What is laughter?

 

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

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

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

State of the Apology, 2026

 The state of the apology, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On epistemologically deviant conditions

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

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

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

earworms in the afterlife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the clothes of fictions, or fictional clothes

 

1. Are the clothes of fictional characters themselves fictional? This is a question that makes me think of Aristotle’s lecturing method, which begins by asking other questions of the question, getting further by the making of problems out of problems that we didn’t even see on our way to what we suppose is an answer. In this case, the question we could ask in response to our question is how could fictional characters have real clothes? Fiction, on this reading, is a universal solvent – once it is introduced into the world, times and places themselves become fictions, their addresses, their faces, their gestures, their voices – all are led like lambs to the slaughter into the fictional void. This is fiction as a dream. Nothing in a dream – not the tree the dreamer sees, not the voice the dreamer hears – exists outside of the dream.

Yet another set of questions, though, question this analogy. For why should we take the fiction and the dream as somehow ontologically equivalent? The dream is not collective – its privacy is its very condition of possibility. Waking up is, among other things, waking to the collective. Here we approach the Wittgensteinian problematic of a private language. “The sentence, „feelings are private, is comparable to the sentence: one plays solitaire alone.” But of course the cards, the gestures, even the time carved out to play solitaire is not a matter of the player’s own act, all the way down the line. Similarly, any sentence with feelings in it – sensations, Empfindungen – supposes some biological structure, some longform evolution.

In a similar way, ficition is always in the collective. It exists as writing, or telling, or images in a movie or video. It thrusts itself into the collective. It “borrows from reality” – to use a common image. The act of borrowing, of not fully paying for, is an interesting transactional metaphor for fiction-making. “Something borrowed” is part of the ensemble of the wedding, according to American folklore. Borrowing hovers on the borderline of thieving – of simply taking. That something borrowed is ritually part of a public declaration of, among other things, sexual activity, says something – but what? - about the connotative field in which borrowing is placed. Borrowing is, contra classical economics, not the same kind of thing as selling. It speaks to a more primal economics of gift giving.

Often, when a writer “borrows” a character from reality -from some real instance of a person – that person feels hurt, or injured. Recently, Hélène Devync, the ex-wife of novelist Emmanuel Carrère, accused him of “borrowing” her for his book, Yogi, an auto-fiction, and thus of violating an agreement he signed not to borrow her. An instance where ontological speculation meets the scandal sheet.

2. There are fictions in which the fictitious character is a piece of clothing – most notably, Gogol’s The Overcoat. H.G. Wells probably was not thinking of The Overcoat when he wrote “The Invisible Man”, but the logic is similar – in the one case, a piece of clothing becomes a real character or at least spirit, while in the other case, clothing of some type or making is necessary to make a person visible (a person who is intent on finding a way out of the invisibility in which he is trapped.

In the Overcoat, the clerk at the center of it, Baschmakin, aka Akaky Akakievich, has a name connected to the Russian word for shoe, bashmak, as the narrator points out – but the shoe is thrown in there as just an odd other thing. In fact, the whole point of the clerk is to be just on the point of recognizability, like a puppet, but not past that point – not to the point where his appearance becomes a positive value:

“… a clerk of whom it cannot be said that he was very remarkable; he was short, somewhat pock-marked, with rather reddish hair and rather dim, bleary eyes, with a small bald patch on the top of his head, with wrinkles on both sides of his cheeks and the sort of complexion which is usually described as hemorrhoidal…”

Yet, no sooner than we are given a somewhat comic description of his complexion than we are back to his genealogy, and particularly his shoes. “Both his father and his grandfather and even his brother-inlaw, and all the Bashmachkins without exception wore boots, which they simply resoled two or three times a year.”

In the shuttling between peripheral clothing items – shoes – and the non-remarkable clerk himself, with the ridiculous complexion and a name that is equally ridiculous, a field is created, or a life, so to speak, in which peripheral clothing items seem to intrude, with a dreamlike insistence, on the “unremarkable”. What kind of vocation suits an unremarkable man best? Gogol again, in a stroke, finds Akaky’s vocation: as a copyist. A pure copyist. The one time he is given a document that requires a bit of editing, he almost collapses. Marking is a torture for an unremarkable man.

As for his uniform: “He gave no thought at all to his clothes; his uniform was-well, not green but some sort of rusty, muddy color. His collar was very low and narrow, so that, although his neck was not particularly long, yet, standing out of the collar, it looked as immensely long as those of the dozens of plaster kittens with nodding heads which foreigners carry about on their heads and peddle in Russia.” A Nabokovian question emerges: can we find a description and natural history of these plaster cats? But no – this is a quest best reserved for other objects – for instance, the German hat worn by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. There, we can look up an actual haberdashery, Zimmerman’s, in St. Petersburg and clap our hands together and rejoice in our little bit of knowledge, our encyclopedic entry, our monad of great price. These plaster kittens, though, seem intended to throw us off.

Indeed, in the case of Raskolnikov’s hat, which we meet on the first page, the whole problem with it is that it is remarkable. And Raskolnikov, planning out his crime, wants to blend in, wants to be Akaky Akakievich-like.

In this sense, Raskolnikov is the opposite of Gogol’s clerk. He is always being remarked. Wheareas Akaky Akakievich dies of being remarked – that is, of wearing his new overcoat, the making of which, with linings included, has been recited by Gogol in the approved epic manner. And of course the overcoat is the death of the clerk - it makes a mark, and in so doing, goes against the very existence of Akaky Akakievich. As he goes out at night in his overcoat and experiences – well, experience, you might say – he violates the terms of his character contract, and naturally wanders into a shadowy area where men with “moustaches” – dimly seen – steal his coat away. This precipitates the last bit of business of the mortal clerk, his attempt to find justice, that is, to have the theft taken seriously. And then the brainfever, and then the death.

“Several days after his death, a messenger from the department was sent to his lodgings with instructions that he should go at once to the office, for his chief was asking for him; but the messenger was obliged to return without him, explaining that he could not come, and to the inquiry "Why?" he added, "Well, you see, the fact is he is dead; he was buried three days ago." This was how they learned at the office of the death of Akaky Akakievich, and the next day there was sitting in his seat a new clerk who was very much taller and who wrote not in the same straight handwriting but made his letters more slanting and crooked.”

A mark – but such a little mark! As for the overcoat, we see, in the sequel, how the ghost of Akaky Akievich exacts a certain justice by taking, in a way, the overcoat of the Person of Consequence – who is so remarkable that he doesn’t even need a name. By the end of the story, the overcoats have doubled – like Dead Souls filling out a list of serfs sold to another remarkable/unremarkable character.

3. In a rollicking attack on D.H. Lawrence as prophet and psychologist entitled “Lorenzo the Closet Queen”, Angela Carter takes the profusion of clothes – and in particular stockings – that Lawrence heaps on the Brangwen sisters in Women in Love to be indicative of Lawrence’s woman problem. “I should like to make a brief, sartorial critique of Women in Love, Lawrence's most exuberantly clothed novel, a novel which, furthermore, is supposed to be an exegesis on my sex, trusting, not the teller but the tale, to show to what extent D. H. Lawrence personated women through simple externalities of dress; by doing so, managed to pull off one of the greatest con tricks in the history of modern fiction; and revealed a more than womanly, indeed, pathologically fetishistic, obsession with female apparel.”

It should be said that Carter also takes Lawrence, at the time she is writing the essay – 1975 – to be the greatest English novelist of the twentieth century. 1975 marks a moment in the trajectory of the “slump” in Lawrence’s reputation, which Lawrentians typically blame on “feminists”. Carter, I think, has another explanation for Lawrence’s rise” “Lawrence's three best novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, form, together, the most moving and profound account of the creation of the twentieth-century British intelligentsia -- British, not exclusively English, of course, because the intelligentsia, itself a new phenomenon in Britain, recruited from all the grammar schools in Wales and Scotland, as well as England. It absorbed colonials and refugees from Europe besides.Those three novels describe the birth of the upper working, lower middle, upwardly socially-mobile-via-education class as a force to be reckoned with.”

It was a class that saw itself in those novels.

What Carter saw in Women in Love, though, was women in stockings. Women in impossible dresses, as well. But always this:

Stockings, stockings, stockings everywhere. Hermione Roddice sports coral-coloured ones, Ursula canary ones, Defiant, brilliant, emphatic stockings. But never the suggestion the fabric masks, upholsters, disguises living, subversive flesh. Lawrence is a stocking man, not a leg man. Stockings have supplanted legs; clothes have supplanted flesh. Fetishism.

The apotheosis of the stockings comes right at the end of the novel, where they acquire at last an acknowledged, positive, sexual significance.

"Gudrun came to Ursula's bedroom with three pairs of the coloured stockings for which she was notorious and she threw them on the bed. But these were thick, silk stockings, vermilion, cornflower blue and grey, bought in Paris."

With sure, feminine intuition, Ursula knows

"Gudrun must be feeling very loving, to give away such treasures".

The excited girls call the stockings "jewels", or "lambs", as if the inert silky things werelovers, or children. Indeed, the stockings appear to precipitate a condition of extreme eroticarousal in Gudrun; she touches them with "trembling, excited hands". The orgasmic nature of the stocking exchange is underlined by a very curious piece of dialogue.

" 'One gets the greatest joy of all out of really lovely stockings,' said Ursula.

" 'One does' replies Gudrun. 'The greatest joy of all.' "

What is Lawrence playing at? Or, rather, what does he think he's playing at? This sort of camp ecstasy more properly belongs in Firbank, who understood about dandyism in women, dandyism and irony, the most extreme defences of the victim. But Firbank, as plucky a little bantamweight as ever bounced off the ropes, had real moral strength.”

4. Carter’s romp through Lawrence’s romp through the Brangwen’s stockings and undies drawer begins and concludes with a bit about the art of transvestitism, which is what Lawrence approaches and, in her view, fails to pull off. “Like a drag-queen, but without the tragic heroism that enables a transvestite to test the magic himself, he believes women's clothes are themselves magical objects which define and confine women.” The criticism, mind, is not that the drag queen’s art is invalid, but that it, like any art, requires a certain skill and reflection that must suspend the perpetual male attempt to capture women, or define them, by the higher method of letting women capture the performer – a masculine surrender. All reasoning, as Carter admits, that Lawrence would have hated.

The stockings of Lawrence’s characters dreams are products, one should say -in as much as fictional stockings can be products – of a grander thing, something that now wraps the world – the invention of synthetics. In the case of the greens, reds and oranges of stockings, these synthetic dyes caused a limbed renaissance – a flowering of stockings that can be traced in the paintings of the time. Toulouse Latrec, for instance, made a series of paintings of women pulling up their collants – variously translated as hose or tights – which were green or pink or orange.

Whether Lawrence was impressed by this, I do not know. At the end of this life, in an essay on painting, Lawrence makes high claims for another artist – Cezanne – and his struggle to be something other than mental. As always, the latter Lawrence goes to 11.

“Without knowing it, Cezanne, the timid little conventional man sheltering behind his wife and sister and the Jesuit father, was a pure revolutionary. When he said to his models: "Be an apple! Be an apple!" he was uttering the foreword to the fall not only of Jesuits and the Christian idealists altogether, but to the collapse of our whole way of consciousness, and the substitution of another way.”

Lawrence did look intently at his Cezanne’s, and I find something intoxicating about his vision of Cezanne’s apples:

“It is the appleyness of the portrait of Cezanne's wife that makes it so permanently interesting: the appleyness, which carries with italso thefeelingofknowingtheo.ther side as well, the side you don't see, the hidden side of the moon. For the intuitive apperception of the apple is so tangibly aware of the apple that it is aware of it all around, not only just of the front. The eye sees only fronts, and the mind, on the whole, is satisfied with fronts. But intuition needs all-aroundness, and instinct needs insideness.”

Carter’s mockery of Lawrence’s women could be put in Lawrence’s terms, here: we don’t see the all-aroundness of the Gudrun and Ursula’s stockings. And this is not their fault – this is not to be blamed on the sisters, any more than Cezanne’s wife could be credited for her appelyness. He does not see the stockings, the legs, the body, the insideness – he is never completely swept away by transvestite vision.

5. Yes, it is the appelyness of the clothes of fictional characters, or there lack thereof, that is the mystery.

Epstein and the history of rape kits

 In part, what we are seeing now with the partial publication of the Epstein files - and the gross reality that nobody will be prosecuted or even investigated for prosecution, in a case that spans the time between 2006 when he was indicted by a Florida Grand Jury and 2019 when he was strangled - is that his case is not being treated with attention to its anchoring in 21st century U.S. history.

Which is a shame. During this time period, other large historical facts were impinging on the perennial question: how criminally patriarchal is our society? When we see a Chomsky decrying the "hysteria" of woke women in 2019, it is a partial glimpse into what happened as "cancel culture" - entrenched establishment figures actually getting fired for sexual harrassment or assault - was overwhelmed by reactionary culture.

"Believe the women" started out as a rather brave utopian effort that could be translated, for instance, into: process decades of rape kits that the police carelessly stored in evidence lockers without every processing them, and account for the number that were simply destroyed because the justice system didn't give a fuck. Alas, that slogan is a bit long. But I do think we would all be served by connecting rapes in high places (committed on girls and boys who came from working class to middle class backgrounds) to rape in general. At the same time Noam Chomsky and Joi Ito and Stephen Kosslyn and Larry Summers, from their Boston area homes, were sending love to Jeffry, the headlines in Boston area papers bumped into the fact that in towns like Cambridge, Mass, the number of rape kits collected and stored but unprocessed by the cops was pretty high. It wasn't until 2016 that the Massachussetts government mandated saving rape kits for 15 years. Replacing a law requiring them to be saved for six months.

Here's a quote from the story about the Governor's conference where the new policy was announced.

"The new 15-year timeframe corresponds with the statute of limitations for rape and sexual assault.
Baker said he had asked Polito, who chairs the Governor's Council to Address Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, to walk him through the details of the bill.
"At the end I looked at her and said, 'Well, why did it take so long for this to happen?' " Baker said, his words partially drowned out by laughter from the crowd assembled in his office for the signing ceremony. "I don't have a good answer for that one but I know many times it does require somebody to start the conversation."

That laughter - the mingled laughs of those who know that the system does not exist to punish the rapist, but to negotiate the victim away from causing trouble, and those who are generally clueless - is a tell.

You won't find any reference in the stories about Epstein to, say, Amanda Nguyen. She was a Harvard student in 2013 when she was assaulted. 2013 was also when Epstein and his friend, Harvard Professor Nowak, were talking about getting Epstein an office at Harvard. A place he could go to and relax. Nguyen didn't want to have her life disrupted by devoting herself full time to the tracking down and trial of her assailant. But she also didn't want her rape kit destroyed - which, as she would discover, would happen to it if she didn't inform the police every six months that she wanted it preserved.

Here's the system in all its beauty: the victim had to keep the police from destroying evidence of the crime. So Nguyen, in 2014 - when Harvard Professor Larry Summers and Epstein were deep into discussions of foreign policy and how to turn a mentoring relationship into hotness - founded RISE, an organization aimed at preserving the evidence of sexual assault for longer than the lifespan of a fruitfly. It worked: in 2016, Congress passed the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, which tied the evidence to the statute of limitations on the crime of sexual assault.

But of course it didn't mandate rape kits were actually to be processed. That is so expensive! And money was needed elsewhere - for instance, buying tanks and neat body armor, and making sure that the police union president was comfortable, and like that. So to process the kits, private parties - non-profit feminist groups, for instance, or what Chomsky might refer to as hysterical women - actually raised money through things like bake sales.
Oh this history! Many of the facts in the history of the rape kit have been gathered into one place by Kennedy Pagan. I recommend reading her book, The Secret History of the Rape Kit, or the article that started it, here.

deleuze on painting: the dream of a segment

 

In the fifth grade,  I began to learn about lines and geometry. Long afterwards, I began to wonder if there were questions I should have asked back then. Wondering if there were questions you should have asked in elementary school is a discipline with a name: philosophy.

My question is: is drawing a line an essential feature of a line, or an accident? To be a little less simple, is it a necessary feature of a line that it can be represented?

On the one hand, the answer would seem to be no. After all, the first thing we learn about lines is that they are infinite. Thus, even given an infinite pencil, and infinite amount of time, and infinite energy, you could never get to the end of drawing even one line. Whereever you stopped, you would have drawn a segment of a line.

Now we all know that the segment of a line mirrors the essential – that is, the angle of the line.  Given this property of the line segment, why waste your infinite energy on drawing the infinite line? But we have still not answered our first question. Rather we have changed it. Does the line segment mirror something essential about the line – by which I mean, given the definition of the line, can we derive a proof that it must essentially be segmentable? Or is the line segment conceptually distinct from the definition of the line – merely a happy accident that allows us to have an image of lines, which are for the most part invisible things.

These questions come to mind when we, and by we I mean me, read Deleuze’s 1981 lectures on painting, which were published in 2023. On Painting, the title of the course, seems an oddly Hegelian title for such a non-Hegelian, indeed anti-Hegelian philosopher.

Deleuze, however, does not begin with history, but with concepts. Or Deleuzian concepts.

He begins not with perspective, or the Egyptians, or with beauty. He begins with the diagram.

Consider the question about the line as a sort of parable or riddle. A koan. By doing so, we can get close to the idiolect of the diagram in Deleuze. He wants to talk about painting given a set in which painting can seem to be highly figurative, or impressionistic, or monochrome, or abstract expressionist. He wants to begin with painting as a manufactured thing.

He takes what he calls the “diagrammatic” approach to distinguish two systems, which accord with two hierarchies. One system accords primacy to the eye over the hand. In this system, painting is a question of color and line.

In another system – one that Deleuze prefers, and one that leads us from the Renaissance to Pollack and beyond – the hand operates outside of, apart from, unchained by the eye. In this system, the fundamental elements are the stroke – the “trait” – and the mark – the “tache”.

Deleuze wants to start, conceptually – outside of the eye’s history, vision’s history – with a germ-chaos. A scribble, a blur, a smudge, a stain. He wants to start from dirt, the expelled thing from the Platonic kingdom of ideas.

This expelled thing helps Deleuze trace a story of painting  that reads like a slave uprising – the hand “slaps” the eye, the stroke-mark communicates with the chaos-germ, the manual follows its own lines of flight, so to speak. And in so doing comes into relation with the “gris” – with grayness. Deleuze, that magpie philosopher, takes the term from Klee. Grayness is the undifferentiated. Out of it we derive our black-white and light-color system.

It is only at this point that we understand – as we do with the question of the representation of the line – that the artist has never been a master of resemblance, but is rather concerned with tearing the appearance from the res, the thing. The painter operates to dis-resemble, so to speak. And here Deleuze goes into a glorious riff about the canvas, the chevalet – easel or stand – and the lure of the window.

Which, to my mind, brings us back to the peculiarities of the segment. Segmentarity, it turns out, is something my fifth grade self should have paid more attention to, since it is the window through which we view so many thousands of things, without ever stopping to consider the metaphysics of the segment.

So today I will spare a moment or two to let myself be wrapped up in a dream of segmentarity.

You do you.