowledge. The scientific community now rejects its earlier beliefs as unsound, realising that they were formed solely on the basis of a poor method.
“On the semantic view this community was making progress until time t (it was accumulating true beliefs) and then regressed (it gave up those beliefs). This, it seems, contradicts the verdict of our intuitions about this episode. The acquisition of beliefs by an unreliable method cannot be genuine scientific progress, even if the beliefs so acquired are, by accident, true. Far from being a regressive move, giving up those unreliably produced beliefs, because of a now well-founded belief that they were unreliably produced, is positive, progressive step. So the semantic view yields a description in terms of progress and regress that conflicts with what we are intuitively inclined to say.”

I don’t mean to pick on Dr. Bird, but this is a rather neat demonstration of what we call the fallacy of the epistemologically deviant condition. The counterfactual only gets off the ground once we suppose “a scientific community that has formed its beliefs using some very weak or even irrational method M, such as astrology. But by fluke this sequence of beliefs is a sequence of true beliefs.” The last sentence gives us, as a sort of axiom, the framing epistemological conditions that will allow us to judge the Bird’s counterfactual.
However, the last sentence is actually a historically contingent statement, even though it is being treated as an axiom – something that is true a priori. Since it is historically contingent, the fact that it is true entails a story about the discovery that makes it true. Such a story would necessarily overlap with the example it is supposedly framing. This means that the story of how, by some fluke, a community’s irrational beliefs, M, were also true beliefs would entail an investigation, if true, that would be formally equivalent to the investigation mounted by the Archimedes like scientist in the story.
The epistemologically deviant condition is a form of begging the question. It is, unfortunately, all too common in analytic philosophy. I have long disliked the arguments made by the consciousness-man. Chalmers, using an argument,which revolves around postulating a zombie human double that can cogitate, speak, and behave like a human being, but doesn’t have conscious experience of being like a human being, since this violates the conventions of framing in exactly the same way Bird does, above. It is, for me, the reason that these arguments are only persuave to the already persuaded.
However, I am less interested in their implausibility than in their motivation. These philosophic fictions share a frustration with the more artistic fictions of novelists and film-makers: how to pack all the information the author has into the story. The voice-over in a film is a perfect example of the kind of artistic compromises that emerge in the struggle between the creator and the material. The voice over doesn’t really have a logical place. Is it supposed to represent the Still-Sprache going on in the head? Is it supposed to be the filmic equivalent of the inaugural moment in first person stories – the fiction that some “I” has sat down to write a story? Oftentimes, the voiceover presents itself in the conventions of written fiction’s first person. Anybody who writes fiction knows the frustration of sticking with the person of the teller – including the frustration of third person telling, which is always about the writer’s calculated interference in the angle and unrolling of the story.
ps -- because I'm an incompetent logician, and because, frankly, nobody cares, I usually don't bother with the technical side of my arguments. But in this case, the technical side would go something like this:
Given a framing condition, S, containing a fact, s, that entails an argument, z.
And given a counterfactual, T, such that S frames T, containing a fact t;
If t entails z, then I'd call the counterfactual badly formed.
There's nothing here, really, except another self reference paradox. Usually, this is disguised by suppressing the epistemological source of s -- in other words, suppressing the answer to the question, how do we know s? It has been my experience that counterfactuals involve assumptions that usually render them either superficial or badly formed. Why? Because, on the one hand, if we can mount a straightforward argument for the framing facts, then we don't need the counterfactual; and if we can't, and have to fall back on the counterfactual, then it is illegitimately prior in the line of argument to itself -- in other words, we have the problem of the vicious circle.

earworms in the afterlife

 1.A couple of days ago, I was shopping in the Franprix when, over the P.A. system, they played a song from my past, a song from the 90s, Ace of Base’s “All that she wants is another baby”.

The beat is the thing with this song. But you can’t ignore the words, even if in memory’s afterwards, you can’t remember all of them. The lyrics are puzzlingly, maddeningly stupid – stupid in the deepest, classical sense, stupid as truisms are stupid, stupid as the stereotypical speech of the bourgeoisie (which Leon Bloy savaged) is stupid. Stupid as an aggressive act, making it, momentarily, impossible to think.

However, the stupidity did not prevent this song from sticking in my head. On the contrary, like certain classically sticky songs – I’m looking at you, Tiffany, and “I think we’re alone now”, or a multitude of Christmas songs involving snow and Santa – the stupidity is a large component of the stickiness. So what did I do? I started playing the song on the phone while I cooked – which is when I also, discretely, rock out.

2. The phenomenon of the sticky song must go back a long way in our songline laden species history. But the inflexion point was reached, I’d say, in the 19th century, when both mass production (of gramophone records) and nationalism (of school singing) emerged in everybody’s life.
Although a folk or street song or opera aria might well have stuck in the head of some paysan de Paris, we don’t read much about this “diabolical” aspect of song culture before the 19th century. At most, we have Orsino, Duke of Illyria:
“That strain again, it had a dying fall;
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour. Enough; no more;
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.”
Like that other mass produced product that quickly loses its sweetness – chewing gum – we hear it and we hear it in our head, the sticky song, and feel that somehow, it is chewing us.
3.The mystery of the relation between the coveted object and the collector is treated by Walter Benjamin in his essay from 1931, “Unpacking my library”, which starts off with the nicely realized scene of unpacking boxes and strewing packaging about the floor. That unpacking is taken to another level when Benjamin tries to peel away the use and exchange value from the books he has – revealing the object as a magical-sexual thing, a showplace or theatre that enthralls the collector. The order of the collector is revealed to be a “magic encyclopedia, whose quintessence is the fate of the object”. The order, here, is a convergence between the death-drive and the libido, between the mastery of the collector and the surrender to the captured prey.

The sticky song is, I think, another “magic object” – but one that inverses the mastery of the collector. Instead, the mastering gesture somehow belongs to the song, accidentally heard and hard, very hard, to discard.

The sticky song has been dubbed an “earworm”, or more technically an INMI – involuntary musicial imagery. Tristam Adams has written a book about it: Horrors of a Voice (object a). This is a long trawl through the archetypal horror of a thing crawling into the ear – which, as author after author reminds us, is not equipped with lids, like the eye. It seems that earworm entered the language via Stephen King. But the phenomenon has been studied by psychologists like Oliver Sacks and going back in time to the psychologists of the 19th century. Adams quotes this rather brilliant observation of Nietzsche’s (and can one write a book about horror without quoting Nietzsche?):

"Night and music—the ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. This is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight."

If only Nietzsche had had a car, a trip before him, and a cassette player, circa 1992. I did. Night and twilight and distance.
4. One of the standard experiences of education in the U.S. – or so I say, having been long out of it but assuming that certain structures stick – is the learning of patriotic songs. God Bless America or the Star Spangled Banner.
In France, it is La Marseillaise. My son approves of the Marseillaise, and could, if forced, probably sing a bit of it.
The attempt to put into the ears of the young various official songs is next to the attempt to put into the playlist on spotify or elsewhere songs that will “ride” and stick with the listener, parasite them – although these experiences are not just horrors, as envisioned by Tristam Adams, but also memories, a head library of turns.
The Marseillaise is a very studied national anthem. Most national anthems lead decorous ceremonial existences, but not that song. composed in the moment in which the popular army was crystallizing in France in 1792, it was bound up with the fortunes of that army. Goethe, hearing soldiers sing it on the field of Valmy, called it the Te Deum of the revolution. Eugene Weber wrote an essay asking the question, who were these singers? For as Weber knew, the French in 1792 were not all French speakers. He traces the fortunes of the song, which are, as well, the fortunes of singing in public places:
“… on June 17 [1792 – shortly after it was composed] it is sung at Montpellier; and within a few days a delegate of the Constitutional Society (that is of the Girondists) of Montpellier carries it to Marseille. The delegate was Mireur, who was destined to become a general of the Republic; for the moment, he was trying to encourage the Marseillais to respond to a Paris appeal for 500 man ‘qui sachent mourir’; and, since he was not beyond using audio-visual aids in a tricky task, on June 22 he sings the new song at the end of a Constitutional banquet.
People sang a lot in those days - popular deputations would visit the Convention and sing patriotic songs of their own composing, which rather hampered proceedings; and Danton had to intervene several times to establish that the Convention was not a place for singing songs3). But banquets were, and this one met with great enthusiasm.”
The National Assembly took as one of its great projects the frenchifying of France. In 1792, the majority of the population inside the Hexagon did not speak French, or at least spoke it badly, as a second language. They spoke langue d’oc, or Breton, or something close to Catalan. High culture did speak French – as high culture spoke it in Spain and Germany and Russia. Weber’s point is that songs were one of the great, unheralded instruments for making the French French. Singing was a part of the rhythm of everyday life. In fact, as Weber points out, the National Assembly was always getting visited by delegates from this or that group who sang to them. Laura Masson has written a whole book about the song culture of the revolution, from which I will cull a quote:
“A deputation from the Piques section arrived to ask the deputies [of the Convention] to attend their celebration of the ‘martyrs of lbierty’ several days hence. One of their members sang a ‘patriotic song of his composition,’ and the deputy Laloi moved that the deputation’s speech and song be included in the Convention’s bulletin. Danton objected, “the Bulletin of the Convention is in no way meant to carry verse throughout the Republic, but rather good laws written in good prose. Moreover, a decree requires the Committee of Public Instruction to give preliminary consideration to all that concerns the arts and education."
It is an interesting thing, the cross between song and language – the latter being perhaps the ultimate earworm.
However, songlines are infinitely fungible. Hearing the opening strains of the Marseilles does not make me think of “aux armes, citoyens!” Rather (such is the songline that traverses my generation), it makes me think: Love, love love… all you need is love!” In one sense, this Beatles song could be defended as a chip off the old Lucretian block.

But for someone not of my generation, this song might be as stupid as Ace of Base’s “All she really wants…” For Adam, my son, it is the Beatles who are a no go of kitsch. Or rather, they are like something dusty brought down from the attic, smelling of mothballs and faded perfume. Which I consider a bit strange: when he was little, I would walk my two year old son, often in his stroller, to his preschool singing Beatles songs over him. And he himself enjoyed The Yellow Submarine movie.
Yet there they are, the long dead earworms, the repressed earworms. In that moment when the repressed returns, that inflection of reaction or revolution, they will be in the throng of the dead, crowding round us explorers of the afterlife, too.
Mine will be singing: I got you babe.