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

UGLY STORIES

 

“A party of us were together one day – we’d been drinking, it’s true – and suddenly some one made the suggestion that each one of us, without leaving the table, should tell something he had done, something that he himself honestly considered the worst of all the evil actions of his life. But it was to be done honestly, that was the point, that it was to be honest, no lying.” – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from Under the Floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. But then I’d be here all fucking day, right? Rameau is, if nothing else, a fount of ugly stories. Of which, let me transcribe one.

The story is funny, in a way. And the bones of it are definitely La Rochefoucauld. It is not about the nephew of Rameau himself, but – like many stories – the telling of it sticks in a peculiar way to both the teller and the hearer - it creates a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In The Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in. But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest it. As a game, of course, it isn’t serious. But like the best games – like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious, making the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect. This is the game like, a ritual aspect to the dialogue between Diderot and the nephew of Rameau. There is something about this one of Diderot’s works that gives it a certain clandestine feel. It wasn’t published in his lifetime. In fact, it first appeared in a German translation many years after his death. It was read with interest by Hegel, and referenced in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that great prose poem.

This is the story. It is about one Bouret. Fermier général Etienne-Michel Bouret – a tax gatherer. A man whose wealth allowed him to hope for social advancement in the complicated court circles of Louis XV. But there is a price to pay for not being born in the right class, there is always the price of birth. There is now, don’t kid yourself. Classless society my ass. Bouret, then, determines to win the affection of the keeper of Seals. This is a story that, with variations, could be applied to the Georgetown circles in D.C. at the moment, or – actually, to corporate achievers, going through the ranks, in any Fortune 400 corporate office, in any tech company. The tv series Silicon Valley dramatized any number of ugly stories, following in the recently popular vein of “cringe comedy” – cringe being the American variant of the ugly story, ameliorating existential shame into entertaining social embarrassment.

I’m going to quote from the Penguin translation, as I don’t feel up to translating the whole bit at the moment. But I will make a few modifications:

Lui [Rameau’s nephew]: “But if this role is amusing at first, and you find a certain amount of pleasure in laughing up your sleeve at the stupidity of the people you are hoodwinking, it ends up by losing its point, and besides, after a certain number of inventions you are forced to repeat yourself. Ingenuity and art have their limits. Only God and one or two rare geniuses can have a career that broadens out as they go along. Bouret is one such, perhaps. Some of his tricks really strike me, yes, even me, as sublime. The little dog, the Book of Happiness, the torches along the Versailles road, these are things which leave me dumbfounded and humiliated. Enough to put you off the profession.
I: What do you mean about the little dog?
He: [What planet are you from]? What, you don’t really know how that rare man set about [scaring a little dog away from himself and attaching it to the Keeper of the Seals, who had taken a fancy to it?]
I: No, I confess I don’t.
He: All the better. It is one of the finest things ever conceived; the whole of Europe was thrilled by it, and there isn’t a single courtier it hasn’t made envious. You are not without sagacity: let’s see how you would have set about it. Remember that Bouret was loved by his dog. Bear in mind that the strange attire of the Minister terrified the little creature. Think that he only had one week to overcome the difficulties. You must understand all the conditions of the problem so as to appreciate the merits of the solution. Well!
I: Well, I have to admit that in that line the simplest things would catch me out.
He: Listen (he said, giving me a little tap on the shoulder), listen and admire! He had a mask made like the face of the Keeper of the Seals, he borrowed the latter’s ample robe from a footman. He put the mask over his own face. He slipped on the robe. He called the dog, caressed it and gave it a biscuit. Then, suddenly changing his attire, he was no longer the Keeper of the Seals but Bouret, and he called his dog and whipped it. In less than two or three days of this routine, carried on from morning till night, the dog learned to run away from Bouret the Farmer-General and run up to Bouret the Keeper of the Seals. But I am too good natured. You are a layman and don’t deserve to be told about the miracles going on under your very nose.”

There are so many beautiful bits here . For instance, the way the problem of brownnosing, of true self-degradation, is laid out like a chess problem, just like the chess games going on around Diderot and the nephew at the Palais Royale, where the dialogue is taking place. And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty. To be willing to go to such lengths of humiliation in order to curry favor – the history of those humiliations will, of course, rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator. One can only assuage one’s own wounded pride by such success that one can enjoy the abasement of others – that endless chain. While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense, or any member of Trump’s cabinet – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most deserving, the most masculine grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next bombing, to kill fishermen and schoolage girls by merely flexing! The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancour of overgrown bullies. In another century, Bouret is Dr. Oz, Bouret is the gay evangelical preacher who gets the 100 percent heterosexual grade at evangelical redemption camp. Giving up the little doggie just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.

Only, only the ugly story really captures that. The contribution of story to human reality is something we underestimate at our peril.

The "I am" and the 'Happen to be" - a cultural semantics

 

Culture shows its hand molecular bits and bytes, the way the Id shows itself in dreams, a self-directed movie starring IT itself. Look for the conjunctions, look for the negations, the excuses, the condensations.

Look for, for instance at “happens to be”.

“Happens to be” is all around us. I was reading a book about an artist the other day, and I came across the phrase: “A painting by a young artist, who happens to be African American and gay…” Happens, here, sends us back to chance itself. He could “happen to be” unhyphenated American and straight, couldn’t he? In which case he would, presumably, not happen to be at all, but would be. There he’d be, an “I am”, pure as Jehovah in the burning bush. Our pre-birth identities wait, like slips of paper in a box, to be selected blindly. Like, say, the slips of paper in the box in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Somebody has to be stoned. Those are the rules of the routine. But who, that is the variable. That is what is written on the slip. Who will “happen to be”?

Such, as our tongue knows, is the lightly exerted pressure on that “happens to be.” It looks like an ontological statement of fact, and it sounds like an apologetic.

Trust the sound.

“Happens to be” joins together the otherwise sociologically separate strands of neo-liberalism: on the one hand, the lessons of the civil rights era – non-discrimination/diversity; and on the other hand, the master of hap, Fortuna and her wheel, the free market with its invisible hand up your rectum, jumping the puppets, who all say “I am”. Not, mind you, the government – the era of big government is always over, in neo-liberal culture, even if it exerts itself muscularly now and then to save the big banks and the one percent and becomes wildly aggressive and polices the world, all of course in the name of Freedom. In what other name can you reduce schools and hospitals to rubble?

The leftist critique of neo-liberalism can’t be simply, as it was under classical liberalism, that it is all a class act – with Capital v. Labor as the fighters in the ring. Because the spectrum of injustices and differences are not engrossed by Capital v. Labor. That lesson of the civil rights (and de-colonial) era has to ring in our ears, if that is one “happens to be” a leftist.

“Happens to be” is an overdetermined phrase. It is apologetic in that odd way in which one apologizes to a bigot for his or her bigotry. “I happen to be x” – Jewish, black, trans-sexual, whatever – is a way to deflect a certain meanness, a certain threat in the conversation, with one’s counterpart who is, for instance, talking trash about Jews, blacks, gays, or whatever. In this conversation, the “I am” is always on the side of insisting. “The Great I am” – this is what Sam Pollitt’s wife,  Henny, calls her American New Dealer husband, Sam, that bully and humanitarian.  It happens that you, my counterpart – my comrade, my brother or sister – are standing here with an x. A “happen to be” x. An all natural x.

 

“Happens to be” was forced aboard the slave ships, and driven out of the territories. “I am” built the log cabin, the Georgian mansion (now available for weddings) and, if it didn’t build the railroads, profited mightily from railroad stock. The “I am” earns his billions – the “Happens to be” is the parasite on welfare who also happens to have physically built the railroads, clerked at the convenience store, flipped the burgers, nursed the patient, and all that low grade stuff they do.

Truly, from the “I am’s point of view, what is more natural than chance? The happens to be should be happy that they are allowed even to be.  And chance is what provides us with our “diversity” – we can’t all be white straight men, cause somebody has to clean the toilets, am I right? And yet, when we tease out this “happens to be”, we begin to wonder why the heteronormative hick never happens to be – he just is. Does anybody ever say, I happen to be white? Does our egg, our Humpty Dumpty, our man whose words mean what he wants them to mean, ever happen to be?

This is just a little flicker in the national, in the international conversation between the ’I am’ and the ‘happen to be’. Neo-liberal culture is so obviously exhausted, is so obviously tied in knots by its own self-contradictions, that one thinks surely it is at an end. It isn’t, though. Happens to be still creeps through our conversations, our second thoughts, our apologies. The way we confront, and the way, at the last moment, we deflect. Happens to be is the deeper character, the more sophisticated character, the rascal and the sage, but the political advantage seems to be all with the I am.

And yet: who among us, in the end, wants to be the I am? The great loud I am. As the glaciers go down and hedonics turns out to measure unhappiness, after all. 

The great depression, my friends, my dearest friends, has been internalized. We are left to drift.