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 ate. 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."

sanity and poetry

 

How much madness we’ve flushed down the drain!

The correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is instructive. Bishop stood for sanity, as much of it as she could stand. She grew up in a house with a mad parent, her mother. Lowell stood for insanity, or sanity shaken to vertigo – and of course suffered from madness himself.

I take this from Colm Tóibín's essay/review: 

“Some of their exchanges remain fascinating, such as the letter in 1957 in which Bishop responded to a draft poem (which became ‘For Elizabeth Bishop 2: Castine, Maine’) that Lowell had written about her in which he mentioned that her mother had tried to kill her. ‘I don’t remember any direct threats,’ Bishop wrote, ‘except the usual maternal ones. Her danger for me was just implied in the things I overheard the grown-ups say before and after her disappearance. Poor thing, I don’t want to have it any worse than it was.’ The following year, it must have struck Bishop with considerable force to learn that Lowell, who had had a breakdown, was incarcerated in the same mental hospital as her mother had been. ‘My mother stayed there once for a long time,’ she wrote to him. ‘I even have some snapshots of her in very chic clothes of around 1917, taking a walk by a pond there.’”

We have, of course, an odd and slightly menacing way of talking of ourselves as "wired" - as though nerves were wires. It is an odd thing, since the wire model of the nerve was pretty much a dead end, and the synapse showed us that it was something else that is happening in the brain and body. Yet we calmly speak of hard wiring, as though we were all appliances. A vision that has its roots in the maddest of delusions, truly of Schreber-like proportions. Wires, of course, don’t go mad, they rust, they misfire, they loosen. There are shorts, there are circuits.

It is a funny thing, but for me, it is only together, only in the circuit of their friendship, that I really appreciate Lowell and Bishop. We do like to take our writers one at a time, but often they come in twos – Blok and Bely, for instance; Verlaine and Rimbaud. Perhaps it was the unhappiness of Baudelaire’s life that he really didn’t find a pairing – he was always the albatross. 

Folie a deux – granted; But sanity is a deux, too. Don’t credit yourself with it if you have it – cause you didn’t make it, baby. You didn’t make it.

Left conservatism

1.Norman Mailer used to call himself a left conservative – a conservatism 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.”