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.

Anger and repetition: a non-Kierkegaardian excursus

 

In Repetition, Kierkegaard’s founding binary is that between recollection and repetition.

As founding binaries go, that is a good one.

Myself, though, I have been thinking about anger and repetition. And here there is a psychology that, I believe, escapes the Kierkegaardian remit.

My own experience of anger, phenomenologically interpreted, is peculiarly driven by repetition. That is, my anger will express itself to me, in my head, as a sort of dialogue with the person I am angry with. This could be someone I know, or it could be someone on social media, or it could be someone with whom I have a bad encounter, etc. The anger will flow into formulas in my head that keep repeating themselves. Anger, I have noticed in angry arguments, does take that blamemaking, repetitive form. I would wager that if you record any angry argument – from societies as different as the Irish-Americans and Balinese – you will find a significant percentage of phrases or words repeated. Repetition is not only the form into which the feeling of anger is pressed, it becomes the motor of anger as it is experienced.

Now I would contrast this with that particular form of happiness called satisfaction. This is not Kierkegaard’s notion of happiness. It has a utilitarian spirit that is alien to his question about repetition – when repetition becomes conceptualized as a part of, or a critique of, dialectic.

But in my own experience, the thing about satisfaction is that it is shaped by refusing further repetition. It is not only absolutely of the moment, it is, in a sense, a refusal of both the past and the future. That is, of recollection and repetition.

My son used to have a very cute trait. When he was happy about, say, a meal, he would say this is the best thing I ever ate. And in that moment he meant it. Neither the past nor the future would alter the satisfaction that here, this food I am devouring, is the best I have ever eaten. This did not express a real quantitative judgment. I don’t think he was actually remembering a series of foods. Rather, the food presented itself, in the moment, as overwhelmingly satisfying.

Consumer society is, in its fundamentals, opposed to this peasant satisfaction. If satisfaction as stasis is encouraged, consumer demand will flatline. Satisfaction, from the corporation’s view, must be edged with dissatisfaction. No perfect moment – no satisfied moment – can be, theoretically, allowed. As this is impossible, the corporate compromise with satisfaction takes many forms. One of which is to take some satisfactory situation and make it more uncomfortable. To, in other words, make the customer just a little unsatisfied, without losing the customer. An unsatisfied customer might be willing to pay a bit more for a higher level of service, meaning discovering, once again, that satisfaction. In this case, satisfaction becomes positional – it becomes competitive, a minor triumph over other customers.

And we know how that goes. That is, if we have ever gone to the airport and flown on a plane. That is the whole business plan of airlines nowadays.

Repetition and anger can well become a political norm. I am not sure how I’d quantify this, but I do think periods of ebb and discontent are partly articulated by an increase in the use of wooden language – which is designed to be repeated. It is so designed that it can be used without actually giving the words any semiotic seriousness. This is a fact noticed by all polemicists – from Jonathan Swift to Karl Kraus.

I should ps this post: Freud, of course, conjoined repetition and anxiety - finding anxiety dreams that were curiously rife with repetition. Freud eventually used this material to develope the notion of the death drive, in which repetition is used as a control mechanism. I could go on... but I won't, except to point out that repetition as function sees repetition as subordinate to the drive, whereas I think that this misses the way repetition can take control of the control - the song, so to speak, is subordinate to the tempo, becoming a different song - a deformed song, a song varied beyond its canonical essence - as the tempo alters.

Karen Chamisso Poem

 ''I'm like a mike -- I have no set sound of my own,'

Said Peter Sellers, nailing

the twentieth century poetic.

I have emerged in the shambles after

and have witnessed the death

of all that imitative fury

which once seemed the modernist escape

from the boring drawl

of one’s perpetually Victorian parents.

Now the jokes in my childhood jokebook are all dead.

He said

- she said.

The view of the top 20 percent income bracket: the great American twenty first century

  An interesting variable in U.S. elections is that the top 20 % does most of the talking - the media, the politicians, the "experts" - but the bottom 80 % does the deciding. The top 20 % is happy with their stocks, but appalled by Trump's boorishness. The bottom 80 % is unhappy with all of it.

For the top 20 percent, this has been a very good century. Their stock portfolios have made them rich. After an oopsy moment that spanned the 2007-2010 period, they were on the road to wealth once again, and have stayed on it for a remarkable 16 years.

Among those people, politics really is a return of the same: a sort of cartoon band of the same figures going around and around, and you could be fans of one or the other. And their political spokesmen - their pundits and pollers, their Nate Silvers and Matt Yglesiases - all agreed that what you do, if you do politics, is you looked at polls - to figure out what the underling class thought - and then you figured out messaging, and then the game went on. A serious game, absolutely removed from historical context or any perspective that would make the great 21st century they experienced as anything more than a grand success.

The 20 percent have had a lot of success slowing politics until it reflected this pivot: keep the means the wealthy use to get wealthier, and bend everything else to that. This is now called the Abundance ideology, before it was the third way, but its posiitional/class character is all about the same configuration.

The crushing of labor in the final stage of the Cold War and the post-Cold War neoliberalism created the social environment in which this 20 percent could talk aloud, one to the other, and call this politics. Now one part of this discourse is fraying - the alt-right is going back to its old openly racist, sexist, lbgt-phobic ways. The liberal gaze that once made overt racism a no-no even while instituting neo-Jim Crow jailing policies and the like has broken down. But the 20 percent is still having the best time.

Most of our analysis will continue to be milled by these people. But the collapse of the liberal gaze is a symptom that underneath, there are anxieties that all the stuff that was put away - for instance, the threat of an international labor movement, or the threat of street activism, etc. - are not so put away.

Oh Saul Alinsky - America turns its lonely eyes to you!

"The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on."