Left conservativism

1.Norman Mailer used to call himself a left conservative – a conservativism with no connection to capitalism.

In Mailer’s case, he had an allergy to progress and its symbols – to plastic, to contraceptives, to a certain bio-politics.

Well, I have sympathy for the allergy to plastics, but I don’t take chemistry as a force I oppose. My Old MAN, an a/c OG, bitched in the 90s about the regulations that we imposed on Chlorofluorocarbons. Those regulations were righteous, however. In some ways, the only presidential action since LBJ that was actually worth a shit was George H.W. Bush’s convocation of the big wigs to get an agreement signed to end the chemical aggravation of the ozone hole. The agreement moved the technology – it didn’t destroy HVAC.

Mailer, a Manichean, would have disapproved, perhaps. He definitely didn’t like the products of air conditioning – for instance, Miami Beach.

I think left conservatism is almost impossible in the U.S. – though certain alt-right people have poked at it. But it had a career that is worth looking at.

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

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

Wollstonecraft was echoing the suspicion that dogged Burke throughout his career – that he was an Irishman who valued cleverness over sound thinking, celebrity over sense. One of Wollstonecraft’s polemical moves is to crucify Burke’s Reflections on his early essay on the Sublime – an essay that moves from paradox to paradox. Her strategy makes for a few strange paradoxes itself, since basically she portrays Burke as a fashionable sentimentalist – a man of a certain kind of womanly cast – while she herself represents manly reason.

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

‘Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference. When I am carried from this state into a state of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should pass through the medium of any sort of pain. If in such a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquillity, or call it what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a concert of music; or suppose some object of a fine shape, and bright, lively colours, to be presented before you; or imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a rose; or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some pleasant kind of wine, or to taste of some sweetmeat without being hungry; in all the several senses, of hearing, smelling and tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure; yet if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of pain; or, having satisfied these several senses with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over? Suppose on the other hand, a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.’

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

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

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

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

Now, there is a sense in which this passage can be overemphasized. In the Great Transformation, Burke does not figure as an opponent of capitalism. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. What interests me, here, is the tension between, on the one side, the advent of an economic system which would profit the upper class for which Burke stood as an advocate, and, on the other side, the gross attitudinal changes that would subvert the legitimacy of the ancien regime order. Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims, even if they so appeared to Mary Wollstonecraft, but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systematicity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defence of irreducible human and social qualities, the unbought grace of life, that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology.

Left conservativism does not have, cannot have, a great thinker as its totem. It pops up in the romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Hazlitt, Eliot, etc., but it is always a guest at the wedding, never one of the nuptial air. This was the great contradiction that tugged at European societies up until 1945 – and when I say tugged, I might add bombed, battled, battered, slaughtered, imprisoned, colonized, and exhausted itself. Frankenstein’s creature is a casualty of this tension – the new man who comes into the world entirely without the unbought grace of life, though endowed with an irrepressible Lockean potential.

Helas, nous avons tous devenu des Frankensteins, mon vieux, A planet full

on Leo Perutz

 

One of Leo Perutz’s classmates wrote that his first memory of Perutz, an “uncommonly untidy boy” next to whom he sat on the bench at the Patres der Parister school in Prague in the 1890s: “In my first memory of him, I see his dirty, bloody hands; he was the enviable possessor of a wonderful pocket knife with which he’d cut his thumb under the bench, not accidentally but intentionally: “I’m going to shock the teacher,” he said. The he lay his hands stretched out on the desk top. The effect was enormous.”

This is a good story, made better by the fact that, unlike most schoolboy’s with a sense of grotesque (a set that includes almost all schoolboys I have ever known), Perutz went on to employ this sense in novels that somehow combine an extraordinary literary merit and the adventure theme of the thriller. Romances, as R.L. Stevenson called them. He wrote a number of them in the 20s and 30s – becoming a best selling author in 1928 with Wohin rollst Du, Äpfelchen. Then the 30s happened, and Hitler came, first in Germany and then in Austria in 1938. Leo Perutz, a Jew, emigrated to Palestine. He did not like Palestine or Israel, and returned in the 50s to Austria, where he died, failing to publish his last book, By Night Under the stone Bridge. In the late 80s, Perutz’s work was rediscovered. It is almost all translated, now, into English.

Borges was a great fan of Perutz’s novel, The Master of the Last Judgment: he ranked it as one of the greatest locked door mysteries. So, out of idleness and because I’ve been thinking about “investigative” novel plots, I read it last week.

I found it wonderful, although I also found it full of seemingly arbitrary transitions and subplots. They should not have functioned – the book should not have been so gripping – but they were sustained by Perutz’s knack for creating an atmosphere in which the ordinary becomes intermittent. The book was written in the 1920s, and set in the prewar period; perhaps the intermittence of the ordinary has its source in the ordinary slaughter of World War One, in which Perutz served. Or perhaps the source is in the Prague of Kafka and Meyrink, the very birthplace of modernist “weird” literature.

Daniel Kehlmann, the contemporary German novelist, wrote a long essay about Perutz in his “Kommt, Geister. Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen”. Many are the essays that take up the tired rhetorical trope of “compare and contrast” – but Kehlmann does something clever with the trope by dipping it into a passage in a letter from Freud to Arthur Schnitzler. Freud apologizes for being so distant from Schnitzler, attributing that distance to Doppelgängerscheu – fear of the Double. Freud wrote that “behind the aesthetic appearance” of Schnitzler’s work he saw an identity with Freud’s own “presuppositions, interests and conclusions.”  Kehlmmann uses this idea to pair Perutz and Kurt Gödel.

It seems absurd, but Kehlmann makes it work. It turns out that Leo Perutz, besides being a novelist, was also a mathematician. His dayjob, in Vienna, was as a actuarial mathematician for an insurance company, and he even invented a formula in that field which is named for him.

Thus, Perutz is a mathematician and writer of fantastic novels that continually play with the conditions of their form, while Gödel is a mathematician whose work concentrates on the very form of the possibility of truth in mathematics who became a paranoid fantasist in the latter part of his career. In fact, it was out of paranoid fear of poisoning that he starved himself to death.

Gödel, I learned from Kehlmann’s essay, had to flee Austria after the Anschluss not because he was a Jew, but because Nazi officials fired him from his post as a Jew, reasoning that logicians such as Gödel were, practically, all Jews. He was the literal victim of a misconstrual of set theory.

Kehlmann’s pairing is imaginative. I, however, kept thinking of Chesterton while reading the Master of Judgement Day. The Chesterton of The Man who was Thursday, which is also an adventure tale in which the pieces don’t seem to add up. In which the protagonist thinks, about the anarchist group he was investigating:

“He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something—say a tree—that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself—a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked.”

This is so fine a thought that I will never understand it – which is perhaps the only way to understand it. It could be said about the narrator in Perutz’s novel, Baron von Yosch, who stands as the puzzled investigator/victim of a circle of acquaintances among whom there occurs an epidemic of suicides. The Baron’s story is about those suicides. But the story doesn’t end with the Baron, but – in an epilogue – with the finding of the Baron’s story among the papers he had with him when he fell at the battle of  Limanova. The epiloguist, whoever it is, treats the Baron’s story with peremptory harshness – it is all lies, excuses for the Baron’s crimes. And so the curtain comes crashing down.

Chesterton is, in some ways, not at all Perutz’s Doppelgänger – he was an anti-semitic Catholic fanatic. But like Baron von Yosch, it was as part of Chesterton’s vices, rather than in spite of them, that he forged his narrative vision – his peculiar method of paradox. In one of the Father Brown stories, The Duel of Dr. Hirsch, Chesterton took the Dreyfus case – which, for Chesterton, had at its incongruous center the innocence of Dreyfus, a Jew – and transposes it to the case of Dr. Hirsch, who develops a formula for a weapon for the French government. A messenger with a letter from Dr. Hirsch to the German command explaining where that formula is to be found is discovered by a “chauvinist officer” named Dubosc. Hirsch challenges Dubosc to a duel. One of the officer’s seconds is Flambeau, a French detective and friend to Father Brown. Brown, looking at the letter, sees that is transcribes the location of the formula in a precisely opposite way from where the formula is. It is, in fact, so opposite that, using a rule of opposites, one could easily locate it.

But opposition is, in Chesterton’s view, less a semantic abstraction and more an incarnate absurdity. But means of opposition Father Brown deduces the truth about Hirsch and Dubosc – that in fact they are one man. Hirsch has simply disguised himself, written the letter, accused himself, and shown up Dubosc. “It is all like I was saying to Flambeau These opposites won’t do. They don’t work. They don’t fight.  If it’s white instead of black, and solid instead of liquid, and so on all along the line – there’s something wrong, Monsieur, there’s something wrong.”

Fan fiction and the stock market

 This is the year of the question: why is this bubble different from any other bubble?

I’ve pondered this. I’ve watched the stock markets in the U.S. follow Trump’s every word like ducklings following a big quacking duck. This, in spite of the fact that Trump’s every other word contradicts what he just said and will say again at the next opportunity. If there was ever an unreliable speaker, Trump is that speaker. Meanwhile, the price system, with its shaky grasp of reality, is showing a lot of spikes for a lot of those goods – petroleum, helium, nitrates – that constitute the global infrastructure.

If the theory that sought to deduce, from the financial markets, the sum total of information as it is quotidianly recognized, the goslings would not be following Trump.

But that theory is only right when it is right, which makes it less a theory than the economist’s dream. A dream at the basis of that vaunted thing, microeconomics.

I could batter on, but I’ll stick to one mania at a time, here.

So I began to think, what does this pattern remind me of?

Looking around, one sees the same odd trust in rhetoric over reality in every company Musk touches. From the point of view of mere profit and loss, Musk’s central company, Tesla, should be in big trouble in the market. Well, suckers, it is flying higher than ever.

Every time Musk issues another insane pronunciemento – for instance, that Tesla is gonna be king of a trillion dollar market in (human) driverless taxis, the goslings line up. The goslings invest. And then, poor forgetful ducklings, they see that Tesla is making a very pisspoor effort to enter a market that already has driverless taxis and there is no reason to think he has a plan for that. And they look to the next golden opportunity Musk announces. For instance, after loosing 18 billion on Space X, he’s set to IPO it, and the company is valued at a cool trillion dollars.

Why is this bubble different from any others?

It has come to me that what connects Trump and Musk is social media. Musk’s purchase of Twitter, from the business point of view, has been a disaster. The exodus of companies and the entrance of Nazi bots is impressive. But what if that purchase was, actually, great for Musk’s other companies? What if the valuation of Tesla, and the valuation of so many other “tech” companies, was a matter of fan fiction?

That, I think, is the key to the financial market in this visibly declining U.S. today.

Fan fiction is a very interesting genre. It takes some fictional celebrity – often a character from a video game or a movie – and it encloses that character in a fan’s fantasy. It quickly, of course, gets sexual, but what is more interesting is that the fiction is built on a sort of claustrophobic mandate: just that mandate that makes a fan actually fantasize about a character. This attraction is, of course, hard to build; and mostly fan fiction, of which there is floods on the internet, dispenses with the difficulties that went into really building the video game or the movie, and takes the props as givens.

What makes this bubble different is that it is a fan fiction bubble. And the “characters” in it have lent themselves largely to fan fiction construction. Trump is his own biggest fan, and his nightly visits to AI are definitely forms of fan fiction. Pomo, if you will, since the fan and the celebrity are one and the same. Similarly, Musk’s cult following is built on Musk’s own fandom for Musk.

What seems to be irrationality outside the sphere of fan fiction – narcissism, obsessiveness, Sadism of the saddest revenge porn kind – is fully justified and celebrated in fan fiction. The eerie parallel with the stock markets in the U.S. makes it impossible to construct a rational path towards investment or even towards gambling. It is all sucked into the fan’s dark hole. Outside the hole, we don’t, well, feel it.

curses

You could not, in words, writing, or printing, legally curse Queen Elizabeth. To do so put you on the road to having one ear removed, or half a tongue taken for fishbait -- that is if the hangman caught you. Guy Fawkes was prosecuted partly for saying that James was accursed. Progress has brought it about that you can legally curse Donald Trump, but you can't legally threaten him.

So to our question: what does that mean?

Cursing has definitely socially declined from the old glory, or inglory, days. Once it implied traffic with divine or demonic powers, and now it simply implies street level babbling, the unalterable fuck of all the movie script drug dealers. Once it was mixed up with blasphemy, slander, and a whole set of verbal crimes -- crimes that were, by their nature, eerie, insofar as they were hints of a black logos that operated just under the surface, just out of sight of the angels in paradise, which, to the streetview, was just a bunch of stinking losers and snitches. And indeed, there’s some truth in the idea that an angel is just a glorified snitch.

There's always been a bit of a mixup, within Christianity, about cursing. On the one hand, Jesus, in Matthew, seems to come out against it:

"Again, ye have heard that it was said to the ancients, Thou shalt not perjure thyself: but thou shalt perform to the Lord what thou hast sworn. 34. But I charge you, swear not at all: neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God: 35. Nor by the earth, for it is his footstool: nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King: 36. Nor shalt thou swear by thy head: for thou canst not make one hair white or black. 37. But your speech shall be, Yes, yes; No, no for what is beyond these comes from evil." (Matthew 5).

 

On the other hand, our saviour enjoyed a good curse himself. Coming upon a fig tree that bore no fruit when he wanted fruit, like any fishwife he cursed it. Later it was observed to be dead -- quid erat demonstratum, or however the Latin goes. And then there are the Psalms, which are full of the most beautiful curses. And there are the Prophets. Nowadays, the secret service would definite pay an unexpected visit to Isaiah, to say nothing of Ezekial. These were men who knew how to wield a curse like a hammer, and ring down kingdoms. The Israel of then and the Israel of now are eerily similar in their sacrifice of babies to appease the god of nations. Isaiah would definitely be hung out by the media, nowadays, for his anti-semitic podcasts.

….

Shakespeare's Richard III dramatizes the curse the way The Merchant of Venice dramatizes the contract. There's a nice essay Jane Shore and the Politics of Cursing by Mary Steible, which takes the case of Jane Shore who, according to one source, cursed Richard III – thus taking part, as Steible nicely puts it, “in the historiographical hazing of one of one of England’s most unpopular monarchs.” Jane Shore was one of King Edward the IV's official concubines. She was stripped of her goods by Richard III, and according to the anti-Richard III literature that flooded the Tudor market (Richard being an inveterate enemy to the Tudors, and conveniently Punch-like), Jane replied with a good many curses that, in the way of a good curse, came true. Steibel examines some accounts of Jane's curses, and shows how Shakespeare substituted Margaret's curses in his play. Margaret was the widow of Henry VI, and a grande dame at the court. Steible makes some excellent points about the way Margaret figures in the play as the spokesperson for the curse. She quotes Little, a scholar who has researched liturgical curses:

"Pope Gregory the Great, says Little, concluded in his study of scripture that "God is said to curse and yet man is forbidden to curse, because what man does from the malice of revenge, God does only in the exactness and perfection of justice." (40) The kind of cursing undertaken by Shore and Margaret is not of the divine sort, and therefore, in the strictest sense, could not be regarded as prophetic, even if they do foresee the known end of Richard's mortal life. Little concludes from his study of curses that the Church's position is that "[o]rdinary cursing by ordinary people [is] decidedly not legitimate. (41)"

The curse, like the oath, was officially a hierarchical speech act, and not to be usurped by the mob. But the mob had its own reasons.

Shore curses Richard over loss of position, fame, property--material goods. Margaret, to be sure, lost much more than Shore, but she wants vengeance, not the "perfection of justice." Her ravings are human, not divine. Shore's are equally human. Indeed, the uncontrolled anger of each woman implies the disorder that results from loss of control, and, in some ways, parallels the loss of control that leads Richard to his fated end.

Steible infuses a feminist colour to her view of cursing: "If words, just words, could cause harm--earthly or otherwise--to others, anyone who could speak could acquire a power that superseded rank, gender, physical strength, and so on. Perhaps curses were feared to "touch the hidden order of things," especially in regard to the divinely sanctioned order of the monarchy; Shore and Margaret both use words with the intent to wish ill upon Richard's body, their curses being directed against his birth, his body, and his soul. The king's body natural is stigmatized, dismembered even. Speaking through their characters, Churchyard and Shakespeare both protest Richard, both make treasonous noises. Embedded in the dominant discourse of the divinely provident, the subversive speech act of cursing is voiced by politically weak figures, "historical" women who are little more than disaffected players in the pre-Tudor court. Having further de-mystified the kingship of Richard through curses, their job is done. Cursed themselves with charges of witchcraft and stigmatized by their own foul cursing, Shore and Margaret are authorized to speak like women in the historical narrative, that is, like witches."

Political weakness, here, might be in the eye of the litterateur, since these women historically were not necessarily weak. Steible does not mention Michelet in her text, but in “La Sorcière”, Michelet reads the reversal of the Lord’s Prayer – the characteristic speech act of the witch – as a tie between the world of the polis, ruled by men, and the rule of the counter-polis, ruled by the Goddess.

“It took the Devil, that ancient ally of woman, her confidant from Paradise, it took the sorceress, this monster who does everything backwards, inversing the sacred world, to occupy themselves with woman, to crush under her feet their [the church’s] practices…”

It is a powerful trope, and a romantic one. At least in Shakespeare’s Richard III, it is the man-devil who is cursed. He has created the inverse kingdom, which is perhaps why the powerful curses come not from women, but from Richard's victims. These curses are definitionally pure, in a sense, because they are so starkly contrasted with the curse's opposite: blessing. Thus, Edward, and Clarence, and the young Princes, and all of Richard's dead victims visit him in his vision and pronounce his sentence, and then pronounce a blessing on Harry, progenitor of the Tudor line and Richard's opponent. It is as if one geneology -- Richard's cursed one -- is being formally replaced by another - Harry's blessed one. As the little Prince's say, "thy nephews souls bid thee despair and die!"

Richard is too modern a man to think that the curse has power. "Soft, I did but dream/O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me." Once the curse is so rationalized, it loses its magical power -- and in its downfall brings all magic with it.

Which brings us to De Quincey's strange essay on Modern Superstitions. The architecture of DeQuincey's essays is always Piranesian, a descent from the tower to the dungeon by an infinite amount of stairs. In this essay he takes us, by degrees, from those superstitions later comprised under Ruskin's term, the pathetic fallacy -- that projection onto the natural of the human - to the superstitions of the ominous. The ominous, according to De Quincy, was as much the ancient's burden as colonialism was the white man's. He is particularly feverish (De Quincey is always supremely feverish) about the the accidental coincidence of a given name with some ill thing, in which the ancients saw malign powers. De Quincy instances the refusal of a Roman legion to go into Germany under the command of a man named Umbrius Ater -- a "pleonasm of darkness," as he puts it: Shadow Black. Offering a series of similar anecdotes, De Quincy gets to the paradoxical crux: that crossing of sign and accident, language itself: "These omens, derived from names, are therefore common to the ancient and the modern world. But perhaps, in strict logic, they ought to have been classed as one subdivision or variety under a much larger head,viz. words generally, no matter whether proper names or appellatives, as operative powers and agencies, having, that is to say, a charmed power against some party concerned from the moment that they leave the lips."

The essay probes the very texture of God's invisibility, which is, of course, symboled, modeled, consistes in logos -- the word, out of spit and air. That movement from the silent movie world of our apishness to the incredible communications of our never stilled tongue -- it has left a scar inside us. Richard III was right: it is our conscience, superstition's last stronghold.

Superstition, blessing, and contract: a fantasia on the horror film

 

“A miracle must be seen at a distance if one is to believe it to be true, just as a cloud must be seen at a distance if one wants to believe it is a solid body.” - Lichtenberg

1. I saw a perfect little horror movie yesterday afternoon. I went with my son, who is an encyclopedia of horror films, to see Passenger at Gaumont in Les Halles shopping mall, which is about half a mile from where we live.

Passenger is little – only an hour and a half, in comparison to the now average hour and a half of movie and 45 minutes of stuffing that seems to be the new Hollywood norm – and it is perfect in that it has no message and no aspiration besides making you tense and scaring you. The jumpscares start in the little prologue to the movie, and then we get to the couple at the center of the movie as they move out of Brooklyn and take to the open road in a camper van. The van subculture serves, in this movie, the same function as the summer camp or the creepy old town. And thus we pass into the particulars, which are well summed up in the IMDB abstract:

“After a young couple witnesses a gruesome highway accident, they soon realize they did not leave the crash scene alone, as a demonic presence called the Passenger won't stop until it claims them both.”

2. I have now seen, or been forced to see by my son, innumerable horror movies. I’m an old and broken structure-monger, a fossicker of motifs, and these movies, in that respect, don’t hide their compositional elements – they flaunt them. In this movie, as in so many horror movies, no good deed goes unpunished. When the couple are in a van convention, an old woman advises the girlfriend/fiancée part of the couple to not drive at night and “never stop” – which means never stop to help people in accidents.

On the one hand, one could interpret this injunction – which is realized in different forms in so many American horror films – as a product of a hyper-individual culture in which the subject must survive by blinding itself to any sentiment of empathy or generosity.

But that part of the horror ethos I find less interesting than the way this ethos combines with the supernatural. What the couple discover is that St. Christopher medals have a way of weakening the Passenger.

3. The discourse on superstition extends through all the European enlightenments, all the way back to the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews of the Mediterranean cultures of the ancient period. Myself, I think the key text for the early moderns was Plutarch’s essay on superstition – and that in the 18th and 19th century this tradition was twisted, or reshaped, by the model of a world of contract – a total contract society, so to speak.

The Voltairian view was that religion and superstition were aspects of the same thing. Voltaire himself acknowledged awe – but his typical stylistic impulse was to mock at all that is awe-ful.

In Plutarch's essay, De superstitione, the move is not to slyly let superstition mean religion. The latin word is a translation of deisidaimonia, fear of demons. Plutarch doesn't disbelieve in demons. He was a member of the Delphic priesthood, and his moral essays are, not surprisingly, not only a model for the early modern genre of the essay but, as well, of its cousin, the sermon. The great Anglican preachers of the 16th and 17th century were utterly familiar with Plutarch. And one sees them lifting the themes of Plutarch’s essay.

In France, there was a different turn given to Plutarch. Amyot’s translation of Plutarch – which made his work plunderable by every French writer since the 16th century – prefaces the essay on superstition with the note: “This treatise is dangerous to read, and contains a false doctrine: for it is certain that superstition is less evil, and approaches nearer to the middle of true religion, than impiety and atheism.”

Amyot’s note should be hung in the hall of Great Horror movies, for it contains the doctrine that allows the horror movie to dicker with supposedly true religion.

Plutarch is concerned with what I would call the world of superstition. World is a key word, here: for the world is, for Plutarch, a divine thing – if not a created thing. And it is world views that separate, in Plutarch’s essay, religion from superstition. Atheism then plays the role of the null set, which is why the essay begins by supposing that null set:

“A man thinks that in the beginning the universe was created out of atoms and void.⁠ His assumption is false, but it causes no sore, no throbbing, no agitating pain.”

In contrast to this, Plutarch constructs the superstitious person. His argument here is nicely rounded in a paragraph:

“To come now to our subject: atheism, which is a sorry judgement that there is nothing blessed or incorruptible, seems, by disbelief in the Divinity, to lead finally to a kind of utter indifference, and the end which it achieves in not believing in the existence of gods is not to fear them. But, on the other hand, superstition, as the very name (dread of deities) indicates, is an emotional idea and an assumption productive of a fear which utterly humbles and crushes a man, for he thinks that there are gods, but that they are the cause of pain and injury. In fact, the atheist, apparently, is unmoved regarding the Divinity, whereas the superstitious man is moved as he ought not to be, and his mind is thus perverted. For in the one man ignorance engenders disbelief in the one who can help him, and on the other it bestows the added idea that He causes injury. Whence it follows that atheism is falsified reason, and superstition is an emotion engendered from false reason.”

The key word here, I think, is “blessed”, makarismos in the Greek. Throughout the essay, the atheist is treated as though he literally lacked a sense, and thus could not see the blessing in which he lives. But the superstitious man is in a similar position – he sees only the curse, he fears the demons more than he experiences the very sensual blessing of the world.

The bones of Plutarch’s essay can be seen, for instance, in Jeremy Taylor’s sermon, On Godly Fear from the 1660s, where superstition is recognized, in line with Plutarch, as a misplaced fear, and put among the pagan and Romish practices – a line of thought that of course has a new relevance given the discovery of New World nations and the attempt to proselytize the Gospel among them. Atheism is to one side, and idolatry is on the other, and they are joined by a certain cognitive kinship. Unlike the New Age Americans who take pagan idolatry to be the worship of nature, Taylor takes it to be a sign of an extreme fear of nature – of a removal from the blessed world into a world of mere survival.

“The Latins, according to their custom, imitating the Greeks in all their learned notices of things, had also the same conception of this, and by their word superstitio understood “the worship of demons,” or separate spirits; by which they meant, either their minores deos, or else their zoas apotheothentas, “their braver personages, whose souls were suppose to live after death;” the fault of this was the object of their religion; they gave a worship or a fear to whom it was not due: for whenever they worshipped the great God of heaven and earth, they never called that superstition in an evil sense, except the Adeoi, “they that believed there was no God at all.” Hence came the etymology of superstition: it was the worshipping or fearing the spirits of their dead heroes, “quos superstites credebant,” “whom they thought to be alive” after their apotheiosis, or deification, “quos superstantes credebant”, “standing in places and thrones above us;” and it alludes to that admirable description of old age, which Solomon made beyond all the rhetoric of the Greeks and Romans; “Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way;” intimating the weakness of old persons, who, if ever they have been religious, are apt to be abused into superstition; they are “afraid of that which is high;” that is, of spirits, and separate souls of those excellent beings, which dwell in the regions above us...” (Sermons, 1874:66)

4. Plutarch’s atheist was a theoretical creature. Taylor's was less so, but the preferred alternative to belief in 17th century England was a quiet retreat into deism. But the world of contract, envisioned by the Enlightenment thinkers and animating, now, a million models in economics, became a very real thing – a set of practices which guides our days and governors - is always shouting in our ears since we first learnt to babble. In the fold between the Blessed world and the Unblessed world of contract, horror movies resort to superstition by way of religious relics. It is an interesting genre in this way, a symptomatic genre, even. The role of superstition as religion is pretty much at the center of the popular horror film notion of the supernatural. The world is not blessed, nor is blessing a possible thing – not if you are to survive. But the relic, the “idol” in Taylor’s phraseology, plays a very important role.

In Passenger, we have a secular setting in which one member of our couple – the man, Tyler – brings with him a St. Christopher medal, which he hangs on the rear view driver’s mirror. His partner, Maddie, laughs, and Tyler says something joking about Maddie going to hell, before taking it off. But Maddie has him put it on again. The bit with the St. Christopher’s medal is, in an odd and surely unintended sense, a play on Plutarch’s contrast between atheism and superstition. When the couple stop to help a man who has crashed his car – thus operating as good Samaritans – the demon, Passenger, spots them. It is for this rather futile good act that they are then punished, throughout the movie. The maxim they learn from a wise woman at the van gathering (never stop!) is in opposition to any view of the world as blessed, as communal. Without that sense, in a world blasted free of blessing, the St. Christopher medal literally becomes a weapon. This is a motif that casts a long shadow in horror movies, back to the magical power of the cross in vampire movies and so on. The only thing the “demon” fears are sacred objects which are denuded of their aura as blessed objects in a world where only curses and counter-curses count.

5. Horror movies, and stories, ride at the margins of the bourgeois story; it is a sign of some movement in the underground, the under consciousness, when they become central. These are moments when the enlightenment replacement of the blessing is strained – when it thins, when all the comforts between the subject and terror take on a suddenly fragile and contingent appearance. If horror movies were only this, then they would not have such weight – but the horror movie cannot utterly keep out the blessed world. Even the wise woman responds to the couple to aid them (although, spoiler, she quickly is destroyed). Interestingly, the horror movie slasher in which only one survives seems to have become a bit out of date. There are helpers in some recent horror movies. Still, it is a hard thing to become a survivor in a cursed world, since it really puts in question the price and value of survival.

6. And yet, these considerations have to be put under the sign of entertainment. The cursed world, the world of survivors, we want to see it re-enacted again and again. It goes down like Coke and popcorn. This is the mystery of the perfect little horror movie.

Olga Tokarczuk uses AI to drive over the bones of her own novels

 I have run into a persistant, and probably PR driven meme on social media that being against AI is "being against "art'" - like banning pianos or something.

The response to this is simple. Being against AI is being for preserving the internet tools we have that support art. AI is destroying the personal search, as well as creating pervasive counter-measures that we are now used to and should not be - like all those idiot popups making sure we are not robots - that in the glory days of this technology just didn't exist. The robots now do exist and they steal.

The recent comments of Olga Tokarczuk about how she used AI to find songs that her characters would dance to two decades ago shows either O.T. has never gone onto Youtube (ask for dance hits from the 80s or 90s - get a hundred to a thousand hits) or that she was really using it to write a scene about dancing and has smoothed out the features, here. The improvement in speed is negligible - unless of course the prompt was a bit more specific than this, a bit more about using AI to write the character.

She has denied this in a statement published on Lit Hub. It is a weirdly stated denial-snark thing that looks like she used AI to write it.

One of the great things about the Internet is that you can find, everywhere, vast banks of information. You can find all of the issues of the Partisan Review at Boston University, or all the issues of Dwight McDonalds Politics magazine with its brief run at Unz. I use the Internet Archive to trace, with unbelievable accuracy, such things as the career of the graphologist/psychic Rafael Scherman, for which I also used the French newspaper and magazine collection on Retronews, the various german colllections of newspapers Zefys, the Hamburger Zeitungen Digita, and the Austrian collection at https://anno.onb.ac.at/. I used Google Books, which is increasingly declining as a resource due to AI, to find hints and quotes - it is in this way I discovered the relationship between Scherman and the wife of Adolf Loos, the famous hater of ornament in architecture. At no point in this search did I need AI. AI's big negative, besides its tendency to fraud, is that it erases that margin of fun that makes searching a matter of discovery. For a writer of fiction, that margin is everything.

I should say that, as well, I use data platforms that are hooked up to academic institutions, like JSTOR, that are simply beautiful. But all this access is precisely what AI is aiming at. The end of the personal search is the goal of the AI tech lords, and with the end of the personal search comes the end of the democratic commons of the internet, period. It is not just that the search is speeded up and under the control of the machine instead of the person - it is that the ability to make a search, to use these resources, is under the gun as AI lords get richer and aim to monetize this freedom. Every AI prompt is another bullet shot at the personal search. It can only take so many hits.

I like Tokarczuk. I loved Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. Which has a strong love of nature behind it. That she now wants to drive her plow over the remaining forests of the world, accelerate climate change, and destroy our glorious research systems to use AI makes me suspect that she is - going down a dark path.

Spending my life reading

 1. At some point between my 11th and 13th years on this planet, a global equator of sorts was passed: globally, the population that was literate passed the 50 percent point. This was one of the great events of the 1960s, although at the time it was not celebrated with jubilees and fireworks. Rather it was simply a plodding little point on a graph.

Still, this was the Enlightenment in action. Even as, in the sixties, what literacy meant – what distinguished the oral from the textual – became a much more philosophically ambiguous matter, the certainties of the classroom locked into place writing systems and reading for boys and girls. The latter is especially noteworthy. I am taking this statistic from Unesco, which made retrospective estimates of literacy in this narrow sense going back to the 1820s, when 20 percent of the world was literate. As we know from studies made of literacy by various French historians like Roger Chartier, literacy was not the doublehanded writing and reading instrument we assume it be back in the day: for instance, in France, teaching girls to read was not complemented with teaching them to write: just as one can have piano practice and learn to read a score without necessarily learning to write a score.

My son has learned in his history class in middle school that there was something called the industrial “revolution”, but his textbooks don’t mention the equally important media revolution. The two are bound together – I take it as a world historical event that on November 29, 1814, the Times of London installed a Koenig press, which attached steam power to to the old manually driven iron printing press, with the result that it could print 1,100 one sided sheets per hour. If ever we want to celebrate a Modernization day, November 29th would be a good pick. It was the steam driven printing press that drove literacy.

2. Which is my queer introduction to praising Simon During’s recent Face Book post, which gave us a variation from the old “what books would you take to be marooned with on an island” motif.

“So, in response to the 100 best novels nonsense we are doing a “ten novels I’d like to reread one more time in the last year of my life” list.”

I am not so much a lister, but I am a reader. And I am fascinated by reading media – and by media tout court. To me, this joining of reading and mortality flashes a light on the context of reading within a species that is now largely trained, from a young age, to see lines and curves and dots and translate them into words and sentences and paragraphs. And for some who spends a lot of time, in fact the majority of the working day, looking at these lines and curves and dots (formerly on paper, and now of this background lit … thing we call a screen), mortality is not measured out with coffee spoons, but with this eye-to-shapes activity, which is enfolded in the other ongoing activity: breathing, heartbeat, blinking, and as we get older whatever ache is chasing another in hands, feet, arms, neck, head, et fucking cetera.

The list, restored to mortal time, takes on an urgency which in some ways disguises the real question here, the question that all literacy invites us to take up: how do we spend our life times? Spend, here, should take on a lot of weight. Etymologically, from the old Germanic forspendan, use up, and from the Latin, expendare, pay out – to consume. An existential consumption, the consumer consuming itself. Use, here, plunges us back to the Hobbesian root of utilitarianism: a war against the elements, a war in which the self becomes a kind of front, autogenerates, a biology primed for picking up signs on the way to eating, excreting, copulating, reproducing, and dying. In the parenthesis of the latter, in that final year – which of course is very hard to predict, in contrast to the familiar movie/tv scenario in our heads where the doctor announces the bad news (cancer, usually) of the one year left – we have books. Novels, for Simon D. We are out of the classroom for good, here – that sponsor of our first reading and for many people, surprisingly many people, the only context in which reading the “great books” happens.

3. The recourse to the Enlightenment program of literacy, which all the 19th century European savants (and their pendant correspondents in North America) noticed, was a kind of scriptural anxiety. For the steam engine driven press had the potential to print anything, against the readers pence. From porn to shockers. The question was, and the question still is, how to fit this reading life (or listening or viewing life, given the audio-visual technology) with the hard fact that the users all die. I find this a terrifying as well as fascinating topic: reading accumulates to what end?

Not that I have an answer