Macron and the paleocapitalist dream

 

One of the great centrist hat tricks is to divert the discussion of government programs from asking whether they successfully meet their goals to the question of its correspondence with some Chicago school notion of how governments just need to get out of the way for capitalism. Here's how France's retirement system meets its goal, for instance: "... just 3.6% of French retirees live in poverty, compared to the OECD average of 12.5%".

Huh. Funny, that stat just gets lost in the squid ink shot around these kind of issues, issues that the richest people - who are the most influential on the media mindset - have decided. One of the conclusions young people are reaching is that the neo-classical defense of Capitalism is a defense of a system that can’t afford retirement for old people or education for young people. Yet the very folks who write this kind of nonsense about “reforming” the system – that is, 99 percent of mainstream media – can’t draw the simple conclusion that what they are suggesting is that there’s a high acceptable level of illiteracy among the young and death and poverty among the old so that ‘free enterprise” can award the top 1 percent trillions of dollars. In other words, they are toting up the cost of social democracy as though it were a matter of cuts in programs, rather then taxing at the rate that preserves social democracy – taxing, for instance, capital gains both every year – not at the point of sale – and at a high enough rate to successfully achieve social democratic goals.

Which is why I’d recommend, for a horselaugh,  the NYT's elegy today of  one of its favorites, Emmaneul Macron, whose unfullfilled promise makes all the upper 20 percent so sad! It is full of these paleo-capitalist sugarplums. I choose, at random, this absurdist description oF Macron's "reform" of the social security system: "Mr. Macron accomplished the first two goals but not the third. He set off angry protests after pushing through an unpopular rise in France’s retirement age to 64 from 62, a move that economists say was critical to stemming the tide of red ink. " Yeah, everybody in France - the France dancing in the head of Bret Stephen's - retires at 62. Or even 64. Those are cases that are at the lower boundary of the retirement range. Macron's "reform" didn't stem any rising tide of red ink, partly because they were purposefully designed not to hurt any of those middle class people who were 62 when the 'reforms" were put in place. And the airy reference to economists is so NYT-y and unspecific that you would never know the journalist is writing as a citizen of a country that owes 40 trillion bucks on its own debts. Which, actually, is the cause of the crisis worldwide. The U.S. bond market drives the interest on other smaller bond markets throughout the world, and in combo with the massive debts accumulated by AI building companies is actually going to sink a lot of people in the next decade.

Anyway, upshot is: the one thing the NYT can never, due to its structure, report on is: foreign affairs. It is always and forever clueless. And it is an essential tool for mapping out the cluelessness of the American elite’s view of the world, provincial, self-serving, and perpetually in shock because it is rejected not only by the dark masses of the benighted, non-U.S. nations, but by the U.S.’s own population.

Kurosawa's brother, Wittgenstein's world

 From Gerald Macé’s Carte de l’empire, I extract the following anecdote.

“Kurosawa’s brother committed suicide when movies became talkies, in a heroic reargard action to defend reciters, who were doomed to disappear. He himself belong to the guild of the benshi, actors who commented on the silent images.

One could well think that the ghost of his brother floated over Kurosawa’s films. Leader of a strike that failed, condemned by the birth of a new technology, the brother, laid off like one of those ronin of the past, having lost their vocation at the same time as their master, incarnated in himself that traditional Japan which put up its fists before allying with Germany before the Second World War, throwing itself into the mouth of the wolf.”

Somehow, this note reminds me that the passing of silent films was an event also witnessed, in a way, by others of that time, like Wittgenstein. I could imagine Kurosowa’s brother intoning the last numbers of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

“My propositions are explicatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

The benti explaining to the movie goer - and the titles in the film are, likewise, dispensable aids. The world of the film, the purely visible world of faces, bodies, gestures, scenery, the picture itself – is the world rightly seen.

Wittgenstein, as is well known, began his long trek towards his second philosophy about the time that the talkies replaced the silent films.

Norman Malcolm has introduced an anecdote that has immediately achieved a place among the great anecdotes, like Samuel Johnson kicking a stone to refute Berkeley. Wittgenstein liked talking to Sraffa, the great Italian economist. At one point, after listening to Wittgenstein on propositional form and language, Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture – putting his fingers under his chin and making a brushing motion – and asked what the propositional form of that was.

One of Wittgenstein’s commentors interpreted this anecdote to mean that Sraffa was telling Wittgenstein that the sense and the meaning of linguistic expressions are use-dependent. Use, or as Wittgenstein put it, Sraffa’s “anthropological perspective”, freed him to the Audio-visual tracks of ordinary life. Or, to put this in cinematic form, the purity of silent film was not sullied by sound – it was rather a way of joining life itself. For better or worse. The silence of the world is not the case. The silent world, perfectly universal, must be put behind us – even though strong traces remain in the way the builders, for instance, in The Philosophical Investigations seem much closer to the comedians of the silent film era, such as Buster Keaton in Cops – with the central actor at a seriously askew relationship in the world that does not prevent him from living in it with a stoic hilarity.

The purity of the world as representation comes crashing down – but it is a world now sadly tainted, as from Kurosawa’s brother’s point of view, or is it one that we wonder, in retrospect, if it ever existed at all?

on the party

1. In James C. Scott’s Seeing Like the State, there is an appreciation of Lenin as a modernist figure, in particular like Le Corbusier. Scott takes Lenin’s text, What is to be Done, as his starting point for discussing the organization of the Communist party as a classic modernist project: the use of military metaphors, a planning structure based on an elite command center, the distrust of spontaneity, the whole nine yards. But more than that, Scott compares Lenin’s notion, in 1903, that a party such as he envisions it, and only a party such as he envisions it, can really bring about a revolution, with what happened in 1917, when the spontaneity that Lenin believed to be doomed by its lack of goals and viable mechanisms actually did the task that the Bolsheviks couldn’t do in fifteen years – overthrew the Czar. Revolution, it turned out, was very different from Lenin had envisioned it.

I think Scott is a little to narrow in his tying Lenin’s theory of the party simply to the Communist party. What Lenin saw was how the party would function in a nation-state. Any party. Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Fascist, Menshevik, Bolshevik – and this is a curiously underemphasized thing.

To get to this, turn to an associate of Weber’s, Robert Michels, who wrote the text book on the nature of the party in 1910, eight years after Lenin’s book, formulating the ‘iron law of oligarchy.’

Michels is an interesting figure. He was a political activist in the Social Democratic party – near the anarchic edge – as well as a sociologist. Later, after WWI, he moved towards fascism, teaching in Italy. But we are concerned with just a few of his notions.

Robert Michels contrasted two ways of comparing democracies and monarchies/aristocracies. One was to compare the frequency of elections as the index of popular participation – and by this criteria, democracies were clearly more ‘democratic’. But the other way – comparing length of tenure of the officials – gave a more paradoxical result. In Germany, an official – in the legislature, in the party, as a minister – had much greater chance of having a longer tenure, or at least a more frequent one, then they did during the aristocratic/monarchical time.

Michels came up with certain psychological reasons for this unexpected datum. For instance, the democratic representative often is the recipient of gratitude for what he has done. An appointed official or an aristocrat, on the other hand, does what he does evidently for – his king or his family, thus arresting the impulse of gratitude. I’d say gratitude is a word whose correlate is very material favors, a whole exchange system full of them. In general, the frequency of election actually puts a greater stress on those factors that are ignored in the notion that leadership would change significantly with each election. Instead, it leads again and again to the successful longevity of the representative. The reason is that the cost of entry goes up, the longer the representative endures in office, and the more the gratitude/favors logic works to ensure the closeness of supporters and the officeholder.

There are also, according to Michels, external reasons that help ensure length of tenure. For instance, “…the party that changes its leaders too often runs the risk of finding itself unable to contract useful alliances at an opportune moment. The two gravest defects of genuine democracy, its lack of stability (perpetuum mobile democraticum) and its difficulty of mobilization, are dependent on the recognized right of the sovereign masses to take part in the management of their own affairs.”

The idea of an alliance is very important. Because the party is so often considered as an instrument, as something that is designed completely to accomplish a purpose, it is hard to see it standing for itself. It must stand for an idea, represent a class, an ethnic group, etc.

2. Imagine, then, Lenin.

In 1900, when Lenin began his second tour of exile in Europe, he was in his thirties, and had been active in clandestine revolutionary activity in Russia for the last decade. He came out of that experience of organizing, writing and prison with two ideas. One was a newspaper – which became the Iskra – and one was a party.

Lenin’s second objective is the whole point of 1902’s What Is to be done? I am not interested so much in the infinite ins and outs of the history of Bolshevism, proper, but rather in trying to understand the idea of a highly intelligent man from a state in which there was little to no experience of parties, as they developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, re-inventing the whole concept. Lenin, then, is dreaming. Not that the dream is uninformed by the historical experience of parties in Europe – most notably, the Social Democrats in Germany. But he is dreaming of a party that will play a different role than any party has played before. In Lenin’s dream, the party will found the revolution – and, beyond the ultimate question of the state’s always to be put off dissolution , that means it will found the state.

Of course, as James Scott points out, Lenin is wrong in the case of Russia – the revolutions came about spontaneously, just as the people he denounced said they would. And in 1905 and 1917, Lenin quickly accommodated to that fact – but the party he founded acted as though they had created the revolution. The thing that is important is that this conception of the function of the party is something new, something that theorizes the way parties will be throughout the twentieth century.

This role is new. No revolution in the past came about through the organization of a party. Parties formed as secondary political characteristics of the state. The change, perhaps, comes first in the U.S. –one could argue that the Republican party, under Lincoln, is the first party to expand its role to something more than a loose confederation of likeminded people seeking the power of office, becoming a nation-builder.

But Lenin was the one who saw the party most clearly as a new dispositif, to use Foucault’s term: there was a new dialectic of agent and percipient set up by Lenin’s notion of the party. It is as if the ventriloquest’s dummy took on life, became a Frankenstein’s monster.

The Lockean-Rousseau-ian state had been founded on a semi-magic relationship between the people and the state. The people were the Agent, sending their thoughts to the great state, the Percipient. The thoughts are, of course, not natural phenomena, but the phenomena of a will – and just as the agent is controlling, in some small way, the percipient, so, too, the Agent people is controlling the state Percipient, which represents the people’s will.

Into this duality, Lenin introduces the party, which is again shaped around an agent/percipient relationship. But by this time the constants had been loosened – the agent’s will might well actually reflect the work of the percipient, who is not simply the naïve, the mind-controlled subject, but a subject who has woken up and reversed the flow of suggestion. The party becomes both instrument and theorizer, dropping its own suggestions into the mind of the agent, or rather making the agent, the people, choose not the desires of its heart, but the desire for one or the other party.

3. Each election, under this interpretation, is a magic show gone wildly wrong.

This is not to say that refusing to vote is not wildly wrong too. The parties may be part of a circus, but it is the only one in town - in fact, it is the town. You can't get away from it, in this scenario, by an act of quietism.

Revolution and its ghosts

I wrote this a coupla years ago. Today, as the Republic, aka the lyceens, gather in the streets to face down repression, I'm thinking about revolution and haunting.  

"In the world of epiphenomena, the haunt is king.

This sentence, believe it or not, forced itself upon me at 6:45 a.m this morning, as I was arising from bed to go empty my bladder. An old man in a dull month, or a dull man with an old prostate – one of those moments.

Well, yesterday I had to finish up some editing work, and in the evening we were scheduled to go to La Rotunde and chow down, but in between times I was thinking about haunting. In particular, haunted houses. Houses in which what happened in the house forms the nucleus of the story.

Haunted houses have been mocked in the cultures that claim to be children of the Roman Empire since Lucian of Samosata was a pup. In fact, Lucian’s dialogue, Philopseudès, or The lover of lies, is one of the great documents of the Hellenic enlightenment, written maybe a decade before Tertullian, in another part of the Empire, began vigorously damning peeps like Lucian. Renan compared Lucian to Voltaire – and Voltaire also compared Lucian to Voltaire. The lover of lies is a dialogue that contains a dialogue, a conversation between philosophers, so called, at gathered around the sick bed of an evidently wealthy man named Eucratès. They commence to talking about miracle cures, phantoms, and other such business, to the disgust of Tykhiadès, who takes the view, sometimes taken by Voltaire and lesser philosophes as well, that superstition is just stupidity. How can anybody be so dumb as to believe in ghosts haunting houses?

This kind of one dimensional positivism is still around. And it has its fragment of veracity: if we believe in something we call “cause”, much of these superstition visions seem to call for explanations rooted in local causes – like fear of the dark – rather than in cosmological causes – like an afterlife from which these phantoms come.

Our anthropological liberalism, too, searches for causes, but not in the stupidity of the credulous, but in cultural practices that we study while withholding our own cultural biases – an epoche that is either tolerant or patronizing.

Haunting, of course, as hauntology and all the rest of it, became a modish object of reflection after the fall of the wall. Helped along by Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, the idea of something haunting something else - the way Communism haunted Europe, or the way Hamlet’s dad haunted Hamlet – became a model for thinking about our own neo-liberal ghostliness.

Myself, as a citizen of Paris, think about haunting as a matter of urban history. And certainly Paris is a haunted and hunted city – we walk past old torture chambers and the ghosts of faits divers, here, as we go to Carrefour and get the meat and veggies and wine.

Paris has always been a central place for occultists, sex magic theorists, Gurdjeffians, far right white magic dudes, clairvoyants, and situationists. Yet, in the Paris media, the ghosts and haunted houses are usually somewhere else. There’s a whole mythology of Britain as a ghost-haunted place, and Brittany too. Whereas if such beliefs creep into Saint-Germain, they are intellectualized – its all surrealists and serious searchers in the Kabbalah.

In Southern France, “folk beliefs” are everywhere. Recently there’s been an excellent scandal in a village near Montpellier. The mayor of Agde, Gille D’ettore, felt that he needed a connection on high. He needed God. Or some spirit. So he searched around to contact the big OTHER, and had the misfortune to contact a corrupt clairevoyant, Sophia Martinez. Here’s the story in brief from the Midi Libre:

“Medium and healer, she is alleged to have used a stratagem with the Mayor of Agde and numerous other interlocutors: in using a masculine and raw voice on the telephone, she made them think she was in contact with a supernatural being from the Beyond. This voice incited them to take good care of the voyante, including materially.

Suddenly, she was able to pay, by means of Gilles D’ettore, for a veranda, a jacuzzi, a sumptuous wedding, airplane tickets for herself and her friends, etc.”

Such little things the beyond wants from us! D’ettore was not the only seeker after advise – some real estate broker is suing Martinez because he gave her ten thousand euros to speak to his late mother, which he did on the telephone – although the voice at the other end might, just might have been Martinez’s own.

If corruption there must be, I’m rather happy that it went into making sure a clairevoyante from Agde could soak in a jacuzzi after expending enormous spiritual energy connecting with the beyond. I get it."

Pour des lyceens!

 I haven't tuned into the NYT gurgling their macronist responses to the police violence against the Lyceens yet. But I have seen a lot of the videos - including a video of an insane police charge at our school, Voltaire - and I've seen the vids of heartening demonstrations of support by parents and workers that are now all around - except of course on French fox tv, which is a phantasmagoria of redfaced racists yelling shit.

Tuesday is the day when the unions and the parents and the high school kids - the lyceens - are taking to the streets. I've been officially informed that we are going out in the streets too.

We are obviously at a dead level in this weird century - the American president, convincted of rape, sending his love out to the Cornell rapists, and the French president, who never met a cop thug that he didn't love, cheering on the flying squads as they take down protesting 16 year olds. At least in the latter case, however, I'm pretty sure that things are going to wind up like they did for the Gilets Jaunes - that is, Macron will try to bribe his way out of this situation while guarding the only thing he really cares about, i.e., making sure the superwealthy are not ever really taxed.

Dead levels everywhere. But we are not dead yet. Meanwhile I'm going to listen to the Who's Baba O'reilly (teenage wasteland) this fine morning.

A rape kit

Shame of the Universities, II : the Droit de Seigneur in America

August 23, 2019

There are scandals that fascinate but don’t educate. And then there are the other scandals, the ones that x-ray a social order, the ones that, in one flash of light, penetrate under the skin of the ruling class and show us the gaudy, gory connections that make up its structure and substance.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal, from his supposed suicide (the suicide of a man who spent 12 hours a day in his jail, meeting in a special meeting room with his lawyers; the man who supposedly despaired that the jig is up, without the thought crossing his head that he might have information that he could use to bargain with the prosecutors; the man who supposedly knelt and leaned so hard against the sheets conveniently provided for him by the prison system and tied to his bed post that he broke bones in his neck; that suicide) to his donations and friendships, showed what money can buy in America. It showed, even more, what money has bought in America: it has bought unaccountable private power that now rules us in ways that would astonish the aristocracy in 18th century France.

Or maybe not.

I've been thinking of the scandal about Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, known to all opera lovers. The plot concerns Figaro’s master’s desire to assert the droit de seigneur on Figaro’s bride-to-be: that is, the right of the master to have sex with the bride of the vassal on the first night of the marriage. A fiction, historians say. In Beaumarchais’s day, it was a common enough trope – considered archaic, but evidence of the ghastliness of feudal times. In the play, the Count has already renounced the droit de seigneur in his own marriage – but he seeks to reassert it with Suzanne, Figaro’s bride-to-be, by buying her consent.

“Tired of prowling among the rustic beauties of the neighborhood he returned to the castle… and endeavors, once more, secretly to purchase from her, a right which he now most sincerely repents he ever parted with.”

Napoleon, famously, called the play “the revolution already in action”. I don’t think anybody will call the Epstein affair the revolution in action, since we seem to be at a deadpoint in history where reaction rules on all sides. But the revolution, like the kingdom of heaven, can’t be said to be here, or there, but explodes – so who knows.

In my last post about the shame of the universities, I showed a streak of moderation that, a week after writing it, I am rather ashamed of. Before I rundown the farce of irresponsibility that is unspooling before our eyes, I should say, in my most dictatorial voice, that the larger scandal is that there is no SEC like regulatory body to police the concentrated private power of tax exempt universities. What regulation exists consists of mere nudgery. We have no body to force universities to be wholly transparent about their donations. We have no body to investigate the responsibility of the administration in covering up not only insalubrious relationships, but crimes. We allow universities and colleges an incredible leaway to investigate sexual assault, to investigate inside dealing by faculty, to allow deals with for profit corporations, etc. Just as allowing billionaires to flourish is like inviting dinosaurs to your five year old’s birthday party and expecting them not to eat the cake and the kiddies; similarly, allowing Harvard or Yale or any U. to be judge and jury of their own doings is not an invitation to corruption, it is corruption in action.

Yale, for instance. Let’s take the recent news about Yale. It too involves sexual assault and an island in the Caribbean – but, at least so far, without an Epstein in it. Instead, it involves Eugene Redmond, a professor at the medical school, who as long ago as 1994 was credibly accused of sexual abuse of students. These students were invited to study on St. Kitts Island, where Thomas seemed to run a private foundation. After hearing that Redmond was tricking students into having sex with him, this is what Yale, in its glory and its power, did:

“… the Yale School of Medicine launched an investigation in 1994 after students from Redmond’s summer internship program reported that he sexually molested and harassed two students. Redmond was reprimanded and signed a settlement agreement that required him to eliminate the program, cease recruiting and any supervising of students in St. Kitts and that he abide by a separate housing policy, the report said.”

If you rub your eyes and think, wow, a cab driver that isolated a customer and raped him would not only be fired by the cab company, but turned over to the police – you obviously do not fit in America. In America, Dr. Eugene Redmond was with Yale. And Yale is no mere cab company, but a trainer of, well, our Supreme Court. So what happened was a stern interdiction of sleeping together. And with that, Yale slapped together its mighty hands. Case solved!

Except that since 1994, Redmond didn’t eliminate the program and Yale did nothing except whistle for 15 years. Cause there was no power on earth prodding Yale to do squat. The state of Connecticut isn’t going to take on Yale. St. Kitts isn’t going to take on Yale. And as for the Feds, they only go to Yale to get educated, and then contribute to its endowment. Its all a little bubble, isn’t it?

If you read the papers about this, it is not: Yale covers up crime. It is about “Yale lapses”. It is not about Connecticut lapses, lapses in U.S. law, because, as we know, the government has delegated its power to Yale. The headlines, as usual, say more than they know.

This news was rather overshadowed by the continuing fallout of MIT’s Jeffrey Epstein connection. Epstein was such a valued contributor to MIT that he was even sent a little trophy, the same type of token they awarded people who were “disruptors”, speaking out about, say, sexual harassment. That must have pleased Epstein – here these metoo feminists were, and here he was, and they got the same award.

The latest letter of non-apology apology comes from MIT professor Seth Lloyd. The letter was obviously penned with some help from the PR department, which has studied the “nerd tunnel vision” defense of George Church’s apology and decided it needed tweaking. So Lloyd comes out firmly, very firmly, in a parenthetical aside, against raping children. It is almost heartwarmingly moral, and makes me want to curl up in MIT’s lap. Here’s the entire, bizarre-orama quote:

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. Mr. Epstein expressed remorse for his actions and assured me that he would not re-offend.

After Mr. Epstein’s release, I resumed attending the discussions that he convened with other scientists and accepted two grants from his foundation, one in 2012, and a second in 2017. These were professional as well as moral failings.

I for one wonder greatly, greatly about the “upon reflection”. What was that reflection like? Epstein, who loved to fund neuro-sounding shit, would probably have enjoyed the shit out of Lloyd’s distance-putting. The suicide went to his death knowing for a fact that if he could make it through his problems in NYC, the universities would quietly come calling again – after a suitable ‘upon reflection’ period.

Of course, the dribble of apologies (which will accompany many university president heralded investigations, leading to nothin) will all contain boiler plate language about being “horrified” by Epstein’s crimes. This is to laugh. In the New Republic, Eugeny Morozov, a tech guru, published an email he received from John Brockman (a literary agent and general connector for high profile sci and tech people, who runs the Edge.org). Here’s what Brockman was saying in 2013:

Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire science philanthropist showed up at this weekend’s event by helicopter (with his beautiful young assistant from Belarus). He’ll be in Cambridge in a couple of weeks asked me who he should meet. You are one of the people I suggested and I told him I would send some links.

He’s the guy who gave Harvard #30m to set up Martin Nowak. He’s been extremely generous in funding projects of many of our friends and clients. He also got into trouble and spent a year in jail in Florida.

If he contacts you it’s probably worth your time to meet him as he’s extremely bright and interesting.

Last time I visited his house (the largest private residence in NYC), I walked in to find him in a sweatsuit and a British guy in a suit with suspenders, getting foot massages from two young well-dressed Russian women. After grilling me for a while about cyber-security, the Brit, named Andy, was commenting on the Swedish authorities and the charges against Julian Assange.

“We think they’re liberal in Sweden, but its more like Northern England as opposed to Southern Europe,” he said. “In Monaco, Albert works 12 hours a day but at 9pm, when he goes out, he does whatever he wants, and nobody cares. But, if I do it, I’m in big trouble.” At that point I realized that the recipient of Irina’s foot massage was his Royal Highness, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.”

Isn’t that cute? As Xeni Jardin (one of the editors of Boing Boing) says: they all knew. (go to her twitter account – which is digging much deeper than, say, the NYT, which has still not reported on the story that its business journalist, Landon Thomas Jr., took 30,000 bucks from Epstein – while reporting on him. @xeni)

You can’t combine a social democracy – even of the mild New Deal/Great Society type – and a pre-1929 economic order. I should add a codicil: you can’t have a social democratic culture and a plutocracy. The squeeze operated by the upper one percent effects more than “social mobility” – it effects our most basic freedoms. It closes off emancipation with a chopper. We need to open it again – even if it takes a chopper.  

A rape kit - rapes and frats, the tip of the iceberg: Baylor https://www.pbs.org/.../former-baylor-frat-president...; Cornell http://abcnews.com/.../cornell-fraternity-member.../story...; University of Minnesota https://abcnews.com/.../cornell-fraternity.../story...; Temple alpha epsilon pi https://www.nbcwashington.com/.../temple.../2028707/; UCLA 1996 https://www.latimes.com/.../la-xpm-1996-06-05-me-38229...; UCLA 2015 https://abc7.com/.../rape-allegations-surface-at.../506276/; USC https://www.latimes.com/.../usc-protests-intensify-after...; Sigma Chi MIT https://police.mit.edu/.../sexual-assault-sigma-chi...; Johns Hopkins https://www.theguardian.com/.../johns-hopkins-rape...; American University https://www.theatlantic.com/.../the-dark-history.../361056/; et fucking cetera. Abolish frats.

some remarks on Pascal

 I understand the relic-mania of the Middle Ages, for I like relics myself. Not that I collect them – I don’t really have that collecting vibe in my life. I’m a great thrower-outer, too great in fact. I have regretted certain trips to the dumpster. However, I do like the idea of seeing a great man or woman’s tomb, or seeing their handwriting, or the chair they sat in. I like to follow the footsteps of some figure from history, donning my psychogeographical mook’s outfit – or more simply, taking pictures with my cell phone – as I find their address and try to imagine, through archives of newspapers, what they saw on their street. I like having a destination. I especially like this in Paris, which is an infinite universe of destinations. The great metropolises contain their chronographic essence in ways that tickle the sensitives among us, the ones for whom the past is an ESP ambush. Who see and dicker with the ghosts.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Pascal. I have not really read Pascal in decades; he never became my life companion, like Montaigne. But Pascal was so obviously that rare thing, the mooncalf genius, the boy who at 6 or 7 went through Euclid and did the proofs himself, that he retains a very distinct freak sparkle for me.

One day this spring I was walking down Rue des Minimes and thought, this is where Pascal and Descartes met. They met and talked for almost three days at the Couvent des Minimes, a building that is now a private Catholic school. They argued about the vacuum, with Pascal maintaining that nature does not abhor a vacuum and Descartes holding the classical Aristotelian position, although borrowed to function in Descartes cosmological system of vortices.

In 1647, Pascal made a famous experiment to show that the air has a weight and that it has less weight higher up – which was an essential insight into the constitution of the atmosphere. He used 2 tubes of glass 40 feet high, which he had installed on Puy de Dome, and compared the level of the mercury in them to the level of mercury in tubes put in a place of lesser elevation. From the heights of the mercury Pascal not only deduced the weight of the atmosphere but, as well, a more general notion of a vacuum.

As he put it: “nature has no repugnance for the vacuum, that it makes no effort to avoid it, and admits it without pain or resistance.”

In that phrase one sees something much larger that was happening in the 17th century: the scientific discarding of nature as a recognized actor. Nature, unlike the elements, or fluids, or matter in its forms, has no scientific profile whatsoever. This was the conclusion, latter in the century, of Boyle, and science has gone on this way ever since. Nature is "law bound" - or in other words, corresponds to our formulation of forces. It is never supervenient on its "laws".

So when Descartes met Pascal on 24 September 1647, he was meeting, in a sense, the future. That was too much for Descartes. If nature didn’t abhor a vacuum, what good was it?

2. Psychogeography, and the random walk, perculate up in the interstices of ordinary life under the reign of deathdrive capitalism. I’d call them all adventures in oppositional nostalgia. We can walk about where natural philosophy started turning our cosmovision upside down – and in that walk, number 12, Rue de Minimes, has a privileged place.

3. Pascal’s vita, in the hands of his sister Gilberte and his comrades at Port Royal, became the story of a God infested man. There were scores of god infested men in the 17th century. Few, though, were also mathematicians, natural philosophers, and experimentalists. Pascal was a prototype, in these respects, of what later came to be that familiar enlightenment figure, the philosopher.

Take, for instance, what Pascal made of his experience of Paris. We do know that the year of his death, the year when the ecstatic state described in the Pensees was reaching its peak, he was also involved in a prescient attempt to provide Paris with a bus service.

We don’t have the dense tableaux of Paris from his time that we have in the Paris chroniclers of the 18th century, like Mercier. But we do have certain documents – for instance, the Lettre d’un sicilien a un de ses amis, which was probably written between 1681, when its writer, Giovanni Paolo Marena settled there, and 1693, when he died, which are devoted to describing aspects of the metropolis. Like Pascal, Marena took a carriage now and then. This is how he describes them: “there are an infinite number here, which are all worn out and mudsplattered and seem to be instruments to kill living things. The horses that pull them eat while they work, like those that pulled Seneca [in the Roman Empire] to the country, for they are boney and mangey. The coachmen are so brutal, they have such horrible harsh voices and clack their whips so much to augment the general noise level that it seems like the Furies are in movement to make Paris into a hell. These cruel vehicles are payed for by the hour, a custom surely invented to abbreviate our days in a time when life is short.”

Pascal and the company he formed addressed what they saw as a need, in the pedestrian and coach crowded streets, to create some order that would allow even the poorer inhabitants to travel throughout the city. Pascal’s proposal would have made certain spots on the street carriage stops, which would be regularized according to a schedule and would be parts of a line that would extend in this or that direction through Paris. The price was to be five sols. The company received a license from Parliament and then a brevet from King Louis XIV – with a codicil that effectively eliminated the potential pool of users, as the court forbade the use of such carriages to “soldiers, pages, servants, manual laborers, etc.” Interestingly, this interference by a hierarchical social order that seeks to maintain the privileges of those on top has gone on to infest every scheme to organize public transport to our day: the wealthier and more powerful are not only wary about according mobility to the lower classes, but are also determined to keep their transportation privileges in place even if that means undermining the speed and reliability of public transport.

4. Pascal’s body was a subject of debate in 1792.

Pascal was buried in Eglise Saint-Etienne-du-Mont on August 21, 1662. He’d died just up the street in the home of his sister, Gilberte. Fifty priests assisted at his funeral. The family donated 20 francs for the services.

And thus it lay for more than a century when, during the time of the French Revolution, the Eglise Saint-Etienne’s neighboring church, Saint Genevieve, was nationalized by the state and turned into the Pantheon. The Eglise Sainte Genevieve was recent, actually – it was finished in 1790, and had been inaugurated by Louis XV in 1744, to pay homage to the saint who he had prayed to in an illness. The Pantheon was conceived as a temple to the great men of the Revolution and the enlightened men who had led up to it – Mirabeau, Voltaire, Marat, Rousseau. As the anti-Catholic vogue became more intense in 1793, the Eglise Saint-Etienne was renamed the Temple of filial piety, and the two great men buried there, Pascal and Racine, were marked for removal to the Pantheon. This never happened – it was buried under the politics of the time. It may well have been the last time that Pascal’s resting place was still identifiable.

Now – and by now I mean last week, when I visited the Eglise Saint-Etienne – we have only an approximate idea of where Pascal’s ashes are stored (against his resurrection, of course). It is somewhere under a pillar in the chapel of the Virgin.

The cult of the virgin, in Pascal’s time, certainly had its fervent devotees, but it was in the 19th century that the cult became more fundamental to the Church. In 1854, the Pope issued a bull affirming the immaculate conception of Mary. This had an unusual afteraffect on the Eglise Saint-Etienne. The archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Sibour, was in the Church on January 3, 1857 when he was approached by an ex-priest, Jean-Louis Verger, who was a fanatic opponent of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Verger took out a knife and stabbed the archbishop to death while screaming: “no goddesses! Death to the goddesses!”

This might be the most patriarchal moment in all of history. Or, maybe not. In any case, I do wonder what the spirit of Pascal made of it all. Pascal did have strong Jansenist sympathies. But he was no prisoner of that creed.

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